Spike’s feet hit the ground and he immediately wondered if it was too soon to climb back up to her window.

“Crap,” he muttered. He turned around under her window, and looked up, planning the assault.

“Hm. I’m a git, here’s the deal. I was…Argh. Bloody hell”’

A vivid mental image of his former self, curls and all, appeared in his fevered brain, and he winced, wondering if there was some way that could possibly be tweaked to be, well, something less git-like. He took a breath, assessing the tree he’d climbed so much earlier in the evening and had just descended, wondering how he was going to handle this.

“Spike?”

“Gah!”

He jerked around at the sight of a disembodied head floating at the corner of the house, but it was just Dawn, eyeing him curiously. At four AM. What the hell? He glared at her severely, but she was unimpressed.

“What are you doing here?” He snapped at her.

“What are you doing here?” She repeated pointedly. “Looking at Buffy’s window?”

Perfect excuse, even though he didn’t like to lie to the kid. Just some things she wasn’t ready for.

“And your point would be?”

He lit a cigarette, and tiptoed toward the back porch, trying not to look like he was tiptoeing.

“Well, I thought maybe you were here to talk about my route, you know….”

She shrugged in a very self-effacing way that was so Buffy and Joyce-like that he stared, simultaneously touched and freaked at the same time. He regrouped and plunged in.

“What route would that be?”

He sat next to her on the deck, patting the wood next to him, and exhaling a smoke ring. Dawn cocked her head and grimaced at him, or perhaps the smoke, but she sat. They stared into the Summers back yard for several minutes, Dawn sleepily, and Spike with a certain degree of panic. There was a five second rule for retrieving fallen cookies from the floor, and there was a totally arbitrary time limit for retrieving one’s ass from one’s girlfriend after it had been pitched into the fire. He was afraid he was getting close to his expiration date. He also had the distinct impression that Dawn had something on the tip of her tongue, and was reluctant to spit it out. Family trait, that.

“All right, kid, what is it?”

“Buffy didn’t ask you?”

“She might have mentioned it, but you know how fast she talks. Why don’t you fill me in?”

“Well.”

Dawn took a deep breath and clasped her hands between her knees. He saw for the first time she was wearing her jammies, which had little white sheep and moon and stars printed all over the tops and bottoms. She was also wearing little cow slippers; it was these that caught his eye, because they so perfectly embodied all her contradictions.

Catching his glance, she grinned in a nose-wrinkling way he could’ve sworn he hadn’t seen since the spring, and stomped one foot down, hard, on the deck. The slipper mooed. He blinked. Dawn did it again, and he shook his head, rather disturbed. The second demonstration sounded as if the cow was in pain..or heat. Either way, definitely a fine end to a very odd day.

“Well, I like them.” Dawn said rather sullenly.

Aha. Now he knew what he was dealing with: 100% sulking American teenager, a creature much easier to deal with the half sulky/ half sweet Dawn who kept changing her moods as fast as….well, her sister.

He exhaled more smoke, and Dawn winced. She waved her hand in front of her face, and he was amused to see it; his smoking had never before bothered her, so he wondered exactly where she’d gotten that habit. Someone new she was hanging about with, maybe? He made a mental note to explore that area later.

“So?” He prodded.

“Well, I want to get a paper route.” She blurted out.

He sighed, knowing where this was going. Good lord, Buffy was working in that awful place, now Dawn wanted a paper route. He knew perfectly well why she wanted one, but it had to be asked.

“Why?”

“Because…”

Dawn sighed an exact copy of his sigh, and he bit back a smile at that. It was obviously a delaying sigh, exactly as his had been, and he could see her weighing her options in her head. Explanation, or just spit it out?
She spit it out.

“We need the money.”

“Buffy told you this?”

“Oh, no,” she said disgustedly, irritated at not being kept informed. It had clearly never occurred to her that Buffy wanted to spare her any adult worries. “But I hear stuff, so I know.”

“What about your Dad?”

Dawn waved a hand dismissively.

“He’s off boinking his secretary and pretending he doesn’t have us.”

