Early morning:

Spike sucked on his cigarette and, in the shadows of a lamppost, his chiselled features took on a gaunt, strained, Jolly-Roger appearance. He’d have looked like death warmed over, except that he was never warm these days. Gone were the golden glory days of basking in the ephemeral afterglow of feeding on live humans. Ah! The bountiful borrowed blood like so much borrowed time burrowing through his body like sand trickling through the gullet of an hourglass. Evidently, the epigram ‘As sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives’ applied to Spike for more than one reason.

"Why do I even bother?" Spike thought, as he looked up at Buffy’s bedroom window, eyes filled with the purest, and most pathetic, vampire angst. He leaned against the lamppost wearily. "I’ll never have what it takes to make her care…" Spike’s dramatic musings trailed off as he glanced at the reddening horizon, which signalled the coming dawn. It was more than time he find shelter. But he didn’t. He just stood there, leaning and smoking. He was still standing there ten minutes later when the timer on the lamppost turned the light off above his head.

Spike thought: "How many vampires does it take to screw…"

And that’s when *it* hit him.

Naw. He didn’t have an epiphany. TPTB’s aren’t into giving ol’ Spikey any freebies. Some green-haired, dweeby, skateboard-riding paperboy, startled by Spike’s odd appearance, lost control of his ‘vehicle’ and crashed in a graceless heap at Spike’s feet. To his credit, or so thought Spike, the jaded adolescent had the presence of mind to be frightened out of it. His mind, that is. Like all the good citizens of Sunnydale, he :: wink wink :: didn’t know anything about the more demonic side of his little morsel of the Hellmouth. Still, he scrambled away from the immortal, immobile… imminent… vamp, grabbed his bag of papers and sprinted off just for good measure. "Remember, Junior, never talk to deathly pale strangers," his parents had told him.

Junior’s genuine fear of him bollixed Spike’s plan for suicide by sun. In short, it made him too happy to want to end his un-dead days. Feeling strangely ebullient for a creature whose body was about to burst into literal effulgence, Spike retrieved Junior’s abandoned skateboard and found pleasure in riding it at full speed all the way back to his crypt; he even jumped a few tombstones for an extra rush. When he reached his home, he gave the just-risen ball of sunshine his trademark two-finger salute, raced inside and closed the door with a laugh looking for all the world like an impish boy childe – or is that like a cat that has eaten a canary? Ack. You know the look I mean. Right? That half-feline, half-sheepish look Booboo gets when he’s being the Small Bad.

Plopping down in his chair, he promptly fell asleep and dreamt of Buffy serving him 98.6-degree blood from a ‘Kiss-the-Librarian’ mug. At some point during the night… er… "you sleep during the day!", he curled into a feline pose and purred softly until the dark sank its fangs into the sun.

***

Early evening:

"What should we name him, Tara?" Willow asked, peering over the edge of their newly acquired turtle tank - complete with turtle.

"How about… La Fontaine," Tara suggested distractedly. She was typing up an essay on the nature of the supernatural in late 19^th Century French fiction on her new PowerBook.

"Neat tie-in, Tar!" Willow exclaimed with a proud Lover-Wiccan smile

"You wanna name ‘em after a long-distance runner?" Buffy said, puzzled.

"Not Prefontaine, Buffy. La Fontaine. The French poet who adapted Aesop’s Fables," Willow answered. Buffy stared at her uncomprehendingly and Willow sighed.

"He was last week’s reading assignment, Buffy. At the rate you’re going, you’ll never get all the reading done for this class. You’d better start on The Hunchback of Notre Dame now or you’ll never be ready for the mid-term test!" Willow explained.

Buffy shrugged off Willow’s advice and fingered a large silver ring that was strung around her neck on a leather lace. As Willow, the scientist, flipped the turtle into its back experimentally, Tara suggested that they call the turtle Aesop. Willow let out a squeal of pleasure and, leaving the turtle on its back, sprang into Tara’s arms and kissed her in that Lover-Wiccan way. Buffy was too preoccupied by the turtle’s struggles to right itself to be embarrassed by her best friend’s PDA. For a reason she couldn’t fathom, Buffy wondered if Spike felt as helpless with his government chip as Aesop did on his back. Quelling her instinctive squeamishness – yeah, able to fell tall vampires in a single bound but afraid of a reptile… is a turtle a reptile? – Buffy gently flipped Aesop back on his feet. Maybe it was her imagination, but when his little turtle head finally popped out again, his eyes seemed appropriately grateful.

Finally picking up on Tara and Willow’s ‘I-wanna-eat-you-for-lunch’ vibes, Buffy tucked the necklace and the ring into her sweater, grabbed her coat and said a quick and awkward goodbye before scampering off.

OK. So Buffy doesn’t usually scamper but for the purposes of this fic just imagine that she does because she’s, like, embarrassed man.

***

Evening:

The first thing Buffy heard when she opened the door was Dawn’s whiney voice. "Great," thought Buffy. "Just what I need after an uneventful, decidedly un-climactic early patrol."

"Mom! Do we have to listen to the old-fogey station?" Dawn called in from the dining room, where she sat doing her homework.

"It is *not* old-fogey. And, ‘yes’, we do. And before you ask why, just because. I’m in the mood and you have to humour me because I’ve been sick. So there," said Joyce, playfully sticking her tongue out at her youngest daughter.

