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Author's Chapter Notes:
A/N: My apologies for the delay, but my muse has been a bit... absent. Thank you to all that have read and reviewed, and of course to my wonderful beta Mari. You all help me keep writing this, even when the words are a little slow in arriving. ☺
The town really was lovely, Buffy had to admit now that she had gotten a good look at more of it. Most of the perimeter seemed to be property like where they were staying, sprawling lots placed very far apart, but the center of town turned out to be a bustling little hive of dusk-time activity.
The center of town actually consisted of only two streets, Winding Water Way and Half Moon Street, named for the two rivers indicated in ‘Deux Rivieres,’ but the two streets were lined with an array of crafts stores, galleries, and specialty food stores that she found charming, if not a little anomalous for such a rural area.
After some brief hemming and hawing, they grabbed some food at a sidewalk café that boasted two menus, the Dieter’s Delight and the Good Grub. Predictably, Buffy ordered salad of some sort, and Spike got French fries smothered in cheese, chili, bacon, and jalapenos.
Buffy wrinkled her nose as she idly watched him eat, pushing her salad around her plate listlessly, eating a leaf here and there. It looked like rabbit food to Spike, but let the man who does not usually exist on plasma alone cast that stone.
He tucked into the fries with gusto, and when he caught her looking, he offered her a fry dripping in all sorts of ‘tasty glop’ (as per the description on the menu). She declined with a shake of her head and went back to her greens, finally pushing her plate away when she just couldn’t muster up any more appetite.
Spike looked at the leftover food disapprovingly, making a mental note to figure out a way to get some calories into the girl who was now looking so painfully thin. She had always edged more towards lean muscle, which was pretty much a given in her line of ‘work,’ but since her return, her clothing was hanging off her frame, looking pretty much like it probably did while still on the hangers in the closet.
“You should have some more, pet.”
She toyed with a few leaves, then dropped the fork again. “I tried; I’m just not hungry.”
Spike gave her the evil eye, debating whether to make a comment about woman and dieting.
“I’m not, okay?”
He decided to let it lie—for now—and motioned for the check, tossing a twenty on the table.
As she reached for the last sip of her soda, Buffy grumbled, “Don’t know why my weight is such a big deal. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were trying to fatten me up to eat me.”
Spike choked on a fry in surprise, and Buffy blushed bright red at the unintended double entendre, grabbing her sweater and refusing to meet his eyes.
“You know what I meant.” She stalked down the street, cutting over the lawn of the town library on the way back to the parking lot where they had left the DeSoto, staying several steps ahead of the vampire the whole time.
“Sure do, luv!” He chortled, never able to resist the urge for some chop-busting. He lit a cigarette as he watched her attempt to put more distance between them. He found embarrassment on a woman who could kick his ass up and down the street just a little endearing.
She turned around to respond, and missed a half-buried root, hooking her foot on it and sending her pitching to the ground.
“Buffy, you okay?” He reached her in two steps, and by the time she rolled over onto her back, he could see that she was fighting tears, and her left arm sat at an odd angle from her torso. “Oh, that looks bad.”
She struggled to her feet one-handed, letting Spike hook her under the good arm to right herself. He took another look in the light from the street lamp.
“This looks dislocated, Slayer, I think you should pop over to the doctor and have him do a quick x—“
“NO!” Buffy’s answer exploded from her lips, and when he looked at her face in question, he saw something there he couldn’t place. She was suddenly rigid with… was that tension and maybe… fear? Given the set to her jaw, there was no way he’d be able to convince her to let the local doc to give her shoulder the once-over right now.
Giving up, he shrugged, helping her gently into the car. “So what do you want to do about it, luv?”
She ground her teeth; every little jostle was sending electric shocks of pain down the nerves of her arm and making her shoulder ache unbearably. “When we get back to the house, you’re popping it back into place for me.”
It wasn’t a question.
Well, that’s just fucking fantastic. It looked like he was in for a little dose of chip-induced searing pain instead of just a quiet evening with the telly.
* * *
Spike dumped the playing cards and snacks he’d bought at the convenience store on the dining room table and went to raid Sam’s private liquor stash, palming a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue before returning to join Buffy in the living room.
“This is gonna hurt a lot, pet,” he warned, tentatively approaching where she sat on the couch. He handed her the bottle, with reservations. He would have preferred not to be liquoring up the already-depressed woman, but this was going to be monumentally painful for both of them, and required a little liquid anesthetic.
She shrugged and took a giant slug of whiskey. “I know, just make it quick.” She made an adorably contorted face as the whiskey burned a path down her throat and turned her back towards him, bracing herself with both hands planted against the arm of the sofa.
