Involuntary Bodies by Anna S.

Involuntary Bodies

May 23, 2001

The smoke was clearing, not like smoke from a fire, but like the mystical stuff it was. It thinned as it rolled off to the sides from the circle of empty air where the portal had been. No scorch marks showed on the living room carpet. Not a sign remained that anything out of the ordinary had happened. In a few moments the room was restored to normal, except for being four people emptier and the current ground zero of the Hellmouth. Normal was that nothing was normal at all.

Xander still hadn't taken it in. He could hear Dawn's sobs and Tara's confused keening and another noise that itched at his attention, a voice saying oh god, oh god like a broken record that needed to be thrown across the room, but he had to focus on keeping his crushed heart beating or he'd...he'd lose it.

"I can't believe," Wesley said, folding abruptly at the knees and lucking out by hitting a chair. "I can't believe it." His face wore the shell-shocked mirror of Xander's insides.

There was no response to that, or no point to one, but suddenly Xander was angrier than he'd ever been in his life. The voice sawing at the air kept on and on, oh god, oh god, driving him bug-fucking nuts. He balled his fists by his sides and swung around to its source.

"Shut up!" he yelled. "Shut the hell up!"

Spike sat against the wall with his knees to his chest, arms wrapped around them. He went silent immediately, staring at the empty space where the others had left. Xander, who didn't want to look at him for longer than necessary, was captured by a pause. He didn't expect to see vampires crying, but more disturbing--he could actually see the soul in Spike's face, huge and newborn and horrified, trapped behind the dead skin and eyes. It sobered him up a little, made him less concerned with himself and more aware of the others who'd been left behind with him. He glanced at Dawn, who continued to bawl like someone ten years younger, a six year-old astonished by abandonment. In the armchair Tara rocked and tugged at a handful of hair and wailed.

"The mothers aren't coming," she broke off to whisper, turning an agonized look up at Xander, as if seeking confirmation. "The mothers aren't coming and we won't have the party."

"Dawn, can you--" It was so cruel to ask anything of her. "Help Tara."

Sniffling, she wiped her face and went to kneel by the chair, where she took Tara's hands and began soothing her. The transition to adulthood could be that fast sometimes.

"They just left," Anya said, breaking an uncharacteristic silence. Her hands were twined and her shoulders unevenly hunched with tension, making her look as if she'd been hung askew on a clothes hanger. "That's a hell of a thing to do. I'm right, aren't I? Xander?" She beseeched him with clear, open eyes.

"Yes."

"Even in the most low-level jobs, they ask that you give two weeks' notice."

He stared at her and bit his tongue.

"I think I'll go through Buffy's clothes," she decided. "She has several nice outfits and there's no point giving couture to the homeless. They wouldn't take proper care of it." Anya never took long to find the silver lining. Putting her plan into action, she headed upstairs.

"I should call the others," Wesley said as if to himself, starting to surface from his shellshock. "Tell them."

"You should tell them in person."

Wesley looked at Xander for a few beats, then said in dispirited resignation, "You're right of course."

"This is nuts." No one needed to be told that, but Xander felt an emphatic need to say it.

"Extremely." The other man stood. "That wasn't the Angel I know."

Xander shifted closer, back to the others, and lowered his voice. "Buffy--all she ever thought about was taking care of Dawn, protecting her. For her to leave like that, it just doesn't make sense." He was only repeating what he'd said to her, to all of them, when trying to convince them to stay, but he had a feeling he'd be repeating himself for a while. The loop of his thoughts ringed his head like a halo of dazed bluebirds and stars. "And Willow abandoning Tara, like this? Never."

"They were certainly under the influence of something," Wesley conceded. "But whether or not it was malign is open to question. Perhaps The Lady was just what she appeared to be, a spirit escorting them to a higher realm. Perhaps this was their destiny."

"That's crap." But Xander dropped his gaze, the pressure of fear throbbing in his temples and making him sick to his stomach. Why shouldn't it be true? They'd been the gifted ones: Buffy, Angel, Willow, Giles. All of them had special powers and strengths. Buffy was the slayer, the chosen one, Angel the vampire with a soul, Willow had magic on tap, and Giles--he couldn't quite pin down Giles, but figured that mystical lore and watcher wisdom probably made for a stellar resume. All of them had been special. Everyone but him. He was just the ordinary guy, the flunky. He didn't even rate as a sidekick; sidekicks had their own powers. This was why he'd been left behind, along with Dawn, now no more than an ex-key; and poor crazy Tara; Wesley and Anya, who never really rated at all; and of course Spike. They were the losers, the unwanted.

"Destinies are funny things," Wesley said. "The powers that guide the universe don't operate by our standards. They don't have human ethics or feelings--they're beyond love, loyalty, promises. They play a game in which we're the pawns, and even the most well-meaning manipulations may appear to us as ruthless."

"Screw the powers."

Wesley lowered his head a notch and Xander read silent agreement in the gesture. "I don't know how I'm going to tell Cordy and Gunn," he murmured, then looked up, frowning. "What about you?"

"Me?" Xander laughed a cracked laugh. "I have no one to tell. Who the hell would believe me? 'Well, Mrs Rosenberg, your daughter conjured the light spirits to kill a hell-god, then she and all my other friends went to join them, and sure, you can dig up my basement, officer.'"

His expression forgiving, Wesley said, "That's not what I meant. What will you do?"

A panicked sensation hit Xander full in the chest. "Does not compute," he said, addressing the blank spot in his brain. "Ask again later." The worry and sympathy in Wesley's face was hard to take, because Xander knew he couldn't ask anything of him. The guy had his own life, his own problems. People who lived on the Hellmouth had to take care of themselves.

"A fourteen-year-old girl, an unbalanced young woman, a newly souled vampire." Wesley raised his brows a fraction; they kept their crease of concern. "You shouldn't have to handle this alone."

"We'll be all right." Instinctively he felt himself closing off against the outside world. "Besides, I'm not alone. I have Anya."

From the way Wesley's face cleared, Xander could tell he was relieved to have an excuse to go without guilt. "Well," he said. "I--" He hesitated, glancing past Xander, and his voice slowed. "I'll stay tonight, anyway."

Xander's own relief was like a froth of beer through his nervous system. "Sure," he said, swallowing, pretending it was no big deal and that he wasn't pathetically grateful. He made himself turn then. He might just want to go somewhere and get drunk and forget everything until morning, or maybe never, but there were other people to take care of. Dawn was stroking Tara's hair with slow movements while Tara twitched her head restlessly away, eyes roaming around the room as if she hoped to catch sight of Willow hiding behind a piece of furniture. The two of them together formed a problem too big to think about, and Xander's gaze moved on and came to rest on Spike, who'd laid his head on his knees. Both forearms were streaked with blood from fighting Glory's nasty little hobbitses and his hands hung loosely, fingers curled, knuckles battered. The dirty ragged hems of his jeans, the scuffs on his boots, his pose--the soul might be huge in him, but right now he looked too small to hold it. And Xander had to toss him out.

"Spike," he said. "Get up. Time to go."

Spike lifted his head and then shoved unsteadily to his feet, not meeting Xander's eyes. "Right," he muttered, swiping at his face almost like Dawn had. "Go." He paused though, studying his feet as if they were a long way off. "Go where?" He sounded like he was asking a real question, like Xander might be able to direct him to some specific place for freshly souled vampires. A charitable agency. A shelter. A halfway house.

"How the hell should I know?" he said edgily. "Back to your crypt."

"Right. Crypt." His echo was getting tiresome and he still wasn't moving. He just raised his head toward the front door, a dog resisting commands, stiff with what might be fear.

"You remember where that is, right?" Maybe the soul had fucked his head up.

"Cemetery. Underground." A half-broken hitch: "Where I belong."

Bingo, Xander thought, and watched Spike drift off.

"You're letting him go?" Wesley asked, coming to stand at Xander's shoulder. The front door closed with a quiet click at the vampire's exit.

"I have enough to worry about. I don't need another basket case." He heard himself and sucked in a breath, ashamed, but Dawn and Tara didn't show any sign of having caught the remark.

"You are aware that a soul doesn't guarantee an immediate conversion to goodness and light?" Wesley seemed to be picking his words carefully.

"Spike's still chipped."

"Oh, yes." Wesley processed this. "At least, that we know of. Angel may have disabled it when he...." A vague gesture headward. "We don't really know the extent of his gift."

"Some gift. Remind me not to invite him to any birthday parties...that he'll never be coming back for." Xander grimaced in sardonic punctuation. "It doesn't make any difference. If Spike is unchipped, I want him here even less."

Wesley looked over at the commiserating girls. Dawn was braiding a stray piece of yarn into Tara's hair. "I understand. But it's worth bearing in mind that he's a champion now."

"Just because Angel said so?" Xander made a scoffing sound. "Do you really want to count on anything he's ever said?"

A shadow passed across the other man's face. "Buffy and Angel are gone, and the only living slayer is a possible sociopath jailed for murder. In terms of strength, Spike's all that's left."

"What are we, chopped liver?"

Wesley looked at him.

"Okay," Xander admitted, "we're liverish. Feel free to adopt him, give him a good home. I don't care." He felt tired, very very tired, and making conversation with Wesley had never been high on his list of late-night pastimes. Leaving Wes to make his own sleeping arrangements, Xander went to lend Dawn a hand.

The two of them got Tara upstairs, sedated, and into Buffy's bed without too much fuss. Tonight it was simple. Looking ahead--to showers, bathroom trips, female problems--the work involved in caring for her seemed almost overwhelming. He watched Dawn smooth the sheets up around the other girl's shoulders, turn out the light, made note of how she left the door cracked.

"Are we supposed to restrain her?" Dawn wondered.

"I don't know." He wanted to be the guy who knew, and groped for something to say. "We'll see what happens tonight."

"But what if she falls out of bed? Or sleepwalks?"

Tiredly he rearranged his thoughts. "I'll sleep in front of her door. Tomorrow I'll get one of those baby monitors."

"Xander." Dawn's eyes were luminous with fresh tears readying to fall, and her voice cracked apart the syllables of his name. "What are we going to do? How could Buffy leave me like this? I don't understand."

As she began to cry in earnest he took her in his arms. His thoughts turned to his parents and the idea of help, which he immediately dismissed as useless, and he thought about Buffy's happy glow as she raised her hand good-bye and melted away into the portal, and about the intricacies involved with giving up his lease and moving in, which there was no question he'd do, then came back to the moment with an armful of damp girl.

"I don't get it either," he said. "I guess it's a destiny thing."

"I hate destiny." Her voice was savage, enough to make his heart skip a beat. He had a terrible feeling that "destiny" might just as easily have been "Buffy."

He let her cry some more, then eased away. "Hey," he said, making her meet his eyes. "Just remember: they're not dead and it's not the end of the world. Glory's gone and you're here. Maybe we won't be able to figure out why they left, but we'll figure out all the rest, first thing tomorrow morning." He checked his watch. "Make that today morning."

It didn't quite get a nod from her, and as she retreated to her room he let resentment bloom in his chest against Buffy and Willow and Giles for leaving them like this. Numb and robotic, he forced his feet down the hall. In Joyce's old room, Anya lay asleep on her side in the middle of the bed, covered in blouses and skirts, a Gucci bag clutched tightly in one hand. Xander pulled a few items further across her body before returning to the hall with a blanket and pillow. Downstairs, a light went off, then another, as Wesley moved from room to room. From Buffy's bedroom came tiny moans and mutters; from Dawn's the wet and muffled noise of sadness. The floor was hard, but sometime between three and four, his own inner light guttered out and he slept.

"He didn't even reply," Wesley said. "He was essentially catatonic. There was nothing I could do."

Xander nodded, eyes absently following the cars driving by the house. Sunny day, sunny people going sunny places. Lucky them. "I'm sure he'll rally. Spike's a survivor." He glanced at Wesley. "Like those alley cats you see with the torn ears."

"I couldn't verify whether the chip was active. If you should come to feel unsafe from him, or any of Glory's minions that might be left, call me. I'll take care of it."

"You."

Wesley drew himself up slightly. "We'll take care of it."

Trying to imagine vampire-slayer Cordelia Chase backing up ex-watcher Wesley Wyndam-Pryce, Xander failed dramatically. Tongue in cheek, he nodded again but said nothing. No need to antagonize nice people who offered to kill for you.

"You're sure there's nothing else you need?" Wesley was lingering on the front porch. Xander suspected the dawdling had less to do with generosity and more with a reluctance to return to L.A. and break the news to his friends.

"Many things," he said. "But I think we've got it covered for now."

