A few years later, Xander is sent to find him, because they need him once more for a mission, that's the story, and Spike just looks at him and blows cigarette smoke in his face. They palaver a bit in the hotel bar, and Xander says, "So men actually pay you to what--sit on their face?" Spike says, "I can punch you now, you know." Xander shakes his head. "I'm out of the closet and I still wouldn't fuck you on a bet, Spike."
Spike: "I knew it. Damn. Red owes me ten bucks."
Xander: "So come collect it."
Spike: "You don't need me."
Xander: "Right, because I would have flown three thousand miles across country on my own dime to find you if we didn't?"
Spike studies him for several moments, then says slowly, "You're lying. Angel told you I was here, didn't he? Bastard. I told him not to--" Not to what Spike abruptly doesn't say. "--well you can fuck off, hear?"
Xander, dropping all missionary pretext for his visit, says simply: "The girls want you home. I'm your--well, actually I'm your escort."
Spike talks about the idea of home. Sunnydale isn't home. "This is home now." Blah de blah.
Xander: "You know, I've heard that line in a hundred movies, and it never gets less lame."
Spike: "Sod off."
Xander: "Hey, I actually paid for this date."
Spike: "Right. So is it I sit on your face then, or you sit on mine?"
Xander: "It's more of a face-to-face thing where I talk until I wear you down and you--hey, where are you going?"
Spike says he has a room upstairs and they jaw a bit more before Xander trails after him. Upstairs they crack a bottle and each takes a drink, and Xander wanders out onto the balcony, which has an unexpectedly posh view of the city. Spike leans in the doorway and Xander turns and leans against the railing and studies him, and it's cool and night of course, and there's a high, light city breeze, with all the lights spread out below. Spike's wearing expensive black trousers and a white silk shirt unbuttoned in a way that should look sleazy but doesn't, and he's suddenly barefoot. Cuffs of the shirt rolled up. Stupid gold chain at his neck, a different one, and his hair is that kind of gold now, and Xander stares at it. He's a different Spike, with his different hair, but still the same. Souled and jaded, very old, this vampire. Lonely and difficult to figure out. Behind him Xander can see white carpet and shiny chrome furniture and big paintings on the walls, and there's also a bookshelf filled with books. Xander realizes Spike lives in this hotel room--more like an expensive apartment--the way a hermit crab inhabits some random shell it finds.
Spike's eyes are different, as if he's slowed down enough in the last few years to give things a lot of thought and ended up thinking too much. There's a lot more going on in there--Xander thinks this just for a moment, and then he looks again and it's like a trick of light, and Spike is bored and flat-eyed again, and possibly there's nothing all that meaningful or deep going on in his head, not really.
They end up talking for hours, about Sunnydale mostly, and every now and then Xander tries to wrap it up and convince him to return home and Spike digs in and refuses.
Eventually, Xander sighs and leaves, but he's back the next night, paid in full. "What are you, made of money?" Spike asks in annoyance. Xander says yep. They wander out, strolling through the city, seeing the sights, drop in at a few clubs where Spike knows everyone. Xander watches him in his element. It's effortless, but facile, empty. Spike has no friends, and a sense of the other man's utter aloneness seeps into Xander and depresses him, makes him take a few more drinks than he should.
When they get back to the hotel, Xander comes up again, comes inside and stands there, shifting his weight from foot to foot, rambling about this or that or maybe trying to make plans to bring Spike home. When he focuses, Spike is matter of factly undressing. Xander is more or less frozen, watching, asking what the hell, as Spike trails expensive clothes toward the minimalist bedroom.
When Xander gets to the bedroom, Spike is naked and expressionless and staring at him. Challenge or warning in his eyes: you're in or you're out.
Xander can't quite make himself move, but within a minute of terse conversation, Spike is standing by him, unbuttoning his shirt, undoing his belt, and Xander is wanting it--if only for the novelty, he tells himself. Vampire. Spike.
Xander: "I never had a thing for you. Just so we're clear."
Spike: "I know."
Xander: "You were annoying, and when you were at your most evil, I hated you."
Spike, looking at him with cool, unreadable face: "You hated me when I was at my most human too."
They're soon kissing, tongues untied, and Xander's got his arms around Spike, and Spike's hair is soft now, filling Xander's palm along the hard curve of the skull. And when they fuck, it's not bad. It's not earth-shattering true-love sex. At first it's the kind of sex you get when you're paying good money for it, and Spike is closed-off, clearly unwilling to show any vulnerability even when Xander blows him and kisses him. But after a while he's getting into it, there's more friction and breathing and a frantic, hungrier need building, and when Xander fucks him, Spike works his hips and takes it so prettily that Xander nearly loses it, and he gets why men shell out serious money for this, and he thinks he could get used to it.
But it's just one of those high-pitched orgasm thoughts. Afterwards, everything is tense and unfun again, and the idea of sex and money and Spike is unsettling and kind of sad.
"Come home," Xander says.
"Hellmouth doesn't exactly support the lifestyle to which I've grown accustomed, mate."
Xander: "You can stay with me."
Spike: "That right?"
Xander: "Not like that."
Spike: "No? Fuck off then. Why should I drag my ass all the way back to Sunnyhell--so I can fight big nasties for you? Pick your pockets for blood money, nick fags from the Super-Mart? Fuck you."
They fight with rough, angry words, Spike getting ever more cutting, until Xander rather wants to punch him, but he balls up his fist and grips his temper tightly instead.
He leaves. And comes back the next night. Spike is sick of seeing him, or is pretending to be. He flings a few mean, angry jibes at Xander, who after taking it for a bit, hands Spike a check. "What's this?" Spike asks. Xander says it's an advance for the first month of his services. "I need you to house sit," he says blandly, with a facade of suavity and calm. "During the day. When I'm not there."
Spike tears it up into little pieces, staring at him coldly all the while, flings them at Xander's feet in fluttering bits, then goes upstairs. A few minutes later, Xander is knocking.
Palaver follows where Spike informs Xander that he's called his manager at the agency and said he doesn't want any repeat visits. Xander says he's paid up for the night. They sit in silence for a while, Spike fuming, Xander trying to figure out what will convince Spike to come back. He asks the question outright: "What can I do--there must be something that'll convince you to come back."
Derision. "Why, because I'm so soft on you lot that I can't live another day without seeing your shining, happy faces?"
Xander: "Look, I know you could stay here. We both know that. You're doing good for yourself." A pause as they both contemplate this, trying to decide if it's the truth or a lie. "But Dawn misses you, and there's monsters to kill, and I'd like to come home once in a while to someone else's mess, not just my own."
Spike: "So get a cat."
Xander: "Got one. He gets bored too."
Spike, patience thin over impatience: "So get a bloke. You're not altogether monstrously unshaggable. Don't need me pissing away the hours on retainer, watching Oprah and drinking up your beer."
Xander: "Yeah, but...you're dependable. On the beer-drinking thing. And...other things." Spike gives him a dry look, but Xander has a sense that he's dragged Spike to the brink, that Spike might be teetering somewhere inside, contemplating the jump, and there are words he should say at this point, persuasive words, nice words, but--
Xander: "Have you really developed a sense of pride? Because I have to say, it's pretty poorly timed." Another pause. "I'll pay more."
Spike blinks, and they stare at each other for several moments, and then: "How much more?" The merest hint of a smile.
And Xander dips his head just a little with a sense of relief, hair falling into his dark eyes, and he can smile without hiding it. "Everything you're worth."
When Xander gets Spike home, there's that whole suspicious-cat vibe going on. Spike picking his way around Xander's house, expression wary, ears pricked, eyes busy, all the while sniffing things out Xander's not sure he wants sniffed out. Dustiness of his house. Total absence of lover spoor. Xander's had several lovers--boyfriends? whatevers--since coming out of the closet, but he's been in a dry stretch for a while. He's got an expensive house. Beachfront property, with his own renovations, totally unlike the house of his parents or any of his relatives, who are never invited to stay. He has lots of excuses, always ready.
It's not a tidy house except right after his weekly housecleaning service comes in. He likes to give them something to do, and he's a guy, after all. He tracks in sand from the beach on his wet feet--from beach to deck, from deck to tiles, the ceramic tiles of his kitchen. Up the beach, up the zig-zagging, boarded steps, through the tall dune grasses and sagebrush and verbena, and all sorts of other things Willow knows the names of and sometimes comes to pick, across his weathered deck, through the sliding door. It's messy mother nature and it seems right to let the outside drift in. It laps at his threshold, some of it getting inside, some of it staying out on the deck. Wood and seashells. Salty sneakers with knotted laces. A kayak paddle he found floating in the waves one morning, propped in the deck corner.
It's how they enter the house.
Spike inspects this without much apparent interest, gaze skating over the debris of the world and the accumulated junk of Xander's life. Stereo system, boat-sized leather couch, and all his other toys--the pinball machine, the pool table, and the work-out machine he bought off the TV one night, which looks like some kind of bizarre sexual fetish equipment, and kind of is.
Xander starts to remark about the house, "It's kind of..." And Spike is looking at him, waiting, and he just finishes, "...home." Not sure what he meant to say. Just fill-in-the-small-blank talk, for those empty moments while Spike prowls around and Xander wonders how dumb it was bringing him back here. Pretty stray cat in his living room, hands in his trouser pockets, and it's very unSpikelike of him to come to a halt and stand there like a motionless male model, bland, no snark. The duffel slung at his feet is ratty and the expensive clothes he brought are probably wrinkling at this very moment. Xander can't bring himself to care.
Xander: "You want a drink?"
Spike: "Nah." Then, changing his mind within seconds: "Yeah."
They're a pair of drinkers, no doubt about it, and it gives their hands something to do.
That's the first night, and the next day Xander goes to work early and leaves his house to the vampire. To his vampire. His pet vampire? His whatever. Later, he'll call Willow and let her know they were back, mission successful.
When he gets home, Spike is on the couch watching TV as promised, as predicted, but he's not sprawled out like Xander would expect. He's got one arm up along the couch back and his legs are spread a bit--he's a guy, he takes up space--but he's also got both feet on the floor and an intent frown, eyes fixed absently on whatever show he's watching, and he looks somehow like a guest. Beer in one hand, propped on his thigh. The black trousers again. The white shirt.
Their eyes meet above the TV and Xander is tired and weather was hot and he was outside on the site all day, so he's got a salty, sweaty, sun-heated human thing going on that vamps seem to die out of, and he just wants a shower and a beer, and a blow-job, Jesus, he really badly wants a blow-job, and Spike seems to read his mind, because when Xander goes to the kitchen, he gets up and wanders in after him, empty beer bottle discarded somewhere, says--when Xander turns from the fridge with his own beer--"Guess I'd better start earnin' my keep then," and folds to his knees, cocks his head, looks up at Xander in a way that is hard to describe. Sort of calm and studious and challenging and sultry and ambiguous and many other adjectives, all captured in the planes of his face, and Xander lets the bottle drop from his hand and roll, drop and roll, and he grabs Spike's head and pulls him close as Spike's hands rise to cup his ass, and he's so sexy and always so fucking ready to fuck--at least, Xander hopes this is proof and precedent--and he's mouthing Xander's cock through the material and he seems darkly radioactive, glowing with amusement and satisfaction and other things opaque to Xander's comprehension. Vampire on the kitchen floor.
He really does suck Xander off. It's kind of a surprise. Here's his--what? houseboy? rentboy? sex tool? whatever, actually doing the job he's paid for, and Xander should really hate himself and oh god, Willow's going to kill him when she finds out, but at least he can say he got Spike back here to Sunnydale. Mission accomplished.
He's a man. Blow-jobs top his list of fun. He rides into it harder than he should, completely selfish, too hard to be nice, but Spike doesn't seem to mind, just plays tricks on Xander with his amazing mouth, busy and serious and slutty-eyed, eyes half-shut, lowered, servile almost, though Xander finds it hard to think of Spike like that, except in a good, willing sort of way. The way of sex. Busy tongue, down there. Hollowed, flexing cheeks. The way his head moves under Xander's hands.
Xander comes harder than he's come in a while, even with New York fresh behind them. A plane ride, a night's sleep, a day's work and some distance--thinking about things, not thinking--have honed him to a horny, nasty edge, made him willing to take advantage of Spike's professional services. He is a grown up now, and rich, the kind of rich bastard who pays for this sort of thing.
It's not bad. Sleazy, but...not bad.
After that, they shower. More sex. And then the cessation of sex, running out of sex like running out of conversation, so that they have to turn to conversation instead. Except they don't seem to have any. That's worrisome to Xander, as they lie in his bed.
They have small talk and big talk but no in-between talk. But maybe that's the kind of thing you grow into, Xander thinks.
It's night, and later they sit at his dining room table and Xander eats, and they discuss practicalities, blood and cars and credit cards. It's kind of a turn on, and Spike seems half-smiling all the time, and very watchful, eyes pinned on Xander, tracking him, making him heat from the balls up.
After dinner, after some TV, Spike strolls to Xander's room and is there waiting for him in bed, everything stripped off, though they haven't talked about this, though Xander has given him the guest room and his own dresser. And for a moment, Xander can picture him there in the future, propped up against the headboard and pillows, reading a book in his intense way--everything he does performed at an extreme of boredom or intensity--and like everything else about this day, it's strange and disturbing and sort of comforting.