Spike flinched at her careless dismissal of her father, then wondered at the practiced way she’d said it. Then he wondered at the man who could ignore his girls in favor of some….
Dawn interrupted his thoughts.

“So I know I eat a lot, and there’s bills and stuff…”

And that way, if I pay some of the bills, people will have to pay attention to me. If I help pay, then I get to decide stuff, too.
I want cable.

“You don’t eat a lot.”

“Well, we don’t have a lot of stuff anyway.”

Spike looked at her, puzzled, and she tossed her head, then jumped to her feet, and led him into the kitchen.
She wasn’t exaggerating; there were lots of things like crackers and pasta in the cupboards, but there was nevertheless lots of bare space there. The fridge was even worse; only one shelf was half full, and there were only a few things scattered on the rest. Dawn caught his eye and shrugged.

“Mostly, that’s Willow’s.”

“Meaning, hers alone?”

“No. Another shrug. “She says we can eat it, but she never has anything we like.”

Hm. Hm indeed. He sat down at the table, and ran his hands through his hair.

“Does Willow pay rent?”

“I don’t think so.” Dawn said doubtfully. She hopped up on the counter, and poured herself a glass of water. “So what do you think?”

“How, exactly, do you have a paper route with a broken wrist?”

“That’s where you come in.”

Spike closed his eyes, suddenly picturing himself sullenly hawking papers on street corners while wearing a newsboy cap or something. So much for the Big Bad.

“So…” he said dryly. “I do the actual paper delivering, and you get the money?”

“No!” Dawn giggled, as if affronting his vampire dignity was amusing. “No, no, you just drive me there and drive me down the street while I toss the papers.”

“Can you even throw papers like that?”

“They said I’d have to wait till my arm was better. But I got up early today so I could see what it’s like.’

“Well. Did you?”

“Did I what? See….how it was getting up early?” She shrugged. “I pretty much already know what that’s like. I really haven’t slept later since Mom died.”

He paused for a moment, thinking of Joyce.

“Did you think of any reasons why this might not be such a good idea?”

“Vampires?”

“Well, yeah…”

“And what else?”

“Demons?”

“And uh, other things…Is that why there aren’t any paper boys in Sunnydale?”

“Could be. What made you want this particular job?”

“I don’t want Buffy’s kind of job. You just do this and it’s over for the day.”

“It’s a daily?”

“Huh? Oh, yeah.”

Dawn looked in his eyes, and saw him wavering, why, she didn’t know. She knew he’d help her, he always helped her….

“There’s got to be a better way, Niblet.” He said slowly. “There just has to be. Is it really that bad?”

“It’s not good,” Dawn countered. “Buffy has a whole drawer full of those bills. And she’s tired all the time.”

“She didn’t seem too bad…” Spike stopped himself abruptly. Oh, no, she hadn’t seemed too bad, but had he actually seen her working?

“She’s working a lot.” Dawn’s tone seemed an equal mix of resentment and worry.

“Too much?”

He hadn’t been paying any attention to much else outside of her that night, and to be honest, there hadn’t been a lot there; just her, and the store. What had he missed?

“Much too much.” Dawn clarified. “She’s never home.” She looked at him suddenly. “What, did you see her?”

“Huh?” Spike blinked at her, caught. “Yes. Ah, yes, I did.”

“So? Wasn’t she tired?”

Spike considered his options very carefully.

“You know, I wasn’t paying attention to that.”

“You were probably just, you know, paying attention to her…”

“Hey!”

“Oh, come on, Spike, I totally know how you feel about her…”

“Subject is closed, Niblet.”

“So, are you going to do it?”

“I have to think about it.” Spike said. “And there’s something I have to do first.”

Spike drove slowly by the Doublemeat Palace, and tried to ignore Buffy so he could assess the place. Crap. He’d gone by it the other night in order to avoid the customers, and he’d been successful, but he hadn’t gotten a real feel for the place. He’d been too consumed with her, being alone with her, after the missed meetings, the charade before her friends. He thought of his Slayer, who defeated demons with a quip and a well-placed weapon, and wondered how to amend the situation.