After watching the other man roar sedately away on his motorcycle, Xander went back inside and surveyed his domain. His domain scared him. He'd graduated from his childhood room to a basement and then to his own apartment and an independent life, but this was a whole house, and he was the man of it. He could hear the radio in the kitchen, Dawn talking over the music to Tara, the sound of clinking dishes and running water. She had three more weeks of school, she'd said, and she should be there today. And he should be at work. They needed a system.

Heading to the kitchen, he began to reinvent their lives.

June 12, 2001

"Xander, wake up! I said, what do you think?"

He jerked his head up from his hand and his nose from the newspaper to blink at Anya. "What?" She was standing with her arms behind her, chest thrust aggressively out, and he considered her pose with uncertainty. It obviously meant something.

"My new brassiere--do you think it lifts and separates? The salesgirl assured me it would." Her eyebrows rose prettily and she took on a helpful tone. "There's subtext here, by the way."

"Sorry. I was just checking the for-sale ads. We need a new vacuum cleaner."

"What's wrong with the old one?"

"It sucks, in that it doesn't."

"You're more interested in household appliances than in my breasts," she accused in that disarming way of hers, as if she were inventing a unique grievance never uttered in the history of male-female relationships, or as if she'd heard of it by report but was taken by complete surprise to find Xander a representative of his species.

He took the opportunity to study her breasts. "Definitely not. I'm very impressed by the...subtext."

"Xander, the subtext is that we should have sex." Anya came around the table and slid onto his lap by a feat of maneuvering that would have dazzled a circus crowd. He slid his chair away from the table to accommodate her better. "It's been four days. This is unprecedented and dire. I don't think I'm overly demanding, but you force me to become repetitive. This is how women get reputations as nags, when it's really the man who's at fault." Pique shaded her words.

"You're not a nag." He ran a hand up and down her back. "I've just been tired. You know what it's been like."

Abruptly he lost his lap-warmer. "Do you know what it's been like? Watching a crazy girl every day, always having to remind her, 'Don't touch the displays, don't eat the candles.'"

"She's eating candles?"

"I'm tired, and agitated, and I'm losing that perky je ne sais quoi that closes sales." Anya moved to the counter and turned, as if having it at her back braced her spine. "She needs professional supervision."

"She's Tara," he said. He let shock carry the words, even though he'd had the same thought himself. "What do we say when Willow comes back and asks where she is? 'Oh, we got tired of her, so we put her in Belle Reve.'"

Anya stared. "Xander. Willow's not coming back."

Looking away to maintain control, he said flatly, "It doesn't matter. We can't afford it."

"Wouldn't they have to take her in," Anya said with a hesitancy that made him tense in anticipation of her next words. "I mean, if we brought her there and--and left her."

"What are you guys talking about?" The voice, stiff and high with accusation, made Xander turn. Dawn stood in the doorway, arms militantly crossed over her Bad Kitty shirt.

"Not you," Anya said. "Tara. We were just--"

"Nothing." Xander gave her a look. "We were just nothing."

"You were talking about getting rid of her."

"We're not getting rid of her." Xander got up and tried to project a big-brotherly reassurance, placing a hand awkwardly on Dawn's shoulder, which was hunched and hard with anger.

"Why not? You sent Spike away. Why not send everyone away? You could put me in an orphanage." Her voice was getting strident. "I'll live on gruel and bread crusts and be adopted by perverts who do terrible things to me."

"No one is sending you away," Xander said, with slightly more force. "This is your home."

"At least until we sell it," Anya put in helpfully. Such bad timing was a gift, like perfect pitch or the ability to wear white pants.

Dawn drew in a sharp breath of alarm and looked from Anya back to Xander. "No! You can't!"

Caught in the middle of this revelation, he steeled himself to deliver fact instead of fantasy. "We may have to. The mortgage is twice what I paid in rent and your mom's insurance isn't--" He faltered for a second at the expression on her face. "There's not much left in Buffy's account."

"I'll help--I can work, after school." Resolve made her stand even straighter. "I can babysit and deliver papers and cut lawns."

He didn't have the heart to discourage her, and the truth was, it would help. He let her return to Tara, glass of juice in hand. Fourteen years old, with the anxieties of someone twice her age. He'd lived that himself, but hated that she had to.

With Anya generously making dinner for them all, he returned to the newspaper and circled cheap vacuums, his pen eventually wandering left into the want ads. Maybe he could get a second job; an evening or night job--there had to be employers looking for someone too ignorant to realize how dangerous night shift was in Sunnydale, or too desperate to care. His pen drifted down the column. Accountant. Apartment manager. Cable installation technician. Fish cutter, experience wanted. The paper wasn't exactly packed with prospects. You'd think a rising mortality rate would leave plenty of openings.

"Is this too salty?" Anya asked, poking a wooden spoon in front of his face. He tasted the marinara obligingly.

"It's great. It's--"

A scream ricocheted through the halls to reach the kitchen and he shoved up from his chair and by instinct grabbed the nearest makeshift weapon, a field hockey stick Dawn had liberated from the basement. In the living room, Dawn was struggling with Tara, gripping her wrists and dodging her kicks in a clumsy dance.

"Stop it," she said, a frantic edge to her voice. "It's just me! It's Dawn!"

Tara's ferocity wiped out the past in broad strokes. She was nothing like the calm, gentle-natured person she'd been before Glory stole her mind; more like the demon she'd once feared turning into. Xander didn't know how to touch her or talk to her anymore, but he rescued Dawn from the attack and held Tara still in his stronger grip.

"Get her pills," he said, turning his face away from a spitting screech, trying not to see the panic and mad hate in her eyes. It wasn't personal, it couldn't be. He let her kick his shins while Dawn ran to get the sedatives, and thought of Willow and the obligation she'd laid on him. Take care of her for me, Xander, she'd said, standing in the ethereal glow as the portal pulsed behind her, unfolding its center like a flower. I trust you. I know you'll be good to her.

He really hoped destiny was worth this.

June 23, 2001

"You do good work," Paul said as Xander was punching out on the clock.

"Thanks." The compliment nonplussed him. His only goal when accepting a part-time job at the furniture plant had been to last long enough to be taken for granted, and he'd adopted the nameless, faceless attitude of an automaton, slipping out the side door each night to avoid any conversations with his coworkers about kids, low-fat diets, or reality TV.

"You worked on a line before?"

"No. I'm in construction."

"You looking for full-time?"

He hesitated, thinking of the pile of bills sitting on the Summers' foyer table, then of Dawn and Tara, waiting home alone and unprotected. "No," he said finally. "Not right now."

On Paul's laid-back wave, he left. Outside the building, the parking lot stretched away into the darkness, its perimeter of security lights filled with gaps that suggested this was a favorite hunting ground for vamps, although Xander hadn't seen one yet and his alternate theory, that management might simply be too stingy to make replacements, was gaining support. He gripped the stake in his pocket and headed to his car, hoping for something to kill--a nice, stupid vamp, the kind who never expected a fight and would blink at you, dazed, as they disintegrated at your feet. It had been weeks since he'd staked anything, though every day the local news carried more stories about the upswing in "animal attacks" and violent deaths. Mostly this was for lack of effort; he didn't patrol anymore, couldn't afford to. As Dawn and Anya too often pointed out, if something happened to him, they'd be left to fend for themselves. So he nodded along, gravely agreed that he needed to play it safe, and fell asleep each night to scenes of elaborate carnage acted out in his head.

At home, he juggled the groceries he'd stopped for and unlocked the front door. Dawn appeared with a guilty face at the sound of his key.

"You need to keep the chain on the door," he said, aware that he sounded like his father on a bad night.

"I know, I know. I'm sorry." She lifted onto her tip-toes and poked around in his shopping bag, excitement making her look even younger than usual. "Did you get Nutter Butters?"

"I got apples, to keep you sleek and attractive for potential mates."

She groaned and pulled a face.

"And Nutter Butters," he admitted, "to ensure my own survival in the tribe."

Dawn's grin was radiant and her gaze a spotlight; it gave him a strange, gripping feeling, as if he'd suddenly been pushed onstage without time to dress and was expected to perform a part he hadn't memorized. The dad part.

"You are the man," Dawn chirped happily, skipping ahead of him down the hall.

"Just one of them." In the kitchen, he eyed the array of dishes and puddles on the counters. "I missed the hurricane warning."

"Tara wanted waffles." Dawn began digging into the bag of groceries without pulling anything out, hunting downward for the cookies. "At least, she kept saying 'waffles' and she seemed really sad, so I made some. They're more complicated than you'd think."

"Did Anya leave?"

"Yeah," Dawn said, sounding more subdued, though maybe that was just because Xander had his head in the fridge. "She said she had to clean her drapes." A pause. "Aren't they your drapes? Ex-drapes?"

Xander pulled out the remains of too many waffles, stacked on a plate. Peanut butter and waffle had something going for it. "Hence the need for cleaning," he said, making his voice light.

They avoided each other's eyes for a minute, moving around the kitchen on their own tracks, Dawn putting groceries away between cookies, Xander spreading peanut butter in a slow, almost hypnotic state of tiredness.

"Why doesn't she move in?" Dawn was keeping it light too, but he could hear the strain. "I mean, it would save her money and you guys could be together. You were living together before."

"It's...complicated."

"More than waffles?"

"Like a five-course meal in a language you can't pronounce, where the soup is cold instead of hot, and the dessert's on fire, and you're supposed to use all these little forks you can't recognize..." He caught himself and stopped, afraid he'd gone too far. This wasn't anything Dawn needed to worry about.

"Yeah, well." Dawn frowned her way very nearly to a scowl. "If she's not going to stay, I wish she'd stop eating my cookies."

He turned, peanut butter knife raised in warning. "Hey. She helps." The words came out sharper than the knife, and Dawn ducked her head and gave him the broad side of her back in silent reply. "You can't expect her to change her entire life just because we had to."

"Whatever," came the mutter.

Teenage moods hadn't been fun the first time around when they were his own, and he understood better now why his parents had so often ignored him and hidden in the den.

Abandoning his own mess for the morning, he circled the house checking windows and bolting doors before heading upstairs. The baby monitor was breathing on his bedside table, assuring him of Tara's quiet sleep. He sat on the edge of the bed--Joyce's once, and how strange was that?--and noticed he still held half a waffle. From behind Dawn's closed door faint music reached him, while from outside he heard distant yells and yodels that might have been demons carousing. His eyes moved around the room, inventorying all the furniture he'd inherited, the exercise bicycle he ought to sell, the flowered wallpaper and drapes that his own masculine presence couldn't even begin to overpower.

Drapes, he thought, and looked at the picture of Anya on the bedside table, with her serious gaze and fixed smile. Tiredness, something other than tiredness, made him sad, sadness made his throat tighten, and the phone sat in front of her photo, silent and too heavy to pick up. He pulled open the table drawer where he'd stowed a picture of Buffy in a fancy frame. She'd been a slayer when it was taken--there was something knowing and heavy in her eyes. Her smile was incomplete.

He took the picture back out and set it on the table slightly behind and to the right of Anya's, taking more care than he needed to align it.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I've been angry." There didn't seem anything else to say. Besides, he was only talking to himself. And it was time for bed.

June 30, 2001

"I'm sorry, Xander, I just can't do this anymore."

"And this is how you decide to tell me?"

He stood with one hand to his head, more or less keeping his skull intact while everything inside threatened to blow. The magic shop was stacked with cardboard boxes marked 'Fragile' and crates overflowing with excelsior, half its contents swaddled in newspaper and packed away, the other half organized in ready piles. The front window held two signs, For Rent hanging next to a Going out of Business banner. These had been his first clue that Anya was leaving.

She was holding a multi-armed statue with ram horns and her gaze dropped to it. "No." Genuine upset twisted her face. "You weren't supposed to come here. I had it all planned." She set the statue on a counter and dug a piece of paper from a skirt pocket, saying as she unfolded it, "I was going to break it to you gently. I wrote a script:

'ANYA: Xander, I need my freedom. It's time for me to find myself. I'll be looking in Cleveland, where I'm relocating and opening a new shop and possibly a web site. This is difficult for me to do, because Giles isn't legally dead and didn't have the foresight to put the business in my name.

XANDER: I understand.

ANYA: I love you.

XANDER: I love you too.

ANYA: I wish it didn't have to happen like this.'"

She stopped and looked up, as if interrupted by her own regret. "There's more, where you tell me I'm the best lover you've ever had, and I tell you how glad I am that you were here when I became human again. And I promise to write, and then you take me in your arms and tell me everything will work out." She took a few steps closer, lips parting, gaze nailing him in a hopeful way. "Do you want to take me in your arms now?"

"I can't tell you it'll work out," he said tightly. "You know I can't do this by myself. What happens when Dawn goes back to school? Who's going to look after Tara?"

