Disclaimer: Effulgent Spike (and Buffy, and Dawn, and everybody) belongs to Mutant Enemy and Joss Whedon, to whom be all praise. I promise to return him in chains and only slightly damaged. No infringement nor profit intended, only more SpikeJoy for everyone.

ONE

He was there but his eyes had gone away, and only Dawn noticed because she was the only one watching. And Dawn didn’t say anything because she was still officially angry, furiousfuckingmad, at him even though Buffy apparently had decided trying to rape her wasn’t such a big deal after all and had collected him like a bloody carved souvenir of the Hellmouth as soon as the Uber-vamp was garroted and dusted, three nights ago.

Dawn had heard them come in, past midnight. Nothing was right on its hinges anymore: everything had to be pushed. Preferably slammed, to be sure the latch caught. Hearing the scrape of the front door opening, then shutting, she’d clambered over five sleeping Potentials, slid silently to the head of the stairs, and peered down, thinking what would be most hateful to say if Buffy had the unmitigated gall to try to bring him upstairs where actual people lived. Close enough to hear whatever they said, if they said anything. But they didn’t. And Buffy didn’t try to bring him upstairs, so that was wasted, too.

She was just about dragging him. He looked awful, which served him absolutely right. Hanging, leaned crookedly against her, inert and ungainly as a rolled-up carpet, bare feet mostly dragging. Dawn wondered why Buffy didn’t just carry him, Slayer strength and all (how Spike would hate that), and Buffy should just pick him up and pitch him as hard and as far as she could instead of supporting in half-steps, awkward pivots and shrugging adjustments, the pretence he was doing anything like walking on his own.

Except for the silence, the stillness, they looked like a pair of drunks seeing each other home.

Before Dawn had thought of a hateful downstairs thing to say, they’d passed below, out of sight. The basement door creaked.

Nothing happened after that, so eventually Dawn stepped high over the Potentials sleeping on the floor and edged back into bed, nudging Rona and Cho Anh away from her allotted eight inches, sullenly collecting her share of the covers and jerking them as far as she could over her shoulder.

The next morning, foamy toothbrush alternately in hand and in mouth, Amanda excitedly reported that there was a vampire in the basement! The Slayer had said so. The basement was now officially off limits 24/7 to all but authorized personnel, namely her Slayer self, but no one should worry because the Slayer said he wasn’t that kind of vampire. What other kind was there? Amanda wanted to know, looking for a place to spit. Dawn did a big yawn and dragged the pillow over her head. It wasn’t as if it was a school day, after all. And she was certain he’d lied about the soul.

Later bouncing down the stairs, Dawn found Buffy in chore-face with a bucket, a brush, and a rag, trying to soak marks out of the hall runner. Dawn told her they’d never come out: they’d set overnight. Buffy rubbed a wrist across her forehead and said, “Thank you, Bob Vila,” as Dawn went by. Dawn didn’t deign to reply, partly because she wasn’t sure who Bob Vila was. Trading Spaces, maybe, but she’d never seen anybody trying to get blood out of a rug on that show, so maybe not.

The SITs who’d seen Spike before were nervous. Amanda and the others who hadn’t were alternately curious and terrified. Big honkin’ deal, Dawn thought, discovering plastic jugs of pigs’ blood behind the orange juice. Again. She must have missed the morning delivery. She imagined a white truck, big Red Cross on the side, arriving with a jingling bell: four of the usual, giant gallon economy size, for Revello Drive.

A discovery greeted with even more unanimous yuk was wads and mounds of bloody gauze in the kitchen trash. Dawn made the world safe for digestion by carrying the tied bag at arm’s length to the can in the back yard.

Sunday, more nothing, except more yucky congealed gauze before breakfast. Lots of it. Half a trashbag full. Before completing her stiff-armed ritual of disposal, Dawn swiped a piece in case she could talk Willow into doing some blood magic. Willow kept away from the bad stuff now, the things Dawn knew enough to know were powerful, but you never could tell: Willow had been known to slip. At least dis-invite him. The whole house was charmed within an inch of its life, charms thicker than the paint, layers and layers of barrier spells that would need renewing because insane-o Buffy had brought the unwanted, unholy stray through all the protections. Maybe Willow could just eliminate the flaw, the exception, make the spells seamless. Or at last resort, the gauze would be handy for a locator spell if he got snatched again. So much blood….

Monday there was school, although only she and Amanda had to go, being local, and afterward it was Xander’s turn to make supper, which meant stacked pizza boxes in the living room, everybody trying to do the most disgusting thing with the rubbery, stringy cheese and it didn’t matter, the whole house was trashed anyway. Then Buffy delegated Xander to count heads, then take them on practice patrol, just the old graveyards where nobody had been buried in the last century, where they were unlikely to run into anything interesting but maybe could polish their stalking skills and learn more about the Greek phalanx formation that Dawn thought of as “synchronized staking.” Since none of that had anything to do with Dawn anymore, it wasn’t hard to slide into the hall closet in the confusion of leaving. Wasn’t as if anybody was actually looking for her.

Dawn stayed behind the half-ajar closet door until she heard what she’d expected: the creak of the cellar door.

The murmur of Buffy’s voice: “Careful. The table.”

His voice, even quieter, hardly even breath, “’S’not gonna attack me, pet. It leaves me alone, I leave it-- Bloody hell. No. All right. Never…never mind. Down now, all right, will you leave me bloody be?”

He must be feeling better: he was swearing. And bonus points for alliteration. It took energy to be irritated or even pretend to be. Took even more energy to be furiousfuckingmad, but that was a small price to pay for something so important.

She leaned out of the closet half an eye’s worth, holding the door’s edge steady with careful fingertips.

Buffy, still in chore-face, fetchingly attired in frayed jeans and a wrinkled blue-check shirt like a Dolly-Parton castoff, was straightening from the crooked couch. Spike sat stiffly, head tipped back and eyes shut, waiting for something internal to change, ease. Then he slowly folded forward until his arms rested on his knees, head bent and back bowed, stiff and careful. Left hand swathed in bandages up past the wrist. Right hand unbandaged but red, raw looking, like the Sunnydale sunburn champion. The inevitable black T-shirt over what Dawn recognized as a pair of Xander’s grey sweatpants at least two sizes too large, shapeless and baggy on him as elephant’s legs. No pockets, but he made the absent gesture anyway, reaching wrong-handed across himself: searching for his cigarettes. Then he let the hand fall. Shook his head slightly to something Buffy said, Dawn couldn’t make it out. Certainly not an offer of a cigarette, not in the house, not in the fucking living room. Mom had strict rules about that. And the ratty couch might be perched on a chunk of wood in one corner and the front window boarded up and the hall runner marked with four bloody footprints, but Mom’s rules still held. It was still home.

“No, pet,” he said, “you go ahead and tell me what-all I’ve been missing around here. Got to get myself caught up again, don’t I, if I’m to be of any use. Fit enough to listen.” He made the effort of lifting his head. Both eyes still swollen and a purple bruise fading diagonally across his forehead and down one cheek, half his face, but eyes clear and steady sapphire.

Rather than make him look up any higher, Buffy upended a wallpaper paste bucket to sit on and launched into one of The Briefings, that everybody generally had to sit through on Fridays after supper, only Spike had missed six of them now (not that Dawn had bothered to count), so he got the personalized one-time-only special extended edition of Buffy interrupting herself, stopping in mid-sentence to add something she’d skipped over or forgotten, or had happened someplace else and so didn’t fit a Buffy-centric narrative with everybody else as afterthoughts, footnotes, and spear-carriers. Dawn had told her she had a bright future as a motivational speaker at the Helen Keller Institute, but then Kennedy had laughed and Dawn had to remember not to belt her because Kennedy could actually hit, which was more than most of the SITs could do, and that had sort of taken the general joy out of it all. Teasing her chore-faced, barely-combed older sister was hardly ever any fun anymore.

But you had to give the demon his due: he was real good at listening. Buffy was sitting on the bucket at an angle, mostly addressing herself to the corner with the broken molding, occasionally making spread-handed up and down gestures like abortive pokes at a volleyball. And Spike with that preternatural stillness he could put on when he chose, or something like it--not just listening, not just looking, but watching: the way he watched TV, some godawful soap or The Iron Chef or Man U, like the fate of the world depended on his not missing a twitch or a line of lame dialogue or another spastic hand lift and fall. One thing Spike had, was focus.

Sometimes, having nothing better to do since it was now quite clear she was the Un-Chosen One, Dawn had tried to practice the focus she’d learned from him watching summer, last year, when things had gone from unspeakably awful to unspeakably joyous to unspeakably awful again and she’d hated herself for not realizing, not being in any way braced, not in the least expecting that the one thing she’d come to rely upon could vanish and be gone as instantaneously as though he’d been dusted, which he should have been. She’d known after Xander had told her and she’d then dragged grudging, constipated confirmation out of Buffy.

At first Dawn had persuaded herself it must be the fault of the Awful Dream, and Spike shouldn’t be blamed for coming a bit unglued, doing something off. But to have just vanished without even having told her why, or goodbye, or anything, that was past forgiving.

She’d stayed in her room for four entire days (not counting meals), being distraught, staring at things and not seeing them at all, unable to take a whole breath, as if she’d been punched right where the breath was and couldn’t get it back.

