Let no one say Fred didn’t have a knack for stating the obvious.
“You’re not wearing pants.”
Buffy wiggled, anxiously shifting her weight from one leg to another. “Let me in?”
“You have to pee?”
“No, I’m not wearing pants!”
Fred’s eyes widened and she threw the door open without another beat. “Oh right,” she said. “Why aren’t you wearing pants?”
“Because I forgot to put them on,” Buffy explained hurriedly, rushing over the threshold. “God, I’ve never been particularly modest, but I swear if Mrs. Hatfield saw me without pants, she’d give me another lecture against premarital sex.”
Fred blinked.
“She saw me and Spike leaving last night for our junk food run and jumped to conclusions that were, while not incorrect, certainly presumptuous.”
“See, this is why I always remember to put on pants before leaving the house.”
“This isn’t something that happens often.”
“I’d certainly hope not.”
“Fred?”
The girl smiled softly. “Want me to get you some pants?”
“That’d be nice.”
Three minutes later, a very clothed Buffy was helping herself to a bowl of Frosted Flakes, trying to look as though she hadn’t bolted down the hallway, half-dressed and wholly panicked. She hadn’t given much thought as to what she wanted to say before leaving Spike and the sinful temptation that was his mouth; all she’d known was she desperately needed perspective. She needed a female ear to bend.
“Either I need to lose weight or you need to gain weight,” Buffy said, sucking in her stomach as she retrieved the milk from the refrigerator. “I always thought my baby fat was kinda cute.”
Fred waved a hand, taking a seat at the counter by the kitchen. “I’m just really bony.”
“Thank God these are elastic in the waist.”
“They look fine.” A pause. “Buffy…is everything okay? I didn’t make a mistake by telling Spike where you were, did I? I really thought that was what you wanted…you told me not to let you send him away again, so when he showed up looking for you, I—”
“No,” Buffy assured her quickly, “it was very good that you told Spike where I was.”
Fred blinked. “Then why are you running around without pants?”
“That’s a perfectly fair question.” She cast her head downward and rubbed her arms. “Spike and I…we came to an understanding. We have an arrangement now.”
“An arrangement?”
Buffy nodded. “We’re living together.”
A pause. “Wow.” Fred blinked again. “Considering you shoved him out just a couple days ago, I’d consider that…well, either progress or slayers and vamps just have a way of moving really fast.”
An appreciative grin tugged at the corners of Buffy’s mouth. “I’ve been a little hormonal recently,” she agreed. “Like a nonstop stretch of PMS.”
Fred’s nose wrinkled. “Okay.”
“Believe me, I’m not normally this…well, I’m not normally this.”
“It’s been rough on you.”
Buffy rolled her eyes. “Like that’s an excuse,” she replied. “Spike’s been nothing but wonderful and I treat him like…well, he did want me dead a few months ago, but things are very different now.”
“Your life is so strange.”
She snickered. “You’re telling me.”
“What happened that sent you out of your apartment without pants?”
“You’re really going to hammer on the ‘Buffy has no pants’ thing, aren’t you?”
“It’s just not something you see every day. And considering I live in Los Angeles, that’s saying a lot.”
Buffy swallowed hard and nodded, shoving a spoonful of Frosted Flakes into her mouth to buy herself at least thirty seconds during which to consider how best to phrase what she wanted to say. She knew she needed to talk, and if it were Willow rather than Fred, she knew exactly how she would begin. But Fred wasn’t Willow, and it wouldn’t be fair to either friend to utilize one in place of the other.
With Fred, she needed to start at the beginning. She needed to tell her everything.
The spoonful was chewed to the point of being liquefied. No more stalling. Swallowing hard and downing the sugary taste with a gulp of milk, Buffy sighed, nodded, and began with a quick confession. “Spike isn’t the first vampire I’ve…had a relationship with.”
Perhaps she was expecting an earthquake based on past experience; it didn’t come. Not the judgmental eyes or the shocked expression or anything to suggest she was tainted by association. Fred did nothing but shrug and reach for the milk. “Okay,” she said, shrugging. “Could you get me a glass?”
Buffy nodded blankly, moving around the kitchen in an almost robotic-fashion. “His name was Angel,” she continued. “I met him…God, a year and a half ago? It was…nothing at first. I thought he was cute but annoying. Just some random twenty-something who popped out of nowhere to tell me I was going to die some horrible death or the world was ending. He made with the extreme vague when I asked for help, saved my butt a time or two, and when we kissed…it was fangs ahoy.”
Fred didn’t say anything until she had a glass of milk in hand. “You didn’t know he was a vampire?”
“He didn’t act like one.”
“Spike doesn’t act like one.”
“Fred, you really don’t know how vamps act.”
The other girl shrugged. “I know those guys who attacked us the other night were very ‘bite-first-ask-questions-later.’”
Buffy nodded, pointing at her as though catching a faux pas. “There you go.”
“What?”
“Vamps very rarely ask questions later.” She smirked, continuing, “Angel and I…we didn’t really get together until about a year after first smoochies, and it was hard knowing if we were together or if we were patrolling-buddies-with benefits. He was…he was different, Angel was.”