He watched the customers flock to the counter, yelling out their orders, yelling at Buffy, the stink of the place overwhelming him from across the street. The uniforms were garish, the hats designed to cause the maximum amount of humiliation in the wearer. And what on earth did places like that pay? Five bucks an hour? Six? Even after eight long hours, it was only forty bucks. How could he have missed it?

Her, of course. It was that simple. How was he supposed to concentrate on anything else? He’d crept closer, watching her through the window, thinking about that first moment, the kiss that started it all, her lips slamming against his, the struggle across the floor, the building shaking around them. The desperate search for some anchor in a world that shivered around them, and finding out the only anchor was one another. He swallowed now as he remembered it. That kiss…..oh, and then everything after……

He shook himself. That wouldn’t do at all. He couldn’t concentrate like this.

What on earth could Buffy do, though?

He watched her standing disconsolately at the counter, and knew there was something he could do. Had to be, and it had to be beyond this horrible place. She wasn’t supposed to be waiting on these ghastly, ungrateful people----it was bad enough she had to save their ungrateful asses over and over again, she had to serve them stupid food. She’d been resigned to it the other night, having waitressed before, but this wasn’t waitressing; there were no tips here. He watched her, and he found himself getting tired.

She did the same thing over and over again; wiping, cleaning, running, fetching, smiling at idiots who chewed with their mouths open. He watched people stand in line for ten minutes, get to the front, and then make up what passed for their minds. There was a guy who ordered a huge pile of food, then whipped out a checkbook, and when told, evidently, that the restaurant didn’t take checks, he drew himself up to enormous heights, bellowing, and then spitefully knocked a cup of soda onto the counter. Some of the liquid splashed across Buffy’s uniform. The customers snickered, and he vamped out so abruptly that his chip blazed a warning across his skull. He clutched his head, waiting for it to end, and wondered why it was even necessary to have a Vampire Slayer. Obviously what was really needed was the Slayer of Rude Bastards.

He watched in horror as a swaggering git dressed in head-to-toe logo wear sauntered up to the counter, and preened while he ordered. Spike, even without the vamp vision, could see that nothing the twit was wearing had his own initials on it, and amended his earlier proposal to Slayer of Rude Bastards Who Dress Badly.

Good God, more people were lining up. The place was an ant farm, the line snaking around velvet ropes, the drive through bumper to bumper. What did they put in those burgers? Drugs? Buffy smiled, took orders, cleaned, smiled, took orders, wiped counters, watched as careless gits carelessly spilled stuff, and just as carelessly shrugged it off.

Spike watched and thought of Dawn, trying to get a paper route with a broken arm that someone caused. Who, he suddenly wondered, was paying for those medical bills? He’d lay money it wasn’t Willow.

All Buffy needed, he thought, was some respite. That was all. Not to be bailed out, just enough so that she could take a breather, rest, not deal with anything. She needed long dreamless nights without nightmares about bills, time to recharge her batteries. Couldn’t they see that?

He wasn’t even sure who they were. He just knew if he waited around for some of her friends to do something, he’d die of old age. One last try, he thought. Maybe if he just talked to her…..

But she was so bloody proud. Had to do it herself. It was one of the things he liked about her, not loved, but liked, the way she was so ferocious about doing it herself, coping. The problem is, she had been so good at it for so long, that when she had too much to do and cope with, she didn’t know it was acceptable to get help.

He’d help, he thought. He had to. He was prescient enough to realize there was a certain selfishness there; he just couldn’t bear to see her like this.

He shook his head at his own foolishness; picturing nothing more than the two of them as they had been in her bed before the nightmare, wrapped around each other, all warm from the bath, just sleeping, an act that somehow seemed almost more intimate than the sex. At least it would till both of them were making love and not just him.

He sighed and waited for the rush to end.

It was the smell that defeated her, the smell on top of the cheerful visit from her friends. How on earth could they visit like that, be perky, when she felt as bad as she’d ever felt? Weren’t they supposed to see that? Wasn’t that sort of the definition of friendship? Were they even looking at her?