He breathed, when he thought about it. Or, weirdly, when he forgot about it, humming under his breath sometimes when the clever hands were busy with something, breath enough for humming. And he snored. Never would admit to it but he did, she’d heard him. Watched him do it. Specially when he was completely plastered, legless, AWOL nobody-home drunk. No breath, no motion for five minutes at a time by her watch, and then maybe one noisy intake of breath and settle his shoulder a different way and inert again, not even faking living chest action.

Now, since she wasn’t a Potential but only the Slayer’s kid sister and therefore not worth anybody’s notice except, disconcertingly, icky Andrew’s and sometimes Xander’s, lounging lanky at the back of the room while Buffy had another attack of speechifying or Rona had a story, chewing on a hangnail, Dawn sometimes tried to focus on the whole room and everybody in it and all the motions and everything said, absorb it all in one grand gestalt, grok the fucking totality and therefore all of the meanings interlaced and poised just so. And sometimes she almost thought she could. For a second, all the motions would balance into a sort of equation, clear focus she could feel but not quite make full sense of.

As she now realized Buffy’s jerky gestures were how hard she was trying not to actually set her hand on Spike’s knee.

And Spike realized it at just the same instant because he slid his bandaged left hand into the reserved vertical gesturing space, and Buffy jerked and sorried and asked if she’d hurt him, and he didn’t say anything but set his right hand on top, hand sandwich, and Buffy looked down on it and lost the thread of The Briefing and apologized for that, coming unstrung wire by wire. Slowly, like balancing a cup, he surrendered her hand to the pedestal of her own knee and then took his hands away, not smirking or even smiling, not even his eyes, withdrawing and letting the interruption go and still attending the same way for as long as it took Buffy to find her thread and go on again.

Dawn hadn’t been listening to The Briefing because it had been tedious and depressing the first eighteen times she’d heard it, or at least all its disconnected parts, and it hadn’t improved. But she must have taken it in on some level because she felt like a prompter in the wings when an actress had gone up in her lines, barely resisting calling out the cue. Dawn had seen Mom; Willow had seen Cassie, and maybe even Tara: Willow’s Briefing, when they’d compared Sightings, had been short and unsatisfying, being all with the crying and the Kleenex and everything, and Dawn had dutifully reported the fact because otherwise, what explanation for the axe-victim living room and microwave, but not what Mom had come to tell her. Unsatisfying, maybe, all around. But of course Buffy didn’t mention that. That had been only Willow. Only Dawn. It was some vamp she’d run into on patrol, nice little social chat with the Evil Undead, that was the interesting part that Buffy had momentarily lost and cued herself back into without prompting.

And Spike’s eyes went away. Not like Bringers, nothing like that. Like he’d heard something and had disconnected from vision, letting his eyes drift, unneeded, untended. Still focused, oh yeah…but not on anything anybody else could hear or see.

Maybe babbling, hallucinating crazy again, holding conversations with people who weren’t there, like before, entombed unalive in the high school basement, hear him through the air vents especially just off the girls’ locker room where the echo was so bad on account of the tile. Nobody admitted to hearing it, of course--this was Sunnydale, after all, wellspring of DeNile--but the post-gym shower contingent dropped off something amazing.

Except silent now. No babbling: that was Buffy, still rattling on. So maybe not….

Into one of Buffy’s frequent pauses, Spike said, “Dusted him finally, did you, Slayer? Or did you two just hang about chattin’ each other up on some gravestone till it got too near to sunup and he had to beg your--“

“Well, of course I dusted him,” Buffy responded, somewhere between puzzled and indignant. “But…I remembered him. Not from before, from college, not that. I had to dust him. But…he wasn’t a thing, Spike. He was a person. A vampire-person who was trying to kill me…. But not a thing. Somebody. Holden Webster. Do you see?”

“’Course I do, pet. Did you do him backhand or forehand?”

Even chore-face could fall. “I don’t remember. Is it important?”

“Might be. Never can tell what’s going to be important, some times.” Spike’s eyes rebooted then. They warmed, the way he could make them do, and the focus recentered itself on Buffy. Or seemed to. Because he was still sitting wrong. Not even quiet but still. The way he was never still unless he slept. Or when he was hunting. He could go still then. Dawn had seen it, lots of times.

Maybe he was just hurt that bad, or wishing Buffy would let him smoke in the living room, or that he had something to smoke. Or something else altogether.

His head turned, just a flick of the eyes and then away, and he rubbed the bandaged hand with the other one, not letting on, but Dawn wasn’t fooled: he’d seen her, smelled her, something. She pushed the closet door away, braced her long legs, and gave him the most fierce-eyed, deathray hateful stare in her entire repertoire, count of a hundred. He wasn’t looking toward her, and of course Buffy didn’t see, but she knew he saw, just the same. Buffy, and the semi-destroyed room in all its nicked detail, and Dawn standing in the hallway, one foot planted on one of his bloody footprints, hating him like Hannibal hating Rome, he saw it all and bent his head a little more, picking at the bandage.

He was ashamed. Afraid to face her or deny what they both knew about him now. Didn’t dare look up. Good!

Dawn took the stairs three at a time and reached her bed in a flying dive, astonishing sole occupant. She bit the corner of the pillow and then covered her whole face with it so there could be no least atomic fragment of a chance anybody she refused to name or even think about might be able to hear her crying her guts out.

TWO

With anybody else, it would have been easy. But Oooooh No, Mr. Bill, this was Spike, so it was freakin’ impossible.

He was up and about now, whole minutes at a time, sometimes appearing during catch-as-catch-can schoolday breakfast pillaging, threading among the abruptly silent and wide-eyed SITs, daylight out the windows but no sun yet on this side of the house, pouring glugging blood into the blue mug everybody else now left strictly alone, impassively waiting out the microwave and then gone again, ungreeted unless Buffy happened to be there: standing to listen if Buffy said anything to him, eyes averted to the floor, silent or monosyllabic even then, calling her only Slayer; or after sundown, sometimes out on the back porch, standing likely because if he got down he couldn’t yet get up again, smoke drifting because some idiot had pitied him enough to smuggle cigarettes in for him, mayonnaise jar lid for an ashtray, just long enough to finish unless Buffy went out and kept him awhile. Either way, a few minutes’ Sighting and then gone again past the basement door Xander had put a big steel deadbolt on. On the outside. Dawn took a certain pleasure shoving the bolt home anytime she was in the vicinity unless she found it already bolted. Once, she tried the doorknob and was surprised and vaguely indignant to realize there must be a bolt on the inside, too.

Present in the house but absent even when you saw him, haunting the corners and staircases like the unwelcome ghost of himself. No window of opportunity for Dawn to deliver her bomb. It was very frustrating.

Then Thursday evening, as Buffy was rounding up the troops for patrol, Dawn onlooking from the stairs, he ghosted up beside Kennedy, who recoiled, and that caught Buffy’s eye. Buffy leaned back against the door, going to parade rest with the battleaxe.

“No,” Buffy told him, and his head jerked up, finally meeting somebody’s eyes.

“Yes,” he said. “Got your back--”

“No,” Buffy said again, in the “Not discussing this” tone Dawn had come to hate.

Spike edged past Kennedy, and the other SITs backed away, leaving a tablecloth-worth of hallway open between him and Buffy. He shoved both hands through his scruffy two-toned hair and took one “Getting ready to talk now” breath. “I’m fit enough. I can--”

“No. Downstairs. Now,” Buffy said, pushing off the shut door and advancing on him. “I mean it, Spike.”

He backed a step, then sort of folded in on himself, turning. Retreating down the hall, he quit trying to hide the limp, with Buffy implacably following, battleaxe propped on one shoulder. He shut the door behind him and Buffy set the bolt.

Surveying the SITs, Buffy said, “He’s going to be helping you train. Soon. When he’s better. Just not yet. He’s a member of this team.” Having waited the allotted 10 seconds for argument or objection to be ignored or steamrollered, Buffy went through them and led the team out.

Nobody left still home but Willow, making magical stinks upstairs with her door shut. Time for the bomb. Dawn dashed to the kitchen and grabbed the package from its hiding place behind the least-liked soup cans, then back into the hall. After a second to stand and compose, she pushed the bolt.

Dark, below: she flicked the switch, then cautiously descended.

He was pulling himself into two-handed chin-ups on a water pipe or anyway trying to, more hanging than chinning. Spotting Dawn, looking past her, he dropped a little wonky, caught his balance, and came barging right past her, through the kitchen and out the back door. When Dawn got there, he was halfway to the sidewalk.

Dawn took a second to shove the bomb back into concealment, grabbed the spare stake bag kept handy by the door, and went in leisurely pursuit.

The first block, he was limping. By the second, he couldn’t hold a straight line but kept going. Third block was it, tipped against a streetlight just to stay upright, looking out into the dark.

“Just resting,” he announced, when Dawn came within what would otherwise have been striking distance.

“Yeah, sure.” She folded her arms.

He rested some more. His left hand, no longer bandaged, spread against the streetlight pillar: taking a better grip.

“Not interfering,” Dawn commented, as a couple of cars went by.

He hung his head. “You should get home. Nasties afoot an’ all.”

“I’m good.” Lifting the bag, she shook it to clatter the stakes, demonstrating. “Just waiting to watch you fall down.”

“Got a bet on it, pet?”

No Pet, she shrieked in her mind. No Bit, no Niblet, no nothing, you worthless freaking undead asshole! You left me and didn’t even say goodbye!