Spike picked the liquor bottle up and took an extra-generous draught, gathering himself. This truly would hurt him more that it would her. The chip’s output seemed to be in direct relation towards the amount of force he attacked humans with, and the amount of force needed to reseat Buffy’s shoulder in its socket… well, he’d be lucky if it didn’t knock him unconscious.
He put one knee up on the couch, lining it up along her back to give himself leverage, then placed one hand flat between her shoulder blades, supporting her, and slowly wrapped the other hand around her left shoulder. She flinched visibly when his fingers made contact with the swollen and tender area, and he paused, reconsidering.
“Will you just freakin’ do it already?” she demanded impatiently.
He chuckled despite himself. “Bossy bint. I’ll do it when I’m damn well ready. What, does Baby like it rough or something?”
Her voice sounded both exasperated and strained, and he realized the pain must be getting to her. “Just. Do. It. NOW!”
He gritted his teeth and snapped her shoulder back towards him sharply, an audible pop and a Slayer’s whimper telling him that the joint was once again seated properly in the split second before Buffy’s head snapped back in reaction, driving itself right into his temple.
Pain shot through his skull at the impromptu head-butt, and he fell backward, fists pressed to his temples, onto the sofa, waiting for the ache to subside and his vision to clear.
Buffy slumped forward, hand on her injured arm, and caught her breath, sharp pains still firing through her arm. “Sometimes I really hate you.” The sofa cushions muffled her words slightly.
His reply was whispered so softly, she nearly missed it altogether. “And yet once again, I’m all you’ve got.”
As the pain in her shoulder subsided, she sat back up, and turned to look at Spike, who was still holding his head in his hands. Guilt pushed some of the pain aside. “Oh, Spike, your head… I’m sorry.”
He cradled his skull in his hands for several moments silently, not responding until she spoke again. “Are you okay?”
“’m fine. Just… my noggin is throbbin’, you know?”
Buffy nodded and went to the kitchen to get His ‘n Hers matching icepacks, and Spike stayed where he was for another minute.
The chip. Hadn’t fired. The chip hadn’t fired.
Oh bloody buggering fuck!
* * *
“How can you never have played poker?” he demanded, shuffling the deck with practiced ease.
Buffy set about counting out twenty-five pretzel sticks into even piles in front of each of them. “I don’t know. I used to play Crazy Eights and Go Fish with Mom when I was younger. And Dawn and I would occasionally play War. Just never really got the chance.”
The whiskey was already warming her belly nicely, and she was feeling a bit more… relaxed… at ease even. “Will you hurry up and deal? I have pretzels to win.”
The vampire narrowed his eyes slightly at her. “What’s the rush, Slayer? You got a hot date later?”
She stuck her tongue out childishly at him—yup, definitely starting to feel the alcohol—and he gave her a cheeky smile in return.
“The hands, in order of value, are high card, a pair, two pair, three of a kind, straight, flush, full house, four of a kind, straight flush, and royal flush. Got that?”
She nodded vigorously and snatched the whiskey off the table, taking another shot.
“Oi! Go easy on that! You don’t drink Johnny Blue like it’s Gatorade!”
She shivered and made a face at the taste of the liquor. “I don’t care what color Johnny is. It’s gross.”
“A, it’s damn good whiskey. And B, if you don’t like the taste of it then quit drinking it!”
“Don’t wanna. Wanna drink and play cards.”
He tilted his head and looked at her. “What say we make this more interesting?”
She squinted at him. “What do you—hey, my clothes are staying on, mister!” She pulled her neckline higher in exaggerated propriety.
Spike laughed. “Didn’t mean strip poker, Slayer. I mean a wager. In addition to the pretzels, every time someone wins three hands in a row, the other person has to tell you a secret they’ve never told anyone else, ever.”
Buffy eyed him up, running through the deal in her slightly warm and fuzzy brain. This could totally work to my advantage. She had every intention of asking him deeply personal questions when she won, and giving him crappy token answers if she lost, like the name of her imaginary friend in first grade.
Spike won the first two hands easily. Buffy was visibly trying to run through the order of the hands in her head, and couldn’t get a rhythm to her betting. When he gleefully slapped the third winning hand face-up on the table, she rolled her eyes and tossed her losing cards down, mentally running over any innocuous truth she could pacify him with.
“I’m not really a blonde.”
“Not exactly news, Slayer. I’ve seen your roots. In fact, I’m looking at ‘em now.”