Spike has been there for a few days, and Xander is getting used to it, in the small-details way if not in the big, existential, vampire-in-my-house way.
There's a reunion with Willow and Dawn, which is giddy and girlish and seems to bemuse Spike. More Spike body language: sitting on the couch, feet on the floor, palms resting flat on his thighs as if he's a patient stuck in a ticking waiting room, or as if like Uncle Rory he's about to say, Well now, in a hearty way, and then stand up. He never does. There's a flight instinct lurking there, though, Xander can see it. But the vampire allows the girls to flutter and fawn, and he listens to various bits of history they impart, listens with his head tilted, eyes down to convey attentiveness, the mannerism of an actor. He meets Willow's new girlfriend, Becca, and is brusque and polite, and obviously assessing her steadily with those cool eyes that have quelled demons, until she just about loses her voice.
And he takes a phone call from Buffy, which from what Xander can tell after handing the phone over is full of stops and starts on her end, warnings and twisted, cryptic encouragement, the push-pull that she saws everyone with. Her wary sympathy and her silent disapproval. Xander can guess at all this, having talked to her about Spike not long before.
Spike gets off the phone looking...strange. Half lost in memory, broody and soulful.
Xander has had to remodel that word for Spike: soulful. In the past, it has always meant the voice of Barry White and the pouty lip of Elvis. Big cry-baby Johnny Depp eyes. Pastel Jesus paintings.
For Spike, soulful means a faint shadow across his expression, as if everything in him is drawing into focus, knots tightening and darkening in the complicated points of his face, where cheekbones meet eye sockets, where mouth meets cheek, where jaw meets ear. More often sadness than grimness, Xander thinks. It's really only a flicker, now and then. It makes Spike look his age. Look adult. Which he's already been for a hundred odd years, not jailbait by a long shot, so Xander confuses himself with what he thinks he sees.
After Spike gets off the phone with Buffy, Xander tries to think of things to say, and his thoughts flash by, something like: Buffy, college--how's she--so do you miss--did you two--and a while back I saw Angel--no, duh, he knows that--what to say--fuck it, I'm a guy.
So he just gives Spike a drink. His stock of beer has doubled.
In those first few days, they shop at the supermarket, they walk on the beach at night and say very little, they drive around and reminisce and look at cemeteries, they kill one vamp. Working the kinks out, is how Spike describes it.
The rest of Spike's clothes arrive. The empty boxes are already folded and stacked near the back door by the time Xander gets home one day, but he knows what was in them more or less, having glanced through Spike's New York closet. Spike is now wearing a black sweater, and Xander makes a study of it, deciding that expensive means shapeless and too big, sleeves that mostly cover the hands. Except it's not too big, really, because the way it fits makes Xander want to unpeel him.
Spike has decided that this sweater is best worn over faded jeans, which is definitely a look.
He's lost the gold chain. Xander isn't sure why and doesn't ask. Maybe it was someone else's gift, with special meaning. Like: whore. Except of course he still kind of is.
Xander, in bed: "It gets me hot, paying you. Is that wrong?"
Spike: "Yeah, you moral cretin. 'Course it's wrong. Illegal, too."
Xander, unmoving, one arm above his head: "Thanks. Thanks for enabling my panic. We now enter full crisis mode."
Spike, after making one of those dry sounds that are never quite laughs: "Too early for a mid-life crisis, 'less you plan to die young."
Xander: "In Sunnydale? Nahhhh."
Later, Xander tries for coherency:
Xander: "It's like this whole thing where...I can finally have everything I've ever wanted, if I just pay for it. Not that you're everything I've ever wanted. I'm just saying."
Spike: "Yeah. I get it." But then: "Money isn't everything, you know." Spike--always trite, always right.
Xander: "I don't get vamps and money."
Spike: "Not much to tell. Some steal, some stash it away. Knew one lucky sod who bought Microsoft early."
Xander, feeling the envy: "Sweet."
Later:
Xander: "I don't want it to be weird, though." Spike stares at him. Xander stares back. "Okay, that was dumb."
Spike: "What you mean to say is, don't tell the others."
Xander: "Well, yeah."
Spike: "They'll figure it out. Red's not stupid."
And later still:
Xander: "You like it, right?" He's gasping and fucking Spike hard into the mattress, twisting his hips and trying not to come. Not yet. Not yet. Not yet.
Spike is stretched out under him on his back, taut as a bow, fisting his own dick: "Oh fuck, yeah." Low, husky, in complete agreement.
Xander, hips snapping erratically: "I'm going to give you...a bonus." He gasps the words. "Nice car. Nice...nice car."
Spike, in rhythm with his hand: "Porsche. Boxster. Black."
Xander, startled enough to jerk to a stop: "What! No! Jesus!" But then Spike tightens his body in a way that severs all connectivity between Xander's brain and dick. "Oh man," he groans, on the verge of promising away fifty grand for a fuck.
Afterwards they are like puzzle pieces broken and rearranged and he tastes the back of Spike's neck and slides his hand between his legs, up behind his balls, the seam of his body still slicked up from the thrusts of Xander's dick when he was getting started a while ago. Xander rubs his thumb there, easy and then hard, and Spike grunts rather breathily, maybe grumpily, except there's no way a guy can be grumpy about that, so it's all a put on and Xander kind of likes that, in an indulgent way.
Xander: "So...you're okay with it then."
Spike, without much heat: "Christ, you're worse than a woman. Said I am, haven't I?" Sighing, he reaches around for Xander's hand and guides it forward to his dick, which is hard. Vampires. Ever ready. "I like your money. Like to fuck. You getting that?"
Xander: "Uh huh." But he's doubtful, and Spike turns and glares at him. And he's doubtful while Spike looks into his eyes and sees him, sees Xander Harris, all grown up and fucked up, more fucked up than he was this time last week, because all it took was this vampire coming back to lick away the years and lies of his boring life and reveal the dark chewy center, a freakish taste for perversion that he's held hidden since Anya--or else why would they be here now? "It's creepy," he says, as Spike stares at him. "I feel like one of those guys who makes a big show of taking out his wallet to pay for dinner." So very much like his dad.
Spike, darkness around the edges of his eyes, says to him slowly and clearly: "I like getting paid. No misunderstandings. No coy games. Someone beats you, you know why you're getting beaten. It's right there, no uncertain terms. Just money and fucking."
It hurts like paper tearing. Bills of big denominations, maybe. Xander's ears burn and he swallows and nods, feeling as if the past is too much with them, and that he and Spike are magnetized, closing in toward disaster together by way of bad, bad awkwardness. But then Spike relents, smiles. One of those different smiles, as if he's someone else now, and it's an even more dizzying turn, a kind of affectionate slap at Xander. Spike smiling as if these are things that don't matter, as if he's past them. This isn't the eternal whirlwind of fury and chaos Xander used to know, and Xander's nerves tingle, hypervision kicks in, because it really is a whorish and sad kind of thing, how readily Spike turns himself off. Not desire, but emotion.
He sees Spike, and Spike is absent.
And it makes it easier. Much, much easier. Because there's a distance between them, wider than a continent--that's very clear now to Xander. And as long as he can hold that thought, it's less scary to reach up and stroke Spike's hair, and to kiss his lips, and to mouth down his body and suck him off, even knowing that there's money behind all of it.
Fearlessness comes and goes in waves. He wants to take care of Spike, he wants to end this. Wants Spike here, wants to send him packing. It's just what he needs, it's the biggest mistake he's ever made.
He's not a very good vampire any more, the vampire in Xander's bed. He's almost too human. It's a deep sticky confusion, it's a submerged bubble waiting to surface and pop. It's unnerving.
There are waves crashing on the beach, audible through the open balcony doors over Spike's groans. It's night and Xander has invited a vampire in. The first fuck-up of the rest of his life. An expensive one, an adult one. Maybe a good one.
Too soon to tell.
Nine Inch Nails. James Brown. Black Flag. Sex Pistols. Blondie. The Clash. Chuck Berry. Aretha Franklin. Dusty Springfield. Billie Holiday. Bruce Springsteen. Nirvana.
Schizophrenic vampire with headphones and an AmEx card, thinks Xander, passing through the living room where the other man is jamming imperceptibly to musical static, painting his toenails a violent red, watching Howard Stern with the volume turned off, messaging Dawn on the iMac, drinking Jim Beam, and tracking Xander without lifting his gaze.
So much for the soul of adulthood.
Clearly, Spike doesn't know what to do with himself, yet within a week he's managed to find a hundred ways to waste time during Xander's daily absence. And I'm paying for all this, Xander thinks. Often.
But he decides he may like the red toenails, which are the latest Hollywood fashion for men, or so Dawn has told them both. The polish was her welcome-home present to Spike, and so he is dutifully applying her gift so that the next time she sees him, she'll beam in that luminous, toothy way. At least that's Xander's guess for Spike's motives.
Hours later, and Spike is staring at his red toenails with a displeased or maybe uncertain frown as he sits on the rail of the deck. Waves crash just out of sight, and they talk about something or other. When a vampire hurtles over the rail to attack, Spike is amazed, laughs, then sits there cracking jokes and watching while Xander bats the intruder around and finally stakes him with a piece of driftwood.
After which they have great sex, Xander nailing Spike over the edge of a crude, wooden patio table workshopped sometime last year, Spike's jeans shoved down around cool pale thighs, his ass slick, ready to be used even though they've been apart all day. Disturbing on a certain level, also crazy-making, driving Xander to fuck him harder, rock the table, unable to get deep enough. Change jingles in his pockets, belt ends swing loose, and he goes bareback, which he's never done with anyone else. If this were a movie, firecrackers would be going off. And as Xander's fucking he's thinking of his exertions, the vampire he just dusted, and how tight Spike's ass is, how beautiful his shirt-stripped back is, and those arms, posed like a swimmer's above his head, and his own back is sweaty but he gets sudden chills at how Spike is folded across the table, unmoving, untouched, ass flush to Xander's hips, letting himself be used. Hair on his neck lifting, excited, it's all Xander can do not to come as he figures out how perfectly Spike has read his own unspoken fantasy. It's scary. It's too much. He comes with forceful thrusts up that tight ass, taking exactly what he wants with the pretense of power: a rich human, calling the shots, totally in control of his dependent, obedient toy.
But when he's done, he kisses Spike's neck and gets him off with the laziest possible touch, with the palm and rolling heel of his hand, fingers stroking wood, lifting and squeezing Spike's balls. Spike is always startlingly easy to please. Xander thinks that someone so old and tired of existence as he often seems to be would find it hard to come, but he's got a knack for sex, a well of orgasms on tap, and he seems to like Xander's touch, leaning back against him the way a woman slides into a coat as you help her.
Years ago, post-soul, Spike had been looking pretty ragged. Now he looks twentysomething and fine, smooth and immortal. He looks like exactly what he is: a body kept hanging on the last breath of life, a piece of art preserved by lack of sun.
Days go by, and he takes Spike out at night, burning the candle at both ends. Sometimes to kill things, sometimes to shop, sometimes for nachos and flicks. In malls and on certain streets, Spike draws eyes like a movie star and doesn't notice. Sunnydale has attracted a Hollywood element during the last few years, which in a world of bizarre improbabilities still manages to make the short list, but there are now chic weekend bungalows cropping up like mushrooms along the shore, and the town feels the occasional ripple of an industry party that isn't publicized but somehow leaks to the locals. Spike comes across as one of those visiting exotics. He's a creature, but his breed is confused with a more ordinary one. His accent makes waiters straighten up and clerks shift into deferential mode the way Xander's money never has. It's pretty funny.
They go to Willow's for dinner, visit Dawn at school, drive by Revello to look at the old house, break into the rebuilt Hellmouth High School and wander the halls. Fuck in odd places around town that Xander always wanted to fuck in. He thinks of Buffy sometimes, and what she'd say if she knew about this. It's bizarre.
At one point he gets some bills in the mail and stares at the figures and thinks: no way. No fucking way. Then when he intends to confront Spike, he sees that depthless lack of joy, that need for distraction, and he pays them and says nothing. It has nothing to do with being used or manipulated, or with love--not yet anyway, because they're not on any kind of wavelength for that. It's just that, why fight? He can afford it. It's extravagant, keeping a pet vampire, but after all--
"How'd you get so rich, anyway?" Spike asks early on, as they're shopping.
Xander: "I try not to think about that." Off Spike's look: "It's nothing...it's, okay, I had this conversation once with Will, and then months later I win the lottery, eight point seven million, and ever since then I just, I can't stop making money."
Spike, brows lifting: "She worked the mojo for you?"
Xander: "She says she didn't."
Spike, clearly shrugging the whole issue off as he fingers a shirt: "Yeah. Gotten good at lying, hasn't she."
Lottery, business investments, fortunate stocks, and here he is.
He can afford Spike, and worrying about being taken advantage of is pretty lame, when you get down to it. Despite his mercenary claims, Spike--it's clear--doesn't give a flying, shit-flinging monkey about money except as a means to buy things to pass the hours. He never looks at price, just hands over the plastic, lets Xander pay the bills on the backend. Gives his backend up for bills. No complaints.
It's a workable arrangement, strangely, and it sustains itself for more than two weeks. Xander keeps waiting for the other shoe to drop. Thinks he'll come home one day to find odd demons milling about and drinking his booze, house trashed, privacy violated, Spike with that old dark gleam in his eyes, a ferocious hatred that he's been hiding up to now, a desire to inflict wounds.
