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It's at the bottom 'cuz it talks about the story.
It was a widely acknowledged fact at Sunnydale High School that Buffy Summers and Spike Walsh hated each other.

No one was really sure why. Maybe there wasn’t a reason. But one thing was for certain: if the two of them bumped in the hallway, or had differing opinions in English IV or Calculus, then sparks were sure to fly. And not the good kind of sparks, either. No, these were sparks of major badness.

So what happened in the lunchroom one Tuesday a few weeks before Halloween was really no big deal.

To the people around them, anyway. To Buffy and Spike, it was, once again, an epic battle.

It began when Buffy, carrying her tray and waving to another person, forgot to look where she was going and bumped into Spike. It worsened when her mashed potatoes went all over his leather duster.

“Bloody hell, you stupid bint, watch where you’re going!” Spike snapped, glaring at the girl.

Buffy blinked at him. She hadn’t even realized that anyone had been standing there. She’d been waving to—what was his name, again? Oh yes, Tyler, that was it. Tyler was maybe going to take her to the annual Halloween dance, if he groveled enough of course. She was going to wear this way cute pink dress and—

Oh. Spike was still glaring at her. “Yeah, well—“ she stuttered. “If you didn’t wear that stupid coat to school every day, then you wouldn’t be all paranoid about it.” There. She’d managed to insult that coat of his again. Not that she really had anything against it. Actually, it would have made him look really hot, if he wasn’t a total outcast, of course.

Spike blinked at the girl in front of him. Sodding—she was one of the cutest things he’d ever seen, but she didn’t have the sense of a sparrow. “Least the leather’s real,” he shot back, arching an eyebrow at her. “Unlike some things I could name.” He glanced down, very obviously, at her slightly overexposed breasts.

Her mouth fell open in complete shock. “You—you—“ she screeched, stuttering, completely incapable of forming a complete sentence.

“Me?” he prompted, grinning.

She was about to respond with a stream of curse words when someone tapped her on the shoulder. Reached up and tapped her on the shoulder, which told her who it was: Jonathan, the shortest guy in school, and a way big nerd. “What?” she snapped, unaware that the whole cafeteria was watching her.

“Mr. Giles wanted me to tell you two that if you’re not engaged in any terribly exciting activity then he’d like to discuss coming assignations regarding you, Spike, and the coming nine weeks in English IV.” Jonathan had a smirk on his face, and by the end of his little speech, Spike did, too. He knew that Short Stuff hated Buffy. All those big words were probably confusin’ her.

“Need me to translate, luv?”

Buffy’s eyes flew to him, and they instantly narrowed. “No. I so totally got that.” She smiled at Jonathan. Which was weird, since she never smiled at nerds, but if Spike was going to be all condescending, then she didn’t really have a choice, now did she? “Just lead the way!”

Jonathan stared at her, completely expressionless. Spike nudged him. “Hey, Johnny,” he said. “Blondie can’t find her way to Giles’ room. She needs help.”

Jonathan stared at him instead.

It suddenly occurred to Spike that Buffy being nice might’ve been a shock to the poor boy, so he just said, “Right then. ‘ll take her myself.” He shrugged off his jacket and handed it to Jonathan, saying, “Get this back to m’ mates, would you?” When Jonathan nodded, he strode past Buffy without even glancing at her, making a beeline for the nearest cafeteria exit.

It only occurred to him after he left the cafeteria that he’d just willingly gone to close himself in a room with a stuffy British man (the fact that he, too, was British didn’t really register at the time) and the snobbiest bitch California had to offer for what could possibly be an extended period of time.

Damn, he thought with a wince as he turned the corner, mark me as the dumbest wanker the mother country’s ever produced.

He marched into Giles’s room and leaned against the wall, not bothering to announce himself or wait for the man to invite him it. Pulling out his lighter and starting to fiddle with it, he announced, “Okay. Let’s just get this over with, yeah?”

Before Giles had a chance to answer, Buffy came in, gasping for breath. She must’ve run—truly an impressive feat, seein’ as how she was wearing little stiletto heels. Her chest was heaving up and down as she gasped for breath, and Spike took the opportunity, as he had a few minutes ago with that crack ‘bout fake things, to sneak a peek at her breasts. Right nice they were, if a bit small. Too bad the chances of him ever getting to touch him were next to nothin’.

“I’m here!” she gasped, plopping herself down at the desk. “Sorry it took me so long, I totally fell on the stairs.”

“As opposed to only fallin’ a little,” Spike drawled.

Buffy wrinkled her nose at him. “Huh?”

He sighed, staring up at the ceiling. “Never mind.”

