Author's Chapter Notes:
I'm back and so is the update ;-)

Hope everyone who 'celebrates' it has a Happy Thanksgiving...and everyone else has a happy Thursday :-)
Chapter Eight


Dinner was a fairly mundane affair By the time she’d finally invited Spike inside, Buffy didn’t have enough energy left in her to argue with him any more so she let everything he said slide. Which was surprisingly, not all that hard. Either she was going crazy or Spike had actually been…nice.

He had paid a bit too much attention to her for her tastes, though. She was already incredibly self conscious—the way her headaches and nausea would hit her without warning left her feeling like a fool—and to have Spike basically studying her every move had almost been too much. If it hadn’t been for her tiredness—and the seemingly genuine concern in his eyes—she would have told him to stop it. Instead she let her mother have her nice dinner and kept quiet. But she didn’t eat much.



“So?” Buffy and Dawn were in the living room watching some TV movie Dawn claimed she just ‘had’ to see (really it was to give her sister an excuse to rest) and Spike was currently helping Joyce do the dishes.

“So, what?” Spike asked like he didn’t know what she was talking about. He knew full well what Joyce was talking about…he just didn’t know yet what his answer was going to be.

“What’s wrong with Buffy?”

“Do you think she’d be willing to go into hospital for a while? Maybe they could get her some medicine and—“

“Spike, what is wrong with my daughter?” her tone left no room for argument.

“Bloody hell! I don’t know, alright?” his angry tone was contradicted by the worry she saw on his face and the way he nervously ran his hand through hair. “I tried…I tried to figure out what it could be but I just…I don’t know.”

“But you don’t agree with Rupert that it’s something Slayer related that will heal on its own?” Joyce was sure she knew the answer—Spike was a smart man when he wanted to be—but he asked anyway.

“You ever known her to be sick this long? Or this sick…ever?”

“No.” Buffy had always been a healthy girl ad got over any illness she did get, incredibly quickly.

“And I haven’t heard of any other Slayer being this sick before, either so…I know it has something to do with that curse I just haven’t figured exactly what yet.”

“But you will?”

“I’m going to figure it out. I promise. But until then maybe…maybe she could go into hospital?”

“I…Dawn will need her,” Joyce answered cryptically and for the first time that night Spike registered just how sick Joyce herself looked—the dark circles under her eyes, the paleness of her skin, how thin she’d gotten.

“You alright?” Joyce was as much of a mother as he’d had since before he’d turned his own mother.

“We’ll see,” she said. “You just make sure Buffy’s alright and I’ll deal with the rest alright.”





All Buffy had managed to do the day before was watch an episode of ‘I Love Lucy’, eat an apple, and sleep. She felt exhausted from the moment she woke up and thought that eating something would help give her energy—and apples especially were supposed to be good for that. So, after slowly making her way downstairs, she found the bowl of apples her mother had neatly arranged on the countertop and found the best looking one.

Buffy slowly went back into the living room and all but fell onto the sofa; hardly eating or doing much of anything else for so many days was really wearing her down. She hoped she got over whatever this was soon so she could at least move around the house and eat lunch without feeling like she was going to die.

Taking as big of a bite out of the apple as she possibly could, Buffy quickly swallowed it before the nausea and absolutely intolerable headache that was sure to come could stop her. She never did know if it was just the moving (of her jaw), or the act of eating, or maybe the food but something always set off whatever was wrong in her when she ate. She had yet to figure out if the migraine or the nausea came first or if they were simply a package deal. Yeah, she thought, only this doesn’t seem to be a package I can return.

The more she ate the worse it would get, but it would also get worse over time so to eat quickly was better than to eat slowly.



Buffy’s late afternoon attempt at a nap—which was failing miserably at the moment—was interrupted by the sound of someone slamming their way into her kitchen.

Spike.

Figured it would be him. Wasn’t like her friends came by any more or anything—apparently you got sick long enough and even your best friends went on with their lives.

“Spike,” she called as best she could, knowing he’d hear her anyway, “I know you’re here. You might as well come up.” Truth be told, as horrible as she felt, some company would be nice. Even Spike’s.

“I didn’t wake you, did I?” Spike asked from her doorway when he’d made his way upstairs.

“No,” she assured him, “I couldn’t fall asleep.”

“That’s good,” he sounded relieved. “I probably should have waited till dark but by then your mum and the bit’d be back from the gallery and—“

“How do you know Dawn’s helping Mom at the gallery today?”

How to answer her question without telling her that Joyce had told him the days that Buffy would be home alone just so that someone would know… “Your mum told me the other night that she was helping out a bit.”

“Oh,” Buffy felt silly for being so suspicious of him.

And of course Spike noticed and felt like a wanker for not telling her the entire truth. “She wanted someone to know what days you’d be here by yourself…in case something happened, I guess,” he told her before he could think better of it.