Failing to get a rise out of her, he revolved enough to free both hands to get a cigarette out and then lit. The lighter took him four tries. But he got it back into his jeans pocket without dropping it, so extra points for accuracy.

And she got extra points for not budging, letting the standoff build. If he let go the lamp post, he’d go down, and they both knew that. She’d let him. And he wasn’t about to move, couldn’t move, stuck for forward or backward as surely as a cat too far up a tree and they both knew that too. Her treasured rage became something like serenity as she waited for him to ask for her help, so she could turn him down. She’d wait for daylight, if need be. He got the cigarette to his mouth without quite dropping it and breathed out smoke. He shut his eyes.

“And this was the wrong way, anyway,” she informed him, resuming the spoken conversation. The unspoken one of course continued.

“That a fact.”

“Yeah. Thursday patrol pattern is the other way, toward Shadygrove. Maybe they forgot to tell you. New rules. While you were…gone. Being crazy. Being tortured. Whatever it is you do for fun these days.”

“And that could be, too. Why aren’t you with them, then?”

“Oh, I’m useless too, didn’t anybody bother telling you that either? Only the freakin’ Slayers-In-Training get to go patrolling now. No use wasting training on humans and no need to practice screaming and running away, Xander’s got that all covered.”

He nodded and didn’t say anything, which made her want to hit him. But there was no need for that. He’d fall down in his own good time, and she’d watch. Better without forcing the inevitable. Better enjoying the whole anticipating thing. Let it play out.

Motion, down by the corner. Dawn stuck a hand in the bag, and Spike straightened slightly against the post, both watching. Only a guy in a striped shirt, walking a shaggy little mutt that ignored Spike to growl at Dawn, dragged past on a shortened leash in otherwise silence that might have been embarrassed or indifferent. Hard to tell, with silence.

“’S’not worth it,” Spike decided, addressing the cigarette. “Go on home.”

“No, I’m good.”

If the next something that moved furtively by the corner or emerged from the bushes was a cruising vamp, there was nothing he was going to do about it and Dawn was iffy, merely a human teenager, after all: no kind of Slayer, not even potentially, not the crumb of a chance.

Dawn took a stake out of the bag and flipped it for a proper underhanded grip. Whatever the next interruption was, if it came at her, she’d try to take it down.

She wasn’t leaving while he stayed. She was her own hostage. Extra points for that, certain sure.

That he wasn’t going to get whatever he’d come out here for wasn’t her doing. He wasn’t her responsibility. He’d once claimed she was his and she’d believed him. They were going to see about that now.

It felt like poker. She’d seen him and raised.

He folded.

“All right.” Spike pitched the cigarette and set a boot on the coal. “Give us a bit of a hand, then.”

“In your dreams, Spike. How about I go home and bring some handcuffs? Leave you decorating the curbside? Only two and a half blocks: maybe somebody might notice, coming back from patrol. Not Buffy, though. She wouldn’t notice. Wouldn’t miss you. Nobody misses you, Spike. Nobody cares. Why did you even bother coming back?”

“Been wondering that myself. On and off. Not like it was up to me, after all. Just go where I’m put, stop until called for….You got it, Dawn: you win. You’re right, and she’s right, and all of us are bloody right and give us a goddam hand here, you stupid bint.”

Dawn smiled like a steel trap. “Oh how can I possibly refuse when you ask so nice? But you didn’t say the magic word.” She was happy to realize she’d grown while he’d been gone. Taller than Buffy, now. She could look him straight in the eyes, and smile, and then be startled as his eyes shone golden as he let his demon out to play.

She didn’t think the demon was going to say “please.”

“Have it your own way, then,” Spike said: glum demon, barely giving her a flash of fangs.

There were last dregs of strength available to him through his demon. He pushed away from the post, stuck both hands in his jeans pockets, and started slowly back. Shoulders hunched as if against an expected blow, a stake just to the left of center from behind; steps as even as though measured out with leg irons.

As he passed beneath the next streetlight Dawn noticed shiny patches on the back of his black T-shirt. A loose spotted circle, an irregular rosette. Black on black. Invisible again as he crossed the street and she drifted along behind. Chin-ups had been really dumb, then: he’d broken something open. Dawn didn’t walk much faster but didn’t need to, to catch up, half a block from the house. He was resting again, swaying slightly, unsupported in the middle of the stretch between sentinel street lights. He’d lost game face. In the lights of a passing car, he looked like what he was: a walking corpse. You could see the shadow of the half-face bruise again. He’d shut his eyes.

“You go on. I’ll be along,” he said. Then his knees gave out.

Juggling bag and stake, Dawn wasn’t quite slow enough to let his head hit the pavement. Dammit, she thought, her own knees folding, flinging the stake wide and out of the way, dammit all to hell! She was as big a total hopeless loser as he was. Couldn’t do it. Couldn’t just watch. Kneeling on the sidewalk with a hundred and sixty maybe pounds of unconscious vampire sprawled, head and shoulders, across her lap. Maybe less. He’d dropped a lot of weight, she saw now, since last summer. Bones showing clear, as if he hadn’t fed properly in months. Thought pig’s blood was just about as disgusting as she did. Drank it anyway because it was that or starve.

Stupid hopeless helpless useless vampire!

Only about a minute before his eyes fluttered open, vague at first, then focusing. “Well, that was educational.”

Dawn was vibrating with fury at him, at herself. She was not going to cry. Not going to cry.

“Time you found out,” he murmured, “you got limits. Same as everybody else. Same as me. Some things, you just can’t make yourself do, no matter how you want to. Might as well learn on me as anybody.” After a few seconds he added, “At least there’s that: I can serve as a bad example. So not a total waste.”

“Get off me. You’re bleeding on my second-best slacks.”

“Oh, can’t have that, send you Anne Klein ripoff hell for that, certain sure.” He got himself as far as sitting, so she could scramble to her feet. “Give us a hand, then,” he said again, not looking at her, arm lifted, calmly waiting.

She could leave him there. Leave him for the returning patrol to find, they’d never miss him, so close. Get him in all kinds of trouble with Buffy. Except that she couldn’t.

“I hate limits,” she shouted, hands fisted at her sides. “I hate souls.” She felt as if she were about to explode. Then she felt better, remembering the bomb.

“No argument here on that. Just how it is.”

“Shut up. Just shut up.” Grabbing his extended arm at the elbow, she hauled, and he came, and she was remembering how Buffy had brought him home not quite a week ago. She ducked and pulled his arm across her shoulders, no point anymore pretending she wasn’t going to do this, so no point doing it badly. She put her other arm around his back below the wet, seeping patches and latched her thumb into one of the belt loops. She waited for him to contribute some wiseass remark but he didn’t, just took one crosswise schottische step trying to correct the lean, so she braced and shoved them both forward, going with the stumbling schottische steps when she had to, straightening when she could, zig-zagging slo-mo between the lane markers of curb and hedge.

She hated it that he’d asked her help and hated that he accepted it. This was so not right. He wasn’t supposed to let her treat him like this, not that he didn’t have it coming, but he always, always went down fighting, what’d goddam happened to him to make him like this?

Passing the last hedge, they hit grass: home stretch. She demanded, “What is it, the frelling soul that makes you so goddam pitiful even I can’t stand it? Is it?”

“Like as not.” She felt him shrug. “When you suss it all out, you tell me. Don’t have a clue, personally.”

Approaching the back of the house, he pulled away a bit, and she let him sag down onto the porch steps.

“Go inside now, there’s a good girl.”

“Make me.”

In the middle of lighting another cigarette, he cocked an eye at her. “Go inside, Dawn. You’re not to be out here with me.”

“So what are you gonna do: faint on me? Been there, y’know. So non-scary.”

He got the cigarette lit and the lighter stowed away. “Not safe. Can’t help it. Need a minder, every minute. You stay wide of me, Bit. I mean it. After awhile I’ll get myself downstairs, all chained up proper again. That’ll be all right then. Safe as houses. Talk then, if you want.”

“What makes you think I want to talk to you?”

“Or not. Just saying. Just get yourself inside where you belong. Where nothing can get at you.”

“I’m not scared of you!”

“Well, I know that, don’t I? Never have been, never will be. But what you haven’t yet thought out is that don’t make me safe, Dawn. I would be for you if I could. Never hurt you if I could stop myself. But sometimes I can’t. Don’t know what-all I do then. Still trying to recall. Got a few pieces but not enough, not all. Holden Webster. Silly git. Never did know his name. He’s accounted for. Slayer did for him. Don’t know the other names. No proper introductions, visiting cards, tear out the throat then open someplace handy, wrist, arm, no matter, hold ‘em breathing long enough to get it down them. Not exactly social, that.”

Dawn sank down on the step too. “You’ve been killing.”

He was looking out into the back yard, that seeming safe edge of the night, past where the light of the windows fell. There were crickets. “That I have, pet. And that’s not all I’ve been doing.”

“But the soul-- So you did lie about it! I--”

“Didn’t lie. Wouldn’t lie, anything else but not about that. Soul makes no difference, seems like. Soul has a nap and things proceed. Chip, that makes no difference neither. No impediment. I don’t have a good handle on it yet but something’s got its hooks in me deeper than I can figure, deeper than I know how to change. Not my own dog anymore, Niblet. Maybe never was, but I thought I was…. Guess I know whose, but haven’t yet found a way to slip the leash. Don’t know how to go about it. Need somebody to watch, be a minder, keep an eye on me, see I don’t do something I’d…regret. Till that’s different, you stay clear of me, all right? Cause if I ever hurt either one of you again….”