"What about Wesley? You could move to L.A. I'm sure they have plenty of construction work there."

Xander felt the gulf between them widening along the fault line. She'd turned away and resumed packing, and maybe guilt could keep her here a week or two longer, if he worked on her, but that would mean negotiating a deal, and he couldn't see far enough ahead to make the effort worthwhile. It didn't matter when she left; the lurch she left them in would be the same. And he couldn't blame her, not the way he kept wanting to blame Buffy and the others. Over the last month Anya had been tired and frazzled and increasingly irritable as she tried to juggle shopwork and the kind of intense adult babysitting that would tax even a professional nurse's nerves. What on the surface appeared to be selfishness was really a stronger survival instinct than his own. They weren't facing a fight they could win. This was the kind of fight that wore you down.

Looking around the half-stripped shop again, with its empty shelves and bare walls, he saw it in a new perspective, like a stage set being dismantled. Something was ending, or already over. People could change their lives, tear down what they'd built, leave Sunnydale. Is this what he needed to do?

"I have to be out by the end of the weekend," she said, hands busy with a rustle of distractions. "I'll be driving. This isn't goodbye...yet."

He nodded and said something inane and left. At home Dawn was watching TV from a deep nest in the couch, and Tara was sitting on the floor in pajamas, arranging crackers in irregular towers on the coffee table.

"How about pizza tonight?" he said.

"Cows think that's funny," Tara said, breaking off her work to give him an earnest frown. "You should ask for more than that."

"Extra cheese it is."

"I have too many fingers." Worriedly, she chewed the ragged edge of a nail. "Too many fingers to play the notes."

Dawn followed him to the kitchen and stood in the doorway while he hunted for a flyer. "She's been upset all day. I think it's the weather. She doesn't like rain."

The print on the pizza flyer blurred as Xander was reading; for a moment, everything turned inside out, Dawn's voice becoming a buzz, the rain outside growing into a roar. His damp clothes felt tight and heavy, and a band of pain circled his head. He looked and Dawn and blinked, seeing her for the first time. Fear kicked him in the gut. "What happened? You have a black eye."

"I do?" She swung around and peered in the hall mirror. "Wicked cool!" Turning her head this way and that for a better view, she said, "Tara hit me--totally by accident. Do I look like a delinquent?" With a dramatic sneer at her reflection: "I'm gonna mess you up."

It wasn't a large black eye, thank god, but the significance wasn't lost on him. What if Dawn had fallen, hit her head? What if Tara started a fire--by accident, on purpose, it didn't matter. This was fucked.

"Listen," he said. "I need to tell you something." He made her come sit with him at the table and took a deep breath, not meeting her eyes, as he figured out what to say. "Anya's leaving." Well, that was simple. And in no way was it that simple.

"Leaving. Like for a vacation?"

"No."

"Oh, great." The sharp sound she made didn't quite measure up to a laugh; he could tell that Dawn was going for cynical indifference, but the shell was so fragile it would crack with just one more degree of pressure. "I guess you'll be leaving next. Everyone does sooner or later."

"I'm not leaving you." He tried to take her hands, but she pulled them away. "Dawn, I'm not leaving. Not unless you want me to." At her betrayed, fearful expression he said quickly, "I mean, if you changed your mind and wanted to live with your dad--"

"I don't want to live with that son of a bitch," she said, venomous and tense as a little snake that's been cornered. He had a feeling she'd never referred to him that way before, that she was crossing a line she wouldn't be traveling back across. "I never want to see him again. All he cares about is his new wife and their baby. He didn't even come to mom's funeral."

He didn't remind her that her dad had been in the hospital at the time--he couldn't even remember himself what for, and it was beside the point. "Then I'll stay. If you want me to."

Dawn didn't say anything; didn't have to. Tears lined her eyes. He reached for her hand again and this time she let him. Her nearest hand was a fist on the table and he wrapped his palm around it. In the rigid, miserable lines of her body, he caught hints of future possibilities that his mind spun into horror stories: traumatized by loss, she'd rebel, growing angrier and angrier, until one day she'd just give up hope and run away, become a hooker, a junkie, la femme assassin. Or--and how tragic that this was the most realistic fear--a vampire.

"Things are going to work out," he said, and he prayed it wasn't a lie.

Walking the streets of Sunnydale at night alone, with Buffy and Willow and Giles far out of reach, made Xander realize how much he knew about his town that he didn't want to know, and how very insane he'd been all those times he'd gone zipping around by himself in the past, as if just being pals with the slayer was a good-luck charm. Even Harmony would scare the bejeezus out of him now.

The rain had stopped and at first the sky was a solid greyish-pink from street lights, but as he moved further downtown, the shadowy spaces between working lights grew wider. His sneakers crunched on broken glass, some from bulbs, some from bottles. From the accumulation of litter, it looked as if no one had swept the streets in weeks. Some stores had boarded windows, others were defaced with graffiti, and several electric signs showed damage.

"Welcome to the other Bedford Falls," he murmured to himself, kicking an intact beer bottle to see how far it would go. It shot down the sidewalk a few yards then hit a crack to spin and roll. He was watching it when a shiny boot came out of the shadows and settled on it, stopping the motion.

The boot attached to a leg in torn fishnets, and the leg stretched up and up to presumably meet a handful of girl bits barely hidden by the skirt of the sleaziest dress he'd seen outside the Oscars.

"Looking for a friend?" the woman asked.

Xander's feet slowed but brought him near enough to see her clearly when she stepped out from the cover of a tree. She wasn't a woman, just a girl, and she wasn't even that, of course. Her eyes should have been cloudy with drugs or boredom, but were bright and watchful instead, surrounded by blue raccoon blushes of eye shadow. By this point, she had to be aware of his skittering heartbeat, though she might put it down to excitement rather than fear.

"Not a new friend. Sorry." He gave her his best boyish smile, pausing in front of her with hands in pockets.

"Hey, I know you," she said.

He blinked, retuning his scrutiny and searching his memory. He had to broaden the context pretty far before he found a match. "Jordan," he said. "You went--you, ah, go to school with Dawn."

"Mmm. Dawnie." A smile cracked across the frozen fifteen-year-old face. "How is she? Haven't seen her around in a while."

"Maybe she hasn't been where you've been." He took any sting from the remark with his own false smile.

"I should drop by and see her." Jordan curled her tongue behind her teeth and cocked her weight onto one hip, her gaze measuring him from the neck down before yo-yoing back up to his jugular.

His hand flashed from his pocket and drove the stake through her chest at the same moment her face shifted. "I don't think so," he said, while her dust collapsed to the grass. It took him a moment to steady his breathing back out. He remembered the job as easier; the recovery time shorter. Too long since his last slay, maybe.

Or maybe you forgot how much it fucking sucks to kill school kids.

Shake it off, he told himself moodily, and headed through the cemetery gates. Horror central, hello. But nothing stirred among the graves as he passed, and he made it to Spike's crypt without another encounter.

Inside, there were more cobwebs than he remembered, more dust of the non-corpse kind, more darkness and silence. "Hello?" he called, kicking aside old bottles as he moved further in. Did no one in this town recycle? "Spike!"

Nothing answered him, and he picked his way carefully downstairs. He hadn't thought to bring a flashlight--some Hardy Boy he'd make--and the darkness rose to meet him like cold water. Only when his eyesight adjusted was he able to make anything out. On the far side of the cavern a weak light burned and he headed in that direction, interrupted only by a spectacular trip over something he couldn't see.

"Damn it!"

The thing didn't groan, move, or bite, whatever it was, and he picked himself up, wincing at the bang to his knee. He was close enough to the light now to see that it was a lantern, turned low and covered by a scarf. It sat on a table next to a bed, and in the bed was a lump of blankets, and in the lump was Spike, curled on his side with his face away from the light. A lot of things were obvious even at a single glance: that he was barely eating, that he rarely moved, that he wasn't taking care of himself. The shape of one shoulder blade cast a prominent angle through a thin grey tee-shirt that Xander seemed to remember him wearing when he'd last left Buffy's. Dirty roots had grown through the wheat of his hair.

Xander looked at the bedside table, picked up a crumpled cigarette package and fingered it. It was dusty and empty. A whiskey bottle stood by the lantern, just as dusty but nearly full--that was even more disturbing. Next to it was a blood pack whose contents had congealed far too long ago. It was covering a piece of paper and he nudged it aside to read. Spike, I'll be back Tuesday. More blood in the fridge. Eat, okay? Yours, Clem.

Stepping back a pace, Xander nearly tripped again over a clutch of cloth. He tried to kick it away, then bent down to dislodge it before straightening slowly with the thing in his hands. It was Spike's old duster, now slashed to ribbons. Somehow he didn't think a demon had done that; except the one who had a right to.

He laid the duster on the end of the bed and hesitated, then gave Spike's shoulder a little shove. "Spike...hey. Time to wake up."

The vampire didn't move or make a sound, and Xander, wondering if he might actually be in a coma, pulled him onto his back. It was like detaching a cicada skin from a tree; he came rolling lightly as if he were empty, all shell, no meat. His eyes were closed; his face thin enough that he almost looked like someone else, someone Xander had never met.

"Spike," he repeated, sitting on the edge of the bed. A beetle scuttled from under the blankets and along the mattress; he ignored it, focused on the sharpness of cheek and collar bones, the outline of skull at the temples, the tiny dry flecks of blood around Spike's lips from whenever he last drank.

"You in there?" he asked, easing back one eyelid, then jumping when both eyes came open, dark pools without recognition. "Remember me? Xander. Xander Harris." Nothing. "Monkey Boy?" he hazarded helpfully. That got him a blink, and slowly awareness filtered back into Spike's face. He looked at Xander without enthusiasm; he looked a hundred years' worth of tired.

"What do you want?"

His voice was so low and parched Xander could barely make out the words, and by sickbed instinct he looked around for water, but there was only the whiskey. He poured some into a dirty but not yet sentient glass and tried to give it to Spike, who didn't exert himself to take it, so Xander nudged the glass against his lips. The other man's eyes sparked into a weak glare--proof that the pilot light was on, anyway--then he sipped. A frown etched his brow; Xander suspected this was as much effort as he'd made in weeks. When Spike finished drinking, he let his head fall back with eyes shut.

"I used to think I was a nice guy," Xander said. Spike opened his eyes again with what might have been a shadow of interest. "Now, not so much. I haven't cared enough to find out how you've been. When Dawn talked about you, I killed every conversation dead." A flicker of something crossed the vampire's face. "Now I," he took a ragged breath, "I'm here looking for favors. I need your help."

All interest drained away. "Need somethin' killed," he said, resigned, his words less than a question.

"I need you to come live with us."

Wan as a ghost against his pillow, Spike frowned up at him for several passing ticks. "Sorry," he finally muttered. "Ears going funny. Thought you said you needed me to come live with you."

"Anya's leaving. I need someone to look after Tara and Dawn. I need..." Fumbling for honesty, Xander looked briefly away, unused to talking to Spike like a person. "I need somebody to keep me from going off the deep end."

"And where do you think I am?" The words rolled out hollow as smoke rings.

After a moment considering him, Xander reached out and took one of Spike's hands. "I'll help you out," he said. "If you help me."

Spike didn't answer right away, but then his hand tightened and he let Xander tug him upright. His skin was cold, his shirt loose, his hair a mess. Head bent, he made it to the edge of the mattress and then sighed and said, "I'm cracked, you know. Like a stopped watch. That's what it is, being dead. The only time I keep is what I've stolen. All their voices, tick, talk." A pause. "I'm a monster. I have dreams that show me that now...red and screaming."

"I think I'd be worried if you didn't."

"Good point."

"Just consider it your eligibility requirement." At Spike's confused look, Xander shook the hand he was still holding and offered a crooked smile. "Congratulations. You're now an official member of the Freaks and Geeks Club."

July 6, 2001

For some reason there was a dust pan, a broom, and a box of cookies on the porch. Xander picked them up as he entered the house. All the rooms downstairs were already dark except for the kitchen, though as he moved down the hall he could hear the singing of pipes overhead that meant someone was in the shower, probably Dawn, who seemed to live there lately.

Reaching the kitchen was a relief Xander didn't question and only noticed as a slight relaxation in his muscles. His days were still long, but he wasn't the only competent adult in the house anymore; when he pulled in it was like making safe harbor and he could switch off some of the hyper-vigilant systems he used to keep running non-stop. Sometimes he even felt like his old self for ten, fifteen seconds at a time.

"Hi, honey, I'm home."