She glared at him briefly, then gave him a victorious smile. “You didn’t say it had to be a good secret, just one we’ve never told anyone else!”
Okay, so she’s going to play it that way? Spike shuffled and dealt, purposefully betting into the next two hands, and then folding and letting Buffy have the win. As she triumphantly slammed the third winning hand down on the table, he leaned back in his chair slightly, appraising her silently.
“Well? I won, so make with the truthiness, mister!” She demanded.
“Ask me a question and I’ll answer it.” Shit, he should’ve thought that one through a little better. There was a dim chance Ol’ Johnny was making Spike his bitch tonight too.
Buffy made a big show of propping her head up on her hands and assessing Spike, trying to pick just the right question.
“What’s one thing that you’ve never done that you’ve always wanted to?”
He answered immediately. “Make love to a woman in the sunlight.”
That shut her up for a minute. “You’ve never… not back when you were… wait, did you—“
He cut her off. “One question per win, Slayer; anything more’s cheating.”
She huffed and took over the deal, questions still flying through her mind. If he’s never had sex in the sunlight, that must mean that he was a virgin when he was… ohhh…
She tried to picture Spike as a sweet, virginal human and failed miserably. As much as Spike talked, he had never really given her many insights into whom he had been as a man. Into William.
She had always pictured him as something of a street punk, a tough guy very much like the vampire he’d become. But every so often—and she doubted he realized this, and she’d certainly never tell him—when he was very tired or very emotional, his accent took on a more Giles-y aspect, something closer to what she thought she remembered hearing her Watcher refer to as “North London.”
Spike took another drink of the whiskey, feeling a pleasant tingling starting in his toes and working his way up. Using Buffy’s distraction, he won the next hands easily, and then pointed at her across the table. “You! Same question!”
Crap. “Could you repeat the question?” she inquired politely, buying time by taking another drink. Her limbs and muscles felt much looser, and the throb had all but disappeared in her reset shoulder.
He laughed, seeing through her. “It was your question, Slayer, but I’ll bite. What’s one thing you’ve always wanted to do but never had the opportunity?”
She chewed on her lip, weighing her possible answers, and it was just as Spike had taken a giant mouthful of liquor that the answer escaped despite her better judgment.
He continued prodding when she didn’t respond. “C’mon, out with it! Everyone’s got at least one thing they’ve been dying to try, but haven’t—“
She worried her lower lip with her teeth as she tried to think of her possible answers, and she realized that for a woman who’d done so many things that other people never would, she also had not done a lot of things that other people had. It was just as the blond vampire had taken a truly heroic mouthful of liquor that the answer escaped despite her.
“Doggy style.” The second she said it she turned fuchsia and clapped a hand over her mouth, as if trying to shove the words back in.
Spike choked, coughing the remnants of a mouthful of expensive whiskey onto the tabletop, and kept sputtering until Buffy got up and thumped him on the back.
“Thanks ever so,” he wheezed out, trying to breathe normally. Buffy sat back down with grace, trying to pretend she had just told him something innocuous, like her shoe size.
There was no way Spike was letting this go. “You mean you never—“
“No.”
“I guessed not with Angel, and that little boy your freshman year didn’t look like he had it in him, but not even with Soldier Boy?”
Buffy wished she could take it back. Or shut him up. “No. Riley was all about… not experimenting…”
It was on the tip of Spike’s tongue to ask Buffy how that was experimental, but he didn’t want to press his luck, seeing as she was already opening up to him. Didn’t want to put the cork back into that particular bottle yet.
She started to shuffle again as a way to refocus her attention and give her cheeks time to cool, and the repetitive nature of the activity seemed to settle her. They sat in silence for a couple minutes, reordering the cards.
“Do you really hate me?” Spike cursed his own big mouth for breaking the silence. And for asking a question he only really wanted one of the two possible answers to.
Buffy glanced up at him, puzzled for a moment, and then her eyes cleared when she realized to he was referring to the moment back on the sofa.
“When I said it before, no, I was just in pain.”
“And the first time, back with Angelus—“
“Yes.” The vampire’s chest tightened a little. Served him right for asking the question in the first place. “Yes, I did hate you. I hated you a lot at that moment.” Leave it to the Slayer to twist the blade. “I hated you for being able to put your Sworn Enemy thing with me aside to get Dru back. I hated you so much for putting love ahead of evil.
“I despised you for being able to do what Angel couldn’t.”
The two blonds stared at each other across the table, the weight of the confession hanging in the air, until Buffy couldn’t take the tension and popped to her feet, announcing something about needing more pretzels before scooting into the kitchen. Spike started reshuffling, and she returned, more composed, and plopped herself, slightly wobbly, back in the chair.