He didn’t say what he’d do, but Dawn knew. From that summer. Before. When they’d each been pretty much all the other had and both fairly desperate-crazy a good part of the time. Remembered talking about it, talking him out of it, hitting him hard, crying or hurting herself until he had to give it up and tend to her. Dancing him away from it any way she could, any way she had to, because the alternative would be beyond bearing. It was understood now between them, no discussion needed. He’d take a walk in the sunshine. A little way. And then be gone.

Time, thought Dawn, suddenly remembering, for the bomb.

She went into the kitchen and was groping behind the cereal boxes when the back door squeaked and he passed behind her, leaning on the countertops: headed toward the basement. Limping so bad now his whole body hitched, skewed, and hesitated with each step. Her hand found what she wanted. She called, “Don’t bolt it.”

“All right.”

She waited a minute for the noise that would mean he’d fallen down the stairs, but it seemed that had gone all right. As an afterthought, she poured a mug of blood, heated it in the microwave, then stuck the package under her arm and carried the mug downstairs. He’d put the light on for her and was settling onto the cot, awkwardly reaching around for the second manacle. Chains in the wall behind him. Dawn blinked, watching him fasten the second cuff around his wrist, then ease back, let go of something he’d been holding tightly.

She hadn’t believed him about the chains. She didn’t like watching him lock himself into them so matter-of-factly, with not just resignation but relief.

So he’d meant it, about not being safe. She could do anything to him now and there’d be nothing he could do about it. And he couldn’t do anything to her, and was uneasy until he’d made himself sure of that. Not right. Couldn’t be right.

She held the mug out and he said “Ta,” and took it with both hands, spilling only a little with the shaking and on the cement it didn’t matter. Didn’t even bother to make a face, drinking. Not worth the trouble. His hair was in the bad stage between short and long. Only the ragged ends were white. The rest was a lighter, sandier color than she would have expected. Slightly curly at that length and untended. He’d always cared how he looked. Vainest guy she’d ever known, every detail considered and chosen to make exactly the impression he wanted. Now he didn’t. Not worth the trouble. Now he lived someplace way back behind his eyes and didn’t give a damn what the neighbors thought. If he even noticed that the neighbors were there.

Beaten down, quiet, no bounce left to him, so different. Give us a hand, then.

But with all the flash discarded, more simply himself: realer than she remembered or would ever have thought he’d be. She’d never thought of him as a thing, never once; but neither was he a man. A person, though: absolutely. Vampire person. Vivid alert blue or fulvous, dangerous golden, a person lived behind those changing eyes. And was himself changed practically beyond all recognition.

The realization that she no longer knew him was both disquieting and also like something still, spinning, balanced like a top. She wondered if the quiet she felt coming off him was something to do with the soul or was only another side effect of giving up.

“So what’s that, then?” he asked presently.

“What’s what?” she retorted, knowing he’d notice, waiting for him to ask.

“Whatever you got so unsuccessfully hid behind your back, pet: that what.”

She whipped it out of its sheath, its bag, and presented it within six inches of his nose. Then she watched his face click through the layered realizations.

Click: pint bottle of liquor.

Click: full pint bottle of liquor.

Bottle of liquor underage Dawn had somehow finagled for him. Click.

Bottle of cheap-ass horrible freaking peach schnapps. Click.

Bottle of cheap-ass horrible freaking peach schnapps with metal cap unsealed, then retightened: it had been opened. Click.

He set the bottle on his knee and considered her, and Dawn was positive he was wondering if maybe she’d put something in it. Vomiting spell with ingredients from Anya, maybe. Or just enough rat poison.

“I spit in it,” Dawn informed him blandly.

“Oh, if that’s all.” He unscrewed the cap and warily smelled the contents.

They both waited to find out if he was going to taste it. Horrible cheap-ass fucking peach schnapps.

“Right, then,” he said, and upended the bottle and didn’t stop or set it down until he’d finished it all. It wasn’t like he had to breathe or anything. After the last swallow he made the face he wouldn’t waste on the disgusting pig’s blood. “You know what that is?” He gestured with the bottle. “That’s horrible cheap-ass fucking peach schnapps, that’s what that is. God, that’s awful. Pinch me something decent next time, pet. Jesus God, that’s appalling.” He made a different face.

“Drank it, didn’t you?”

“Might as well, why not? Better than nothing. Besides, you took all the trouble to spit in it, least I could--“

Their eyes met, and they both started laughing and couldn’t stop. Dawn had to sit on the floor, convulsing and choking, slapping the cement. She wet herself, and of course he knew she had and that set him off even worse. He couldn’t find anything to do with his hands until he settled for yanking at the chains, howling his head off. But that wasn’t enough. Bending, he curled himself into a ball, the chains curved around him, as tight as he could, head bent against knees and arms wrapped behind his head, and it wasn’t laughter anymore.

Dawn started to lean up, levering herself to reach, and just like that he was staring at her and she’d never seen his eyes do that, wide and golden and stark in his human face, tears still running down his cheeks.

“Don’t,” he said. “Don’t you come near me.”

She sat back, obedient: out of reach. Because he meant it. It was important to him.

If he could tolerate and enforce the limits upon himself, so could she.

He rolled onto his back, gradually unclenching, letting his knees unbend and stretch flat. His harsh gasps of breathing softened into hiccupping clicky spasms, then into silence.

“Done me good, that time,” he said after awhile, and she had no trouble knowing what he meant. Doing somebody meant something quite different in Brit-speak: anything from murder to sex and everything between that left a victim. “Done me bleedin’ marvelous. Gimme time, I’ll think of something as nice for you, love. Haven’t had--”

His head lifted and he pushed up onto an elbow. After a minute she heard it too: the thundering herd returning, girly screeches and chatter, the bang and clash of mishandled weapons going back into the chest.

“Did you think to bolt the door, love?”

“Exactly how stupid do I look?”

“Best not to say if I want to keep friends with you an’ all. Not if I want to ask you a favor.”

Looking around, Dawn found the gold gone from his eyes. He was sitting up again on the edge of the cot, his hands neatly folded on his knees. Best behavior pose. Or maybe the schnapps was beginning to get to him.

Terrible stuff: she’d tasted it to make sure. An insult even to offer. And he was desperate enough, and yet calm enough within himself, to take even that. It wasn’t possible to humiliate him anymore: they both knew that about him now.

Dawn still hadn’t quite made up her mind which of them was the biggest pathetic loser. She thought she still had him on points but it was hard to know how to score intermittent insanity. She wondered what it would take to back him into a place where he’d drink a rat.

“There’s a thing,” he said. “Have I got it right, you don’t go patrolling anymore.”

She nodded, then shrugged to say how completely that didn’t matter.

“Right, then. What I want…. Listen. Ask. If they staked any vamps tonight, the last few nights, last couple of weeks. If, if any of them had a chat first, like. Like that Holden fucking Webster. Any that seemed to have the least sodding clue what they’re bloody well doing, idiot fledglings, just come blundering at you without a thought in their cement fucking heads, all fangs and Rrrr, it’s a pure mercy staking that lot, you see? Any not like that.”

Dawn nodded again to show she was listening, but what she was actually doing was watching his hands. They were moving again, dancing to his voice the way they always had and were supposed to, making shapes and punctuation in the air, precise visual counterpoint to the swoops and stops of phrasing.

“Fledges, mind.” His leveled finger instructed her. “Not some clapped-out sodding relic like me or Peaches. Not like that. The new ones, that’s all. Last month or I s’pose six weeks, at the longest. They may not know the difference, those chits, but you do, love. Find out for me. Any like that. Can’t look for myself: she’s right, I got to get a whole lot better before I’m fit to set foot outside without a keeper, I’d only be in the way. A distraction…. So you find out for me, will you? And if they did, if there were any, get me the best description you can. Will you do that?”

Dawn thought about it. “Names?”

“Don’t care about the names. No use to that. Never knew ‘em, wouldn’t know ‘em now, and they don’t come at you with labels. Unless you catch one fresh-risen and the gravestone handy and all. Don’t care about the names.”

She thought about asking, Spike, why did you go out tonight?

But she didn’t. She figured that she knew.

So instead, she inquired carefully, watching to read his signs, “Can I ask Buffy?”

“No need of that. They’ll say, and you’ll know, and no need to bother the Slayer about it.” The hands were back on his knees, demurely folded.

Dawn understood: No telling Buffy. Check.

No problem there: it wasn’t as if they were apt to have anything resembling a conversation in the next thousand years.

I want to show you the world!

Yeah, sure.

THREE

Spike couldn’t recall ever having been so happy.

Well, there was the first early sunlight, wasn’t it? out the kitchen window and back door panel, all laid so soft across the grass and the upright bounding hedges: Turner light, Watteau light, and like that. He barely noticed the bloodsmell children twisting past, behind and around him, always so careful not to touch him, flowing out to the yard to start their morning jerks with the brat, that Kennedy-girl--yeah: a few names he had that he could put, that lot, he had her number right enough for all she thought she had his--calling them to it, and the light like silk over them all, so soft, and the clear greens and browns and smooth sliding pink-beiges, red of a car going by out on the road and another blue almost to black, every color a little, like he’d almost forgotten….