Spike's eyes went immediately to the things Xander carried and the guilt that was never far off settled in his features. "Sorry," he said. He pushed the rough word out as if rubbing a lemon across his own bleeding wrist. "I'd've got those."

"No worries." Xander had stopped telling Spike not to apologize--for existing, for not breathing, for decades of murder, for dropping a glass of orange juice. Spike clearly had a hard time separating it all, and letting him apologize seemed kinder. "Should I even ask?"

Spike stashed the broom and dustpan in the cupboard. "Just some vamps. Pretending to raise money for--what was it--oh, band camp. Can you believe the brass?" His brows drew tight and he cocked his head in reflection. "Town's getting weird." The box of cookies thunked into the trash can as if to punctuate this judgment.

A week ago hearing about this would have freaked him out; a week ago it would have been Dawn answering the door. But now Xander merely nodded and decided no comment could really do the incident justice. He glanced at the open cookbook on the counter, took in the smears of oil and curls of carrot skin and haphazard mess of knives, and guessed hopefully, "Chow mein?"

"Yeah." Spike picked up the pot lid and they both studied the contents. "Meant to put that in the fridge."

Deciding against an anecdote about Willow's germ-phobic two-hour rule, Xander said, "Hey, I'm a guy. As long as it doesn't get up and run from my fork, I'll eat it. I've never understood the point of putting something in a little box in the fridge to get cold, if you're just going to take it back out and reheat the whole thing. And then you have to wash the box. Stop the madness, I say."

He got himself a plate, maneuvering around Spike, who maneuvered back as he cleaned off the counter. Watching a vampire put dishes in the dishwasher still ranked as one of the novelties of Xander's life.

Actually, there were a lot of changes to get used to, and an element of strangeness running like a thread through all of them. Not long after Spike's arrival, Xander had offered the other man some of his less frequently worn clothes. Old Spike would have refused with a sneer; new Spike accepted as if it were his duty. Tonight, the vampire was wearing an old striped Oxford shirt with the sleeves rolled up over his own threadbare blue jeans. Take it further: the dead demon walking around in the slayer's kitchen was wearing the shirt Xander's grandmother had given him four years ago for his birthday. With his newly shiny hair, he and the blue shirt made a walking hallucination. Xander had taken some comfort from the visible evidence of soul Spike had when found--his neglected hair had said, here's someone too scrambled to be dangerous--but one of Dawn's first welcoming gestures had been to cut and dye him back into shape. Now, blood-fed and cleaned up, he looked more like his old self. His old unchipped self, as experiments had confirmed.

On the other hand, he didn't act like it. So far Xander hadn't been given any reason to regret opening his home to a fiend of former darkness. He watched from the corner of his eye as Spike read the instructions on the dish detergent box with earnest intensity before carefully filling the dispenser.

I make the repentant killer do dishes, Xander thought. With this level of atonement, he should reach redemption in about ten thousand million years.

"How was your day?" he heard himself ask unironically.

Head lifting like a startled deer's, Spike looked at him. "Oh...all right." He paused, apparently giving the question additional thought. "Did laundry. Cleaned the bath. Watched Trading Spaces with the girl. Made her some paper dolls."

Xander tried to picture this. A grand failure of imagination blurred the visual. He didn't feel guilty about the deal he'd roped Spike into, not exactly, but even with a vampiric past taken into account, gratitude was inadequate when measured against the job description. With both Dawn and himself wage-earning to the best of their abilities, Spike was left housebound to look after Tara all day, his limits defined by closed curtains on every side. Personally, Xander was certain he'd go bugfuck fast in a situation like that, but Spike seemed to be settling in.

Upstairs, Tara's room was dark and she was sleeping, but Dawn's door showed a crack of light, and he knocked. There was a creak of mattress springs and an unidentifiable rustle that reminded him of his own hasty attempts to conceal contraband before parental visits.

"Hold on," Dawn called. "I'm--I'm indecent." A half minute or so passed before she opened the door. "Hey," she said brightly, stepping back to let him in. "What's up?"

"Young ladies past midnight."

"Uh huh. Good one." Her cheerful lack of respect was strangely reassuring. She hopped back to her bed, bounced her ass down, and crossed her legs.

"Everything going okay?" He'd taken to checking in with her each night, and they had a kind of understanding, that one question asking a dozen other unspoken ones.

"Yeah. Highly copacetic." She maintained a sunny face, but he was beginning to get the tickle that told him something was off. And of course, something was. She had no mother, no father, no sister, and behind her teenage façade, she was a newborn, a ball of energy pulled together by monks and shaped into a girl.

Xander stuck his hands in his pockets and leaned against the door, feeling awkward but holding her eyes directly. "Dawn, you know if you want to talk about anything, you can."

"I know." Too quick, too easy.

"No," he said, head lowering a little to plow himself deeper. "Look. I'm not being Father Knows Best guy here. We're all we've got. We're like the people who get washed up on a desert island after a shipwreck. If we don't pull together, we're just setting up our own little forts on opposite corners and talking to monkeys."

"Who are the monkeys?" Dawn asked.

"What?" He couldn't tell if she was being serious, but her face had lost its luster.

"This is an analogy, right? So who are the monkeys?"

"I don't know," he said, shaking his head once. "Maybe all the people who'd lock us up if we started talking about demons and portals and hell-gods."

Dawn picked at a fluorescent band-aid on her ankle in a moody way. "So can I talk to you about girl stuff?"

Please, dear god, no, he thought, trying to recollect what he knew about tampons. "Uh, sure."

"I don't have any girl stuff to talk about right now," she said, mild and smooth as butter. "But if I do I'll come to you."

Xander had a sinking feeling he'd been played. "Okay. That's...good..." He moved to go, but a sharp turn in conversation derailed him.

"What do you think Buffy's doing right now?" A head tilt. "Do you think she's watching us? Like, sitting on a cloud in one of those glowy white gowns, just watching us struggle down here like little ants?"

He took a steadying breath. "I don't know. She might not have time." God, that sounded shitty, but what was worse--believing that someone watched you and did nothing to help, or believing that she didn't watch at all? "I mean, she's probably busy saving people--"

"Saving other people," Dawn said, her voice hard and merciless.

"Dawn, she loves you--no matter where she is. She had to go because she was called. She'd never have left you otherwise. Not in a million years."

He wasn't sure what the truth was, so he might not even be lying.

After wishing Dawn good night, Xander went to his own room. On the foot of the bed were two piles of his clothes, neatly laundered and folded. It made him think of his mother; he hadn't talked to her in weeks. He had reasons to call, questions about property taxes and water heaters, but was afraid he might say the wrong thing and puncture the illusion that Buffy was still in residence. They had to keep that illusion alive as long as possible.

Thoughts swirled and connected in the back of Xander's mind as he went through the motions of getting ready for bed, and after his shower he went downstairs again, then into the basement. He gave a cursory rap against the banister as he descended the steps, then briefly stopped as he spotted Spike across the room, sitting on the floor, back to the wall, pose bringing to mind the night he got his soul back. It was a moment before Xander's feet moved again.

Spike's head lifted at his approach. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing. Just came down to see how you were doing." He took in the bare concrete, the cot, the forty-watt lamp sitting on a box. "We need to get some more furniture down here."

"It's all right." The words were low, almost a slur of tiredness, the kind of tired you get from existing too long.

Looking around, Xander spotted a wooden chair and brought it over. "Government regulations require you to be at least thirty-six inches off the ground when brooding."

"It's better down here." Spike pressed one hand flat against the cold floor and studied it. "Closer to the crimes."

Xander sat on the chair himself. "Glad to see you're not letting the creepiness get to you."

They shared silence for a moment, and then from upstairs a toilet flushed and the habitrail of pipes bisecting the basement sang and shuddered overhead.

"That worries me a bit," Xander said, looking up.

The vampire followed his gaze. "What's that?"

"Debris in the pipes, maybe." He looked back down. "The surest way to financial ruin is through the plumbing."

"Or the roof."

Startled by this knowledgeable observation, Xander nodded with tacit respect. Another wordless pause grew like a bubble before he broke it. "It's not too cold down here, is it?" He was reaching a bit, for conversation's sake; he seemed to recall asking that same question two days ago.

"No."

"Look," he said abruptly, scratching his jaw. "I don't want this to be weird, but I have to ask you something." A wary expression came into Spike's face but he tipped his head in what Xander took as an invitation to continue. "How much do you know about programming that thing?"

They looked over as one toward the robot Buffy, which was eerily balanced upright on both feet among storage boxes containing the random junk from the magic shop Anya hadn't wanted to keep. Someone--probably Spike--had draped a gauzy scarf over its head, hiding the face.

"Nothing. I didn't--I just told the boy what I wanted." He sounded heavy with self-loathing at the memory, and Xander almost regretted asking, but there were still gaps in his sympathy for Spike and this was one of them.

"Warren. Yeah. I don't really want to involve him if I can avoid it. I don't want anyone guessing that Buffy's gone."

"Suspect it hasn't gone unnoticed."

Xander met his gaze. "It's not demons I'm worried about." After a moment, he sighed and stood, absently repositioning the chair as if there were some magical angle that would give this corner of the basement a homier feel. It had already occurred to him how strange it was, this tidy reversal of fortune: Spike tucked away in basement digs, while he lived above in a proper house. It seemed like every way he turned lately, he took on an unsettling resemblance to his dad.

"Good night," he said, then glanced at the cot's unwrinkled sheets and blanket. "Don't sleep on the floor, okay?"

Xander left, not certain Spike would heed him, or even that he'd heard him, but there were only so many worries that fit his schedule before bedtime, and this was one too many.

The beauty part of Saturday mornings had always been lying in bed while other people did stuff, like bringing shirts to the dry cleaners and mowing the lawn and cleaning out gutters, and if you were young and lucky enough, making you pancakes.

Xander wasn't young anymore, and wasn't certain he'd ever been lucky, so he savored bed for about five minutes, listening to the rising buzz of Dawn's voice from the kitchen and inhaling bacon at too great a distance, before getting up and heading down, leaving rooms of open summer brilliance for the shaded dimness of the lower floor. It was like descending into a cool well.

In the kitchen, it was Dawn cooking. Spike sat at the table, spoonfeeding oatmeal to Tara, who looked surprisingly happy and more cooperative than she'd ever been with either of them.

"That's not bad, is it, love, with all the raisins gone." Spike was operating somewhere between murmur and croon, one arm laid across the back of her chair.

"Old women," Tara confided to him, enthusiasm crossing into worry. "And the cancer."

"Yeah, I know." And Spike sounded as if he did. "It's a terrible thing." He gave her another spoonful.

"I can't get the bacon right," Dawn complained, holding up a limp piece on a fork over the sizzling fat. "It's either noodly or burnt. Mom always got it perfect."

Xander poured a cup of coffee, wishing for one of those café mugs big as his head. "The secret of good bacon is to have the Denny's waitress bring it to you."

"Grrrr."

"Or you could try microwaving it," he added. He collected milk and cereal and brought them to the table. Someone had already set a place for him, just visible under layers of scattered newspaper. As he worked his way through his cereal and the movie reviews, he glanced now and then at Tara. The sight of her like this made him ache, as if someone had sunk their hands deep into his belly and was twisting his guts into balloon animals. With Spike around to take over her care, it would be easy to leave all the thinking and worrying to him, to let his own mind slide off the problem, the way you let your eyes slide away from someone with burn scars or no legs. He couldn't let himself do that; it would eat at him either way, so he might as well choose the way in which he was least a bastard.

"Hey, Tara. How's it going this morning?" He put down his paper and gave her a smile.

Distracted from the rather goopy look of adoration she'd been giving Spike, she gazed over at him doubtfully and then a flash of old authority firmed her expression. "She ate almonds--but for you, ginseng and daisies."

"Please don't eat the daisies," Dawn advised sassily, sliding a plate of bacon under his arm.

He exchanged a look with Spike, who seemed untroubled by nonsense.

"You're a smart one, aren't you, pet." As he took her bowl away, she gave an anxious little whine. "Nah, you've finished it all, see? Here, give that a scrub." He left her diligently polishing her spoon with a napkin and a frown of concentration. Xander marveled.

"You're good with her," he said.

"She's the good one. I'm just with her."

That conversational route seemed to call for a full stop and left turn. "Do you think she's up for the mall?"

"Mall!" Dawn pealed, her face blossoming into open anticipation. "Can we go to the movies?"

"I offer you the deluxe movie-pretzel-shopping-arcade-taco package, with optional aquamassage."

With a noise pitched for dolphins, she ran from the room. "I'm getting dressed," she called back unnecessarily from a point somewhere half up the stairs.

"You in?" he asked Spike, who was clearing the breakfast debris away.

"You sure?"