But Spike does nothing like that. He's restless at times, yeah, but he just drinks, and lets Xander lead him into the night to kill stuff. Battles he no longer goes looking for on his own. He doesn't go off alone to bars, never postures or picks fights. Is polite to the service class. Tips well if he's the one paying. Now and then Xander looks up to find Spike watching someone--a waitress, a businessman, a kid. His face blank as a photograph of a face, something you'd flip by in a men's magazine. And Xander has no idea what's going in his head. Not the tiniest fragment of a sliver of a clue.
He's got a mouth on him. Matter of factly says shit that makes Xander's hair stand on end, with a kind of horrified delight. But it's a tactic, he thinks. A way for Spike to goose the mark. Is he ever himself anymore?
"You're so good," Spike murmurs in bed, when Xander's dick is buried inside him. And he sounds raw, as if he means it, but who can tell.
Xander thinks about asking: "So have you thought about what you want to do?" as if Spike is just some aimless slacker, a seventeen-year old with a future ahead of him who needs to buckle down. But what sense does it make, asking him that, when he could be around a hundred years from now, lying next to some other guy, or doing things equally uncertain--sitting and smoking in a cafe on the Left Bank in Paris, lying on a soiled mattress in a New York tenement, ghosting along the edge of a Peruvian jungle, fighting side by side with cyborg soldiers in a bombed-out version of L.A. He's Spike. He'll survive when Xander himself is ashes.
I'm just renting him, Xander thinks. And not even rent-to-own.
One Saturday at the mall they meet a co-worker of Xander's, stop for introductions and idle chat, Spike mostly listening as they shoot the shit, bitch about work. After the guy walks on, Spike says: "Don't you have any friends?"
Xander, defensively, startled: "Excuse me?"
Spike: "You've practically got 'fuck off' tattooed on your forehead." He smacks the heel of his hand against Xander's brow as if he has every right to.
Xander: "I have friends."
Spike: "Who? Red? Dawn? Buffy? Bunch of chits who don't even know what flavor of porn you like."
Xander, heartfelt: "Ewww."
Spike: "You've got no mates, no one to drink with."
Xander: "I drink with you."
Spike, rolling his eyes: "Yeah. Real healthy. A man ought to be able to round up a poker game. You've got a social deficit, Harris."
Xander: "You should talk."
Spike: "I'm not the one breathing here."
And he's right of course. But he's annoying about it, as if he lifts all his insights from Maxim or The Man Show, and Xander finds it hard to take seriously the advice of someone so deeply lost.
Late one night he wakes up and walks to the kitchen and finds Spike leaning against the counter, staring down at the floor tiles, just as naked and alone. He thinks the vampire might be heating up a cup of blood, but he isn't. The lights are on but he isn't doing anything that requires him to be in the kitchen at three a.m. Xander is tired but it gives him shivers.
"Hey," he says. And there's a forgettable exchange of words, and some kissing, before Spike comes back to earth and relaxes against him. On call again. But Xander isn't interested in taking what he's paid for. Not exactly. He holds Spike's hips loosely and tastes the shape of his mouth and the kitchen lights are disorienting and dreamlike and then they go back to bed, leaving the bedside lamp on, and Xander bites lightly across Spike's chest and shoulders, making him smile in a rather amused way, some private joke or wry old knowledge, and they are up far later than they should be, or later than Xander should be. But he's a rich guy. He's an owner. He can go in late. He can indulge his vampire.
It had been surprising when Buffy finally left. Xander had suspected she might back out at the last minute, unwillingly to part from her sister. It had only been four months ago, when Dawn started college, that she'd made the move, and she'd been planning it for over a year, selling off the house at last to score enough for double tuition. Even so. Freaky. A Buffyless Hellmouth.
Willow ruled the school now, powerful enough to keep a spider web of magical protection across the town, every shiver of a strand alerting her to invaders who would fast become prey, sometimes with goofy expressions of surprise as they died. But webs had holes. Webs were in fact mostly holes, and she stressed herself out trying to cover them all, even with Becca at her side, serving as another soothing sidekick, not unlike Tara in many ways. It was a little scary watching that play out again, especially after the whole Kennedy meltdown, clash of the lesbian Titans, an entire freaking year of stormy weather, sometimes literal. But they'd never taken it to that edge Xander had feared, and in retrospect he saw how much more in control Willow had been. With every repetition of a pattern, things seemed to get smoother, and this time around she might just have it down.
Once more, with less feeling.
Oh, she felt real affection for Becca, he could see that. But not the passion she'd worn for Tara, or even the tension--ego fighting ego--that she'd built up with Kennedy. And maybe it was for the best. She needed some serenity. Stable was good.
She corresponded all over the world, and beyond: with witches, warlocks, and the new crop of watchers who were rebuilding in London. The world felt safer and smaller with that network in place, and the threat of an apocalypse would now bring people scurrying to help--planes delivering visitors with their crisp accents and shabby suitcases, cars winding up from L.A., portals dislodging oddballs at them from dimensions adjacent to their own.
Buffy, calling him at work, making a few minutes of conversation, then: "So how's he doing?"
Xander: "Spike? He's hanging in there."
Buffy: "You know, we didn't mean for you to adopt him." Dry.
Xander: "Yeah, I know. But it's cool, having someone around." Like a pet, he almost said. But the word stuck on his tongue.
Buffy: "Uh huh. I called him the other day, and got a big wave of def jammed in my eardrum. And what's he doing, just mooching around your house all day? He was watching Days of Our Lives."
Xander, getting annoyed: "So what?"
Buffy: "So, you need to kick his ass into gear. Find him something to do."
Xander: "Why? I thought the point was getting him here. He was already doing something."
Buffy: "Kishoi, Xander." Disgust. "Sucking off suits to pay his Elvis-sized bar tabs? Yeah, that's a real savvy career choice." Her voice is sharp. Her most dangerous edged weapon. It's hard to tell how much she still cares for him and how much she simply feels responsible for all the lost causes and head cases she's collected over the years.
Xander, wandering to the window to gaze out at his little slice of view: "He wasn't trolling the streets or noshing rats." Nearly as sharp.
Buffy, dismissively: "One step up." Still judgmental as hell.
Xander: "More like thirty stories."
Buffy, amazement dawning: "Oh my god! You're sleeping with him!"
Busted, he tries to figure out if he can summon plausible deniability, and the hesitation nails the coffin shut.
Buffy: "Don't even think of denying it, Xander Lavelle Harris."
Xander: "I didn't--I'm not!" Deep breath. "Denying it."
Buffy: "I could hear the denial fairies massing to attack."
Xander: "I really hope you're not going to claim prior attachment." The words are weirdly formal, but they come out of some drawer in his mind like a loaded pistol he's kept ready.
Buffy: "What does that mean?" She sounds thrown off.
Xander: "I...don't know. Just, don't try to claim he's got fuck-exempt status." He doesn't often talk that way to her, but it doesn't even slow her down.
She has her own train of thought: "I've been down this road more than once, and I'm telling you," urgent tones of friendship rising, "no good can come of it."
Xander: "Did you just say 'no good can come of it'?"
Buffy, deflating: "Okay, that's a bit more Victorian-melodrama than it sounded in my head--but, Xander, he's damaged. He'll bring you down. He may not even try to, but he will."
Yadda, yadda. They talk some more and she keeps worrying at him, chewing at his thoughts like a tiny Buffy rat. Gives him the benefit of her experience with total earnestness, and it's really laughable, but he's not that mean, so he takes it with a smile she can't see and lets her lecture him as he goes to his desk. There's an e-mail from Spike with pasted spam asking: "DOES THE SIZE OF YOUR PENIS REALLY MATTER? Yes… More than you can imagine." And a photo of a horse and a jockey he's found somewhere online. Xander stares at it for a minute with stoned fascination until he realizes Buffy's still talking and he's on the phone with Buffy staring at horse porn, and he ends the call quickly and puts his head in his hands and sighs and thinks about the Spike problem, like, is there one?
How weird is it that--almost without noticing--he's slipped into white knight mode for the vamp he once wanted to dust? Is that some proof of adulthood? You get up each day, squeeze some orange juice, go to work, move on with your life. It's not what you'd call easy.
He goes home, they say dirty horse-porn things as foreplay, they lick each other.
The cat comes to visit them mid-fuck, which is startling--it's done nothing but lurk in closets and under furniture since Xander bought it a year ago. Poor pet-shopping logic: picking the one that shies away from your hand because you feel sorry for its geeky social awkwardness.
Some things change, though.
The cat is removed but after sex it comes back and settles on Spike's chest, folding itself up, paws tucked in. Furry collapsible luggage. Spike stares at it like a feline mirror, eyes to slitted eyes in some meaningful silent dialogue.
Later, Xander pets Spike's head with an owner's touch, and is aware of doing it. He likes the sway of Spike's naked torso, his unbuttoned jeans, his bare painted toes. He's been waiting for things to go wrong, sex and money, but it's still okay. It's still an unbearable turn-on sometimes, too. Spike lying across the couch, head resting on Xander's thigh, turned to watch the TV. So post-coital and cozy.
Yesterday Xander came home and found that Spike had ordered a carton of cigarettes with the delivery groceries for the first time since his arrival. He was standing in the open door, blowing smoke out toward the deck as the sun died. "I don't want you to smoke," Xander said and took the cigarette from his mouth, threw away the pack and the carton. As if he had a right to. Didn't ask, didn't second-guess himself. And it made him hard. He came back hard and kissed Spike's smoky mouth until Spike yielded and grabbed his waist and rubbed against him. Spike was very accommodating. He liked being handled. There was no hitch of uncertainty there when Xander pushed Spike's shoulders down, unzipped himself, guided himself in with a hand on the back of Spike's neck.
He gave gaspy cries as Spike blew him, as they did this unbalanced, dangerous dance.
Tonight he is disturbingly contented and feels good. The constant sex is beginning to soften him, abrade away the shell he's grown around himself over the last few years.
A breeze from the open window teases the back of his neck and the TV's laugh-track roars softly and he enters a deep place of calm as he strokes Spike's hair. Regular strokes, petting. He hopes that it isn't just money that makes Spike lie there so quietly and accept his touch, and when he looks down he sees Spike's eyes have closed, which he takes as a good sign. The sigh of waves around them all the time may be working their mojo on Spike, even if he's trying to drown their lull out with loud, obnoxious music.
Kick his ass into gear, Xander thinks in Buffy's voice. Find him something to do.
But he has no ideas. He's not so much the idea man these days. He's the getting-by-on-luck man. He surfs the wave.
Spike turns fully onto his back and opens his eyes upward. Xander writes on his forehead with his fingertips, invisible letters. H-O-R-S-E.
Spike: "We going out tonight?"
Xander: "Feel like killing things, Pinky?"
Spike: "Don't mind."
Xander: "We'd have to move."
Spike: "Terrible thing, moving."
Xander: "Bad."
Spike: "Tragic."
Xander: "You have a very hard head."
Spike: "I'm often told."
Xander: "Move your head back like--oh yeah." He shifts his hips up and nearly groans.
Spike: "You have a very hard...horse." And he's rolling his neck, shoving his head around in Xander's lap as if he can't get comfortable, the perfect picture of frowny restlessness, but the lines of his jaw and neck are like paintbrush strokes in motion and Xander wants to take his dick out and rub off in Spike's hair. In a minute maybe he will.
Xander, talking to delay gratification: "Do you need anything?"
Spike: "Need?"
Longing tugs at Xander then as he realizes he has nothing to offer. "I want to buy you things," he says. "Expensive, stupid things." If Spike were Anya, she'd be having orgasms already.
Spike: "Mmm." A thoughtful, shut-eyed pause. "Don't have a watch." Frown. "Then again, don't really need a watch."
Xander strokes Spike's jaw and neck, handles him, moves his head to different angles. Every angle is photogenic and every one feels so damn good it stuns and slows down his entire central nervous system. "I like what you do for me," he hears himself say.
Spike opens his eyes, smiles like a flirt, and says in that low voice with vibrations fast and light as hummingbird wings: "And what shall I do for you now?"
Another week and Spike's secrets are leaking out. That first ridiculous credit card statement was, Xander learns now, a finagled funds transfer to pay gambling debts. Not even his own, which is the real shocker, but a friend's--a human friend's--from back in New York. Spike has apparently been waiting for Xander to bring it up, but winds up volunteering it himself as part of a longer, rambling story about the things he's been doing for the past few years, the people he's known. Musicians, whores of all genders and species, boxers and bookies, demons and fixers, poets, shady dealers, and suits. A whole underworld Spike wandered the edges of until Xander spirited him away in Cinderella fashion.
Xander broods a few times, wondering if any of that world will follow Spike here. Don't buy trouble, he tells himself.
Xander: "You were pretty generous with my money."
Spike: "Pocket change to you now."
Xander: "Yeah, but..." But nothing. His two-week old outrage is as stale as duck bread, and Spike is curled up against him, the knobs of his spine almost like peas pressing up from within their pod as Xander traces them.
Spike says to Xander's chest: "I know. Ask next time."
Xander: "No, screw it. You're right. I have the money. But if you go over six figures I'm going to have to spank you."
He feels Spike's smile. It's probably a smirk, but he'll think of it as a smile. "And here I thought you were vanilla all through."
Xander: "That's a terrible and...annoyingly accurate thing to say. I have sprinkles. Though, no cherry."