She decided to dismiss that last comment as another stupid Spike-ism and turned to Giles with her mega-watt smile on her face. “Anyway, sorry, Mr. Giles. You wanted to talk with us about something?” To add to the whole innocent thing, she pulled out a lollipop and started sucking on it.

“Ah, yes, of course.” Mr. Giles took off his glasses and started cleaning them, a move that made Buffy wonder uneasily just exactly what he was going to say. Mr. Giles never cleaned his glasses unless there was something majorly wrong.

“Now, I don’t know if you two know this, but our next unit will be a rather extensive one. We will be reading The Grapes of Wrath primarily, but our focus will extend to a study of familial relationships and sociology in general.”

Both of them nodded, Buffy with an inner eyeroll. Who didn’t know about the huge soci-whatever unit in Mr. Giles’s class was a better question.

“Good!” Wow. The poor old guy actually thought that stuff getting all notorious was a good thing...

Buffy blinked when she realized that both the Brits were staring at her. Oops, she’d drifted off again. “Um—sorry, what?” She scowled at Spike when he snorted derisively. “Hey, stop!”

“I asked if you knew about the nine weeks’ project I assign as a corollary to the general unit to students I believe will benefit from it?”

Buffy’s eyes began to widen. Oh, no. This could not be happening.

There were horror stories about that project. People said that every semester Mr. Giles picked out two kids he thought should get to know each other better. He’d give them this huge family study project thing, one that required big-time cooperation and stuff.. The teachers said it was this huge success, but the kids all hated it. And now he was going to give it to them.

Eeeew! Buffy thought, half going into major panic mode. He’s gonna make me work with Spike!

“Um, Mr. Giles—“ she began, fully prepared to tell him that he could kill her if he wanted but please don’t make her work with that jerk—but Spike beat her to it.

“There is no bloody way.”

Mr. Giles stared at the student in front of him, clearly perplexed. “Mr. Walsh, I’m terribly sorry you don’t like my proposition, but I’m afraid I didn’t give you a choice.”

“’m not working with Lil’ Miss Bitch Queen!”

“Hey! That is so totally unfair. Mr. Giles, make him stop!” The other teen sitting in front of him twirled a piece of clearly dyed hair in between her fingers, pouting around the lollipop she was currently sucking.

Giles sighed and looked at the ceiling. These two could go at it for hours, with him as the referee, and still hate one another. They had done just that many a time in his English IV class.

“Ms. Summers, Mr. Walsh, I’ve made my decision. You will work on this semester’s project together, or you will fail.”

Spike’s next remark pretty much summarized what both he and Buffy were thinking: “Bloody fuckin’ hell.”

~*~

As soon as Giles released them, after handing them both a sheet that detailed the project requirements, Spike rounded on Buffy and, scowling, informed her, “Just to let you know, ‘m not gonna work with you. You do your half, I’ll do mine, an’ that’s how it’s gonna be.”

She stared up at him. “Yeah right,” she snapped. “I mean, puh-leeze. You think I actually want to work with a dumb punk like you?”

Spike smirked at her, knowing that his next words were going to shock her. He wasn’t even supposed to know, but bein’ a military kid, well...you learned things. “’m not the one who’d failin’ English here, luv.”

She stared at him, mouth wide open. For a second Spike was worried that she was going to haul off and slap him—that was what she looked like.

But instead she just blinked a few times and said, “Don’t call me love.”

“What the bloody—“ Spike stared at her. Not a single run-on sentence, or like totally. No tears or feel-sorry-for-me looks. No, the bloody chit just popped that lolli back in her mouth and raised her nose.

“It’s, like, common knowledge that my grades suck. So get over it. Oh, and if you think for one second that I’m going to come anywhere near your stupid house, or talk to you, or even look at you during school hours, you are so living in another world.”

Spike sneered at her. “Like I wanna be seen talkin’ to you, Blondie. M’ reputation’d tank.”

“Puh-leeze.” Buffy rolled her eyes and picked up the sheet, scanning it quickly. That crack about her grades had hurt a little—well, actually, it had hurt a lot—but there was no way she was going to let Spike know. He already had enough stuff to use against her, especially since he fought her like every time they talked to each other. Speaking of which...

“Omigod!” Buffy squealed, her brain finally absorbing what she could read on the sheet. “I am so not doing this!”

The sheet said that they’d be doing a project on studying families. They both had to study the other’s family for two months, filling out this huge questionnaire that included questions about The Grapes of Wrath, questions about their own families, and—this was the major ick for her—interview questions. She was going to have to interview Spike Walsh.

Not to mention spend a bunch of time at his house. That was kinda gross, too. But she could talk to his family without actually talking to him, right? It was gonna be a little hard to interview him without talking to him. Maybe she could pay Cordy to do it. Cordy thought Spike was ‘a hunk of salty goodness’. Cordy wouldn’t mind.