The blatbuzz of the microwave recalled him and he retrieved the mug, slowly drank and refilled it, put it back in the microwave and set the blood to heating because that’s what was to be done now. Terrible swill but that’s what there was, what he had to get as much down as he could every few hours until he was fed up something like proper again and not just a waste of the space and the feed.

Watching a squirrel doing a neat, twisty traverse across the slack of a roof-high cable, he started checking the inner inventory. Amazingly, nothing actually hurt. So long as he just stood there, no pain anywhere. He tried to absorb that unaccustomed benediction until the microwave box said it was time again and he collected the mug.

He was still playing audience for the squirrel that’d almost made it safe home to the big maple in the corner of the lot which Spike considered he had a claim on, all those nights standing under it, good view of the Slayer’s window from that one and pity about the elm blight, so many grand old trees gone, when he felt Buffy come in behind him. Click of cabinet opening and shutting, various slides and bangs. Not real coordinated of a morning, his girl. Well, there were worse things.

Still a schoolday, today, he knew that: she’d have to be going, off in a tick, always running two steps late. He’d learned the drill on that, this past week. He set the other mug he’d fixed, terrible kack passed itself off as coffee around here, in the microwave box and pushed the right buttons in the right order and the wonder was he knew how to do that, who recalled when electrical lighting was a nine days’ wonder and locomotives, too, and people died of the soot and the clap and consumption, died of a thousand other things nobody died of anymore and hardly worth mention in the morning Times.

Her arms folded across his shoulders: pillowed, no weight, warm. Clean girlsmell, too many mints: toothpaste, mouthwash, and the faintly metallic undertone that was the muscle ointment. She breathed, “Wha’cha watching?” in his ear.

The squirrel had reached the tree and vanished. At the announcing buzz, he took out the mug of coffee and held it for her to take.

She didn’t mind that he hadn’t answered her, she was good about things like that: no totting up points, no ceremony. “Mmmm,” she said against the back of his neck, breathing coffee that smelled much better on her than in the making or the mug, “you smell good--what’cha been doing?”

He chuckled, looking halfway around. “While you were off doin’ your bit for God, puppies, and good ol’ Sunnydale, Bit fetched me a pint of peach schnapps.”

She smiled back at him and made a wry face, all at the same time. “Peace offering?”

“Dare, more like. Went down all right. Least, didn’t come back up. Had a good night out of it, anyways. As to the rest….” He thought a moment. “Well, maybe we’ve got as far as she won’t decide to dust me in my sleep. It’ll work its way out. Can’t take back what’s done. She’s entitled, and I can take the punishment.”

“Good enough, then.” Warm hand stroking down his spine--warm, even through the shirt. “How’s the back today?”

It took a little to get under his steady refusal to notice, but the hand that had settled on his ass was way past that. Way past noticing. No use talking, saying she wasn’t to do that, it could only make them sad: she knew. Some things, knowing didn’t help and you lived with them how you could. Bit couldn’t help it either and it was much the same thing, he thought: pretty much the same. But he couldn’t be what they wanted and likely never had been and there was no use either of them, any of them, pretending different. Besides that, he didn’t want either of them to get too attached to him as it would only grieve them the worse when he was gone.

He took it up to the point where he couldn’t and beyond that, they had to let him be. That wasn’t what he was for.

He loved them both like a fever he’d caught and would likely die of, and that was all right. He could remember being otherwise but not why.

He moved away and reached to put his mug under running water in the sink so none of the children would have reason to complain of him on that account, scraping a thumb along the rim to dislodge a crust dried against it. His back and other things cooled and didn’t like it but that was their problem, not his.

Nothing like a month, six weeks of unremitting, educated torture to help you separate out what was what, sort out the confusion about most things. Wouldn’t recommend it but he’d take from it what he could, what he could use.

“Sorry,” she said to him. “Sorry.”

“No harm, love. Not gonna do you like that anymore.”

“I know. I don’t mean to. Just kinda sneaks up on me, too.”

Best he thought, not to say anything. Best not to begin.

“Back’s some better,” he reported, setting the mug at the side of the sink, “all the little nobbly bits settlin’ down to their job. No outright gaps I can feel. Should start stirrin’ ‘em around, they’ve got lazy. Train a little with you, if you like? Should be able to stand a bounce or two. Then you could judge how the rest of it has got on. After the school lets out? ‘Bout ha’past three?”

“Oh god, what’s the time?”

Spike stood aside so she could do the usual dash of grabbing herself a couple of those anemic revolting fake pastries out of a box and gulping the last of the coffee, poking her hair for stray wisps except of course the ones she’d put there on purpose, and making a general kerfluffle of herself. Deep turquoise skirt today, an almost Aegean blue; white silk shield-front shirt with brass shoulder buttons; ballet-style pumps, white, because it’d be impossible to exactly match the blue and near wouldn’t have done at all.

Catching his eyes regarding her, she stilled, almost on tiptoe, then started nervously patting folds. “All shipshape--?” she asked.

“--and Bristol bloody fashion. Never better. Get on with you.” Following as she sprinted for the front because he always followed because she always liked it when he did, he called, “Oi! Training, then?”

“If I can, sure, and if I can’t I’ll cell you, is--” Her eyes followed his pointing finger to the hall table, saw the cellphone standing there in its charger base. She grabbed the phone, waggling it by way of thanks, then hauled the front door open and was gone.

He wandered back to the kitchen. The light had begun slanting in, casting an oblong brilliant rectangle across the front of the refrigerator. More spilled in when one of the children whose name he hadn’t yet got down burst in and sprinted for the upstairs bathroom, throwing him a wide, spooked glance in passing even though he’d left her plenty of space to get safely by. Outside kitchen door still standing agape as she’d left it. Likely set her elbows on the table and talked with her mouth full, too. Raised in a barn, the lot of them.

Even though the strengthening light lifted all the colors into something incredible (like the contact high when you’d just eaten a flower person, his mind sardonically supplied), the kitchen had become what in law was called an attractive nuisance--beautiful and deadly. He turned away. He knew his limits. And what he was for.



While Spike stood irresolute in the hallway, considering which would be the best thing to start with, Harris barged through the front door in his work kit, maneuvering an armload of 2 x 4s and carrying a bucket.

“Hey: Evil Undead!” Harris said, letting the bucket thump down. “As long as you’re upright, lend a hand with this.”

Spike glanced at the timber, estimating weight, then leaned aside and shouted loud enough to carry through the gaping kitchen door, “You: pup. Get yourself in here.”

Harris’ turn would have to wait. Spike wasn’t going to jeopardize a chance at a training session, let alone tonight’s patrol, for the likes of that.

Within a minute, the pup came trotting in, all puppy sweat from the session of jerks with all the girls and nice as a peach underneath, which Spike had no intention of telling anybody. Spike spread a hand and rotated the puppy’s hopeful head in the correct direction, then gave him just enough of a push. “Don’t want you. Harris does. Go make yourself useful.”

Dru would have liked the puppy. She’d have had him for dessert.

For pudding, Dru’s voice in his mind corrected and Spike checked around himself a second to make sure everything was as it should be, no phantom Drusilla seated on the steps for instance, all crazy, luscious, and savage, needing to be seen to. Not this time. Not with all the wards in place. So no present problem on that score….

Having juggled and then dropped the load of boards because the puppy hadn’t the sense to catch hold as it tipped, Harris stood with hands on his hips, gazing murder at Spike, which bothered Spike not at all, but he didn’t have to let Harris catch him smiling so he turned away first. Be awhile, he expected, before the whelp was going to let done be done in respect to Spike’s having had his woman: only natural, wasn’t it. But no need to get the whelp’s back farther up about it than it was. He’d see to Harris in due course. No use bolloxing it up in advance just because he could.

I learn by going where I have to go.

The line of verse singing itself in his head reminded him. He climbed the stairs, aware of the laxity of muscles too long unused, taking his time. He was past the worst of it: all the major bones had healed. The injuries merely to flesh had already sealed themselves. That was how it always was: heal from the outside in. It was disuse, as much as anything, slowing him now. Needed to get himself stirring, make some use of the daylight hours. As good a chance as any, he thought, to start seeing to the witch, without the brat drooling all over her.

I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.

He had a healthy respect for the witch but none whatever for the brat and truth be told, he thought the less of Willow’s taste, not to mention her good sense, for taking up with the bint, considering that Tara had been one fine, choice lady. Never would have said no to that.

He tapped on the door. Could have walked right in: once he was into a house he had the whole of it, attic to basement; but he wasn’t inclined, out of respect for Tara. And even respect for Joyce, Buffy’s mom, whose room it had been until she’d had no more need of it. Always knocked. And knocked again when he got no response, warily judging the likelihood of a big patch of sun about three feet off making a sudden jump at him.

“Red, it’s me. All right if I come in?”

He heard her voice but not the words and decided to take it as permission.

He had about eighteen inches of clear floor before the sunspace started. Dust motes shone in the air. All the windows were shut. The witch, in a nubby grey robe and thick white socks, sat cross-legged on the bed, tapping away at the laptop. Her rich auburn hair stuck up in stiff tufts in all directions like a really cheap wig.

“What,” she said.

Spike made the experiment of sitting back on his heels in the clear space. Nothing gave way. “Wonder if you might have such a thing as a spare notebook I could have.”