Buffy couldn’t help but smile at her mom’s sassy retort but, as her mother and her sister fell silent once more, she suddenly felt inexplicably weary and, leaving the front door open, sat down on one of the steps in the staircase and listened to the early 80s music coming from the kitchen radio. Buffy breathed deeply as she replayed the day’s events in her mind, especially those of the early morning. Would she have let Spike commit vampicide in front of her house? She’d awoken early and been drawn to her window for some reason. That’s when she’d seen him, standing there under a halo of lamplight. For many long minutes, she had stared at him trying to decide if he was only playing a game of Peek-a-boo Chicken with the sun or whether he intended to fry himself into a fine grey dust. At the very last moment, she’d almost called out to him but, luckily, the paperboy had come along and she had stood, bemused, as she watched him careen down the sidewalk on the stakeboard… er… skateboard. But that hadn’t been the weird part of it all. After Spike had disappeared in the distance, she’d gone to get ready for an early class. As she was fishing around her vanity drawer for a hair clip, she’d found it.

*It* being the ring she was fingered in the previous scene, in case you are wondering.

She got a curious rush as the entwined silver skulls hanging between her breasts, knocked about against her skin. "Aye, Buffy. The Big Bad Boys will be your undoing," she reprimanded herself.

Lurking behind a tree, Spike watched the Slayer… Buffy… slouched on the stairs. "God. How can someone that young be that tired," he thought. He then frowned as he watched her dig out a leather lace from her shirt. From his vantage point, he couldn’t make out what was hanging from the lace. It looked like a ring of some kind.

Buffy and Spike both listened as a song by the J. Geils Band played in the Summers’ kitchen:

*** You love her, but she loves him
And he loves somebody else
You just can't win
And so it goes till the day you die
This thing they call love is gonna make you cry
I've had the blues, the reds, and the pinks
One thing's for sure
Love stinks ***

"Ain’t that the truth!" Spike snorted under his breath. "Life’s a bitch and then you die," Spike muttered. Oh yeah. Life was a bitch, all right. But, as we all know since we’ve all seen Lovers’ Walk, Spike is the quintessential Life’s Love’s Bitch himself. God only knows (and the audience, Supreme Godhead extraordinaire, of course) how his Bloody-Awful-Poet’s soul, oops, philosophical ghost(!) had turned both his life and his un-life into an example of "Love’s Labour’s Lost’.

"If you’re lucky, you get to shag a few in between…" he continued bitterly, working himself into a snit. "If you’re not so lucky, you have to wait for the latter to happen and then you’re still screwed – but unfortunately not literally, because you either fall for some crazy chick who has you roaming the world in search of the bloodiest entertainment available or you find yourself pining away for the one bitch that could make you Hoover food."

Of course, you guessed it folks, Buffy heard that last li’l bit. Yes sir. She did. And out comes Hissy Huffy Buffy, hands on hips.

"Spike! What the hell are you doing here? Go home before I’m forced to drive an emery board through your wormy little heart."

Spike didn’t answer. He was too busy staring at her breasts.

"Pig!" Buffy thought.

Er… Sorry. He’s not looking at your breasts, luv. He’s looking at the ring hanging *between* your breasts. There you go. Now that you’ve looked down at your chest to see what all he’s looking at, you don’t have much to say so you just sort of stand there looking exceedingly un-blithe.

Spike’s still not saying anything and it’s making you *real* nervous. You fidget until he reaches out for the ring and holds it up and examines it analytically, pensively. Then he drops it casually and the heavy metal hits your breastbone with a thud but you don’t feel a thing, don’t hear a thing because your heart is knocking so hard your blood is rushing in your veins and your heartbeat is beating an entrancing rhythm in your ears. Suddenly, you’re convinced you are falling under the spell again because all you can think of is Spike’s head nestling between your breasts, not his ring.

That’s it. Shake your head, Buffy. Wash that man right out of that shampoo-commercial hair.

Nope. No good. You still want him to grab you and kiss you. You still want him to look at you as if he wants to eat you alive. Worse yet. You want to eat *him* alive.

Completely at a loss, Spike finally says: "That’s mine."

You aren’t sure which tone to strike so you opt for your usual snarky you’re-beneath-me one: "You gave it away, Spike. Now it’s mine."

"’t’s’fine with me, luv. I just didn’t know you were into the gothic stuff is all," he says, feigning indifference.

Yes, Spike. She’s wearing your ring. It doesn’t mean squat – well not in the way you think - but you go ahead and build your mansions in the dungeon… :: author rolls eyes ::

"You have no idea what I’m ‘into’, Spike," says Buffy.

There she goes, Spike, your very own White Goddess stomping away and slamming the door behind her. But you are a persistent little stalker dead boy and you have all the time in the world to try and get a chance to pray at her temple. Unless she just stakes you. Ack. Channelling Harmony there.

***

The next day:

"Whatcha got there, Buffy?" Dawn said as her sister walked in the door with a turtle tank – complete with turtle.

"Went to the pet shop to get me a Pet Shop Boy," Buffy answered with uncharacteristic friendliness.

"Ohhhhh. He’s so cute! What’s his name?" Dawn asked, as she stroked the wee turtle’s head.

"Spike," Buffy answered with a Cheshire grin :)

The End