"I know it's this whole flaming blanket thing for you, but we'll try to make it worthwhile."

After a nod from Spike, an hour of dithering, and an only slightly crispy car ride, they pulled into underground parking, and parked among an armored calvary of SUVs. When they got out, Spike paused for a moment, head lifted like a bird dog scenting game, but he didn't say anything and with the others in mind, Xander didn't either until they reached the mall floor. The girls were walking ahead, Dawn guiding Tara through the bumper-car traffic of strollers and motorized wheelchairs.

"You get a line on something in the garage?"

Spike shrugged. "Maybe. Tunnel entrances down there. Mall's a favorite hang-out for vamps."

"Buffy used to say that whenever she wanted to defend all her shopping trips," Xander mused. "None of us ever really believed her."

"Oh yeah. Underground access, indirect sunlight, Eddie Bauer." Spike sidestepped a sticky three year old on a leash. "And all the stray toddlers you can--" He broke off so suddenly that Xander thought he'd spotted someone, then noticed the boomerang tension of his jawline.

"Come on." He gave Spike a light but manly clap on the back and they caught up to where Dawn was examining a jewelry kiosk, Tara in tow. "Okay, troops. We need a plan."

Dawn hooked one leg around the other and stood poised like a stork, while plucking something from her jeans pocket. "My plan involves Buffy's gold card and several shoe stores," she said with an air of satisfaction, wiggling the card from side to side.

Just as deftly, Xander plucked it from her and stuck it in his own pocket, ignoring her squeak of protest. "As the custodian of all things plastic, I authorize one pair of shoes, not to exceed the low double digits."

"Hmmph. If you were a demon, you'd be, like, a fun-sucker," she decided, then looked floorward. "Spike needs shoes too."

"Nah," Spike began, but Xander rolled over this denial.

"Spike needs many things, the operative word being 'need.' You and I live in the land of 'want,' so let's try to keep our heads attached to our wallets."

"Oh my god, you sound just like my mom," Dawn said in amazement.

Tara gave a sharp cry of distress that knifed through the conversation and turned nearby heads. Instinctively they became a defensive huddle and tried to soothe her, but she wouldn't calm until Spike slipped a quarter into her hand and urged her to hold onto it for him. She ducked her head and pressed closer to his side, fisting the coin tightly against her chest. They stuck together without further discussion, letting the current of people carry them further down the storefronts, stopping now and then and gradually accumulating a collection of bags.

It was an interesting challenge getting Spike to try on clothes while keeping him away from mirrors, or at least from other people who might notice the gaping lack of Spike in those mirrors. After about an hour of this, the vampire wore a long-suffering look, broken once by a spasm of alarm when Dawn began rummaging through a bin of men's boxer-briefs. He was spending half his energy trying to refuse clothes and the other half keeping Tara in hand, until Xander finally took pity on him and declared it was time to visit the food court.

"You hanging in there?" he asked Spike while Dawn bounded off like a gazelle toward the pizza counter, leaving them to grab a table.

Spike settled into a plastic chair, looking steamrollered. "Like a worm on a hook."

"Great. After this, I've been given to understand we're shopping for bras." He flashed a brief smile as Spike's eyes went glassy. "You'll be earning back some karmic brownie points today."

Xander sometimes wondered if traces of magic lingered even after a spell was broken; he'd asked Giles this question once and received a woolly spiel of an answer that, once stripped of its Latin, seemed to untangle to: no, and sometimes yes. The sometimes yes confirmed the fleeting twitch of hyena he felt now and then, along with the muscle memory he had of basic training and parachute jumps. He also suspected that despite all of Willow's assurances, her will-be-done spell had left him with a permanent demon-magnetic hangover. This could be the only explanation for why, of all the hundreds of people in the Sunnydale Community Mall, his troop was singled out for a snack attack from vampire mall rats.

The pack hit from both sides as they were coming off the elevator into the parking garage, and the acoustically receptive walls immediately caught and bounced Dawn's shrieks and Tara's screams in every direction. A blur of skanky satin shoved Dawn against him; for several confused moments he was trapped behind the pinwheel of whirling shopping bags she wielded against their attackers. In the time it took him to get his own hands free and his hair from his eyes, it was half over. A blast of dust smacked his left cheek and a blink later the annoying growl to his right was cut short.

The two vamps still standing, skank in white satin and a bozo in black leather who had to be her dead dumb boyfriend, confronted Spike with astonished expressions.

"Dude," said the guy. In a valley accent worthy of the great Spicoli, he managed to drag a few extra syllables from the word. "Chill with the killitude. It's not like you need three bags full. Share the wealth, man--we'll stand the beers."

Spike slammed a stake through his chest and dragged it sideways through his disintegrating ribs to land smack between his girlfriend's breasts while she was still crying, "Daaaaaaaave!" In moments they were both gone.

"Tara." Dawn took hold of the older girl's arms. "Shhhh. It's okay. It's all over."

"Well, I was wondering if you'd kept your edge," Xander said to Spike, whose arm was slowly lowering. He took a step closer, bent to gather the contents of a tumbled bag, then straightened. "I guess now we--" Whatever he'd been saying evaporated as Spike turned. He'd staked himself with a shocking quietness, and the results didn't make sense. The wood disappearing into his chest might have been a novelty gag, but his hand still gripped the end tightly, holding it steady as blood began seeping into his shirt. He stared at Xander, agonized, clearly waiting for a death that wasn't coming. He'd missed the heart, and after a moment this understanding seemed to sink in, an even deeper pain than the wound.

"What the--Spike!" The vampire was stumbling into him, sagging, and it took all Xander's strength to lower him to the ground.

"Edge is a bit dull." Spike grimaced. "Used to know...just where to aim...so I'd know where not to." His faced looked creased with anger, as if someone else had done this to him and he was seething for payback, but after he spoke he closed his eyes and gave into raw, hopeless, hitching tears.

Confounded and at a loss for what to do next--pull the stake out? help him to the car? pat his shoulder?--Xander knelt there next to him and waffled. "Look, should I--I'm going to get this out." Behind him, Tara had begun wailing again despite Dawn's comforting noises, but he ignored all this fuss and edged Spike's hand aside to grip the stake. Thinking of all the tricks his mother used to pull when he got shots, he said, "This will probably hurt. Just count to five and it'll be over."

Spike, stone face forced, set his jaw and muttered, "One--owww! Bloody hell!" His exclamation was followed by a long groan. It was a resigned sound, the kind a normal, human guy might make when waking up from an ill-considered binge.

"You know--and I say this kindly--I used to think Buffy was a drama queen." Xander helped Spike to his feet.

"Sorry," Spike sighed, as he leaned hunched and bleeding on Xander for support. "Poor impulse control." The joke didn't sound at all like a joke; there was a bleakness to his tone and he looked weary.

"We need to get Tara home," Dawn said, her urgency carrying the force of a command.

Somehow Xander got the car around and everyone into it without drawing the attention of security guards or rubberneckers. In the front seat next to him, Spike slumped; in the back, Tara rocked in place and Dawn began singing something too softly for Xander to make out the words. As they re-entered the outside world, he felt a headache coming on. But at least they all had new socks.

Once home, Spike insisted on getting Tara calmed down before accepting help himself, and he was already halfway up the stairs with her before Xander could weigh in on this. A sedative took the edge off, and while he and Dawn hung nervously at the periphery, Spike sat holding her hand and rambling on in a low voice about anything and everything, about Dru and her spells, her bad spells, not her witchy spells, and then something about cats and something about pixies. Eventually Tara drifted off and he came out to the hall, where Dawn promptly crossed her arms and lit into him.

"What do you think you were doing?" she asked with an edge of hysteria she must have been keeping on hold ever since the mall. "People don't just say, oh hey, I think I'll off myself in the SunCom parking garage and leave all my friends to sweep up my dust!"

"Sorry, bit--"

"Leaving people you're supposed to be taking care of is selfish." She was relentless in her rage, her whole body vibrating with it. "If you're going to go, you should just go. Just go!" With a sharp turn on her heel, she vented herself into her room, not quite banging the door behind her.

Spike stood looking after her with a hangdog expression.

"And now the paramedical portion of tonight's program," Xander said, gesturing him back down the stairs and then following on his heels. "Brought to you by Happy Strings, makers of fine sutures since nineteen forty-nine."

When they reached the base of the stairs, Spike hesitated and glanced back up. "Maybe I should--"

"Let her cool down."

Neither one of them said much while Xander got the first-aid kit and studied the wound. It hadn't entirely closed yet. The opening still held the rough shape of the stake, and a dark red furrow ran to the left under the skin, almost like a burn.

"I think the point skidded off your ribs," he said, glancing up. The lack of surprise in Spike's face said he'd already figured this out. Xander leaned back and began threading a needle.

"About what happened--"

"You freaked me out. You freaked Dawn out. And Tara. They're not up for this kind of thing right now." He met the other man's eyes again, then began stitching. "You know, I used to think I had a purpose that might be revealed someday. No prophecies, no Superman save-the-world destiny, but maybe a little purpose. When we defeated Adam last year, we had to do this spell. I was the heart. I thought that meant something--that I was supposed to be the heart of our family--that we were family. But when they left, everything changed. I felt like my own heart was ripped out."

Spike took a careful breath that might have been because Xander pulled the thread tight. "You got a raw deal."

"Sometimes I lie in bed and imagine, you know, what I'd have done if they'd offered me a ticket for that trip. I picture myself making this big speech, talking them out of it. And they'd listen, because I was like them. And other times I think: I'd have gone in a heartbeat. Even if it meant leaving Dawn and Tara."

"You wouldn't have done that."

"You don't know," Xander said with a head shake, cutting the thread.

"I know you."

That was a bizarre claim, one he could only ignore. "My point was, I know it's bad right now. It's bad for me too. But I need you to hold it together, because they need you." He wasn't sure how well this appeal would work; it depended on having an equal share of bad for the comparison, but the truth was, coming to terms with murderous guilt on a grand scale probably trumped the angst of getting dumped by all your friends, and taking care of a teenager and a headcase, and working two jobs. It was just a hunch.

"All right," Spike said in quiet answer.

"All right?"

A nod. "All right."

"All right." And it was settled.

September 18, 2001

"I'd forgotten just how horrible it could be," Xander whispered to Spike. "I'm really, really sorry. If I'd known there'd be torture, I'd have come alone."

The man in front of them interrupted his clapping to turn around and glare. "That's my daughter, if you don't mind!"

"Um. Sorry."

On the stage, the girl made a deep curtsey that bespoke years of parental stage handling, then strode off in a flash of sequins while the emcee approached the microphone. "Once again, that was Kara Dononvan singing," the teacher consulted his program, "'We Don't Need Another Hero.' Let's hear it for Kara. She's a big girl with a big talent, isn't she, folks?"

An appalled murmur swept through the audience as the clapping subsided, broken by a scatter of laughs. The man in front of them craned his head to both sides in search of the culprits; the teacher, a disheveled man in a misbuttoned vest and slipping glasses, seemed oblivious to his faux pas and went on cheerfully.

"Next up are Dawn Summers and Vijay Natarajan, dancing their interpretation of 'All That Jazz.'"

"Wooooo!" Xander yelled loudly, prompting another angry look from the good Mr Donovan. Next to him Spike clapped along and loosed an impressively piercing whistle.

A few minutes into the song they exchanged a glance, then squirmed a little bit lower in their seats in a shared, strangled silence. It was fundamentally wrong, Xander thought, for a fifteen year old to be performing dance moves like that. In public. In a black spandex bodysuit. Never mind that he'd once lusted after fifteen year olds--he now had the correct perspective and that perspective was one of dismay. The amazed height of Spike's eyebrows seemed to indicate agreement. Never mind what he'd once done with fifteen year olds.

Backstage after the acts had wound up, Dawn hopped over to them with glee, all spangles and hair. "How did I look? Did you hear all the clapping? Did you see where I missed a step? I'm pretty sure no one noticed, but I swear, I think I went hysterically blind for five seconds after that. I thought I was going to fall off the stage and have to become a nun, because I'd never ever be able to show my face again. So what did you think?"

Xander and Spike exchanged another glance, each suggesting with his eyes that the other should go first.

"Well?" Dawn asked, her anticipation taking on a faint tinge of anxiousness.

"You looked amazing, princess," Spike said sincerely. "Would've put the great Anna Pavlova to shame."

"Who?"

"Famous ballerina. Before your time."

Dawn's face scrunched. "Okay, you know that wasn't ballet, right?"

"Of course, sure," Xander put in, pocketing his hands and hunching his shoulders a little. "More like a dirty dancing kind of thing, right?"

She rolled her eyes. "Please."