She reached into a nearby bookcase, grabbed a green notebook, and held it at arm’s length, all without removing her attention from the screen.

Spike looked at the notebook, looked at the sunspace, and stayed put.

Eventually the witch noticed she was still holding the notebook, glanced around, saw the problem, and pitched the notebook to flop and slide far enough that he could set cautious fingertips to the spiral spine and draw it in.

Spike continued to stay put. After a time the witch noticed that too and lifted her head, frowning a question. Give her another year and she’d have permanent lines bracketing her mouth and that same crease stuck between her eyebrows.

“Pen,” Spike mentioned.

“Oh!” Tipping far forward, face nearly to the mattress and ass in the air, she rooted in the folds of a blanket and produced one and flipped it in his direction. He caught it on the fly, which was pretty good, considering, but she’d flopped back and was staring at the screen the instant the pen left her hand.

“Red,” he drawled, choosing the tone very carefully, and got a flashing What now? glance he immediately disengaged from. “Have I done something to piss you off?”

“What? Oh, no, I didn’t mean it like that, I never--” Her whole face collapsed and she started babbling, waving like a disjointed maniac at the screen, him, the window, the middle of the air, blah, blah, blah bad search results, blah, blah, blah indeterminate parameters, blah, blah, blah search criteria, Spike nodding just like he caught more than one word in ten.

Good to know the girl he’d known and mostly liked was still someplace within that brittle shell.

When the words ran dry and she sat gaping at him blankly, he asked, “You got a library card?”

She took up about two feet of slack in her jaw. All the features readjusted, just like that, just like magic, and he was facing a redheaded gamine barely older than the Bit, endearingly awkward except for the shrewd eyes that finally were seeing him. “Why: you wanna borrow it?”

The bright skepticism he put down to habit, didn’t take it personally. He wrote a line on the pad and thought a moment. Writing another, he said, “Had some things running through my head. Know what they are but can’t sort the order--”

“I know, I know! Happens all the time, me, I mean, and don’t you just hate it when that happens?”

Upon consideration he added a third line, then tore the page off along the perforation and held it out. “I’d bring it to you, but….” He nodded toward the drifting dust motes hanging in the sunshine.

“Oh, sure, right, no problem!” She hopped off the bed and skidded in her socks to scoop the page from his hand. Bright in the sunlight, she stood reading it. Lost into attention and her own head, utterly forgetful of the vampire at her knees.

She had no physical fear of him. None at all. Nobody else except Buffy herself and the Bit, of course, had such an absolute lack of wariness of him.

Disengaging from the scan, she cocked her head at him. “They’re all poetry,” she mentioned as if happily surprised the puppy had done a trick.

Spike could put up with being considered cute. “Well, yeah. They are. Not real heavy to carry” (his hands described minute dimensions) “except for that one anthology, there,” he said, as though that were an important argument. “Can’t very well stroll in there, get ‘em my--”

“Yeah, excess flaminess factor, I get that. Sure, Spike, I’ll get ‘em for you. But if there are any fines, you know, I’m way no with the fines--” She emphatically waved the no with both hands, smearing it out of the air.

“Understood. Thanks.” He concentrated on getting up without using his hands: should be a doable trick. Pretty much made it, except for dropping the pen. And bending straight down to get it wasn’t likely a trick he could yet do. But there was no need: it sprang up from the floor and Willow was holding it out to him, blink and there.

Spike considered it, suddenly a good deal warier of the witch than she was of him. She just kept smiling. And it was a good smile--not like she had a clear picture in her head of how he’d look without his skin.

“Thought you weren’t doing that now.”

“Thought you weren’t eating people anymore,” she riposted calmly. “Sometimes, we surprise ourselves, right? So: books. Poetry books. Cabin fever starting to get to you?”

“No,” Spike said, letting the word go long. “When just standing up is the high point of your day, there’s still a ways to go before boredom sets in.”

“You look better,” she offered.

“Can’t always go by looks.” Spike gently picked a dust bunny off her hair and presented it to her. She swapped it for the pen. Except for making a sour-smiling face, she didn’t seem annoyed.

That seemed the best way to leave, so he did, pleased on the whole with the encounter. If you wanted to make a connection with somebody, do them a favor. Failing that, have them do you one.

He’d coaxed several smiles out of the witch, and waked her up a bit, and she hadn’t taken his skin off for it. She now had an actual reason to leave the house, which he understood she hadn’t done in at least a week. Pry her away from the brat at least for an extra hour or two because he doubted Willow Rosenberg could get within touching distance of a whole bunch of books in bright bindings, solid and satisfactory to the hand, all squared up in rows like a perfect dream of order, pictures and secrets and lies better than truth, and not collect twice as many for herself as the ones she got for him.

He knew that about her because he knew that about himself. So, easy enough to make the jump and figure the best way of seeing to her.

He’d found it absurdly easy to split the Scoobies and set them at each other’s throats, some years back. So far, he judged that weaving them together again, patching all the broken places, and linking them as a solid wall around the Slayer shouldn’t be all that hard either. Harris, he could handle Harris well enough when all the rest had been attended to….

Besides, he wanted the books.

I wake to sleep and take my waking slow.

Roethke, he knew. But there was a line he couldn’t retrieve, that continued to itch at him like the insane zodiac he’d been told was what had been cut into his back, at least the number was right, 12, but no symbols or characters Buffy could recognize, which in itself didn’t mean a whole hell of a lot. He doubted she’d cracked a book since her resurrection. More for direct action, his girl. He didn’t know if the marks on his back were the same as on his chest and abdomen or different. And no idea what any of them meant, of course--could be anything from the Mark of the Beast to Eat at Joe’s. A mirror would obviously be no help; he wasn’t real enthusiastic about the idea of stripping down for Willow; Rupert might be tolerable, whenever he happened to show up again. Would not be pleased to find him here again, would Rupert. And there’d be the Leonard Cohen anthology since there was no way for him to get music into the basement, at least not at any kind of volume, and the Cohen should be good, didn’t need music if you had that. He’d decided he was off music and back to words. Scraps of things, a couplet or a stanza announcing themselves in his head out of noplace, cadenced and precise, was bloody astonishing and brilliant, he thought. Hell of a lot better than 99% of the crap he’d had erupting in his head lately.

Defend him against not-Dru, maybe. And not-himself, who derided what he’d become and had such a lame line of patter. Worthless lazy git. And the rest of the whole bleeding carnival of persuasive masks he’d refused to put any trust in, any belief, throwing words back at it, any old words, scraps of poetry and song at first while his voice held, then anything that connected and helped shut the voices out because he couldn’t move his hands and something had been done to his back, Miss Flyte and the birds, yeah, that’s another one that should go on the list: Dickens. Taste of home despite all the silly-buggers melodrama. Bleak House, was it?

And at the foot of the stairs he stopped because the sun was sparking rainbows from a shard of broken glass that’d likely come in with Harris’ steel-toed size elevens and the lumber. All quiet inside again, Spike settled between two steps and watched jewels bloom and fade against the wallpaper until the sun lifted higher and the show was done.

He was no longer in that place: she’d come for him. He’d known she would, and she had. This was real, and not that other.

He needed nothing more or different than that. He could barely contain it. It sufficed completely. In proportional response he’d give himself away by handfuls, buckets, or boxes man-sized long and shoulder wide. He was giving himself away already.

Cisterns contain; fountains overflow. William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

At least he’d gotten himself a proper soul with no stupid happiness clause.

FOUR

When Buffy got to the training annex of the Magic Box, she found Spike sitting on a bench by the back wall of the big training room scribbling in a notebook: so intent that he didn’t seem to notice her arrival, all of which was weird and, though not necessarily of the bad in itself, so damn…un-Spike-like. Like he was channeling Willow or something because that was definitely one of Willow’s endless string of color-coded spiral notebooks he was working in. Buffy forgot what green meant, but no way was she not gonna know one of Willow’s notebooks. Willow went into research trance, blind and deaf for hours at a stretch, biting the top of pen or stylus, either frowning at the page or screen or else in catatonic thousand-yard-stare mode--not Spike, never Spike!

He was just so weird now. Buffy was puzzled, frustrated, and vaguely annoyed at him. Not an unusual way for her to be feeling about Spike at any time, of course, but not for the current batch of reasons. Yesterday he’d not only volunteered to do laundry, on the grounds that since he was down in the basement from midday on, he might as well get that chore seen to, being so handy to it; but he’d actually done it, which was uber-weirdness of the first magnitude. Unthinkable. And he still hadn’t noticed her.

She went behind the screen and changed into training sweatpants and strap-shouldered top. Barefoot and carrying her sneakers, she marched over to the bench and plopped down on it heavily. Incredibly he still didn’t look up, just said absently, “Right, in a second….” in the pen-top biting phase.

Spike never didn’t notice her!

Stuffing her left foot into the sneaker required Buffy to twist and lean against his arm to reach the laces right.

“Yeah,” he said, and smiled at her. Suddenly there, back from wherever he’d been, just as if he hadn’t been committing uber-weirdness and she was the crazy one for finding him so off that it didn’t compute.