It was hard to say what was worse about the place; the comatose coworkers, the hours, or the smirking customers. She watched with clenched fists as one older gent, obviously drunk, yelled at one of the youngest workers, a boy no more than sixteen who looked twelve, because the kid hadn’t put enough ice in his drink. What she could do to a guy like that… And the manager didn’t do a damned thing about it.

Keep going, she thought. Just keep going. Overtime. Overtime is good. Rent would be better. She shoved that thought out of her head. My friends. Save the world a few times and people seem to think they can just wait around for me to come galloping in and clean up after them. She avoided the clock, which had become her enemy. She wiped the counter, swept the floor, mopped the floor, filled drinks, knowing that if she looked up, no more than seconds would have passed, and hours still remained. Keep going, Buffy, she told herself. Keep going. Paycheck.

But the mindless tasks left her with only two alternatives: think or don’t think. She didn’t want to think about this place, the very place she stood in now, because it seemed that this must be hell. The uniform was horribly cheerful, the hats were worse, and the smell…oh, the smell…..If a demon had suddenly attacked her, she wouldn’t have had the heart to fight back.

“Buffy! Empty that trashcan!”

She didn’t even protest, because it meant looking at the Fire Escape of Lust, but it also

meant fresh air. Freedom. She yanked the bag out of the can, and slammed through the back door, stomped to the dumpster, and realized her feet were practically numb. Accelerated healing powers, my ass, she thought. She sat down on the last run of the fire escape, wincing at the sensations suddenly flooding through her abused feet, and the memories coursing through her head.

Crazy. Bad. Disgusting.

She was so tired, she didn’t have any defenses left. Crazy? Oh, sure, her best friend was marrying a thousand-year old demon who, if you didn’t stuff a sock in her mouthright away, would just natter on about either capitalism or the good old days when she’d wreaked vengeance on the male half of the population. Her other best friend had managed to get so drugged on magic that as a result her little sister now had a broken arm. Her ex was living in LA. But her? She’d come back wrong. It was like a ghost, hovering around her, that thought, and the thought of Spike’s last visit. The noises he made, the way he gasped against her mouth…Oh, it wasn’t fair. She was a Slayer, she lived in a world with demons and monsters, and she had a vampire, for a boyfriend, why couldn’t she find a normal guy?

What’s normal around here? A rebellious voice in her brain piped up. Vampires are normal around here. Get over it.

Bad, disgusting? It sure didn’t feel that way. Spike was the only one who’d seen her naked, body and soul, and her friends, who should have known her better, mistook her excuses for her. But he didn’t. She blinked rapidly. “Come with me, Buffy. This place will kill you.” Oh, God, had she wanted to. But where to? How? He’d said he’d get money for her, and that was something her friend would surely notice. They wouldn’t notice her depression, the hours she called ‘patrolling’ when in fact she was with Spike, they wouldn’t notice Spike patrolling with them for months, trying to save Dawn, they wouldn’t notice that she needed money that they had, and they wouldn’t notice how tired she was. But they’d certainly notice some how if he gave her money enough to stave off the worst of the money hemorrhaging. And they would disapprove. They would make her feel bad, but they wouldn’t, of course, help.

She sighed. They needed me to slay, she thought bleakly, but I need them. I can’t lose anyone else. She got up and went wearily inside.

The skies darkened, and the evening rush came. To her, they might as well have been demons, these people; they seemed to be so distorted, these people, all hurried, barking orders, glaring at her for her fumbles, all loud voices, too many of them, none of them looking her in the eye. She ran back and forth, filling orders, dropping things, dropping fires, never doing anything right, apologizing, explaining with a self-depreciating giggle that ‘It’s my first day,’ only to be greeted with a shrug. She kept offering the statement as an explanation, receiving over and over again the same response: a disinterested eye roll, a ‘whatever’ or, worst of all, no response at all. Nothing.

Then she looked up, and there was no one waiting at the counter, and the tables were slowly being abandoned in the restaurant. She sighed at the chaos in the dining air, but there was a breeze coming from the drive through. She turned toward it, not yet ready to face the cleaning up, when she saw something through the window and froze.