She followed his hands with her eyes as they danced over the deck. He was clearly a practiced card player, and the grace and ease with which he shuffled was extraordinary. She found something immensely calming about the motions, and focused on his as the cards with fluffy little cartoon kitties on the back slipped between his fingers.
“When I was fifteen, right after I was first called, and still living in L.A…”
Spike ceased his shuffle, sensing import to Buffy’s words, but the loss of the motion seemed to make her lose her nerve, and as she struggled to find her words, he resumed the gentle movement.
Her courage returned, and she continued, “I was out one night in the cemetery, fighting this fledge, and I wasn’t very good yet. You know, I had all the speed and the strength and the blah-bliddy-blah that you get as a Slayer, but no idea how to harness it, you know? So I was fighting this vamp, and I got tossed over a tombstone, and next thing I know, my arm’s all… making with the broken. So I manage to stake him, run back home, and Dad takes one look at my arm and drives me to the ER.”
The words were virtually flooding from the blonde’s lips by now. “So we get to the ER, and the doctor takes one look at it and knows that it’s broken, but they still have to do an x-ray, you know, to make sure it’s a clean break and all that?”
She paused and the vampire nodded. He didn’t know from squat about x-rays, but agreeing seemed reasonable.
“So they take an x-ray of my arm, my whole arm, and they find two other partially healed fractures from other slaying incidents. One I didn’t even know about. And a whole bunch of bruises and stuff. Anyway, so apparently, it’s protocol when you get a child in that’s… I mean, when there are unexplained bruises and fractures…”
Spike’s heart sank as he got as a feeling of dread rose in him. He thought he knew where this story was going, and it was nowhere good. “Go ahead, luv,” he said softly. “’S’okay.”
“So they separated me from my dad, put us in different rooms, just kept asking me the same questions over and over. Who did this to you? Is somebody hurting you? You know it’s all right to tell us. We can protect you…” Her voice trailed off as she choked back tears.
Spike wanted to reach for her, comfort her, but he didn’t know if that would break this… whatever it was that was prompting Buffy to talk. So he kept shuffling the cards slowly, the sight and sound easing her further.
“I was terrified. They had three people crammed into this little tiny exam room with me, and they wouldn’t let me see him, and I started crying because I didn’t know what was going on, and they wouldn’t answer my questions as to what they were doing, and so I just stopped talking. And since I wouldn’t talk at all, they ended up calling the child welfare people… cut to three hours later, after they finally let me call my mom…”
Spike felt rage. Pure rage. Hunt-these-people-down-six-years-later-and-make-them-eat-their-own-spleens rage.
Buffy’s voice become clearer again, as she realized she did want to finish finally telling this story to someone.
“So anyway, Mom comes down to the ER, all righteous indignation, and makes an ugly enough scene and threatens some legal-type stuff if they, and I quote ‘Don’t stop scaring my little girl over some goddamn old cheerleading injuries.’ So they end up letting me go home with them after all these vague ‘call us if you ever need anything; your mom and dad don’t need to know’-type warnings and hotline numbers. Dad didn’t speak to me for two days after that, and Mom… she didn’t know what to think.” She stuffed a couple of pretzels in her mouth for emphasis. “I think that was the beginning of the real end for them.”
Spike didn’t know what to say, and so stuck with silence, companionably noshing on a couple pretzels from his own stack.
They played a couple more hands, Spike winning easily, as he noticed the Slayer’s eyes starting to droop. “C’mon, luv, why don’t we call it a night?”
Buffy squinted at him, the liquor fogging her vision just a tad. “But I was just about to stage my big comeback,” she protested.
He chuckled. “It’s late, you’re a little drunk, and we’ve eaten most of the betting chips. C’mon, bedtime.”
Buffy grumbled but got to her feet, rolling her neck and wincing slightly when her shoulder ached with the motion. “All right, but I demand a rematch at some future time of my choosing.”
She shuffled off towards the stairs, and Spike extinguished the lights, following her up the staircase.
He paused at the top, not knowing where she expected him to sleep tonight. He stood awkwardly in the hallway for a for a few minutes, unsure if he should presume to be sharing the bed with her tonight, or if he should head back to the little stupid racecar, or—
Buffy reappeared in the hallway, teeth brushed, and closed her hand around his wrist, leading him into the enormous master bed beside her, folding herself delicately up against him. Decision made.
As he lay there, waiting for sleep to claim him, arm wrapped lightly around her slender waist, he could almost believe that this was real.
Almost.
TBC