Or, actually, she would, and Buffy knew it. She slumped against the wall, groaning dramatically. “We’re screwed,” she whimpered.

Spike lifted his eyes from the paper. “Well, not yet, but hey, ‘f you’re offerin’...” He leered at her.

“Not in a million years.”

“Well, luv, not sure how long I can go for, but we could try for a million years...”

“What the—okay, ew!” Buffy snapped when she realized what he was saying. “If you honestly think I’d do that with you, you so need professional help.”

“So now I have to pay you? Didn’t figure you for the hooker type, Summers.” And—uh-huh, along with that stupid remark came one of those incredibly annoying smirks.


She fought not to roll her eyes, lost the fight, and rolled her eyes incredibly obnoxiously, all under ten seconds. Then she did a bit of quick thinking. So, if she refused to come anywhere near stupid Spike, then Mr. Giles would fail her. And yeah, she was doing the whole Golden Years thing, but she really kinda wanted to graduate this year.

She was doomed.

Spike, meanwhile, was leaning against the wall, once again fiddling with his lighter and eyeing her speculatively. “Made up your mind, pet?”

“Don’t call me that,” she snapped. He arched an eyebrow but didn’t respond, a move she took to mean that he’d given in. Okay. If he was going to be this obedient, maybe this wouldn’t be so bad.

“And yes, I’ve decided. I’ll do the stupid project.”

“Good,” he said, which just sent her right into a fury again.

It wasn’t the word he’d said. Good was a nice word. Usually, as far as words went, she liked it. But it wasn’t the word she wanted to hear just then.

Because he said it like Daddy said it when she’d agreed to take stupid Dawn shopping. It was the parent-type good, the, ‘I knew you’d see it my way before I had to whack some sense into you’ kind of good.

And it really, really made her mad.

“Good? Good? I agree to hang out with you for this stupid school project and you say good?”

“Well, yeah,” Spike said, as though it should be obvious.

“Auuugh!” she fairly screamed, throwing her hands up and getting quite a few funny looks from kids who’d elected to skip lunch hour. “Okay, that is so it,” she said, pointing a finger at his chest. “I’m done with this.”

“That so?” He smirked at her. “’Cuz y’know, outta the two ‘f us, ‘m not the one who can’t afford to fail, luv.”

She narrowed her eyes. Any other time, she would have completely killed him for calling her ‘luv’; it was almost as bad as ‘pet’, only less, you know, derogatory. Too bad for her, though, he was right. Horribly, incredibly right.

Oh, poop.

“Fine,” she snapped. “I guess we’ve got to, like, hang out and stuff?”

“’s what it says,” Spike told her, scanning the paper. “Less cheer-shit, but yeah.”

She didn’t even bother answering that one. A dumb punk couldn’t possibly understand the athletic demands that came with as competitive a sport as cheerleading. Hello, she had to carry like five pounds of makeup to every game!

“Whatever,” she said. “So, meet me at my house after school.”

“Right,” he said, crumpling up the paper and shoving it in the pocket of his super-tight jeans. “Where d’you live?”

“Ask anybody, they’ll tell you,” she replied. Like she was going to give the bleached idiot her address.

“You don’ listen, do you? ‘m not talkin’ to a bimbo cheerleader or a nancy-boy jock!”

She fisted her hands. She was so going to slap him all the way back to stupid England if he didn’t shut his big mouth about her friends. “1630 Revello Drive,” she ground out, before flouncing away, hair and, she knew, boobs bouncing.

As soon as she got out of sight, though, her footsteps slowed, and the bounce turned into a dragging walk.

As of now, her life totally sucked. And in Buffy’s mind, it was all Spike Walsh’s fault.

Uh-huh, she decided as she pasted a smile back on her face in preparation to enter the cafeteria again. She definitely hated Sunnydale’s resident British Uberfreak.

So now the only question was, how were they going to go for so long around each other—and each other’s families—without going all Jack the Ripper and killing each other?

Buffy sat down at the popular table, a pout forming, one thought foremost in her mind:

Wah.

~*~

A/N: Gotta love family trips…18 hours in a car with my two younger siblings singing N*Sync in the backseat. With my mom’s complete support, because apparently me calling them brats damages their self-esteem, or something. I thought self-esteem was a myth, too… =) Anyway, about the story: I’m trying really hard to make Buffy as annoying and whiny and Harmony-like as possible. In case you didn’t figure it out, this is LA, pre-Slayer Buffy, except, you know, this is AU so there won’t be any Slayer-ing. But there will be a change in her, and soon, because honestly, I can’t really stand even writing this for long. So review and then wait for the next chapter, where I promise things will get interesting. Thanks! =)





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