Well if that didn’t make Buffy feel like she was seven-years-old…

“She’s just worried about you, pet, that’s all.”

“Yeah, I know…I just hate being…” They both knew the word she wasn’t saying was ‘helpless’.

“It’ll pass…not the hating it,” he amended, “I mean…You’ll be up kicking demon ass in no time.”

“Thanks, Spike…You going to stand in my doorway all night?”

“Didn’t want to intrude,” he admitted.

Buffy wondered something, “All this cautiousness because of what happened that night or because I’m all sick?”

“Not entirely sure.” And he wasn’t. “Sorry.”

“Why don’t you come sit down and tell me why the heck it is you risked the wonderful flammability of the sun to come over?”

Suddenly Spike was shy and wouldn’t quite meet her eyes as he pushed the chair closer to her bed and sat down; for the first time Buffy noticed that he was keeping his hands behind his back.

“What’re you hiding?” Buffy couldn’t help sounding wary.

“Oh nothing. So you feeling any better?” Spike tried to change the subject.

“Spike.”

Why did she have to have that tone? The one that made him know he was going to tell her whatever the bleedin’ hell it was she wanted to know just because she was Buffy.

“Fine,” he nearly gritted it out, “I got you something.”

“And this is a bad thing, why? It’s not something disgusting is it?”

“No, it’s not disgusting….Just…you’re going to laugh at me.”

“A present?” He nodded. “Then nope, I’ll be no laughing Buffy. Promise.”

“Yeah, sure,” he sounded extremely doubtful. Just the fact that she was smiling again—something he honestly hadn’t seen in over two and a half weeks—had him ready to deal with her laughing at him. “Alright fine. Here,” he thrust the object from behind his back at her.

Her smile fell and she lay there, propped up against her pillows, staring expressionlessly at the thing.

“Right, knew you’d hate it.” Just when Spike was about to grab it back from her, Buffy broke into a huge grin and began giggling, looking happier than she possibly ever had in his presence. Ever.

“You bought me a teddy bear!””

“Know it’s stupid,” he liked her happy but the William part of him, the part of him that was in love with her still wasn’t sure it liked her laughing.

“Hey, quit it Spike. This is good laughing…I promise. You really got me a teddy bear? And he’s so cute, too!” The sixteen inch bear was a light brown color and very fluffy, but it was the outfit that got her: the bear was wearing a red sweater, black cape, and…white bunny slippers.

“I was going for a bit of a vampire bear thing but they didn’t have that so I had to get Batman’s cape and that dodgy red sweater and put them together.”

“I like it…Where’d you get all this?”

“There’s uh…there’s this place at the mall,” she could have sworn Spike was blushing just then.

”The Build a Bear Workshop?” she tried really hard not to laugh and somehow even succeeded.

“Might’ve been,” Spike dismissed her suggestion even though it was correct.

“So I get the vampire thing, but…the bunny slippers?”

“They were cute,” he admitted very, very, very quietly, so quietly in fact that Buffy asked him to repeat it.

“They were bloody cute, alright?!”

Buffy just grinned and hugged the bear tight against her.

“Sweet dreams, Slayer.”

“You know, I’ve got to get going…” Spike started to leave but Buffy wasn’t ready for that just yet.

“Did the bear just say ‘sweet dreams, Slayer’…or rather did the bear, sounding incredibly like you, just say that?”

“Was better than ‘Bloody hell, Slayer!’ and well you’d’ve staked me for the other one.” Spike had almost made the bear say ‘I love you, Buffy’ before thinking better of it. “But I’m sure I can get the thing out and it’ll be quiet as a…quiet thing,” he assured her when she didn’t say anything.

“Spike?”

“Yeah, pet?” he asked warily.

“I love it. Thank you.”

“Well I just figured girls’re supposed to like teddy bears and all that rot and with you home sick—“ Spike tried to act like it was no big deal; he didn’t know how to handle grateful Buffy.

“Come here?”

Cautiously he stepped closer to her bed and sat down on it when she indicated for him to do so.

Sitting the bear carefully on her side, Buffy leaned forward and wrapped her arms around Spike, hugging him.

”Thank you, Spike,” she whispered. No one else had seemed to think too much about how horrible it was for her to be stuck home alone, all by herself all the while also worrying about her mother and somehow…somehow the teddy bear was making it all better. At least for right now.

“You’re welcome, pet,” he whispered back as he returned the hug.


TBC........and please review :-)





Hey, hey, hey..guess what.......come on guess.......seriously, why aren't you guessing?

I got nominated for something that actually involves voting by people (well judges are people of course, but I mean everybody people, not just judges.)

Reader's Choice Voting at Spark and Burn Awards where Silently Broken is nominated





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