Spike: "I'd like to have seen your cherry. Could've popped it for you, real sweet." He's licking Xander.
Xander: "Sorry. If I'd known." He waves a hand that Spike can't see, then lets it slide down the other man's back.
Spike: "Hope he took care."
Xander: "Yeah, it was all right." Different things are on his mind. "So, what...you think I need some new tricks. Handcuffs, sex toys..." He's trying to come up with other stuff for a list, but he's already running out of ideas. Vanilla. Back in the day he'd worked hard to keep up with Anya, but now he remembers that time as a blur of bad plans and worse execution whenever they strayed past the basics. He does consider himself good at the basics, though.
Spike: "Whatever turns your crank, love." Within seconds he's straddling Xander and very seriously looking down at him. "Rates you're paying, it's the full-service menu." Leans in with his arms propped on either side of Xander's head, all fluid muscle and floppy hair. He's got that smile, the one that says he really has no inhibitions, four syllables unnatural to his body. Xander knows that even a vampire must have a few but they'd be things he'd never want to do himself, so...so.
And when the subject is picked up again after a half hour's fun and sweaty interruption, Spike lists all the things he's done, and all the places he's done them, and all the people--and things--he's done them with. It's a numbing inventory. Some of it requires other languages to describe. He says he liked most of it, and Xander is wavering on the edge of feeling intimidated, dick-shy, but Spike shrugs into the crook of Xander's left side. "It's all body parts," he says with no real enthusiasm, and Xander senses that comparisons won't be made and some animal angst begins to unknot again.
He thinks about the list, and makes mental checks by certain items.
Xander doesn't sit and watch Spike like some perv at a peep-show, like a stalker in his own home. But over time moments and impressions collect. Spike is like one of those guys you see in bands. Devon comes to mind. Devon used to write musical notes on his arms, hum to himself, lie on the bleachers and commune with the sky during classes, and was permanently stoned just above baseline, just below adult radar, for five straight years until, to everyone's startlement, he graduated. And then went to be Devon elsewhere.
Actually, Spike is nothing like Devon. But Xander is trying to pin down what it is that makes Spike Spike, and it has something to do with his wrists and hands, his frowns, his attunement with whatever it is he's doing, even when there is no sound to the universe except its dial tone, its static, a background hiss of massive boredom that makes Spike's eyes go blank. He is so far from zen, he's like the anti-zen, but he's got some trick of being in the moment that fascinates Xander. And he's hard to define. Is he smart? Xander doesn't consider himself that smart, so he finds it hard to tell about others. Willow--easy call. Buffy--a different kind of smart. But people who bottle up their thoughts and always match their level of conversation to yours, what's that about--is it disguise?
That's kind of what Spike does, and it makes Xander flounder, because he realizes after a few stray hits that if he talks books or music or history, Spike is right there with him riding shotgun, quoting unexpected poetry and spinning yarns about the jazz age that Xander only half believes, but wants to. He's got more in his head than he's bothered to unpack, and Xander thinks that maybe if Spike finally makes himself at home somewhere, settles, he'll start to leave bits of himself lying around.
One day they play pool and before long they're playing almost every night, and it strikes Xander that--though Spike might well be playing alone during the day--he's never the one to suggest a game. He loves pool, it's obvious in how he handles the cue and works the angles, eyes busy, but he always waits on Xander. And never said the first word on arrival--let weeks pass, most nights walking with Xander by the room where the table is kept as they went upstairs.
Was Spike always like this before? Is it soul trauma, new and wrong, or was he deferential to Crazy Dru without her even noticing--did he try to match Buffy's needs at her every whim? Did he hide a small self under a big, bad coat of brashness?
Maybe. But honestly, Xander isn't sure.
Spike makes a cup of tea now and then, and some of his gestures are precise and some of them are sloppy. Dunking the little strainer, stirring in milk: precise. Tossing the leaves and missing the trash can: sloppy.
"Gives the maids something to do," Spike says of the flung tea, a splat drying on the wall, clump on the tiles.
Xander: "Do they bother you?"
Spike: "What, Patsy and Edina?" Xander is confused, because their names are Marta and Trish. "They let me be."
Most of Spike's blood supply is in a special storage room, in a locked fridge.
Looking for small gestures of his own, Xander buys Spike jewelry. First, he gets it wrong. He gets it embarrassingly wrong. He buys Spike stuff grossly expensive and Spike murmurs thank-yous with raised brows and wears it politely. Desperate, he tries to find out what Spike really likes. He fears he knows--death metal rings and dog collars, god help him. But Spike digs in, claws to carpet, like Supercat when he's poised to fight or run, and makes Xander do the heavy lifting, tells him to pick out whatever the hell he wants. It's a wrangle, and funny--Xander suddenly wonders if he has any taste of his own. Why did he buy Spike stupid gold bracelets? He doesn't like them either.
On the way to the movies one night he sidelines Spike to one of those leather kiosks and buys him a choker and a bracelet, both cheap, both so perfect he wants to take Spike into the mall bathroom and lick him all over.
They don't do that, but they grope during the movies, and in darted glances at Spike's profile he can see that the other man's lips keep up a steady series of smiles--twisty, kind of goofball, as if he's trying not to laugh--right up to the credits.
"Buffy told me."
Of course she did. He can hear Willow's grin through the phone.
"And your objection is...?"
"None. I think it's cool."
He tells Spike that: cool.
Spike accepts this with a mildly amused mouth twitch and a quizzical downturn of his eyes, as if he's thinking of something that's funny or doesn't add up. No way to know what except to ask, and Xander doesn't.
There's that mildness again and--not then, but later, apropos of nothing, some TV debate--Xander says: "You were so feisty in New York. Now I can't work up a fight." It's a dumb, off-the-tongue word, feisty, but Spike is staring at him for other reasons, frowning.
Spike: "You want me to fight?"
Xander: "No. Of course not. I'm just saying, you've changed."
Spike, pointedly: "Not me that's changed." And when Xander doesn't get it: "You're a proper client now, aren't you?" It's like a punch in his gut, and then almost at once Spike is climbing astride Xander and winding his arms around him with an affable but reproving expression. "Now, now. Don't look like that. Nothing to get upset about." It's a seduction of voice that lifts and lowers the words.
Xander: "I thought there was. I thought this was wrong."
"Well, yeah." Spike blinks. "But a good wrong."
The next night they're in a graveyard killing vamps and Xander is still picking at the subject in a roundabout way. "So, you didn't kill anything all the time you were in New York?"
Spike: "Not after the first few months. Couldn't."
It's the first time he's said that word and it snags Xander's attention: "What do you mean couldn't?"
Spike, dusting a vamp: "They wouldn't let me."
It's like pulling teeth. Fangs.
Xander: "Who?"
Spike: "Local bosses. Demons." He's spinning, kicking, not out of breath at all, except in the permanent way. "Called me on the carpet not long after I got there--threw me on the carpet, more like, after playing piñata with my innards." He frowns. "Dripped a lot, but it was a red carpet. Which is sort of odd, now that I--"
"Spike!"
"Anyway. Said if I killed any more of 'my own kind', quote, I'd be made an example of. 'S why I had to look for other work."
Xander is flummoxed, upset about things that happened two years ago or more: "You could have left."
Spike, as the last fledge explodes, looks at him and says simply: "Could've. Didn't."
After pushing at the subject all the way home, Xander senses Spike getting tense, tight-lipped, and testy, and that is reason enough to keep at it, because that's his agenda--wind Spike up, get him kicking. Except when he figures that out, staring across the kitchen at Spike's set shoulders and stiff back, Xander lets it go. It wasn't fun five years ago, and it's less fun now.
They don't talk about New York for a long while.
In the immediate while of their lives, Xander is figuring out how to make love to Spike. If they've been hot and heavy already, it's now becoming humid. Tropical. As the novelty of paid sex wears off, Xander wants more. Can't get enough, wants more, gives more. He's all about making Spike lie back and take it now, learning his buttons, making him clench his fists on the sheets and turn his head aside and force back snarls. Dick bobbing up heavily, arching until it rests on his belly, swollen and dark and getting all wet at the head. That's before Xander even touches it, some nights.
He's gotten handcuffs, and it's a no-brainer that Spike likes them. But it's interesting to find out how much. Answer: way more than Xander expected. Frantic, gasping, hip-thrashingly more as Xander works him over and sucks him off and teases his ass. Sort of French Vanilla there, and if Spike gets so wild-eyed over this stuff, which has to be tame, what does real kink do to him? Scary thought.
Harsh sobs into Xander's pillows. Game face sometimes. Cursing, begging, strangled yelling. And the Night of Eleven Orgasms, which will awe Xander for years after that, since none of them were his. He kept his own tab, a modest number, but stayed home from work the next day, sore and exhausted and hormonally hungover from his efforts.
Now it's Spike who is beginning to look blissed out from all the sex. He looks the way certain surfers do, guys Xander sees on the nearby beach sometimes, thoroughly baked on sun, weed, and waves, with eyes that look as if they've seen god.
Now it's Spike who sometimes comes up behind Xander and dares to manhandle him, hungrily sliding himself up under Xander's shirt, rubbing against his backside, mauling his neck with soft noises. Palm skating smoothly into the front of his jeans, reaching for Xander's cock, drawing it upright as if he's trying to tug a carrot from the earth.
They goof off and around, and have taken up a new hobby of grinning at each other, and when they have dinner with the girls, their audience is full of knowing glances and teases.
Wes comes up from L.A. on an errand--they're in the Magic Box for the confab--and he gives the two of them funny looks.
A week later, Angel shows up with little warning and visits them for an evening, disappearing to walk along the beach with Spike for an hour, returning with the same expressionless face he left with and delivering a few bland words of goodbye to Xander accompanied by a dark, direct, warning gaze, but after the other vampire leaves, Spike tells Xander his old sire has a lot of things on his mind, and Xander isn't sure but he thinks Spike may have gotten a little boost from Angel's willingness to take time out and check on him.
This makes him feel a strange thing. Happiness. Anything that associates happiness and Angel doesn't seem natural to Xander, but if Angel makes Spike feel good in any way, however small, he'll go along.
"I think I should have a lesbian phase," Dawn says. "Don't you?" She's asking Spike more than him, twirling her hair around one finger and wiggling her toes as a conscientious vampire tries to paint the little piggies. "It's probably emotionally healthy to explore my options."
Xander isn't going to get sucked into this one, no matter how many times Spike looks his way. He's working on his taxes. Ha ha ha ha ha.
He is strangely moved by the friendship Dawn has renewed with Spike, and relieved to know he has company once in a while. She visits during the day a few times a week, and is often still there when Xander gets home. She stays for dinner, is trying to be a vegetarian but moans and moos in worship of the Great God Cow when Xander drags out the grill. She writes essays for the university rag, wears strangely sloganed tee-shirts, takes back the night--irony there, since it's more a vamp than rape issue the campus needs to worry about--lectures them both about global oppression and textile employment practices, wrests the labels from their jeans and shirts up to view so she can judge their political correctness.
They adore her.
Spike is a big brother of a vampire to her, or would be, except they're bonding over weird shit these days. Music, fingernail polish (gold is the new red), classics of European literature, and the latest American Idol competition, which they both try to pretend is passé but watch avidly.
It's a suspicion Xander has, that Spike enjoys being a girl.
When he makes this joke to Spike, he gets A Look. Dry deadpan expression, slightly lowered head--Spike's big cat look--the better with which to contemplate Xander askance, as if assessing him for a head-butt or a smack, which he'd never try these days, but it still raises a whiff of punk sensibility. It's like the smell of your old favorite clothes unearthed from a drawer.
So very much not a girl, his look says, and he holds up one painted fingernail at Xander. The middle one. It's a startling victory of some kind, but then Spike is full of contradictions.
For an arbitrary birthday--giftday, she calls it--Willow enchants their bathroom mirror so that it holds Spike's reflection, and also the long mirror that hangs on the back of the bedroom closet door. The vampire of vanity immediately orders six hundred dollars' worth of hair care products from the net--six fucking hundred--and glares darkly at Xander for not saying anything about the state of his golden locks before now. Loon, thinks Xander. But he's smitten, loves looking at Spike's face in the glass, and often stands behind him and does the obligatory naughty stuff.
"Xander gives Spike money," Dawn says to Willow.
It's easy to reconstruct the conversation that occurred, and Xander does so many times in his imagination.
"Xander gives Spike money. Don't you think that's kinda weird? I mean, because he was, you know," a hesitancy, "selling his groove thing, and now he and Xander are in the groove, and it's groove, money, groove, money. How does that work?"
Her half-innocent puzzlement, her worry as she tries to work it out.
It blows up into a whole big thing: Spike and Dawn go shopping, Spike passes his card across the counter one too many times, Dawn is envious, Spike says too much, Dawn talks to Willow with a girlish frown, Willow listens, Willow confronts Xander in a dark, ferocious huff.
He tells her to fuck off.
Not in so many words, not at first. But then, when she won't back down and she's scaring the living shit out of him, he does say that. And they stare at each other for a long moment. And he's nearly shaking because, fuck, he can sometimes be scared of his best friend. She's powerful and too ready to jump on what she sees as wrong.
She doesn't talk to him for two weeks. He waits for a spell, and has nightmares wondering if she's already cast one and he doesn't even know it. Wakes up each day checking for the status quo: is Spike still living with him? Does he sleep with Spike? Do they smile and canoodle and kiss?