Her dancing partner, the kid Vijay, appeared with a wide smile. Up close, he had an open, well-scrubbed boyishness with a sprinkling of acne and suspiciously shiny hair, details that didn't quite square with his elegant dancer's body. Spike's eyes narrowed in appraisal.

"My parents would like to take us to Applebee's to celebrate our success," Vijay said to Dawn. He looked at Xander and Spike. "Of course, you are all welcome to join us."

What were unmistakably the parental units came up with smiles as wide and white as their son's and offered greetings and handshakes and a lot of off-putting eye contact. Xander began to have a strange, Alice in Wonderland sensation of an expanding telescope--somewhere along the line, he'd become a tall adult person that other adults nodded to with recognition. Would he finally learn the secret adult code?

"I'm afraid we have to pass," Xander said when the Natarajans repeated the invitation to celebrate. "We have a sitter waiting."

"Ahh," Mr Natarajan said, gaze traveling to Spike and then back to him. He continued smiling; he was the endurance runner of smiling. "Yes, we understand."

After they left, Xander turned to Spike. "Do you get the feeling we were just pegged with the 'My Two Dads' label?"

"Better hope they don't ask her a lot of questions."

"I have years of practice concocting the perfect cover story. She'll be fine." They headed out of the auditorium toward the car.

"You don't think her sister's mysterious wasting disease will start to make people wonder?" Spike asked dryly.

"No one wants to visit the bed-ridden. Besides, people in Sunnydale don't dig deep. As long as we don't attract any official attention, we'll be okay."

September 25, 2001

"Parent-teacher day?" Those were so not words he wanted to hear over breakfast.

Dawn was sitting back low in her chair, clinking her spoon against her cereal bowl. This morning she'd pulled her hair into a lank ponytail and chosen to wear a baseball shirt with green sleeves that was unlike her usual fashionable tops. Her face was overcast, on the brink of a storm. "I'll just tell them she can't make it. It's true." Clink went the spoon with more force, splashing flakes and milk across the mat.

"We can't blow it off." Xander glanced at Spike. "They might decide to drop by."

"Oh, like anyone cares that much." Teen derision. "It's not like I'm cutting school anymore. My grades are fine. And I'm making money. You said that's learning fiscal responsibility. So they can't do anything...right?" When no one replied she grew more agitated and looked from face to face. "Right?"

"Nah," Spike said. "They can't do anything. But we need to keep it that way."

Despite their assurances, Dawn headed out under a thundercloud and left a pall behind. Tara twisted in her seat and issued childish sounds of distress as Spike smoothed her hair and held one restless hand, rubbing his thumb across the skin.

"A bitter sea and a bowlful, buckled fast," Tara said, curving her head toward him like a horse nosing for sugar. "Buckled fast. Buckled fast."

"Shhh. We'll take care of that. Don't you worry, kitten."

"Kittens!" Tara laughed suddenly, putting a hand over her mouth. For all anyone knew, the best joke in the world had just been transmitted by aliens directly into her frontal lobe. "The kittens."

Xander left for work in his own state of distracted unease, which itched under his skin most of the day. He sniped at Matt Tucker for not ordering enough I-beams and then had to apologize when he learned the vendor had shorted them; he prowled the site, winding himself up tighter and tighter for every guy he found slacking; he drank bitter dregs of coffee and wallowed in disgust; and he let the late September heat get to him. By the time he returned home, he was hot and irate and some deep, crawling part of his soul wished that one of those successful aversions of the apocalypse had failed and that a shroud of darkness covered the entire world.

In this mood, everything grated. The simple fact of the closed curtains in the front windows made his heart thump with unreasonable anger. Inside, all the lights were on in every room. Hey, concept, people: electricity costs money. He went around snapping down switches, the skin on his arms and hands and neck prickling as it cooled. The house had a Dawnless feel to it--he'd developed a kind of sixth sense for whether she was home--but music from some distant source was scraping the air and his nerves, getting louder as he headed to the kitchen. The basement door stood open and the discord rose from below. For a moment, rage crashed into his skull and he nearly slammed the door for the sheer brutal satisfaction of it. A riffing guitar solo scaled the stairs, whining and sharp with insinuations. He plunged down, letting gravity and the weight of his boots accelerate his pace, and if he fell, whatever.

For one horrifying moment as the basement floor came into view, Xander thought: oh god, he's killed someone and that's the body.

Spike knelt on a blanket with his back to the stairs, a toolbox beside him and the Buffybot laid out in front of him, her glass eyes staring up sightlessly. He was tinkering with her guts, his head bent intently over the work, and didn't turn.

Anger seeped out of Xander like air from a flattening tire, and he lowered the volume on the radio rather than knocking the thing off its perch and into pieces as he'd vividly pictured himself doing.

"Hey," he said, as Spike swiveled a look over his shoulder at him.

"Hey."

Sinking onto a chair, Xander stared at the robot. It was uncanny how lifelike a hunk of metal and plastic could be. He thought of all the movie FX magazines he'd read, and of Warren, fellow geek, and how he must have read the same ones. Polymers, silicone, latex, urethane. He could have built monsters, but instead he built girls. Not a bad choice. Tragically pathetic and misguided, sure, but understandable.

"It's like she might blink and wake up," Spike said quietly, reading his mind. "Snow White frozen with a bit of apple in her throat."

Somehow, maybe because of the odd, enforced intimacy--Spike here, Buffy gone--Xander for the first time allowed himself to understand how easy it must have been; falling under the wheels of love and getting crushed; having this toy built for consolation. He didn't particularly embrace and relish the understanding, but it was here, and he let it be.

"You knew what I was thinking this morning." It had required mental readjustment to take Spike on as an ally, and now it was unsettling to realize how much of an ally he'd become, that their routines and rituals were bringing them into synch. That they could have a conversation without words.

"Yeah. Figured I'd give it a go, see if I could, er..."

"Help her develop a healthy self-actualization?"

"Right. That. But none of the bloody wires are marked. Accidentally cut the green one and she sang in rhymes for two hours."

"Where's Dawn?"

"Girlfriend's. Tara's having a lie-down."

Xander frowned. "I don't like her being up there alone."

"Over there," Spike said, nodding at a pile of cartons against the wall. "She's made a fort. Sleeps through anything once she's out."

"Oh." He went over and peered over the edge of the carton fort. Tara lay curled on her side, cheek pillowed against one of Willow's sweaters. Returning, he said, "I keep thinking we should get rid of that stuff." He threw a nod back at the boxes and clutter that seemed poised to take over the rest of the basement. The contents of Giles's apartment, Willow's dorm room, Buffy's drawers, the magic shop. "Four months. When have we waited long enough?"

"Four months." Spike gave him a calm look. Their eyes held for a moment and Xander could feel it sinking in: the permanence of it.

Rubbing his hands back and forth across the knees of his jeans, he nodded. "You should take some of Giles's things."

"Yeah?" A head cock. "Don't suppose you held onto that sporty red midlife crisis of his?"

"Sorry. That I sold. Car equals cash, cash equals food, food is life."

"Always choose life," Spike said, tweaking something with a pair of pliers.

"Choose life!" Buffy cried. The two men flinched back in startlement while the robot sat up and smiled at them, tangled wires and a circuit board dangling horribly from her open belly. Bot guts.

"What did you do?" Xander asked nervously.

"I don't know!"

"Spike!" Buffy said with pleasure. Her head swiveled. "And my friend Xander. You are a very good carpenter and kind of a git."

He hadn't heard that voice in months; the little hairs on his neck lifted, and then the words sank in and he glared at Spike, who winced. "Okay, that's not going to fly."

"Girls can't fly." Buffy's tone conveyed the silliness of this statement. "Only birds can fly." She tilted her head to reconsider. "And also planes and bats and butterflies and moths and bees and flies and kites--"

"Good girl," Spike said hastily.

"I am good." The robot Buffy's tone was earnest but pleased. "And you are a very bad man. Should I punish you now?"

Spike closed his eyes and tightened his jaw.

"No punishing," Xander broke in. "We'd like you to do...different things. Fun things. But a clothes-on kind of fun."

She seemed to give this a microsecond of thought. "I slay vampires with my clothes on."

"Yes. Yes, you do." Groping for the right approach, Xander said, "What do you know about...high school?"

October 2, 2001

"...and then she told them that high school was a place with many demons."

The Buffybot smiled at Dawn's words as if they were high praise and Xander felt an uneasy pang at the machine's expressiveness, a trick of programming making her look briefly like the real thing.

"Oh man. I thought we'd fixed that glitch."

"It was okay." Dawn popped the tab on her soda. "Everyone thought she meant, like, drugs and teen pregnancy and the stress of college acceptance. Then they all started talking about how they needed to improve the guidance counseling program."

Without comment, Spike hit the off switch and the Buffybot froze, her lips parted as if she'd been about to say something. He looked grim and almost viciously glad at shutting the bot down. Xander knew how much the thing's animation had been wearing on him. The vampire picked her up around the waist and started to carry her off.

"Hey," Dawn said. "Where are you taking her?"

"Putting her back in her toybox." Spike disappeared down the basement steps, and Dawn looked to Xander in supplication.

"I thought we were going to keep her around."

"We were just training her." Unsure of Dawn's feelings, Xander chose his words carefully. "We wanted to be sure she could perform, that she could pass. For the real Buffy."

"I know, but--"

"We don't need her anymore right now."

Dawn continued to look torn, but she let it go and headed to her room with a claim of homework. After a few minutes, Spike came back upstairs. His shoulders had a dispirited slump and his face was full of shadows.

"You okay?" Xander asked.

"Top of the world."

He laid a hand on Spike's shoulder and left it there longer than he normally might, hoping to convey a camaraderie he didn't express often, hoping it wasn't too awkward. Spike had that dark look he sometimes got, like a closed umbrella or a bat that had wrapped its wings around itself. That was okay, that was predictable. Spike wrapping his arms around Xander was less so, and Xander tried to remember how this sort of thing went. In his limited experience, men didn't hug other men, not without a lot of beer to ease the way. He hugged back though.

Spike didn't seem to want to move. After more time than he'd ever spent with his flesh pressed against another guy--thirty seconds, easy--Xander thought about saying something.

"I'm sorry," Spike said first.

The words vibrated inches from Xander's skin, low and heavy, and he rubbed the small of Spike's back and felt his eyes prickle. The bridge of his nose ached and his ears heated; he had that stupid feeling he always got when he resisted trying to cry, of being about five years old. "What for," he managed to ask.

A muffled laugh of incredulity spilled against his shoulder. Yeah. Dumb question.

The longer they stood there, the easier it was. With his eyes closed, everything else in the world was a black absence. Buffy, gone. Willow, gone. Giles and Anya and Jesse and Jenny and Cordelia, all gone in different ways, but gone. But he wasn't alone.

Abruptly Spike pulled away to look him in the face, as if a serious thought had just occurred. "You didn't defend yourself."

"What?" He searched his mind, puzzled, for recent fights. "When?"

"Now." Spike's expression darkened again and he took another step back. "Vampire, unchipped," he said, smacking himself in the chest. "That's your jugular." Another smack.

"Ow!" Xander said in disbelief, rubbing his neck. "Pain!"

"That's the point." Spike turned and paced a few feet, running a hand through his hair. "You can't lose your edge in this town. Only thing between you and a feedbag is survival instinct. Christ!" A burst of anger, maybe fear. "I've let you get soft. We need to patrol. Keep our hands in."

"I've kept my hands out for a reason. Two reasons. Dawn and Tara. If something happens to me," he took a breath, "that's it. Game over." He watched understanding sink in. "Also, I do know the difference between good vampires and bad vampires. Chip, no chip--it doesn't matter. In this house, I'm not worried about my jugular."

Spike got a hunched and undeserving look and didn't seem entirely convinced. "Maybe you should be. Angel--"

"I don't care about Angel. You're a better man than Angel." That lifted Spike's head. The intensity of his eyes, level and steady as a vow, made Xander's cheeks heat a little. He probably shouldn't say things like that unless he was ready to back them up with...what? Going by Spike's face, a pledge of eternal friendship, loyalty, and sacrifice, possibly sealed in blood. He had a sudden inkling of how Spike could have once carried himself as the big, bad master vampire: because he was. Sunnydale's newborn fledges were just bugs, nothings; Spike was a hundred years of something else entirely.

Later, Xander couldn't quite remember how they'd extricated themselves from that sticky moment, but it left him with a restless buzz. He jerked off in bed that night thinking of Anya, and briefly of Willow and Buffy, and of a certain girl he knew only from Neutrogena commercials, but as he was hurtling up to the edge, riding his fist, he thought of Spike and that moment in the kitchen and his orgasm hit like ten thousand volts, the shocks whipping him like a loose power line for a minute or two afterwards.