A year ago, something that strange, she would have hurried off to discuss it, poke and wrestle with it--with Spike. Which left her doubly frustrated because that resource had been withdrawn and there was nothing to replace it. Just the fact of him, no more than acknowledgement he existed anywhere within a hundred square miles of the heart of Buffy-dom, was enough to produce frozen-face, eyes that wouldn’t meet hers, and unsubtle changes of subject from Willow or Anya, flaming sulks from Dawn, and outright accusations from Xander--no different from a year ago when the unthinkable (secret awful Spike/Buffy sex thing) had been an actual fact, whereas now…it somehow wasn’t.

Which was a good thing, Buffy told herself about 2,000 times a day: only whenever the subject happened to pop into her thoughts, not as if she was being all obsesso-girl about it. That was generally Spike’s department, except that he’d apparently taken on some new hobby instead of colliding with her at full speed and fucking each other blind and legless four or five times a day, interspersed with a nice savage punch-up as an occasional change of pace.

It had gotten awful before she’d put a stop to it. Good that they weren’t doing that anymore. Good that she’d gotten over taking out on him her inarticulate and otherwise unexpressed fury at having to be alive and grown-up, which she’d never asked for and had thrust on her, just like everything else; having to somehow stand under the crushing weight of all her responsibilities, pick them up afresh every day and carry them through to the next collapse into another night’s black oblivion and seething with resentment and hopelessness that it would ever be any different. Hitting Spike, punishing him for being the nearest thing to an outlet that she had because the Slayer wasn’t allowed outlets, wasn’t allowed fun, and certainly wasn’t allowed wild destructive liberating sex with a thing like him; hitting him because that was safe, she couldn’t break him; hitting him until he hit back, lost what passed for his temper and defended himself. It had been awful. It gave her a sick, shamed feeling whenever she thought about it: roughly 2,000 times a day.

But they were both so over that, and it was a good thing to have nothing to hide or apologize for or explain away to her friends about anything she did in regard to Spike now. A civil friendship, they’d tolerate, and even be (mostly) civil to him in return. He’d won that much acceptance from them, during the summer she’d been…gone. Without Buffy in the equation, Spike was regarded as minimally OK. Not worth the effort of tormenting, rejecting. Easier with him than without him, so might as well let him hang around, help battle the nasties since he volunteered to do it anyway, rather than go to the trouble of, say, chaining him up in a tub. It wasn’t, anymore, Spike himself that roused instant and unconditional hostility just by showing up in a room. Only any least suggestion or even suspicion of any connection between him and Buffy different from or deeper than their own would trigger frozen-faced rejection, criticism, and outright condemnation. They’d made it clear that she could have Spike, or she could have them. Not both. And she couldn’t possibly defeat the First Evil and its Harbingers, and protect all the Potential Slayers known to exist in all the world, without them. Without them all.

All week, since recovering Spike, Buffy had felt them watching her. Judging her. Timing her visits to the basement to change his goddam bandages or oversee the 2 a.m. feeding. Waiting for their unholiest suspicions to be confirmed. And it was good that there’d been nothing at all to see. And it was just perverse of her to find herself sidling up to him, nudging to see what sort of response she’d get, pushing closer the more he backed away: stupid and perverse and self-destructive and mean, even to him, and she was determined never ever to be mean to him again, he’d never deserved it, nobody deserved that kind of vindictive punishment in the one way they were completely helpless and undefended: as ugly as beating a child or a parent or a spouse just because you could, because they’d let you or couldn’t face doing what could force you to stop. Because they loved you. Because you hurt in ways that really had nothing to do with them but you took it out on them anyway. Because their love trapped them and as long as the two of you were in reach of one another, caught in that circle of pain and intimate flailing combat, it was only gonna get worse.

She’d broken out first, because, really, no commitment there. It had been easier for her. And after all, she’d started it.

He’d had to be overtaken by the blind compulsion to connect somehow, anyhow--always more powerful in him than in her because for him, it actually had been love--unable to realize that this once, out of the last 2,000 times, no had actually meant NO, be pushed by it into craziness and intimate attack beyond what even he could tolerate.

So he’d spun off like a spark from a wheel and insanely battled himself a soul, that she’d mercilessly lambasted him for lacking: a soul that made him more whacking insane than ever.

Buffy was coming to the unwelcome conclusion that souls sucked.

Since the soul, he hadn’t made one single attempt to come on to her. Didn’t get in her face, challenge her, make her life hell. Disengaged from the cycle of abuse as though it’d never been. Was helplessly crazy, or captured, or as helplessly rescued, accepting her half-grudged concern just as though it meant something, so she found herself ratcheting it up into declarations of faith in him, doubting herself instead of him, giving him trust and freedom within her life far beyond what was safe or prudent or asked for, giving him finally a freaking blank check to anything he wanted from her…which he placidly didn’t even seem to see and certainly showed no inclination to use.

And it was good that all that was behind them, that they could simply be friends. Her record, in converting ex-lovers to friends, was 0 for three, not counting Spike. He was useful, made himself useful any way she asked and any way he could, even without her asking. Was a hell of a good fighter, the best next to her or, if he was healthy and motivated, possibly the best including her--they’d fought innumerable times to a draw but never to a decision, a death, and he’d left two dead Slayers in his wake before he’d ever collided with her, so somebody betting on the outcome might well consider Spike had the edge, if it ever came to that, which Buffy was determined it never would again. She was gonna abso-freaking-lutely need a fighter like that, and desperately felt the lack of him, battling the Ubervamp Turok-Han, who’d whipped her ass soundly and painfully every time she’d gone up against him, giving ground, counting just escaping as an achievement, until she’d finally come up with the right weapon and dusted him at last, an object lesson to the SITs. Aware every sick, terrified second that she and Spike together could have taken that monster out, no problem, on the very first go-round. Hating her responsibility that required she make protecting the young Slayers In Training her absolute priority and set aside, each second, the desperate need to simply push the Turok-Han aside, duck and dash past him to the prisoner he guarded.

She’d managed to set aside the screeching personal imperative Get Spike the hell out of there, now! for six unspeakably miserable weeks he’d somehow survived more or less intact--at least no physical injury, however gruesome, horribly upsetting, and disabling, that vampire healing wouldn’t eventually take care of--no thanks to her.

They’d both been basket cases, the night she’d brought him back.

She’d expected him to say something like What kept you. Instead, he’d said, You came, like that was all that mattered, and enough, and everything.

She did need him and she didn’t love him any more than she loved herself. He was a necessary part of her and she no longer denied it to herself, or him, or anybody. It would be some kind of huge insanity to want the madness back. Overturn the first peace they’d ever had between them for nothing she even wanted, nothing he wasn’t content to have over, stupid and destructive of everything that actually mattered to her.

But she didn’t seem to be able to help herself. She didn’t understand why she did it, or why he did freaking anything anymore, and none of it made any sense at all.

Except this wasn’t right. He wasn’t right. She worried about him and tried to reach him and was calmly rebuffed for reasons she even agreed with, which only made her reach harder, more insistently, and this was not gonna end well either, which awareness made her more and more frantic.

It wasn’t the capture or the torture. He’d been like this ever since the soul she’d said she couldn’t love him without: evil soulless thing! she’d spat at him, over and over, until he’d believed her.

She’d thought it was safe, that he was indestructible.

She was horribly afraid she’d broken him beyond all mending.

He’d gone back to his damn notebook, perfectly content to wait another hour if that was how long it took her to tie her other sneaker. OK by him: he was occupied. Self-contained and placid and inert.

He asked nothing of her. Expected nothing. Nothing at all.

What she had, she’d come to suspect, was William…or some bastardized half-assed lukewarm approximation of him; what she wanted was Spike. And if she got him, it would almost certainly destroy them both and the world, for lack of their effective intervention.

She could so not do this!

The hardest thing she’d done lately was not kiss him.



“Wha’cha doing?” she asked, trying to shove all the tightness and confusion away, not dump it on him, or at least keep it out of her voice.

“Tryin’ to get things sorted. All the pieces flyin’ around every which way…. Workin’ out a timeline, try to make some sense of it all…. You gonna do your warm-ups, pet?”

“Is Willow helping?”

When he looked around inquiringly, Buffy gestured at the notebook.

“Well, she’s the one with the stash of notebooks, isn’t she?” He chewed on his lip. “Thought you said she’d gone off magic.”

“She has. I think she scared herself. I know she scared me. She’s gonna have to face up to it again, though. If she’s gonna be any use.”

“Ahuh…. Go do your jerks, there’s a good girl.”

Resisting the impulse to flounce, Buffy put herself through a medium routine of calisthenics and stretches, feeling the muscles loosen and warm, the ligaments extend her range of motion and reach. Ending a leg raise and drop-into-split move, she landed on her butt at catching sight, beginning the drop, of Spike poised in a one-arm handstand, straight up, reading the notebook upside down.

“OK, tiger, you made your point,” Buffy commented dryly, collecting herself from the bad landing.

Upside down, he blinked at her with the familiar bland innocence. “Oh, you ready now, are you?” He set the notebook on the bench, then easily leaned out of the handstand in a move like a slow cartwheel.

Buffy couldn’t help grinning: happy to see him moving the way he was supposed to again, vivid as a dancer, not above showing off to her. It seemed like forever since she’d seen him move like that, easy, gliding, and predatory, and until she saw it, she hadn’t known how intensely she’d missed it.

“Okay,” she said, “let’s see your moves. Come at me.” With hands and arms, she beckoned him in.

Immediately she was in the middle of a blindingly fast exchange of blows, counters, spins, jumps, slides. No time to think or prepare, just react and strike, sweep low, kick high, roll off to the left, lean back, push forward.