He and Willow communicate through Dawn, and after a while Willow comes to the office, and he takes off for a few hours and they drive downtown for coffee. She doesn't apologize, upset that he doesn't fully trust her--that's the "trust issue" which they apparently have to talk to death. He can tell she wants to yield ground but can't quite, so they sit and spat in their awkward way and she assures him she's not the Willow of yesteryear, but she has such wounded eyes.
And all this is over Spike, which is a little odd if you back off for a moment and think about it, as once upon a time she had no use for him, and Xander didn't either. But now they're fighting over the vampire's peace of mind and the ethics of informal prostitution and similarly weird shit that they don't put into quite those words.
Who the hell are we, Xander wonders. It's like Hotel California is droning on some eternal replay as the soundtrack to their lives.
Xander, his cappuccino cooling and ignored: "It's my business and his, not yours."
Willow: "You'd never have even gone to get him if we hadn't pushed you."
Xander: "You don't even--so I give him money, so what? He buys stuff. It's what people do. Good, old-fashioned American consumerism. And so help me," his hand arresting like a slash in the air, "if you're going to claim a vested interest in where that money came from--"
Willow, getting het up: "I told you--"
Xander: "Uh huh. And I so believe you, because hey, any Harris can win the California State Lottery. On the Hellmouth."
Willow, bitterly: "Believe what you like."
Xander: "I will."
Willow: "Fine."
Xander: "Fine."
But they get over it. Time passes and Willow--as far as Xander can tell--allows the details of what she suspects to blur until she no longer seems to be holding a grudge. She starts coming to visit again and smiles warmly at Spike, hugs him on arrival and departure. He, like Xander, is cautious of her: "Witches are the scariest women you'll ever meet, mate."
Xander: "No fucking kidding. It's like the GynoPower 5000, with crispy frying action."
It's terrible, fearing that everything you've gotten used to might be taken away with the snap of someone's fingers, your memory burned clean and rewritten like the hard drive of a computer.
Fuck, Xander thinks, staring in tiredness at Spike's sleeping face as morning chirps into life. He is stressed and seriously thinking of leaving Sunnydale for a few weeks, months--however long it takes to shake this anxiety. See Europe is a thought that's been looping in his brain. Why not? Something to think about. He wants to spoil someone. It's what life is about, if you can afford it, and the idea of taking Spike away and fucking him on crisp hotel sheets in strange countries has a definite appeal.
It's unhappy for him to think that Willow can't see this, can't see that for fuck's sake he's not going to hurt Spike. What the hell does she think is going on behind closed doors? He knows that really, her concerns are more or less subtle ones about dependency and self-actualization and emotional vulnerability, but Xander manages to whip his dark thoughts into a latte-like froth, and rewrites the argument they had so that he can say things in his head like: "What do you think I'm doing--using him for a punching bag? A sex bot?" Because those things he can deny.
He's picking at his own anxieties.
Spike smiles when he wakes up. It's a smile that has taken Xander time to recognize--weeks--a movement of lips so small you might think it was your eyes playing tricks on you. He considers Xander alertly and says nothing for a minute, while Xander knuckles his collarbone gently. The day begins.
There've been several orgies of shopping both online and off, some of which Xander has participated in. Spike is pretty, ambling to the bathroom in striped silk pajama bottoms to stare at himself in the mirror, study his hair. Then out to the kitchen with careless gestures that still catch Xander's eye: lazy skritch of fingers across abs, vigorous hair scrub, thoughtful backhand check of jawline to see if a shave is needed--he shaves once a week, no more, the Lex Luthor of vampires.
He drinks coffee, and breakfast blood, collects the paper, and is usually sitting at the table when Xander comes in. Though they've never really made contract negotiations, waiting on Xander is by no stretch of interpretation part of his duties, and Spike remains charmingly thoughtless about many things humans need--bacon, cereal, fruit pulp. Even so, Xander has now and then caught Spike observing what he does in the mornings, and he thinks that if he could establish a regular breakfast habit, that he might come out one morning to find food prepared. Sadly, he is a male, and random, and his breakfasts go something like this:
Sometimes when he comes home at night Spike is still wearing the pajama bottoms and nothing else. It should annoy Xander, but it so completely doesn't. Also, though Spike loves showers and the jacuzzi, he sometimes hasn't bothered to wash. And the great thing about a vampire is, Xander decides, the low ick factor. Vampires, unlike the guys at his construction company, are not prone to interrupt their conversation with you to hawk up a gob of phlegm and spit it a yard from where you stand. They don't catch colds or develop unsightly rashes or have weird toilet practices you need to get used to if you're going to maintain roommate sanity.
Other evidence that Spike is in fact not quite what you'd call a guy. Except in the thousand other ways he very much is, like the drinking, swearing, grumbling, and casual tit-ogling he indulges in, not to mention his emphatic positions on music, his dislike of certain types of shoes, the panthery way he plays pool, and of course his dick, which is a handful of goodness Xander hasn't tired of and never will.
There's the strange New York sweater collection, though--high fashion, not femme, but Xander can't entirely accept that Spike's clothes nature has changed from dusters and Docs to silk and cashmere. It seems one of the most telling pieces of evidence that Spike is having some kind of mid-death crisis. He wears jeans when they go on their killing sprees, and shirts that he can toss afterwards if necessary. But the old Spike skin gets stripped off so quickly when they get home and Xander is often struck by how arbitrary and even false that skin has turned out to be. A lot of Spike's swagger was in the old duster which is god knows where, and he loses a few inches when he removes his boots, and then he's barefoot and cat-sleek again, groomed for indoors.
So it's a relief that he's cracking wise more often these days, and seems to be honing an edge again. Maybe it's the mirror.
Xander is waiting for Spike to nag him, to assert himself, to use his strength, maybe call Xander a few rude names. Give him the finger again.
I'm not a client, Xander thinks. He can be himself.
Whoever the hell that is.
He never tells Spike the exact comments of Willow's that were responsible for tipping his freak-o-meter into the red. "He needs fixing," she said with a determined look. And also: "Maybe we shouldn't have brought him here."
Words to chill a man who knows a witch. But the horizon is now sunny again.
The day is sunny too, and it's totally out of the blue when he turns around on site and finds himself face to face with Riley Finn. Immediate grin from Riley at his astonished expression, and then they're laughing and hugging in a manly way, clapping each other on the back. Riley doesn't get into town often--three or four times a year, following up on special ops business. This time around it's nothing urgent, and they go to lunch and shoot the shit. Xander learns:
1. Riley and Sam are going through choppy relationship
waters.
2. The Australian outback is crawling with
dragons. ("But that's hush hush," Riley says.)
3. The
government is thinking of reestablishing a monitoring presence on the Hellmouth.
Xander: "Yeah?"
Riley: "Yeah. That's why I'm here."
Xander: "Huh. They didn't learn their lesson the first time?"
Riley, tipping his head to acknowledge the hit: "They want to learn from it. They're thinking of assigning a smaller unit here, more in a liaison capacity."
He has big hands, Xander notices as Riley toys with a breadstick. He's more likely to notice stuff like that now, even when he's not attracted to a guy.
They talk about Buffy and Willow and Dawn, and then things reach a point where Xander has to make room in the conversation to say: "Spike's back...he's living with me." Existing with me, his mind corrects, but as Giles would say, that's pedantic and not especially humorous.
Riley: "Wow. That's...living with, or living with?"
Xander: "Emphasis on the with."
He sees wheels turning in Riley's head as the other man thinks about how this development clears one more ex-lover off of Buffy's greatest hits list, and what this might mean for a guy who is probably going to divorce his wife.
That's purely speculation. It's just that Riley seems a bit sad and lonely, and the way he was talking about Buffy earlier made it clear that he still has a thing for her even if he's tried to move on.
Riley's business is with Willow and with Bennett, their locally assigned watcher. He's in town for three days and they do the obligatory dinner on the second night. It's pure comedy gold: Spike, Riley, Xander, Willow, Bennett, Dawn, and Becca all gathered at a table over spaghetti and a carafe of blood, everyone but Dawn taking great care about what they say and how they say it.
Riley making small talk with Spike: Mister Iowa, well raised by his mother, puts a lot of effort into getting over the hump of the past, while Spike gazes across the table as if studying a not-very-interesting form of talking plant life. He's the least polite he's been since his arrival, very Old Spikish, and it would be heartening to Xander if it weren't so awkward.
At one point Riley gets some sauce on his shirt and Spike, who is wearing off-white silk and drinking blood, pauses with his wine glass halfway to his lips and stares for one long, obvious moment at the stain as if it's evidence of a character flaw or social gaucherie--this from a man who once cleaned mud from his boots on Xander's mother's coffee table with the broken rib of a Vargal demon he'd wrested earlier from its corpse as a trophy.
Riley clears his throat, dabs at his shirt, and excuses himself to the bathroom.
Xander kicks Spike under the table.
Two days later Riley is gone again and Spike sulks less, and time rolls forward again at a comfortable pace.
They go out for coffee in the evening on their way to a poetry reading, of all things--a university event that Dawn winningly begged them to attend--and end up waiting in line at the open-air cafe down the street from the Magic Box. They're debating the rankings of pricey sports cars, and gradually a man behind them adopts a listening attitude. When Xander drags his gaze from Spike for a brief moment, he realizes it's a famous movie star. The guy hit it big in a classic flick with Tom Cruise that still makes the cable circuit now and then, and several other films Xander can't immediately name. This close he looks both older than expected and larger than life.
When he catches the man's eye he nods to show he's cool, and the man nods back, casual and with complete politeness.
Spike's back is mostly turned to the star, so he doesn't notice a thing; he's yattering on about automatic versus manual transmissions, torque and cooling systems and cornering.
They reach the counter and Xander turns to order and it's as if his movement turnstiles Spike's head in the opposite direction--as he's focusing on the menu board he can see from the corner of his eye Spike nodding back vaguely toward the man, then he hears that matinee voice say, "How've you been?"
Spike: "Sorry?"
Famous Star: "Diane's last week, wasn't it? Rita introduced us."
Spike, slowly: "Oh. Right."
Famous Star: "Did you sign that deal with Miramax?"
Spike: "Nah. Didn't like their offer."
Famous Star: "I have a script you might be interested in. I'm producing it myself. You're with Kim at ICM, right?"
Spike: "Yeah."
It goes on like that, freaking out Xander, who fears at any moment the Famous Star will realize Spike is just fucking with him, but by the time they break away, he's given Spike a card with his cell number and invited them both down to his cottage for drinks the following night, letting them know that "Kevin and Phoebe" will be there.
Xander, admiringly, as they reach the sidewalk: "You're such a dick."
Time passes and it's hard to figure out how exactly it all happens or when, but it slowly dawns on Xander that Buffy and Spike have been talking on the phone a lot. He is not aware of this at first because she almost always calls him. First there's a conversation he walks in on, no big, Spike is lounging on the couch and keeps talking, Xander figures out it's Buffy, he talks to Buffy for a few minutes himself. All fine. Then Spike makes some comment a week later and it's some piece of news about Buffy, or not even news, but some tiny indication that he's up to date on her likes and dislikes. And that is a bit odd. Then Xander gets the phone bill and sees three long-distance calls to her number in the past month, each lasting about an hour.
It's embarrassing the way you behave when you're paranoid, and what follows after this is a painful period of several days, two weeks at most, where he chips away at Spike, a little bit here, a little bit there, trying through dozens of indirect questions to figure out just how much they're talking to each other, and what about, and why, and the ripple effect of his tension is palpable and laps into other talks, other things they do together.
One night it comes to a head, he doesn't even remember how. It's like crash, bang, and all of a sudden they're standing in the living room, mid-fight, and Supercat has flung himself at a gallop down the hall to escape the angry giants.
Xander: "Just tell me, okay--are you still in love with her?" Classic cliché interrogation, but the pain is uniquely his.
Spike: "Of course I'm not." The words are enunciated very deliberately, and his tone and eyes say: you stupid sod, but Xander thinks he may be reading them wrong.
Xander: "Then why the hell are you talking to her all the time?"
Spike: "I told you. She's just lonely."
Xander: "So tell her to call Willow. Or the sister she left when she decided to go off and see the world." Man, he's harsh. He hears it in himself but he can't keep it down.
Spike: "She does. I'm just one of the many, Xander."
A patient tone, and it's jarring, because he only ever uses Xander's name in bed, head hanging face-down over the pillow, hips working frantically back, voice desperate: "Christ, Xander, ah fuck, love, yes, fuck, need it harder--"
Hearing it now makes Xander ache, his temples throb. "You're mine. I've fucking paid for you." And he gasps instead of laughing, chest tight enough to burst, and turns and punches the wall. Hasn't done that in years, and fuck. It really, stupidly hurts.
Spike comes to him and doesn't do anything for his hand, just yanks him gently back by his belt and forces him to turn, and then shimmies against him as if to say yes, you have and he's kissing Xander's neck and baring his own, and then he's not quite moving anymore, but just waiting for Xander to do whatever he'll do.
The sex is so intense, it's nearly a walking, fucking black-out, a haze filling his brain, a cyclone. He throws Spike against the wall and kisses him and bites hard enough to split Spike's lip and he grabs Spike's head and pulls it forward then slams it back against the wall, hand full of curls at the nape, which makes Spike arch all over, mouth falling open and eyes falling shut, as if he's sky-rocketing into delirium. Xander rips Spike's shirt open, buttons flying, grabs his shoulders and his neck and his head again, wanting something he can't quite get his hands on.
