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I promise, promise, promise I'm working on finishing a new fic to post for you...


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Chapter 25


The next three days were fairly simple—Buffy would wake up, make sure Dawn got off to school, then after she was dressed she—or usually she and Spike—would go to the hospital for a few hours before coming home so she could rest. Then after Dawn was home, Spike would help her with her homework, one of them—which usually ended up being Dawn and Spike strangely enough—made dinner, and after dinner they’d go with Dawn to see Joyce.

It has also been three days of Spike noticing how little Buffy ate unless Dawn was around. He’d come by in time for breakfast and been surprised when Buffy told Dawn not to worry, she’d be eating hers in a little while. He knew for a fact that she wasn’t going to be doing any such thing.

“Buffy?” he asked when he knew she had no way of getting away from him and thus avoiding the question.

“Yes?” she wondered, her chin resting on his shoulder as he carried her piggy back through the sewers toward the hospital. She hadn’t told him yet, but smelling him made it a lot easier not to smell the sewage—which wasn’t so good for the whole nausea bit.

“Why aren’t you eating?”

“What? I eat….sometimes,” she finished lamely.

“Pet, you’re not eating breakfast. I’ve been letting you off lunch because hospital food isn’t the most nutritious and I thought you’d been eating breakfast. You can’t eat nothing until dinner, pet. Especially not with how little you eat then and how sick you’ve been,” he tried to keep his voice calm, but he really was worried about her and sometimes that made him sound harsher than he intended.

“You’re not my mother, Spike,” Buffy haughtily informed him, not happy to have been caught in her lie.

“No, pet, I’m not. I have a feeling she’d be a bit less nice about it. Why aren’t you eating, luv? Are you trying to…” he couldn’t find a way to even ask it.

“No, I’m not trying to kill myself or something. God! Why does everyone think I’m doing this for the fun of it?”

“I didn’t say that, pet. I just…I just don’t understand.’

“So why couldn’t you just ask?”

“I did,’ he reminded her gently.

“Yeah and then you suggested I was trying to starve myself, kind of takes away from the asking.”

“I’m sorry—you know how bad I am about saying stupid shit. I’m just worried, luv.”

“Yeah, well I’m worried, too. But if I get these horrible headaches more the more I eat-and then I start feeling like I’m going to throw up because my damn head hurts so much…as long as I drink stuff like evil Gatorade a lot during the day, I’m okay.”

“Evil Gatorade?”

”It tastes like it,” she defended herself.

“Buffy, you’re not okay, you realize that right? We need to figure out something so you can eat more—you need food pet.”

“Could always be a vampire, then I wouldn’t,” she mused.

“Would you quit saying that!?”

Buffy hadn’t expected him to get so mad at her. “I was just kidding, Spike. Just meant that all this eating and sleeping and everything wouldn’t be such an issue then.”

“Yeah, ;cept you’d be dead,” he said coldly. “And it’s not exactly something to joke about when you’ve already gotten yourself nearly killed once already. If you’re thinking I’m going to do something you can just forget it.”

“Spike—“

“Just save it, alright? I’m only not leaving you here because…well I can’t,” and he meant due to that conscience she was always trying to say he didn’t have. “We’ll go see your mum then I’ll take you home and I’ll be back round if the Bit needs it.”

Some days she wished she weren’t so good at making Spike mad. He was always saying how he said the stupid stuff…she was pretty sure she had him beat there.



“Buffy?” her mother asked, trying not to sound amused. “Why is Spike sitting in the corner? And why is he…sulking?”

“I’m not sulking,” he muttered grumpily.

Buffy answered her question anyway, “Because I don’t eat enough.” She heard the ‘huhmph’ he gave to that answer. “That,” Buffy finally admitted, “and he’s decided I’m trying to get myself turned.”

“Into what?” Joyce asked, the answer not even occurring to her.

”A bleedin’ vampire!” Obviously Spike was over the sulking bit. He never had been too good at staying quiet—he was more a yell at you when he was mad kind of guy than a silent treatment one. In fact, she wasn’t sure he could stay silent any longer than ten seconds. Even walking to the hospital while he was ‘not talking to her’ and then at the hospital while he was ‘not sulking’ he’d been muttering things at her every few seconds.

“Buffy is that true?” her mother asked, her voice neutral.

“What is wrong with you bloody women?! Do you not see how this is a bad thing?”

“No,” Buffy assured her. “He’s just taking two things I said way far apart—I don’t even remember the first one to tell the truth—and deciding I want him to turn me or something.”

“You’re forgetting the bit where you almost let the vampire who said he wanted to drain you, kill you,” Spike all but stomped back to the chair he’d pulled across the room. “Probably wouldn’t be me anyway. Probably ask the poof or something.”

“William, why are you so worried about her?” Joyce asked and both Buffy and Spike looked at her oddly. “You know her well enough to know that’s not what she wants. You also know that the fight that night was just her making a mistake. Chance is these things she said were just…things she said without thinking about them.”

So someone other than Buffy herself saw that she did that. That was nice to know.

“I’m not…It’s nothing; I’m being a wanker, sorry. You’ll excuse me while I…take a walk?”

“As long as no sunlight’s involved, sure.”

Spike only gave Buffy a dirty look before laving the room.

“I think I broke Spike,” Buffy mumbled just after he left.

“While I’ll admit he’s acting a bit strangely today I highly doubt it’s your fault, sweetheart.”

“He’s at the house almost all the time. He comes here with me, then usually he…well he does something while I take a nap or just rest, then he helps Dawn with her homework and dinner, an then he’s back here with us again at night…He’s only going home for like an hour total during the day and then at night. And I’m not really sure,” Joyce noticed how worried her daughter sounded, “that he’s getting any sleep at all.”

“Why would you think that, sweetie?”

“Because from eight thirty in the morning until nine o’clock at night I know he’s not asleep and…I’m pretty sure that from nine until the sun comes up he’s not either.”

“He’s back to the tree thing?”

“Yeah….Which would be fine except….he needs to sleep at some point.”

“Have you told him that you’re worried?”

“I’ve tried to get him to rest when I do…but he’s always downstairs or at his crypt doing something—and the one time I went to his crypt, besides being mad at me for walking that far, he was looking through a bunch of books.”

“So I can figure out what the bloody hell I’ve done to you.”

“Do you have a habit of just popping up in doorways and conversations or is it something to do with us?” Buffy asked, looking up to see Spike still in the doorway.

“I’m moving in with you,” he stated without preamble leaving Buffy stunned and Joyce only slightly surprised.



TBC......





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