You Always Looked So Human

By Mys

Xander smiled at Spike before he leaned down to kiss the ragged scar on the blond's eyebrow. Their late-night activities had left them both exhausted and Spike had fallen asleep shortly after. Xander had stayed awake to bath in the afterglow and enjoy the fact that he could do that.

Leave the blond breath- and boneless, that is.

Ok, the first wasn't exactly a challenge since vampires don't *need* to breathe but Xander remembered smugly that he could also make Spike pant.

*Ha! Go and try that!*

Despite whatever Xander might say to Spike and whatever rules he might have established, he loved it when Spike woke him up in the middle of the night. He was amazed that Spike wanted him that much and even more amazed that he found himself wanting Spike just as much.

Anya had been demanding and her constant need for sex had become tiring after a while.

OK, big, fat lie there. Xander was 20 and a guy, of course he *hadn't* minded having sex with Anya all the time but with Spike it was just different somehow.

With Anya it had felt like she needed to remind him all the time that they were together and that their interlocking parts were supposed to interlock with each other only ...

Yeah, he was probably being unfair cause Spike could be pretty possessive of Xander himself and he couldn't exactly say that he minded *that*.
But with Spike he could finally be the one who was held and taken care of.

Without being reminded of it, though. Spike didn't ask questions he knew Xander couldn't answer. Neither did he push the brunette to tell him things which weren't for him to know.

At least not until Xander felt the need to talk about them. And somewhere deep within, he knew, when he was finally ready to talk, Spike would be there to listen.

Xander chuckled silently so not to wake the vampire with the exceptional hearing, as he heard the soft snoring coming from Spike and as he lay his head lightly on top of Spike's exposed chest he could feel a soft rising and he had to chuckle again.

Spike was definitely one weird vampire.

The best proof was all the human food he loved so much. Xander found himself buying Weetabix and other crunchy stuff all the time. Although he couldn't be persuaded to eat it anymore. He didn't mind eating breakfast himself while Spike was consuming his blood but the last time he had wanted to eat cereal with milk, he had watched the white liquid dropping from the spoon and in his head it had turned red and slightly sticky, so he had decided that today would be a good day for scrambled eggs. And every other day as well.

Xander shrugged and turned from his side onto his belly. If Spike liked his blood this way he would put up with never eating cereal again without problem.

He picked up a blond hair from the pillow and let it fall to the ground, not without smiling as he saw the dark part of it. He kinda liked the look on Spike but the not-so-blond-anymore had found it made him look too much like an 18th-century poof.

Spike had things he wasn't ready to explain to Xander, too, and Xander had frowned, raised both eyebrows (since he still hadn't learnt how to move them separately, damn it!) and finally agreed to bleach Spike's hair.

Ok, the threat of 'no more sex till they're blond again' might have helped a bit. But then again, he knew a thing or two about such threats and how they went along with horny vampires. Especially his horny vampire. But none the less he had done as Spike had asked.

Funny thing that Spike's hair still grew. Xander still waited for the day Spike would decide to let grow a moustache and he would have to use bodily harm and sexual favours to get him to shave.

Maybe he wouldn't have to offer both since bodily harm kinda already counted as foreplay in vampire-terms. Creepy.

But Spike wasn't like that.

Oh, he got off on pain and blood all right but not on rape. And that made him different from other vampires, too. Not that Xander had first-hand experience with vampires (other than the obvious, of course) but you would be stunned what those watchers felt the need to write into their diaries.
Yeah, Giles had forbidden them to read those books but once things had gotten serious between Spike and Xander, the brunette had felt the need to make up for the hundred and twenty years he *hadn't* had with the blond.

As Spike had started to talk about his past himself, Xander got, that the watchers didn't really have a clue of all the stuff they were so freely writing about and that he would only get to know the truth if Spike would want him to know so he stopped sneaking past Giles to read things he wasn't supposed to and just waited for Spike to tell him.

Some of the stories had scared him, some of them had made him smile and some of them had made him wipe his eyes covertly every now and again so to not let Spike know that he was crying for a person Angelus never quite managed to break but constantly kept trying to. A person Spike no longer was but none the less it made Xander's fury for Angel heat up even more and when they went to bed afterwards, wrapped around each other, stroking hands whispering touches up and down each other backs, Xander was never quite sure who was comforting who.

Xander laid his right arm around the blond's narrow waist, nestled his face into the crook of Spike's neck and smiled as strong arms automatically wrapped themselves around him.

When the room was dark like that and the only light coming through the slightly open door fell on Spike's face he looked almost human. Xander smiled as he thought about it but he smiled even more as he found he didn't care.

Found that he didn't need Spike to have a beating heart as long as he had a loving one.

~Fin~