He might have run out of steam then, become aware of his own violence and turned away from it. But Spike is a pro at this, more than in the strict sense of the word--he's got over a hundred years of passion behind him and he knows how to take the lead. He goads Xander by touching himself lazily, licking the blood from his lower lip, and then it's nearly impossible to wait as Xander fists his own dick out, makes Spike get down on the floor and suck him off, right up to the edge of reason, and then fucks him with madness over a chairback--some tumbled furniture before they find the right piece--and Spike's not slick for him, not easy to enter, but Xander does anyway and feels Spike thrash beneath him, hears him make noises that signal when he's about to come.
It's over quick for both of them, actually, Xander following several thrusts behind Spike, dick sharpening--that's how it feels--getting that edge that says now, now, now, finer and keener and faster, until he's spilling over. Bang.
He can't keep anger past that moment. He's immediately flush with the joy of aftermath.
He'd be giddy if he didn't ache so much, wanting forgiveness between them both, wanting it all to be good and not a literal fucking mistake.
Spike's lust-whacked face says it is. Not a mistake, but all good.
Xander is shaky the rest of the night, his entire body one big cocktail he can't unmix, but in the morning he wakes up and looks over at the vampire in his bed--dead, undead, bedhead--and Spike is already awake and watching him and smiling. And it's a real smile, sized just right, with nothing at all to hide.
They go to The Rambler, the better of Sunnydale's two gay clubs.
As a reason for going, Xander says: "I don't want to lose touch with my roots."
Spike's gaze cuts up to his hairline. He's clearly puzzled, because Xander doesn't actually dye his hair.
Xander: "My other roots." A pause. "My roots in the gay community." Spike is staring at him and the words silly sod nearly appear in a thought bubble next to his head, kinda like when a cat stares at you and you know he's thinking: Give me fish, stupid human. "Okay," Xander has to admit. "I have no roots in the gay community. But why don't I? I should. It doesn't seem right to just be gay. You gotta shake your gay thing sometimes. Not that thing," he clarifies, as Spike's gaze turns downward this time.
They go to The Rambler. Spike dances. Men's heads turn to watch Spike dance--men's heads turn away from the go-go dancer on the bar to watch him dance, even when sometimes he's barely moving, but he also manages to make Xander look and feel less than completely lame.
Outside the club, as they're leaving, an earnest young man tries to hand them a pamphlet, asking, "Have you accepted Jesus Christ into your heart?"
Spike: "No, but I've accepted dick into my ass. No more room at the inn, wouldn't you say?"
The kid, amazingly, manages to come back from this: "He has room for you. We are all loved by our Lord and Savior."
Spike gently takes the pamphlet from his hopeful, outstretched hand, nods, and lets Xander escort him away.
"Jesus," Xander says with feeling when they're out of range.
Spike: "Just a messenger, I think."
Later, Xander finds the pamphlet on the counter, reads it: "He bled and died for our sins." He throws it away, then gets up at three a.m. and fishes it from the trash and puts it into a kitchen drawer below the delivery menus. Whatever. Spike might want it, and it's not his to toss.
They debate about installing a flatscreen TV in the bedroom on the wall opposite the bed, so that they can lie like beached fish after sex and watch cooking shows and Xander's Babylon 5 CDs. It seems both very right and very wrong to Xander, the first flagstone on a path to hell and the kind of tacky, all-out immersion in a gadgeted lifestyle that he's tried to avoid despite having loads of money. Tried to avoid...now and then. Once or twice at the very least.
"The bedroom is for sex," Xander slurs after one marathon session leaves him steamrollered. Flattened. Barely verbal.
No TV.
Looking back, it's clear that this was not the first flagstone on the path to domesticity, which is turning out to be nothing like hell. All of Spike's clothes have been moved into Xander's room now, his own side of the closet. His CDs outnumber Xander's. And he's stopped nesting in the living room quite so much. He's allowing himself to take up more space in the bedroom. Finally, one day: a paperback appears on his side of the bed, and what was Xander's personal space is suddenly theirs, shared.
He has his own side of things.
Right about then is when Spike starts to get antsy. The broodiness is like a third person in the house. One night Spike says, "I'm taking the car for a drive." His own car, but it's the first time he's ever expressed such a whim. He vanishes for three hours, comes back with blood on his shirt from a slice along his chest. It was a good shirt, not a throwaway. Xander isn't sure how many questions he should ask, or not ask. He has the inevitable thought: how would I know if he started eating people again? Not that he believes that. It's just the inevitable thought, a blip on his mental radar, and then gone again.
Totally, utterly unchipped vampire. And people with souls do bad things all the time.
The next week, Xander comes down with a hellacious cold and, after bringing him a mug of tea and some toast, Spike climbs back into bed with him among the littered, snotty tissues and stays there for three days. Reads books and lets him sleep. Fetches and carries. Cleans up his tissues and makes soup and orders ineffectual homeopathic medicines off the net by overnight express, based on a recommendation of Becca's. Shares a hot bath, sitting behind Xander and washing his body with soothing palm strokes. He's mellow, stretchy as taffy, folding himself to Xander's body whenever Xander gives him a sign that it's welcome. Spooning him, playing pussycat.
When Xander is well again--ye, having passed through the Valley of the Death Wish--he feels a profound sense of gratitude and can't keep his languid, molesting hands off Spike. Touches him all the time.
When Xander is well again, Spike gets hincky and quiet and half-withdraws. Back to brooding. He's killing things grimly when they patrol, sometimes with an angry ghost of the old Spike vim. Kick, smash, snarl.
He's been the new-and-different Spike for so long that it nearly rips Xander to pieces when the vampire picks a fight with him. Bypassing any number of several smaller fights, he bears straight for the championship match, and it's a big rude bloodbath of shouts and angst. Never goes for the jugular, but it's still terrifying. Emotionally. Not physically. Meltdown, some of which Xander had guessed at, some of which he hadn't. Spike paces almost the way a lion does, but trying to hold back from attack instead of working himself up, Xander feels.
Spike, drunk, eyes angry with tears: "It's all so bloody pointless!"
Xander, teetering on the edge of heartbreak and afraid to touch him: "What is?"
Spike: "Why don't you just put a collar 'round my neck--chain me up in the garage with the car--not as if this is going anywhere--"
Xander: "Is this about the money--is it--"
Spike: "Of course it's about the fucking money!" A storm-eye of cold calm: "The fucking money, Xander."
Xander: "Take it, you can have all of it." He means it, and what he's trying to say is, it doesn't matter.
Spike's mouth twists. "Oh, right. Guess you've got me pegged, then. After your fortune, is all. Big wads of cash up my bum, thanks." Words dripping with contempt.
Xander: "No, that's not--that's not what I--"
And then, whiplash: "It's not about money."
Xander: "You just said--"
Spike: "Sod your magic money. You think I give a fuck--"
Xander: "No--"
Spike: "You're so bloody thick--it's a wonder you don't topple like a buffalo with that massive, self-absorbed head on your shoulders."
It's grossly unfair, it's incoherent, it's frustrating as hell, and it goes nowhere, at least not until Xander braves himself to walk to Spike and take the sides of his face in both hands. Spike, his head tilted down and to the right, resists looking up for a moment in a stubborn, bullish way that makes Xander feel strangely generous and tender and willing to play the big dumb man in this equation, to another man who keeps giving it up for him: "Tell me what to do--I'll do it. Please, baby." And he's only ever said that during sex. Baby. It's wrong, but he says it anyway. "Just tell me." He's reduced to babbled endearments and begging, as desperate about this as he's ever been about the sex.
And when Spike meets his eyes, he's so close to spilling over--anger, tears, pain, a miserable twist of death and time and soul--that it's hard not to flinch.
Spike sags against him finally, his head on Xander's shoulder, and Xander swallows down all pride as meekly as any man ever has in a fight like this--as he never in a million years would've done with Spike before he brought him back from New York, as he really never did with Anya, if you want to get honest about it.
In the morning, Spike is actually rather embarrassed, but things remain strained and there's the difficulty of being men and not wanting to talk about things in plain terms while sober. And just when Xander is afraid it's all going to cycle and spin out of control again, Spike stretches next to him on the couch one night and draws his eye and asks, "You ever put your mark on anyone?"
Xander's mouth goes dry and he shakes his head and the next night they come home and Spike has a tattoo on his lower back and Xander nearly breaks himself when he thrusts along the clasp of Spike's ass--outside, not in--and his dick is pushing toward the tattoo like a clock hand, pointing to his own stylized initial, almost reaching it and then suddenly rubbing across its bright surface. And he comes instantly, gasping, tremors, a slippery cry pulled from his balls, it feels like. Has to relearn how to hold his spunk after that, whenever he's taking Spike from behind. How to make it last.
It's really not about money. It's moving past that, and the money sometimes doesn't even feel like his own, so the idea that it could matter is starting to seem...off. There should be boring red tape, Xander realizes, paperwork, bank meetings, and it should be Spike's as much as his, in every formal, legal way. Something to solve. Spike doesn't even have a social security number. He'll need to call Willow, of course. These things usually end up in her lap, and Xander resents that if he thinks about it too much--a good sign that he needs to let something go, because she's his best friend and if he's feeling resentful, this is in fact a bad sign.
It's all about roots. Xander wants them, Spike might be afraid of them, Willow makes them. But really, it takes more than one person to make roots.
It's funny, the things you can ignore, avoid talking about, take for granted. They're in bed and Xander has several slick fingers buried in Spike, who is gripping the rails of the heavy iron headboard hard enough to pull them out of true again, and it's like he always has a camera trained on him instead of just Xander's focus, framing every look and move--chosen to walk the earth in eternal night because his face caught a vampire's eye, his survival odds aren't hurt by being pretty. No need for fancy vamp thralls to keep Xander fixated. Watching the twist of his arms and the tossing of his head and his agonized-ecstasied face working is like seeing a religion getting born.
The handcuffs--manacles, really--rattle against iron as Spike tries to find a grip to keep him anchored, as if he might lift off the bed otherwise. His hips are weightless, muscles tensed, pushing him up from the pillow beneath his ass, and he's gasping and then chokes as if he he's cutting off the word god. It snaps into a sob and Xander feels a hot spurt of pre-come slide from his own dick at the sound. Parts of him start to tremble and vibrate with the strain of waiting, making himself wait.
"Fuck yourself on me," he says in a husky strangled voice. Spike is. Then Xander can't wait, he drags his fingers out--Spike gasping no with a wild shudder--and shoves his cock in their place, demand flushing through his balls all the way up to the sticky head, and sex, the need to satisfy the ache under his skin, is like that time he had a cast on his arm, stifled, sweaty flesh and knitting bone, twinges of pain and that maddening itch that made him want to rip things off and use his teeth on himself. He wraps his hand around Spike's cock as he fucks him, jerks it and feels Spike clench around him and there's no doubt at this moment that Spike is desperate for Xander's cock, working himself on it, going offline whenever Xander hits him inside at a certain angle--his wild thrash freezing suddenly, his body an arc, even as his muscles tighten to keep Xander right there, oh fuck, right there, love. And Xander is big, and Spike likes that, has told him so with amazing expressions on his face, in every position, hands free to clench on his shoulders, or chained and punishing the headboard.
Xander likes to feel big, and does when he's inside Spike, thrusting, sliding toward home, because it's always so tight, and he's a master at dicking, it's just something he does well, no bullshit false modesty, he can bring Spike off without even touching him, even if he takes his hand away, can make him shout when he comes, cock tight against his belly, spattering himself with little white stripes as Xander finishes inside him.
What they don't talk about is how Spike is always the one getting dicked. They've had a total of two short conversations on the subject, one in New York that ended with Xander saying, "I don't really like it," and the one about losing his cherry, which was Spike's way of dropping a hint, offering--or more accurately letting him know in an indirect way that he wouldn't mind a reversal of fortune now and then. Xander had ignored it.
He's felt remarkably little guilt. He's fucked Spike in the kitchen against the counter, in the shower, bent over the bathroom sink, shoved across tables and armchairs and deck rails. Spike on his knees facing the headboard, on his hands and knees, on his belly with his ass lifted up, upright and slouching back, straddling Xander while he sits or lies back. Every way they could figure out, and it's always good. After the first few weeks Xander confessed that he never much liked "the whole ass thing" before Spike, and he meant giving it as much as receiving. He kept the conversation from diverting to questions of reciprocity by adding, "I want you all the fucking time, twenty-four seven, I just want to live with my dick in your ass...maybe I can get one of those headsets to take conference calls from bed, what do you think?" Spike had looked amused.
But now he's beginning to feel something else, which is...Spike's dick. He feels it against his thigh, or rubbing against his own, heated by friction, or filling his hand or his mouth, or nudging him from behind whenever Spike spoons him, and it's melting his brain. He's got to have more, he's got to have it do something to him. It's not enough when Spike thrusts between his thighs--almost enough, insane-making, but now he wants it to prod up and in. He thinks he does. Except he honestly hasn't liked being on the ass-end of things up to now. There's a grossness factor and there's discomfort and he's never come that way, nothing like the way Spike does, where if you just touch him inside he's gasping and ready to pop.