It was the best fuck he'd had in months. He slept better than the dead.

"This is really not good," he observed a few nights later.

"What are those things?" Dawn asked, peering over his arm and through the curtain at the demon-driven motorcycles roaring by.

"Hellions." Spike stood at the other end of the windows, his face unreadable as he watched the carnage. "Road pirates. They usually hit backwater towns. Only reason they'd raid a place like this was if--" He knifed his thought short and traded a look with Xander.

He filled in the blank. "They know Buffy's gone."

Outside, their mailbox crumpled under a whanging blow from a demon wielding a baseball bat. A victory howl trailed behind his cycle as he drove off. Dawn tensed and shifted closer. "What are we going to do?"

"We might want to start by backing away from the window," Xander said, watching rocks shatter the glass of a house across the street.

"Don't worry, petal." Spike joined them. "Not going to let anything happen to you." He looked comfortingly cold and hard with resolve, the way you wanted a vampire on your side to look when danger presented itself.

"Why don't you check on Tara."

Dawn took Xander's suggestion and went upstairs. As soon as she was out of earshot, Spike said, "We should call the watcher. He's got people, right?"

"It'll take them at least three hours to get here." Nerves were flaring, muscles tightening; he was afraid, but some part of him wanted a fight. He might even have been waiting for this--an excuse to cut loose, a problem that couldn't be fixed any other way. It was like being on the frontier, cowboys versus outlaws, with womenfolk to protect. "We could be a toasty fire for demon marshmallows by then."

"We can't stay here."

"I've got a plan."

"Yeah?" Spike seemed skeptical but was giving Xander all his attention.

"It goes something like this..."

The car reversed off the driveway and into the street in a series of fast, maniacally controlled swerves, tires screeching. From under the rear wheels came a crunching sound and a scream. Spike switched gears and peeled forward without glancing back.

They'd made it from the house to the car safely, but their flight had attracted attention. Ahead of them now was an approaching line of demons on cycles, wielding clubs and chains.

"Hold on," Spike said tersely.

Xander glanced behind him at where Dawn huddled in the foot well, below window level. She had an anchoring grip on Tara, who'd been laid still sleeping on the back seat. When he turned his eyes ahead again, the cycles were nearly on them, the middle two heading directly for the car in a game of chicken. He braced by instinct even before the car began to spin, and had a blurred impression of the cycles beginning to veer off to either side, only to be met by the unexpected length of the car as it swung sideways. The bikes hit the driver's side and their riders bounced over hood and trunk. Spike had the car straightened out and accelerating again in moments. On the hood, a Hellion clung to the wipers with knobby fingers and snarled through the glass.

"Stupid bastard," Spike said, and put on the wipers with squirts of cleaner. It was like something out of a bad movie, thought Xander. Any moment now they'd sideswipe a truck carrying crates of live chickens.

"Hey!" he shouted at the Hellion. "Big and ugly! Get off my car!"

The demon ignored his command, but Spike braked, a wiper snapped off, and a few hundred pounds of rank meat went flying off the hood. Spike followed this up by running over him.

"That really works," Xander said in surprise.

"Learned all my best moves from Hollywood."

"Somehow I knew this."

They lost their pursuers after several sharp and crazy turns by pulling into a gravel drive and zipping behind a building. When they got out, he identified their location as the gravedigger's house adjoining the cemetery. The fence followed the contours of the house and lot, where a backhoe and a dusty hearse were parked. Spike busted the lock on the gate and then scooped Tara from the car and carried her in his arms. They made it to the crypt without bumping into anything that wanted to eat them, and the vampire led them underground.

"You'll be safe here," he said while laying Tara on the bed. "Local vamps know better than to bother me." He fidgeted doubtfully though, scrutinizing the room and then Dawn as if gauging defensive capabilities.

"We'll be okay." Dawn was clearly making an effort to sound game and upbeat about the surroundings. "And hey," she picked up a magazine, "there's stuff to read...or, oh." She developed a slight stammer. "Stuff with...pictures."

Spike grabbed the magazine away. "There was an article," he said, slipping it under a pile of loose clothes. "About Beckham."

Without warning, she launched herself at him in a crushing hug. Bemused, he looked at her closely before enfolding her and pressing his cheek against her hair, his face tight with tenderness. Xander received hug two. She felt stronger than she looked, more solid. He could remember a night years ago when he and Willow had stayed over and he'd carried Dawn up to bed wrapped around him like a little monkey. Eleven is too old to be carried, Buffy had said, but she'd been so small and light, it was nothing to pick her up. Strange to think that had only ever happened in his head.

They left the girls and returned to the car in determined silence. Inside, they looked at each other.

"Go ahead," Xander offered. "Say it. It's traditional."

He got a tiny frown. "What's that?"

"'Xander, you should stay here.' Where I won't get hurt and in the way. Just so you know, I'm not staying behind unless you knock me out."

With an open face and incredible steadiness Spike looked at him. "I want you fighting beside me," he said in a quiet voice. "You never need to ask, got that?" The question was in his eyes. "I've got your back."

Stuff like that wasn't supposed to take a guy's breath away. Xander knew he was supposed to give a cool nod in reply, sealing the pact with repressed manliness. But his mind flung itself inside out and thought: So you're the one. It froze him, and Spike started to key the ignition, but paused to look at him again, and that was the moment, the gut-plummeting, naked-in-class moment of raw terror when he saw Spike get it, and then Spike's hand came off the keys and wound itself in his shirt and they both twisted into a struggle he meant to win despite the severe violence in Spike's face, but Spike kissed him.

"That was...unexpected," Xander said raggedly after the attack ended. Their faces were still close, and one cool hand cupped the back of his head, fingers woven into his hair. He wasn't sure he could pull away unless Spike let him, which wasn't a bad thought.

"You need to not die." Spike was serious as he delivered this instruction, as if he thought Xander might be inclined to disobey.

"Okay."

And Spike kissed him again. The first one had been hard and quick; this one involved a lot of desperate, fluid tongue and pushed Xander's temperature up five degrees and woke every sleeping outpost in his body. He had never been kissed like this, not even close, and it was so maddeningly long since anyone had wanted him that he was ready to climb over the gear shift and do crazy, apocalyptic things. Everything was crazy, why not this?

Breaking away again, Spike settled back into his seat and started the car. "Hold that thought," he said.

Xander boggled at him, then let his head fall back in surrender to necessity. "Okay, if I don't live, I'm going to be so pissed."

He lived, but it was a close call. At first he thought they were heading back to Revello, but Spike pulled in behind a building downtown, its back wall plain brick with barred windows. "How's your aim?" he asked, but didn't wait for an answer before kicking in the door. "Stay here." Within five minutes he returned carrying a large bag and they were in motion again. Xander opened the bag to discover several guns, clips, and boxes of bullets.

"We're really taking things to a whole new level tonight, aren't we?"

"You don't want to get within arm's reach of those yobs." Spike was grim.

Xander began loading the guns. At one point he could feel the vampire's glance across his hands, and decided that it was an admiring one. Speed, dexterity, the expertise of the seasoned soldier--he had it all, no doubt about it. He was the man. Man with a gun. As he was basking in this self-image, he smacked a clip into place and skillfully spilled a box of bullets on the floor.

By the time they reached Revello, he was armed and feeling dangerous--nervous and jittering with adrenaline, but dangerous. "Oh crap," he said as the house came into view.

They'd left the Buffybot with instructions to defend the homestead until they came back, and that's what she was doing. A gang of Hellions had driven their cycles onto the lawn. Two were churning up the grass and breaking windows while three more circled the bot with nasty jeers and laughter. Spike brought the car to a halt halfway across the lawn and conveniently on top one of the demons, then jumped out and began swinging. Xander took advantage of the distraction to take careful aim, and then, summoning the power of every psycho, gun-toting teen stereotype, fired at will.

It was refreshing to see demons jerk and howl and fall under his assault, and even in the midst of chaos he wondered why no one had ever thought to arm him before. Good-bye bloody head trauma, hello victory. He'd picked off one and wounded another before a flickering light from the house caught his eye. Behind the broken front windows, flames were rising into the curtains. With Spike and the bot taking care of business, he ran inside to find the couch on fire too. He was putting it out with the extinguisher when a boulder crashed into his back and knocked him to the floor. Gasping at the weight, he fought to free himself as a hand grabbed his hair and banged his face down a few times. Don't get within arm's reach, he remembered Spike saying, and knew he was going to die.

"Wait," he said urgently. "I have something you want."

"That's right, human scum." Hot and terribly fragrant breath neared his ear. "Your skin. You're gonna make a real nice wallet."

"No, really! I can give you lots of money. You want something to put in your wallet, don't you? I have it here. I can show you."

After a pause, the weight rose off him and he was lifted by his shirt collar right off the floor and dropped to his feet. He turned to face a nightmare that had never known mother love. "Thanks," he said, rubbing a hand across his sore belly.

"Where's the loot?"

Xander slid his hand further under his shirt and nodded off to his right. "Upstairs." As the Hellion glanced away, he pulled his gun free and shot three times.

Pole-axed with surprise, the demon stared down at the blood oozing from between his vest flaps and grunted. Tripping back a step, Xander shot him again in the chest and then the head. Bingo. The carpet was suddenly covered with a fat lot of stupid.

Spike came in and studied the mess. "You all right?" At Xander's nod, he said, "This lot's clearing out."

"I like pistols," Xander said warmly.

A smile hooked up one side of Spike's mouth and he raised his brows. "You sure you didn't bang the jam about?"

"My jam remains intact."

"Are we having jam?" the Buffybot asked sunnily, limping into the room. Her blouse was ripped and askew in a way that would draw most men's eyes. Xander curbed a pointless impulse to fix it.

"Only a few more hours," he noted, checking his watch. "Should we do some more damage while we're waiting, or just hang here in the DMZ?"

"Reload, get her fixed up," a glance at the bot, "do a run through the neighborhood, make sure they've all gone."

Their eyes met in an almost incidental way, and everything froze again like a camera snapping a picture. Every time he looked at Spike he saw him more sharply, every last dot of him connecting to another: the fixed blue kiss of his eyes, the familiarity of his face, the lock of neck to shoulders, the shape of his chest under his shirt. Xander couldn't remember what he was supposed to be doing; thoughts blurred just out of reach. An ache rose in him, pressure-cooking his jammy, very confused brain.

"Guess we'd better get on that," Spike said, saying other things with his eyes.

They moved through their tasks, passing each other to and fro like those little figures on cuckoo clocks that make their rounds without ever quite touching. Spike dragged demon corpses into the shrubbery for later disposal; Xander reloaded guns and patched up the Buffybot. The neighborhood was empty of Hellions, but no one came outside except the Myersons, who stood on their lawn in a rigid clump and watched the firemen put on the blazing remains of their house. Faces appeared in windows though, and Xander waved now and then. Half-hearted hands went up from a few.

Two hours later, Wesley arrived with Cordelia and a guy named Gunn and some heavy weaponry. By morning, the town was flushed clean of its visitors. "I'm afraid this still doesn't take care of the indigenous demon problem," Wesley said as they collapsed into various positions around the living room.

"We'll worry about the locals later," Xander replied with a negligent hand wave. "Demons eat free on Fridays."

Gunn sort of shrugged with his face, the rest of him battered and unmoving in his chair. "Your turf, your call, man."

"Should I make coffee?" Dawn wondered, looking around.

Cordelia stood, wincing on the way up. "I'll help."

"How's Dawn doing?" Wesley asked after they'd left the room.

"About as well as any orphan of the Hellmouth. Better than she should, most days." Xander wasn't interested in having this talk and let himself be distracted as Spike came in.

The vampire glanced at the front window where burnt curtains were letting the sunlight through, and avoided that side of the room. Bruises and cuts had remodeled his face, though not as badly as when Glory had tortured him, and the number of slashes in his clothes gave him a punk fashion-plate look. He wore it well.

"Got Tara set up with her little TV in the other room," he said. "Don't know how she can watch People's Court with Wapner gone, but it keeps her occupied."

"There's been no change in her condition then?" Wesley's brow drew tight with concern at their headshakes. "The madness given by gods usually takes a much different form. I wonder...when I get back to my books, I'll see if there's anything on this type of derangement."

"Thanks, mate."

Wesley seemed slightly put off by Spike's response, as if he'd gotten out of the habit of thinking of vampires as allies, but nodded.

"You sure you don't need stitching?" Xander asked, tilting his head back on his chair to study Spike more closely. "Gauzing? Taping?"