“Like Spike is?”
Buffy shook her head. “No. No, I…Spike doesn’t have a soul. When you become a vampire, the soul leaves the body and a demon goes in instead. Spike is pure demon. Angel…Angel had a soul.”
Fred paused, arching a brow. “How’d that work?”
“Something involving a curse with a really lame escape-hatch.” Buffy exhaled. Despite however much she didn’t want to discuss this, there was something undeniably liberating in getting the words out. “Angel had a soul, meaning he was just like a person but on an extremely limited diet and very much allergic to sunlight…oh, and he’d live forever. But he didn’t bite people. He didn’t hurt anyone. He wasn’t…a conventional vampire.” She grew quiet, her eyes focusing on a spot on the counter. “I loved him. He was…it happened so fast. We were just…and then I loved him. Then Spike and Dru came to town and everything changed.”
“Dru?”
Buffy nodded. “You know…the girl I mentioned when Spike was here a couple nights ago?”
“I tried not to listen.”
“We weren’t quiet.”
The look in Fred’s eyes betrayed her efforts to not listen had been entirely in vain. “The woman who…ummm…nailed him to the wall?”
“That’d be the one.”
“She sounds…ummm…nice.”
Buffy snickered. “Yeah, a real prize. But Spike was totally about Dru. He came to town to make her get better…she was some vampire-version of sick, and the Hellmouth could make her better.”
“Hellmouth?”
“Sunnydale.”
“Oh.” Fred’s brows perked. “There are better nicknames, you know. The City of Angels, for example. The Big Apple. The Windy City. But the Hellmouth?”
“Well, it’s…not so much a nickname as it is…what it is. The mouth to Hell. Or one of the many mouths to Hell.”
“Ummm…”
“I know. Comforting.” Buffy waved a hand. “He brought Dru there to heal her. Things happened. He tried to kill me, it didn’t take. I tried to kill him, and he ended up in a wheelchair. Then Angel and I grew…ummm…pelvic, and suddenly he wasn’t Angel anymore.” A pause. “Apparently…his curse only kept his soul in place if he didn’t get happy. And when we had…ummm…the, ummm, sex…he got…he lost his soul. And he turned…he was sadistic. He came after me through my friends…through my mother…he killed my Watcher’s—my surrogate father’s—girlfriend. And he tried to end the world.”
Fred just stared at her for a second. “Wow,” she said. “And I thought my breakup with Pete was bad.”
“Pete?”
“My last boyfriend.”
“What happened?”
A beat; Fred glanced down, blushing. “Okay, so it was in high school. I told him I was going to LA for college and since he was still into Nirvana and pot, it was over. And he took it bad to the extreme of…toilet-papering my house. But in my hometown, that was like…front-page news.”
Buffy bit the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing. “Oh man.”
“Yeah. And we had some tall trees in our yard.”
“I really wish my life was that simple at times. Other times I think I’d be bored.” Buffy cast a wistful glance to the door. “But it broke me…Angel turning the way he did. Saying what he did. Doing…I was heartbroken. And Spike wasn’t happy, either. With Angel back on the side of evil, Dru was on him like white on rice, forgetting how much Spike…” She paused at the bad taste in her mouth. It wasn’t fair to be jealous of the past, but God save her, she couldn’t help herself. “Spike came to me in very bizarre circumstances. Let’s just say…we weren’t ourselves. Kissage happened. And it threw us both. We teamed up to stop Angel from ending the world…only Angel got his soul back but I had to kill him anyway.” She paused for comments, but none were forthcoming. Likewise, it struck her as a good idea to ignore how easily it was to say those words. How much truth it brought to her own hypothesis. Sometime between Angel losing his soul and Spike coming to her aid, Buffy had fallen out of love with Angel. The little girl whose kisses he’d stolen, whose naiveté he’d taken for granted, had grown up. She wasn’t that child anymore.
However, getting over Angel didn’t mean she’d forgotten the hard-learned wisdom their relationship had imparted. Vampires and slayers were a messy, sloppy deal; she might have fallen out of love, but she hadn’t forgotten the pain. The pain was still very much alive.
And killing him had killed her in ways she couldn’t even explain to herself.
“Spike took me away when it was over,” Buffy said softly. “I was so lost, but I needed to feel…and I…I jumped him in our motel room and we had sex. Hard, painful sex. But it was…more to him than that. More to me, too, but I didn’t want it to be. And then by accident claimage happened.” Anticipating Fred’s question, she pulled her hair back to reveal the bite mark on her throat. “Shorthand, it’s marriage. Marriage without divorce. Marriage that makes me never age. And that’s why, by the way, I was so sickly not too long ago. Spike tried to explain it…since the claim’s new, we need to be together to make it feel complete. To be claimed basically means that we’re one, therefore to be apart makes our connection spaz. It’s also why we decided to try this living-together thing.” She paused again. “The thing is, even if Angel and I are very much of the past, I’m just not ready to go from one emotional train wreck to…whatever Spike and I are. I care about him so much…really, it freaks me out, considering he has no soul whatsoever—except maybe he’s sharing mine now, but the jury’s still out on that—and whatever we have wouldn’t be a rebound. It’d be another live-or-die relationship that I can never get out of. And God, all I wanna do is throw myself at him but I can’t because if I start confusing…I don’t even know him all that well. I mean, I do, but the circumstances have always been extreme and…well, they always will be but I can’t control that and I rushed things with Angel and that killed me and if Spike and I fail at being claimed-people then there won’t be anything left of me to kill ‘cause I’ll be devastated. I’m just not ready for that…and this alone is scaring me but I have no choice.”