It's not hard to figure out that Spike would like to do him. It's the whole guy thing--you stick your dick in stuff and drain your brain cells off. That's what guys do even if he himself had never been fully sold on it. So no question, he's been depriving Spike in a bad way.
I'm a bastard, Xander thinks.
Spike is spooned close behind him, slick and working between his thighs with amazing little twists and thrusts that drag his cockhead up behind Xander's nuts--tease and stroke and push and a wet little kiss of the head to his throbbing flesh. "Oh fuck," Xander says, gripping himself to keep from coming. Spike is tonguing his ear too. It's a circuit of moist, horny vampire.
Xander: "Why don't you...oh fuck." He spreads his thighs a bit and drives himself back, trying to direct and intensify that brushing heaviness. Tying to manipulate someone else's dick like that is like trying to work a paint brush with your teeth, or master chopsticks, but once in a while the pay-off is amazing.
Spike: "Hmmm?"
Xander takes a deep breath: "Why don't you do me?"
It's an absolute pause, as if time stops ticking forward and the universe ceases spinning, and then--
Spike: "You sure?"
The rigidity of his body and his dick and the strain in his voice--not a growl, but some subharmonic note of tension that suggests the moment before game face--makes Xander realize how long he's made Spike wait, how badly the other man wants it. Probably wants to plunge inside him and howl and fuck him with rough, raging strokes.
Xander: "If you...you know I've never really liked it. But that's okay." He's not trying to be a martyr, but it's unnerving. Ass. Dick.
Spike: "You going to let me drive?"
Xander just manages to nod, and Spike slides his arm around him and thrusts again, three or four times, quickly, gasps and spills in the inseam of Xander's body. Just taking the edge off; Spike can raise wood on a dime.
The first time with Spike is like the first time. He's been almost apelike in his stupidity, he realizes--an epiphany that hits hard about seven minutes after Spike positions him face down on the bed, props a pillow under him, and begins tongue-fucking him, which is when Xander begins to shake all over and beg. He's actively discouraged this act before, though he's done it plenty often for Spike, licking his tidy vanilla-bean ass inside and out with no hesitation.
I am so dumb, he thinks dizzily, trying to climb out of his skin when Spike's tongue stabs him open--repetitively, obsessively--thick and long and clever and wet. He uses his tongue until Xander can't take it anymore, then two lubed fingers as he croons reassurances, and then his dick, which makes Xander sob. One slicked-up hand stays busy, keeping Xander stiff, driving him to the edge of climax and holding him there, and he's strong--vampire strong, duh--and lifts Xander up to his knees, sinks human teeth into his shoulder to pin him upright until Xander is driven to a good, new place that makes him snarl almost like Spike does, and his orgasm just about jumps out of him.
They lie together side by side on their backs, both of them nearly unconscious and unable to speak above a sedated murmur.
Spike: "So that was all right, then?"
Xander: "Shut up."
Spike: "Because they say it's not every bloke's cuppa tea."
Xander yawns, and then: "Bite. Me."
Spike: "Guess you'll not be wanting to do that again."
Xander smiles dopily at the ceiling, his eyes deeply closed. It's what they call a lazy smile: mostly on the inside because he's fucked himself to immobility, too wiped out even to widen his mouth.
Xander: "Mmm."
His head sings to itself.
I will buy you a new life. Perfect, shiny and new.
Two days later he and Spike are at Willow's house, standing on the back porch as dinner preparations are being finished in the kitchen--women bustling, men hiding, traditional gender roles triumphing--and Xander stands behind Spike, arms wound around his, their hands clasped, and he butts his chin on Spike's shoulder as Spike slouches in that melting, accommodating way he has which seems to make him three inches shorter.
I didn't kill him, Xander thinks. He can hear Willow talking and laughing in the kitchen, and there's this momentary braid of then and now, everything looping together like a big bow around the present, and he's startled to realize how little he could have predicted if he'd put his mind to it years ago. It's not just the earth-shattering things, but the people and what they do to you. If he'd been any one of his more ordinary classmates, he could have pegged some tacks into the map of his life: graduation, college, job, marriage, maybe a move across country or a sudden career change throwing him a minor curve, but no major shockers, not like saving the world or setting up house with a more or less dead ex-killer whose hair smells of the same shampoo he uses. The same pillow.
Spike: "I can hear the little cogwheels grinding."
Xander, pretending to misunderstand: "Sorry. I'm kind of hungry."
Spike gives one of those grunted laughs that doesn't quite leave the throat. A few moments later says: "You move that hand any lower and I'm going to give the ladies a show."
Xander: "You won't believe who I heard from today." Spike hums an inquiry. "Anya. She's coming to visit. I mentioned the us thing. The you-and-I-same-bed thing."
Spike: "And what'd she say?" Slightest possible emphasis on the she.
Xander, raising the pitch of his voice just enough to mark the quote: "'My god, Xander. If I'd known you were going to have sex with him too, I'd never have felt so guilty. All that wasted energy!'" Spike snorts, and Xander goes on in a normal voice: "I'm not sure I want you two in the same room. I think she might try for a threesome."
Spike, sultry: "And that'd be bad how?"
Xander: "Trust me. You so don't want to go there."
Spike: "I think it's you, doesn't want to go there."
Xander, copping to it easily: "You've got me."
Spike's seductiveness is like a thin, silk veil across naked uncertainty: the practice of distraction and undertones. "Have I?"
Xander lets his mouth warm Spike's ear: "My wallet, my dick, my hands, my..." Heart. "...green and utter jealousy."
Lashes lowering, Spike curls out a smile for him. "Your orgasms."
"Yes. You're a good orgasm friend." A surge goes through him, a river rush of feeling like he's only ever felt for Willow, a strange but wonderful thing. His lips move to add with gentle redundancy: "My friend."
Then they're called to dinner, and they go.
Xander dealt with the attempted rape things years ago. It was ordinary alchemy. A while after the First Evil had been handled, Buffy was working Xander's nerves--he can't even remember the reason now--and at the same time Spike had done something equally forgettable that earned him a temporary spot in Xander's good graces. They'd all been at Buffy's: post-traumatic social gathering number nine hundred and whatever. He'd walked into the kitchen to get something, a drink maybe. The two of them had been in there talking--Spike and Buffy--and Buffy had briefly smiled his way, distracted, the conversation nothing so intimate that she clammed up or shooed him off.
The smile wouldn't normally have irked him, but it did, a feather across a sore, and he tried to pointedly ignore her, but she didn't even notice. She chattered on as Xander got his drink, and he was half-listening, casting the two of them casual and blameless "I happen to be in the same space as you people" glances, and something about Spike's slump-shouldered, helpless attitude of befuddlement struck a chord, because for crying out loud Buffy was so Buffy she drove them all crazy, and that didn't excuse Spike for one motherloving minute, but clearly Buffy had moved on, Buffy could deal with what had happened--whatever had happened, because the details were never shared. She'd dealt with Spike the same way she had with Willow and Faith and Angel and Andrew and too many others to count, and here she was, dressing down Spike in the mildest possible tones for who knows what, delivering sugar and tart verbal slaps, talking to him the way a know-it-all girl talks to a friend or some kind of social improvement victim, and there was still a lot of hatred on Xander's part, but it suddenly struck him as bloodless and lukewarm, like leftovers from some meal you can't recall eating; the kind of hatred you feel for some punk-ass stupid ex-flame of your sister's, and not a neck-crawling vampire.
The sister who never pressed charges and gave as good as she got.
Time can create small stitches of affinity as much as it can create distance, mend as much as rip. When you're young you don't get that. Aging helps. You don't get perspective so much as you just get tired.
So one night there's some movie on Showtime, enacting a terrible, disturbingly graphic rape. They watch in silence, as if someone had clicked the mute button on their normal idle commentary ("What the bloody hell's she wearing--looks like someone killed an ostrich on her head"), and then Spike gets up and leaves. Later they talk around the subject, briefly and with a crosshatch of aborted assurances to each other. They reach a mute understanding. Xander thinks they do, anyway. As much of an understanding as you can reach when you aren't verbalizing a goddamn thing. They could be acting out their issues with hand-puppet therapy, if they were oh, say, two other people.
The next morning, Xander wakes from a dream that Spike is raping Buffy. It's creepy, but it's a dream, and the extent of his angst is to slink from bed, shower, and navigate his way through the rest of the day via a series of grunts and hand gestures.
That evening he does the wacky and unthinkable and brings Spike flowers. Which makes no sense, and on so many levels. Spike stares at the handful of truncated dead things in surprise and then smiles. It's an amazing smile. It's the only blossom worth looking at in the room. His eyes soften and he gazes at Xander as if he's never seen him before. The whole exchange stuns Xander, makes him Spike's bitch for the rest of the night, dumbfounded and clumsy and short-circuited by weird impulses, schemes to make Spike do that neat trick again with his lips. Cruises, chocolates, fancy dinners--okay, his impulses are not so much weird as trite, not to mention so totally inappropriate for both a vampire and a red-blooded male.
Xander's entire romantic history is Anya and that's just fucking scary.
Well, reconsider: his entire romantic history consists of Cordelia, Faith, Anya, and Tim--a guy who thought sharing Chiclets was a sign of commitment and started talking about moving in with Xander right after his own dishwasher broke.
Still fucking scary.
Anya comes to visit and it's just as freakish as expected. Her chain of magical shops--modeled after the Magic Box but given a New Age face lift--have been successful, and in consequence she's flashy and upbeat. She condescends to Becca and Dawn, trades snippy repartee with Willow (who, when Anya turns her back at one point, raises clawed hands in parodic witchiness and pulls the most comically terrifying face that Xander has seen in years), and shows way too much interest in the nuts and bolts of his relationship with Spike. Sexual innuendo fully applicable there.
Spike, strangely, takes some of her harsh edge off. He liquors her up over dinner and calms her down to a soft hum until her hair is a bit awry and she's pressing a tumbler against her cheek to cool it. Her old insecurities and uncertainties, still present, start to reveal themselves, drawn out by his mild questions. By the end of the evening everyone is feeling sympathetic toward her and the gathering closes with a series of hugs.
On the dark winding drive home, it strikes Xander that her visit was completely gratuitous, not at all business related, and--a bit tipsy--he almost starts to cry. They're all freaks, damaged and alone, and it's wonderful, like being part of a secret club--the ones who've saved the world--but it's also terrible sometimes.
He says nothing to Spike of what he's feeling, but maybe Spike senses it. They don't make love that night; they walk down the beach with their bare ankles in the waves. No demons attack.
I have a demon, Xander thinks. It's walking next to him, made colorless by night, just a figure in shadows. He is unutterably happy. The universe is huge and strange. Unkind but strange. And it's the strangeness that makes it bearable. He's only getting that now.
The season turns and it begins to rain all the time, warm rains. His nerves are a perfectly tuned piano and the weather plays scales on him, sends his moods up and down--it's really work that is setting him off, but the rain seems timed to accompany. He leaves work early more often and comes home to find Spike in the living room, lamps on, the rain busy outside, the cat making a lump of itself on the couch arm and staring at the TV. Spike will almost always be on the computer, shoeless feet propped on the coffee table. And when he looks up and sees Xander, he's never not happy. He's so fucking easy to please. This is his life.
Xander, erratic, sometimes drops down to the carpet and gives Spike a blow job that makes him writhe and card Xander's hair. Or they'll just sit, Xander's mind turning off for a while.
It feels as if stormclouds are massing, as if the dark is rising. Evil might be making dire plans at any moment in some crack or corner of town, or motoring on its way to the Hellmouth for a fling.
"I don't want to die," Xander says one day, when the sun is so overcast that Spike can stand with him at three o'clock in the afternoon on the deck and see the distant, restless waves hitting the beach, through a gap in the bushes.
Spike: "Don't knock mortality."
Xander, still watching the waves, feels a flash of anger: "You say all the wrong things."
Spike, quiet. Sad maybe, though it's hard to tell: "Yeah?"
Xander, after a long pause: "No."
Spike has a particular sweater, wool and cable-knit and authentically Irish, in a complex shade of blue-green that Xander's eye keeps trying to puzzle out. It's one of many articles of clothing that are very unlike him. That is, the old him. He has dyed his hair again, though, and it sticks up in whitish-blond tufts that draw Xander's hand upward whenever they're close.
He loves Spike's face, the way it molds to his head, the way his head rests on his neck, the way his neck stems up from the downcurled edge of his sweater. Spike often smiles at him. He's so pale, and so perfect, and when Xander sees him at three o'clock in the pearly twilight of the sky he can't tear his eyes away.
It's time for something different, and he takes Spike to L.A. for no good reason. "Let's get out of here," he says. "Let's go somewhere." There's a concert Spike wants to see and they attend in ridiculous outfits, leather and ripped shirts, both of them laughing and stoned off some sweet pot that a friend of Dawn's scored for Spike, a thing Xander will never tell Buffy.
They visit Angel and company. Stay for a few days and help kick some local demon ass. It's a hell of a good time, and at one point Angel lifts his chin and laughs with genuine pleasure and Xander quite likes him. Just for a moment.
Then they take the car and drive east in random paths, heading toward Buffy. She's expecting them and when they get there, she's radiant, white teeth and wispy hair and big eyes. Such a skinny, pretty woman. No longer a girl, not at all. There are hugs exchanged--Xander lifts her off the ground and she squeals. It's hard not to look at her, impossible not to love her. Spike is more jazzed than Xander has seen him in a long time, ebullient and attentive to his slayer. They walk around the college, then town; have dinners, see the sights. Buffy introduces them to her boyfriend, her friends. She's found a place for herself.