"More like smoking, showering, sleeping." He glanced at the broken window again, the scorched couch, the trashed walls. "Probably should get this in order first."

"I say we just throw sheets over it, worry about it later."

The watchful, interested eyes of their guests followed this conversation, which was interrupted by Cordelia's arrival with coffee and stacks of toast, and then by a general raid on the refrigerator and cupboards. Xander stopped trying to keep track of what was going on around him, absorbed by the pleasures of eating and yawning, but focused himself again long enough to thank and wave off the L.A. crew, who with perfect timing knew when to cut through the social bullshit and leave a party.

He did get a hug and kiss from Cordelia, and the--for her--sincere remark: "You're like a real man now. It's actually kind of impressive."

Like a real man, he thought, closing the door behind her. Ninety-nine point nine percent manlike. He caught sight of himself in the hall mirror. And also a proud member of the mammal family.

Turning around, he yipped to find Spike at his side. "You have little cat feet," he accused.

"Careful not to say that around any djinn."

"Like in Wishmaster," Xander agreed sagely.

Spike gave him a rare tiny smile. "Time for bed, isn't it?" He asked the question in a suitably bedroom voice and hey, should bruises really be that sexy?

Swallowing, Xander felt his voice plunge into the pit of his stomach. It took a moment to bring it back up. "Bed."

"You look knackered. I'll stay up, keep an eye on things." He glanced around behind him at Tara, who was watching commercials at the dining room table with chin propped on both hands. "Don't want to sedate her again so soon."

"Right." Xander hated himself for briefly contemplating disagreement and instead downshifted his expectations. "That would be bad."

Not doing what he'd been thinking about doing gave him more time to think about what he wasn't doing and to wonder what the hell he was doing. The house smelled of smoke, even upstairs, and as Xander stripped off his clothes for bed he felt a sleepless funk coming on. It had nothing to do with Spike, really, but his mind wandered places. He was in Joyce's bedroom, and he thought of her and her death, of Spike bringing flowers and his own ungenerous response. Spike had been a sickening thing at that time, a horrible, in-your-face thing that had cheated death and spent its afterlife killing everything good in the world, children and mothers, people like Joyce. Even living with Spike back in his basement hadn't changed his gut feelings about the guy--he'd never forgotten he was sharing space with something inhuman. It had been like living with a giant cockroach or spider that you try not to look at too closely. You go out of your way to avoid its corner of the room, try not to jostle it or engage its attention, and sometimes you resent it and other times you tolerate it. You'd kill it, but you can't quite figure out how to get away with that.

That's what it had been like. And now he was standing half-undressed in Joyce's bedroom, hand sliding absently across his belly, and further down, and he was thinking of Spike. And he wanted it bad. He was pretty sure he did. He was getting hard, and okay, there was no great trick to that, but he was getting hard thinking of Spike's mouth and hands. Maybe five months and proximity was all it took to find anyone attractive; maybe if Spike were Larry, a live gay Larry, he'd still be standing here stroking wood.

Quite possibly I am just that easy, Xander thought.

A knock on the door made his hand fly away from his fly. "Just a minute," he said, dragging his shirt back on. The door opened while he was fumbling one button closed and he saw with relief that it was Spike, not Dawn. He was fairly certain Social Services frowned on displaying erections to fifteen-year-olds. "Oh. Hi."

Spike shut the door behind him and said, "The girls are downstairs."

"Okay." Xander wasn't certain what reply that needed. "I was just going to--"

In five words Spike had reached him and kissed him. There was a lot of Spike in that kiss. It was gentle, but not too gentle. It was the kind of kiss that said the kisser had been thinking about it and was now bungee-jumping from a dangerous height of anticipation. It was a good kiss.

And then it ended. "I want to do this for you," Spike said.

Do what, Xander wondered, but the vampire was already kneeling, popping the button on Xander's shirt again, unzipping his jeans. I should stop this, he thought, as Spike's mouth closed around him, but then the thought went away. He wound his hands in Spike's hair and gasped and thrust, closing his eyes and snapping them open again, pulled his thumb forward along Spike's left cheekbone and felt his dick moving inside, and came. Every time he jerked across Spike's tongue he made a sound he hoped they couldn't hear downstairs. He didn't hold back. Spike's hands anchored him in place until he finished.

Afterwards they kissed again and Xander thought it would be a good time to say something, but he let Spike leave instead. He fell asleep in his jeans, in a sprawl, thinking of all the things they'd do when he could keep his eyes open.

October 9, 2001

That Friday night, whenever he cornered Spike in the kitchen, Dawn walked in on them, never paying attention to their sitcom hijinks--jumping apart, nervous fumbling with kitchen work, loud and awkward jokes. Saturday Xander's father called to demand his help cleaning out the basement, which turned into a thing, and then into a big thing, and then into a Major Fucking Deal. Sunday, Tara had hysterics while watching the Weather Channel and Spike stayed by her side all day and half the night. Monday, Xander went to work, came home, stole looks at Spike across the dinner table, and didn't hear a word Dawn said about her history project until she cried, I'm going to fail, finally capturing his attention. And then Social Services will come and take me and I'll end up on the wrong end of a shiv, scarred for life. The project was due the next day; they stayed up until midnight finishing it together.

"Now," Xander told Spike Tuesday night, while Dawn was watching TV with Tara in the living room. They rubbed their bodies together with hard, fantastic lust, Spike pinning him against the kitchen island. He looked half mad with need. Xander felt that way. It was amazing they hadn't chewed each other to death yet.

"Where?"

"Basement."

Dumb with kisses they made it to the door and down a few steps, stopped for a break, more tongue and touching, and descended again, tangling legs, trying to shuck their clothes. They scudded to a halt at the foot of the stairs, so insistent on each other that it was becoming a struggle, then broke to match frowns before looking down.

"We're standing in water," Xander said.

Spike glanced over toward the ceiling, where a burst pipe fueled the flood. His reaction focused in his brows, which looked dark and confused.

"We're standing in water." Xander thought this bore repeating. It was up to their knees. "Big...water."

"Pipe's busted."

A sombrero floated by, followed by a thin volume on witchcraft. They watched these things pass, then looked at each other. Xander sighed with resignation. "The shut-off valve's on the wall behind all that junk."

They shoved aside soaked boxes of magic shop leavings and books and people's clothes to stem the deluge at the source, and when they had, they carried everything upstairs. It took over a dozen trips and halfway through, Dawn came first to gawk and then to help. Emptying boxes, hanging clothes, and setting books out to dry carried them through the evening, and then it was after midnight, Dawn was yawning, and Xander said, "That's it. No more tonight."

"What about the basement?" Dawn asked.

"We'll figure that out tomorrow."

"Maybe we should turn it into a swimming pool." She caught his expression and added, "Maybe I'll just go to bed now."

"Your cot's turned into a life raft," he said to Spike after she'd left.

Spike tipped his head. "Couch is burnt to a crisp." A pause. "Guess this means we'll have to bunk down together."

"Damn it," Xander deadpanned. A minute later behind the closed bedroom door, he made his real feelings known in detail using sign language. Hands-on sign language. "We need to be quiet."

"Quiet as little...rutting...mice."

But they were men, not mice. Men, men, men, men, and even though Xander had been waiting for this all week, it was still shocking how good it was to get his hands on all that muscle and not have to stop mid-grope. Good and scary, because nothing was dividing them except a few inches of air, and up close Spike was himself to the tenth power. It was possible to get lost in the curls around his ear and the stretch of skin below his ribs. He was touchy-feely too, running his hands over Xander's chest and shoulders, studying where his hands moved as if Xander was the most interesting thing in the world to him. They'd both slowed down. There was nothing else to do but this.

Barefoot and shirtless they stood together and kissed. Xander wondered if Spike had been rougher before, but he didn't ask; he didn't need to know that. Kissing could become a new hobby, and these kisses had ninety percent of his attention. The other ten percent was busy noticing things like the melony solidity of Spike's head under all that fluff and also the guyness of him. Bigger than girls, guys. It made a difference; more weight behind the smooch or something. And it was comfortable, almost the way kissing Willow had been comfortable. No surprising reactions, and they fit together well. At odd moments, Xander would remember that Spike was dead, but only in contrast to how very not dead he actually felt.

"You smell good," he told Spike, who looked surprised, then happy. The softness in his face made Xander want to say other things, or to touch him and work loose even better expressions.

Their kisses and hands grew urgent, then their hips bumped and Spike made a choky sound of need against his mouth, which was a good reason to bump and grind some more. Once they had friction, it was impossible to stop. It was like a Neapolitan ice cream bar of fun: a layer of pink tongue over a layer of naked skin over a layer of excited denim. Spike cupped Xander's jeans as if getting a feel for him, then unzipped and worked him free of his briefs. That deserved a prize. Prizes. Piñatas of prizes. Xander tried to communicate the fullness of this with his tongue. Not wanting to come first and alone, he reached to return the favor. It took three tries, but he finally got it. He'd been thinking about this so much that holding someone else's dick didn't even seem strange; it was about what he'd been expecting.

He liked to think he could multitask with the best of them, but he had to pull out of a kiss to focus on the aching build of pleasure. "Did you want to get in bed?" he asked, for something to say.

"Bed's over there," Spike murmured dismissively.

Three feet to the left. A long trek, Xander had to agree.

Spike's hand slid down the length of Xander's dick, tugged his balls, then climbed back up.

He lifted his chin and gasped in response. "Oh fuck, do that again." Spike did, and Xander pushed his hips into it. "Oh god. Now you're just distracting me."

Lips curled, showing an amused flirt of tongue. "From what?"

"From this," Xander said, running his hand up and down Spike's length, working the foreskin over the head in a steady rhythm. He felt Spike's hand go slack while the rest of him stiffened. Eyes shut, lips parted, Spike looked prayerful, poised on the edge of religious conversion. Xander pulled harder, faster, wanting to carry him over the edge, his other hand gripping the back of Spike's neck to hold him steady. The wild thrusts into his fist fired every nerve ending in his skin and grew rougher and rougher until Spike was bucking and arching and giving breathy little cries, his face taut with effort and anticipation, and then Xander's fingers were slippery with come.

He'd forgotten how exciting sex could be, probably from having gone too long without it. He watched Spike ride out his climax, and kissed him before he recovered. Intimacy, the in-your-face kind, made Xander invested and possessive. He'd known this about himself, but was experiencing a fresh new recognition. If fear of intimacy was a merit badge of manhood, he was flunking, because he wanted to mouth Spike all over and share secrets and a bed with him. He didn't want to be alone. He liked the solidity of another body pressing close. It felt safe, a shield against danger.

Spike seemed to like it too. They went to bed and grappled nakedly on the sheets like wrestlers, trying not to make noise, and it was a revelation. Xander could do no wrong. Everything he did made Spike twist and groan softly, made his dick twitch north, a tight compass needle along his abs. It got Xander hot, getting someone else that hot. There was a haze around the bed and in his brain; he lost track of time and exhausted himself with pleasure, muscles strung out and vibrating from holding off his own orgasm while he worked Spike over, until he couldn't wait any more. He shoved up along the other man's body and laced their hands together and pushed hip to hip. Spike looked up into his face with attentive, hungry eyes. It didn't take Xander long to come then, and every unraveling shot was private and personal and specific. He wasn't thinking of anyone else.

In the morning, Xander woke up, propped himself on one arm, looked over at Spike and had a muted panic attack. It wasn't the fabled morning-after homosexual panic, more of a sleeping-with-the-undead kind of panic. For a rattled minute or so he decided he wasn't cut out for this, that he wanted his life back, wanted to have woken up next to Anya in a world where Buffy had stayed to slay and where vampires were clearly bad things you didn't invite past the welcome mat.

Then Spike woke up and uncurled a smile and Xander felt guilty and shmucky, so he smiled back and stifled his uncertainties. They lingered, though, and the whole day was weird. He stayed home to deal with the plumber, and whenever Spike wasn't looking after Tara directly he was at Xander's shoulder, serious and talkative and helpful, so quick on the draw that he handed tools over even as Xander reached for them. It got on Xander's nerves; he got the impression Spike was playing a part, and he didn't know how to react to that. The talkier Spike got, the more taciturn Xander got.

And then it was the end of another day and Dawn was yawning and good-nighting them. The new couch had been delivered and he and Spike sat on opposite ends while the TV flickered from one commercial to the next.

Not knowing how to segue--all their old shared habits broken and not yet replaced with new ones--Xander stood up and fidgeted with his pockets. "I guess it's that time." Nicely vague.

"Yeah," Spike said, staring at the TV in a fixed way. "You go ahead. I'll kip here."

The words were short and flat, and Xander knew himself to be the cause. He'd shut down, leaving the ot