There was nothing for a long minute. Fred just looked at her, her hand wrapped around her barely-touched milk. Then, blinking, she shook her head as though forcing her thoughts to fall in place. “Wow,” she said.
“Yeah,” Buffy agreed dryly.
“You have a lot going on.”
A beat, then Buffy laughed. Hard. “Now that,” she said, covering her mouth, “is an understatement.”
Fred grinned. “Well, it’s…I do that. Why with the no pants again?”
“Spike and I were trying to sleep in the same bed. It didn’t take. He got snuggly and then we played musical-sofas and this morning, when started talking about…stuff…he kissed me.” Buffy held up a hand. “A friend kiss. I’ve kissed Spike a lot, and this was definitely a supportive friend kiss. I’m the one who turned all whory on him. Massive lip-attack. And since I’m the one who put the boundaries…I just…I left him confused and probably some stuff worse than confusion and I needed to get out.”
The empathy in Fred’s eyes grounded her completely. “I get that,” the girl said. “And I’m betting, even with the confusion and stuff worse than confusion, that Spike will, too. This thing is…well, over my head, but he cares about you. A lot. I’m just this bystander-shaped person and I can see that.”
Buffy nodded, her heart clenching, her mind flashing back to the soft smile on his face and the way his words cascaded over her like a waterfall. He did care about her—more than she likely knew. Perhaps even more than he knew. And that was terrifying.
But not so much as the idea of facing him now—of facing him after what she’d done to him. After asking for space and then jumping his sexy bones, only to pull away when he began to lead one thing to another as any man—living or dead—would.
“You wanna go shopping?” Buffy asked suddenly. “Or…job hunting? I can get pants that don’t make my ass look so big and…well, my cash is in my apartment, but I have enough that I can pay you back for—”
Fred held up a hand. “You need to get out?”
“Yes. I can’t face him right now. Not after…that.”
She shrugged. “Then we’ll go shopping.”
“You sure?”
“Absolutely.” Fred smiled warmly. “We’re friends, right? This is what friends do. They’re there for the boy trouble and the shopping therapy. Or so I’ve heard. I never…had…you know, friends who weren’t total geeks.”
Buffy grinned, spontaneously leaning over the counter to throw her arms around Fred’s shoulders and hug her as best she could. “Well, all my friends are,” she said. “At least the ones I had before I left.”
“Then you might have a decent chance at putting up with me.”
“I definitely wouldn’t rule it out.”
“Oh my God.”
“Calm down.”
Buffy glanced up to aim at Fred a well-deserved glare, but she couldn’t see for the mess of tears in her eyes. Nor could she trust her feet to walk, even if it meant closing a gap of no more than four feet. The day had been going so well, too. Full of shoppage and girlish giggles and the unspoken hope that maybe, just maybe, thing would work themselves out.
Two hours had passed since sunset, and Spike wasn’t home.
Spike had left. No note. No explanation. No nothing. He was just gone.
Gone.
“I chased him away,” Buffy said, wiping at her eyes. She couldn’t stop crying; she’d been crying now for a half hour, pacing when she could trust her legs and doing her best to not let all the inner-crazy out, though with zero success. “I did. I was so…stupid. I was so stupid.”
Fred’s hands were up, trying unsuccessfully to coax Buffy onto the sofa. “He probably just wanted to give you time,” she said, her voice all too reasonable. “Maybe he needed time. You said he likes killing things. Maybe he went to…kill things.”
Buffy shook her head. “He’s gone. He left.”
“This would be the non-stop PMS you were talking about earlier.”
“Not. Helping.”
“I just think you’re jumping to conclusions.”
“I never jump to conclusions!” Buffy paused, realizing belatedly the words had ridden out on a scream. She cast Fred an apologetic glance, then amended her statement with a softer, but no-less tearful, “Except I sometimes do, but I’m not now. I’m not. I feel it. I feel it…I felt it earlier, but I thought it was just…nerves. I didn’t…something’s wrong. He left. He’s left. He left because—”
“Buffy—”
“He’s gone.”
Three swift knocks to the front door stole whatever fruitless comfort Fred was about to offer right off the girl’s tongue. She and Buffy exchanged a quick glance before the brunette bolted to answer it.
“Oh God.”
“See?” Fred replied calmly. “He just—”
“No.”
“What?”
But there was nothing to say. No words to follow. Nothing that could hope to explain what Buffy knew. The trepidation squeezing her stomach. The knowledge crashing against her chest.
“It’s not him.”
Fred frowned. “Don’t be silly,” she returned, though her voice was shaky.
Then she opened the door. And froze.
Buffy was right. It wasn’t Spike.
It was Gunn.
TBC