Buffy: "I still get in a good slay now and then. The commute is nothing--New York, Boston, Philly. The vamps in Philly? So easy to spot. It's like a Michael Jackson video. I swear time stopped in the mid-eighties."
They're both terribly, manfully indulgent and protective of her, though she clearly doesn't need them to be.
Her friends are a mix of flighty and intellectual, goofy and aloof.
Spike, speaking softly as the first streaks of pink are appearing in the sky, as they're all sitting around in Buffy's apartment after a night of talk and beer: "Dawn misses you."
Buffy, looking down: "I know."
Xander: "Come home more often. If it's money--"
Buffy: "No. It's...not. I just," shrug, "I lose track of time. I mean to visit, and then there's a test or paper due, or I end up in Hartford tracking down some vamp with a kiddie kink. And Dawn is...she's doing so great. Best thing that ever happened, big sister leaving the nest."
The drive back to California is mellow, slow. They seek out the kitschiest hotels, the ones that still have unsold stock of color-tinted postcards from the fifties, agate keychains and rock candy and locally jarred honey, pine cabins and mountain views. They ignore interstates for the back highways and discover restaurants with proud pedigrees, selling huge, dripping burgers that stun Xander's cerebral cortex, touristy places that Spike visited with Dru once upon a time, though his stories require careful editing.
Xander's Jag has well-tinted windows, and he takes great care with his passenger. They don't fight over the radio. Much.
There's one motel where the walls are glossy knotted pine, hung with flying-duck paintings, and the lamps have small orange shades. The ice machine is broken. Xander has been chewing gum and his breath smells of wintergreen and Spike smells of the shower's tiny, floral soap. They are on rough sheets and the room's heater has an annoying buzz.
"I want you to stay with me," Xander says.
Spike, blinking up at him: "Don't I now?"
Xander: "Just stay."
Spike: "People clamor for my presence."
Xander: "I know."
Spike: "It's hard, bein' in such demand."
Xander: "You can't go, though. Tell them you're booked up."
Spike: "Well, I don't want to disappoint..."
That could be taken a few different ways, but he's looking into Xander's eyes, and his voice is a quiet thing, and his meaning seems clear.
Xander: "Good."
It's a moment of good. It's like a postcard.
Some of his best Spike-induced orgasms:
Evening, in a well-lit chain store parking lot, isolated from nearby cars but in view of shoppers coming and going. Classic car-parked blow job, Spike disappearing below the horizon of the dash like a street hooker and sucking him off. After a few hair-raising minutes, Xander flings his head back and becomes so loud and encouraging he wouldn't have noticed if small children or cops had been knocking on his window. He's the one knocking on the glass when he comes, hard enough to crack it.
A creature they nickname the Acid-Wash Demon destroys Spike's boots and does some nasty damage to his feet. Spike is laid up healing for three days. When he's done, the two of them bookend the smaller couch and Xander massages Spike's feet with oil, a gift of Becca's. One of Spike's feet keeps wandering between Xander's legs with wicked intentions, and god, every part of him is clever, Xander thinks. Every part of him is sex. Spike has elegant feet, like a statue's, as if someone put artistry into making them, getting the twist of ankle just right, the veins and bones. And Xander lets himself be talked into taking his dick out, letting Spike work him over--ball and heel and arch of his foot--until Xander is shuddering like that time he stuck the screwdriver in the electrical socket.
Spankings, which Spike does dirty and good. He knows just how to give them without making Xander feel like a fool, which is something Anya failed at spectacularly the one time they tried it. Spike has done this before, and that takes Xander's mind places it does not want to go, because...Dru? Angel? Gyahhh. Vampire hands warm themselves on his ass; Spike has a few different methods of angling his blows--kind of sideways, or flat on--and Xander discovers he has a preference for the first. His dick drools and aches against Spike's thigh until he comes, rubbing himself off with hitches of breath and then throaty cries, his burning face smashed into the blankets. Sometimes Spike adds dirty, whispered words to their little tableau and Xander goes to a psychological place he never entirely gets used to. But it's deep, like a pain surfacing from his chest to become lighter; and it makes him realize how much he trusts Spike, so he asks for it. Sometimes.
The full-body dick rub, playful and a bit nasty: Xander straddling Spike and rubbing himself across Spike's face, neck, chest, painting him wherever it feels good to thrust. The way Spike lies there almost peacefully, the way he shifts, flexes, turns his head and jaw, murmurs approval with his eyes closed, makes Xander swell all over, inside and out.
Everything they do is good and hot and fun, never really awkward. Or when it does get a little awkward, it solves itself without fights or trauma. They don't often have bad sex. Spike doesn't make him feel lame. When someone gets called "easy" in a sex way, it's usually about sluttishness, but with Spike it's a different kind of true. He's apparently had enough sex in a hundred years that everything has run together, like tigers melting into butter, and he can be savage or unhurried or amused or taunting in just the right way, and maybe he's tailoring himself to match Xander's needs, so skillfully that Xander can't pin him on it, or maybe it's chemistry, synchronicity, that makes them want the same things at the same time.
Xander: "Were you always a good lover?"
Spike looks pleased to be complimented and says: "What--you think it comes without practice?"
Xander: "Isn't that the difference between a skill and a talent? It could be a natural talent, right? ...sucking someone off." He smiles, half kidding.
Spike's face is odd and intent and serious as he considers Xander. A small frown has etched itself between his brows: "Suppose so. Wouldn't know." Dry turn to his voice. "I was well trained."
They've touched on this before, and Xander has always been interested in hearing more details, harboring an illicit, naughty-boy thrill at the implications of this. Training. Even though the figure behind this mystery is Angel, their history fascinates him with a low-down dirty tickle.
But whether or not it's Spike bringing up the subject himself, he always answers Xander's questions with the assurance: you don't want to know. When he says that, Xander lets it drop. He can tell when Spike isn't interested in talking about something: his face closes down. Shades dropping in the windows, shop sign turned to closed.
Now, though, Xander feels that Spike has mentioned it one too many times. Maybe he does want to talk, and just needs to be pressed.
Xander: "So how exactly do you train someone to do...that."
Spike gazes at him, and says predictably: "Told you before. You don't want to know."
Xander looks at Spike's face and thinks of how Angelus probably hurt him; but then again--here and now--Spike seems completely untraumatized, matter of fact about it, as if he really is just thinking of Xander, like maybe Xander's too human or too young to hear such adult, vampire secrets.
"I do," Xander says. "What makes you think I'll freak out? Does my Hellmouth cred count for nothing? I've walked on the dark side, my friend--" And now he's playing it up for effect, a topping of extra cheese. "--I've seen the evil that lurks in the hearts of men." He wants Spike to share his secrets. They're lying in bed on their sides, facing each other, close enough to touch, far away enough to talk. They're primed for secret sharing.
Spike is still serious, and his face has started to smooth itself out, leak away expression. "Xander--"
His name: a bad sign, and annoying. He says in exasperation, "Oh come on."
Spike, calmly: "Fine. You want to know how vampires train their kind? I was a bashful, tight-arsed little sod 'fore I was turned. Closest thing I'd had to sex was back-alley hand jobs and I prayed God's forgiveness after, for letting low women tempt me. Dru was my first, made sinning easy. Then she took me home to Daddy." He pauses. "I was all puffed with myself--worryin' his ankles, always a laugh to see if I could trip him up. But I was a pup, hardly worth his attention. Slapping me down now and then was as much trouble as he took, till I pissed him off enough to make it interesting for him. Spent a good year on me then." His tone is musing. "Darla's doing, really. Think it was a bet." His eyes flick to Xander. "Sex was just part of it." And then: "To keep a man from biting, you have to pull all his teeth out. Takes about a week for a vamp's to grow back if you feed him well. Longer if you starve him."
Xander's throat is tight and dry.
"'Course, the point was to break me in so well I could keep my teeth. Till he was sure I'd do anything he said 'fore he even said it." A smile without any pleasure, cold eyes above. "Once he got started, he wasn't in a hurry to stop. I was his workshop project. He broke me long before he lost interest, kept on to try out new things. I heeled like a good dog for him. He had this thing for dogs, trained them as well. Amazing what you can teach a dog to do if you--" Spike pauses. "You want I should stop?"
Xander nods, and it stops and he feels shaky and small--not small as a man, but small the way a human feels small when he realizes there's more in the darkness than just him. He wants to crouch down and hide away from things.
Later though, he gets angry in a way he hasn't gotten angry in years. Not since he first clashed with Angelus over Buffy. It's a smoldering, killing anger, it's as if he's operating some heavy power tool, the vibrations working deep into his bones. He battles it in his own workshop, cutting and sanding things, blasting noisily through wood, smashing and hammering and ripping until sometimes he's hard, a rageful hardness that he doesn't bring to Spike, but eases with his hand, rough jerks as he imagines killing Angel in different ways. Climaxing always on unspeakable violence.
It's not as if Spike hadn't been evil too. Make that a capital E: Evil. Obnoxious, sleazy, ruthless: a stalker, a manipulator, a guy who'd kidnap kids to serve his purposes, who'd killed slayers and thousands of people, cutting a bloody swathe across continents, his vampire face hard and ugly and empty of life. Xander had enjoyed Spike's humiliations and been indifferent to his feelings, the angst and bitterness of a monster.
Nothing makes sense. Xander can't make it scale out to justice. He's starting to see things differently--he's somehow been stuck with an idea of good and evil as an equation on the level of basic math, but it's not, it's beyond that, beyond even algebra, where you can fill in x's and y's as almost anything--it's like those equations in Good Will Hunting those squiggles and shapes up there in the stratosphere of meaningless complexity. Down here on Xander's level, nothing is ever going to add up or factor out. He can't kill Angel. He'd once wanted to kill Spike. Now he feels about Spike the way he once did about Buffy, at the time he'd hated Spike.
It's enough to make a man cry. In private.
He builds Spike a desk. An elaborate, detailed, roll-top, pigeonholed desk, with a hand-rubbed varnish, styled like an antique but designed to take a computer.
For a while Xander has trouble getting it up in bed, now and then, but the problem passes off with time, and sex acquires another layer, a deeper patina. This complicates things that used to be purely fun, because it's a kind of intensity inside him that isn't going to go away. It's harsh and full of longing, trapped inside him, and he tries to get it out--through his mouth, with kisses all over Spike's twisting body, through his dick when he comes, through the planing movements of his hands over all that unmarked skin.
Xander hopes it's getting out of him and through to Spike. He doesn't have a lot of good words for it, but it's something he can do with his hands.
Willow: "Are you in love with him?"
Xander: "That's the big, heart-shaped question, isn't it?"
Willow, smiling, eyebrows lifting gently in a very cute way: "You act kind of hearty, you know."
Xander: "Do I?"
Willow: "You touch his hair," she lifts her hand up behind her head to the nape, "right in the sweet spot." Her lips twitch, a tiny but firm not-quite-a-smile motion, pretty much a gavel banging down to say: case closed.
Xander goes for the smaller, safer admission: "I like that spot. That's the best spot." He smiles and looks off to the side, his thoughts taking an alone moment. Traffic goes by.
Willow: "It'd be okay to love him, you know."
Xander cuts her a glance, and some of what he's thinking reaches his face: a dryness at her permission but also an acknowledgment that vampire boyfriends come packaged with issues. "Yeah." A pause as they continue ambling toward the Magic Box, coffees in hand. "Timing is everything, isn't it."
Willow's face knits up into a quizzical, self-directed little frown. She's got a navy pea-coat on, and a fuzzy striped scarf, and her hair is doing the Chloe. "We have the weirdest lives," she notes, more or less to herself, as if this hasn't occurred to her lately. "By the most objective standard, I mean? We're right up there."
It's nothing they haven't joked about before, and it's not even a joke really, but Xander nods as they re-establish the common bond of weirdness.
When Xander next sees Spike, he thinks about love. Big word. Four whole letters. He's trying it on for size as he studies the curve of Spike's bowed head, nape to neck to shoulders. Spike is on the couch, typing, absorbed in something, eyes fastened to his monitor screen. Xander thinks that love isn't a useful word for what you can feel for someone. It is and it isn't.
Most of the time he thinks of himself as: Xander Harris, ordinary guy. It's his shoe size. If the shoe fits, and all that. And ordinary guys have ordinary-sized loves. At least, this seems the usual rule. He's not the kind of guy who gets the slayer, for instance. He found that out early. And when he was with Anya--and wow, honesty isn't the nice place in your soul, is it--when he was with Anya, he loved her, he did. But he'd also settled. Settled for settling down with her, because he's always been the kind of guy to try hard and work at things he isn't a natural at. His love was ordinary-sized and not enough. Which was why the whole big botched marriage thing, if you rooted down to the underbelly of fear.
Spike is not at all ordinary. He's slayer-sized. It doesn't matter if he's communing with Xander's couch, or that these days he's more often cursing his keyboard than cursing some demon with the nerve to bleed on him as he guts it. He's an established element--like a rock star with those seven solid albums to his name that ensure his place in history. Not a one-hit wonder, by any means, and he can afford to coast for a while, bring it down a notch. The concept of retirement is meaningless when it comes to vampires; y