Spike.

He stared at her though the window, swallowing, a muscle in his jaw flexing as he looked at her, as if he could make her come with him by the sheer power of his stare. Behind her, there was cleaning to be done, over and over again, more food to be cooked, because her uniform wasn’t yet totally permeated with the grease smell yet….

She brushed past her coworkers, banged through the back door, and stopped. He gave her an exasperated sigh that so reminded her of her mother that she could have broken down right there. Somebody else who cared enough about her to yell.

She couldn’t go, she absolutely couldn’t go, but she couldn’t stay, she couldn’t do the same thing endlessly over and over again, like that horrifying day of the repitition spell at the Magic Box, except here it was real. She realized, with something like horror, that she was going to cry, if she didn’t do something about it, and he knew it, too. He reached out, as if he were afraid of being burned, and touched her hair. “Come on, Buffy. Leave.” He whispered. It broke his heart to see her so exhausted, so defeated. Not his Slayer. She grabbed him by both lapels, and though he had some speeches all worked up in his head about how he only wanted all of her, they appeared to have been tossed out the window. She buried his face in his shoulder, and he realized she was shaking with exhaustion, too proud to admit it, too stubborn to quit something once she’d started it, and too naïve to realize that the job was Sisyphean. I only want all of you, he thought, as if it would convince himself. At least it was’t a New Year’s resolution.

“Come on, Buff.” He whispered again.

“No. I can’t. You know I can’t.”

He was the only one who knew, the only part of this horrible day that wasn’t nightmarish. She buried her face in his chest, tightening her arms around his body till it almost hurt, wanting to crawl inside him, just wanting him.

The wall was against her back, and he was wrapped around her, the only refuge she had. He knew what was going to happen, knew he couldn’t stop himself, wondered if he ever would. She needed him, he thought, and that was enough for now. He lifted her head off his shoulder with a gentle palm, but his other hand found her breast, the irresistible soft curse of its underside, and molded it into his other palm. He slid against her, hands sliding down her body, down her thighs, lifting her off the ground just enough, rubbing against her, while she clutched him like a drowning woman. She was the one who got his fly open, but she lacked her usual coordination, and he had to lower her the few inches to the ground to lower his pants. He noticed she winced when her feet hit the ground. He dealt with her clothes as if she were a child, she was practically limp against him, always looking desperately into his face.

She was wearing the tacky skirt that came with the uniform, a coarse polyester that didn’t go at all with the Victoria’s Secret panties he pushed aside. They were so close in height he only had to lift her a few inches against the wall, and then pushed into her. He rocked against her, trying to reach her, but she clutched him with her hands, pressed her forehead against his, and tried to pull strength from him. It always worked, he always did this to her, awakening her nerve endings, charging her cells with pleasure.

Except it didn’t work, not the way she intended. She saw the dumpster over his shoulder, and reality descended on her. He was right. It was killing her. She remembered the first time, the shock on his face as she guided him inside her, the shock to her senses as he slid all the way home, hitting nerves she didn’t know she had. The biggest shock had been his eyes, the same eyes looking all the way inside her now. He was watching her, worrying about her, when, she thought, I should be worrying about him. He slid one hand between them, finding her clitoris, and she realized with a shock that some things didn’t change. It was short, and sharp, this orgasm, her muscles clenching around him, and she found she wanted him to come more than she wanted herself to. He braced his hands against the wall, and went faster, freezing against her, with his face pressed against the wall.

She didn’t want to move, but that would mean being discovered. Why did she suddenly care? she thought. She never cared before.

Spike sighed finally, and pulled away from her, looking at her sadly. The thought hit him again: Money. Lots of money. He had to get lots and lots of money. Maybe it really was unfair of him to demand her love when he was a distraction from her responsibilities. Money. Where could he get money?

He leaned against her, kissing her with a calmness that he’d never felt any of the other times they’d had sex. It was almost pleasant, being so calm, so resolved. He knew what he had to do, and who he had to do it for, and to.

Who had money?

Angel.

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