She came down hard on both heels, abruptly still. Spike froze with a bladed hand about an inch from her neck.

“What?” he asked, dropping the arm and coming to stable rest, facing her.

“What are you playing at?” she demanded in an even, controlled voice.

“Dunno know what you mean, pet.”

She set her hands on her hips. “Yeah, you do: five minutes skimming around and you haven’t hit me once. What’s that supposed to be?”

The floor suddenly became fascinating. He muttered, “Donwanhurtya.”

“I didn’t hear that.”

He squared his balance back into fighting stance, staring her in the eyes, and shouted, “All right, I don’t bloody well want to hurt you, all right?”

“You think that’s what I’m looking for, Spike? You think pat and duck is gonna get the job done? What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

He was breathing, which meant he was angry. “Getting. Better.”

“Not better enough, if all you can show me is the moves, not the guts to actually hit something. You think I’m gonna take you out on patrol, entrust the troops to you, let you demonstrate how a vampire can come at them, so you can show off your repertoire of neat handstands and cartwheels?”

He breathed some more, centering, making up his mind. “Again.”

“You got something to show me? Something more or something else? Because otherwise, we’re both wasting our time here.”

“Again.”

“This time,” Buffy said, “I’ll come at you.” Then she did, like one two three BLAM.

Reflex kept him out of the way of the blur of her punches and kicks in the first lightning exchange. The speed was there, she’d give him that. And he once caught her wrong-footed and jabbed an elbow jam to the side of her head. She stopped, surprising him, letting the elbow hit her right where it should, in the temple. No more force to it than being lightly whacked with a rolled newspaper.

She said nothing, just folded her arms and gave him steady, grim attention.

He stood furiously breathing, jaw and fists working, then wheeled for the alley door. Halfway, he remembered the notebook and leaned, snatched it up. Then on and out, slamming the door resoundingly behind him.

What did he think he was damn well playing at?

Having unlaced one sneaker, Buffy flung it into the far wall. The smack did nothing to relieve her ferocious disappointment.

Maybe Dawn’d had the right idea: get him a quart of scotch and then see if she could push him beyond his self-drawn limits.

Because he sure was no damn use to her the way he was.

FIVE

Stalking along the sewer conduit considerately prepared for vampires who needed to get crosstown at inconvenient hours, Spike performed furious dialogues in his head and sometimes aloud. He hurt about 30% of what he had, but that was nothing, that just fed into the blazing frustration.

“What do you want from me, woman?” he demanded of the Buffy in his mind, waving both arms. “You agreed: got to start over, different. That other, that was no good for anybody. So what do you goddam expect--I’m gonna hammer you into the fucking floor, when I--”

He hauled off and punched the wall a few times, which broke some knuckles and bloodied his hand, and whatthehell difference did it make, turn himself inside out, do anything except the one thing she required of him--to strike out at her, full-force.

Which he would never do. No matter what hung by it. Never once, made him dizzysick even to think about it. No, no, no, not gonna do that anymore, and you agreed to it, you damn stupid bint! It’s all one thing, can’t take the part you want and the rest ain’t there too, you want the water except you don’t want it wet? Have a clue, at least pretend you got the least scrap of a goddam clue. Let me fucking be, let me take the idiot children out for fucking strolls in the park, let me be what I’m for, don’t--

He spun and flung himself to a seat on the walkway that edged the channel, wrists tight against his ears, fingers locked across the back of his head, rocking and breathing himself toward something closer to calm.

“She doesn’t want you,” he heard his own voice say, and there he was, like a skewed mirror because what he saw was all complete: hair short, curly, and silver, fucking eyeliner he hadn’t used since he’d had Dru to put it on for him, sleeveless vest; careless, indifferent, amused, leaning at ease on the far side of the channel. The damn duster, trophy of the New York Slayer, hanging off his shoulders like black wings.

So that was how he’d looked. Not bad.

“Right face,” he snarled in reply, “wrong version.” He shoved himself up and continued down the edge of the channel.

“What in hell,” said his voice, from behind, “does a Slayer need with a vampire?”

Suddenly the image was before him again, standing in slow-flowing shallow water that wasn’t deflected around the boots. “A doorstop? A nanny? You’re no use to her,” his not-self commented. “You’re no bloody use to anybody. Why--”

“Get stuffed.” Spike set his shoulders and walked directly through the phantom, that scattered and dispersed the second he touched it.

That was when he caught the sound of solid feet, running. Sometimes in water, sometimes on cement. Not close yet but converging on him from two sides: pipes he could see intersecting up ahead. If they were more of those goddam Turok-Han, he was cooked. Not so much as a knife on him.

Glancing over his shoulder, he started back the way he’d come, where he knew there was a grate. It was still light out, but if he circled wide--

What burst into the central channel were two pairs of raggedy vamps, one set from each side, gaping around them like the idiots they were to see where he’d gone. All in game face: fledglings. Spike laid the notebook safely on the ledge. Then he turned on his heel, stuck his hands in his pockets, and grinned, strolling back toward them.

“Well, you’re up early,” he commented cordially. “Missed your beauty sleep, looks like. Hope you got paid in advance for this because I don’t fancy your chances of collecting afterward.”

The smaller one on the right said something to his partner. Then they all rushed him: all together, down a channel that would only allow two abreast. Idiot fledges. One stumbled against the walkway, and the one next nearest shoved Stumbles at being bumped, and before they’d invented any more entertaining antics, Spike sprang onto the walkway and twisted Stumbles’ head off. That put him in good shape to drop down, light, and punch his bladed hand through Shove’s ribcage and pull the heart straight out while Stumbles was still dusting, an image momentarily hanging on the air. Spike hurled the heart splat into the gaping face of the closest of the two that remained, which left that moron pawing at the thick blood in his eyes. Heart and blood delayed-dusted too, of course, but Moron too dimwitted to realize before Spike dropped onto his hands and kicked both boots sideways into Moron’s neck. The head came right off with some mess at the chinline there for a second. When the various dust had settled, Spike and the remaining vamp were facing each other, Spike sitting at on the edge of the walkway, hands neatly folded on his knees.

Spike let his demon surface, to give his smile that certain something that said no problem, they were all demons here. Vision sharpened, and he could have heard a rat fart a mile off. It felt good all down his arms, and the pain in his hand faded so he could shake the bones back in place with just a quick a flick of the wrist. The stink was something amazing, but the idiot fledge and grooming had obviously not been introduced and it wouldn’t be a problem for long.

“Now, then,” Spike said. “How about we talk, or would you sooner fight first? ‘Cause if that’s how you want it, I’ll oblige you, but then we’d miss the chat. Your call, mate. I’m agreeable either way.”



When Spike returned to the house, the streetlights were just coming on. He circled to the back door and went in that way, to make less of a noise of himself. Didn’t find anybody abroad, which gave him a clear shot at the shower. Children might be upset by him wearing demon guts and liberally coated with blood that tasted even more rancid than pig blood.

Pity vamps couldn’t feed on each other. Well, they could but there was no substance to it. Sort of like blooming onions, except for the taste. And the texture. And the lack anything remotely edible.

Catch it fresh enough, though, from one who’d just fed--second-hand, so to speak--not too bad. Except for the taste. No improving that.

He didn’t like the bathroom. Kept clear of it mostly. But his good mood of the morning had revived, and once the room was full of steam, it wasn’t too bad. Done was done, and they both knew the truth of it, so let it be; let it rest.

Shaking water out of his hair, he thought vaguely about getting it cut. Bet the pup knew how to do that, had that look about him. No need to advertise he’d just come off six weeks of…well, neglect was one word.

Didn’t want to scandalize a houseful of little birds, so he wrapped up decently in the biggest towel he could find, then ducked down to the basement and got himself changed. When he climbed back up, Buffy’s voice was coming from the front room, and Dawn was hanging about just outside in the hall.

Joining her, still toweling his hair, he asked softly, “So what’s this, then?”

“You left your gross, disgusting clothes in the bathroom, you know,” she hissed back.

Well, there was always something, he thought.

Dawn added, “So I knew you were back.”

“Thought you’d got rid of me, did you? Sorry to disappoint.”

Dawn managed to seem as though she was looking down at him. He checked her feet, but no: it was just something she did with her head. “Are you drunk again?”

“Nicely warm, is all. Just nicely warm. So what’s this, then?” He gestured at the front room, packed with the Slayers In Training and the Scoobies, the former mostly sitting on the floor or the couch, the latter scattered around the wall where it was harder to escape, since there was only the one door. Spotting Anya, he nodded to her. Her hair was auburn at the moment, so for a second, until she turned her head, he’d taken her for Willow. Anya smiled and nodded enthusiastically back, then flashed solemn and darted her eyes around to check whether Harris had noticed her being in danger of fraternizing. The whelp was being adequately entertained by his third or fourth beer and disapproving of the woodwork. Well, he should know. There was the witch not far off, but still inside the room. Red made a hands-opening gesture like a book and nodded brightly to say she’d gotten his books, and he signaled appreciation.

It was a mercy she so far was keeping out of his head. He’d never liked it and had more company in there than he really wanted anyway. Didn’t need the witch poking around besides.

Dawn leaned against him to whisper, “It’s Friday.”

“And…?”

“The Briefing.”

“Oh. Right.”

The longer he watched, the more he wondered what it was in aid of. Nobody was listening except one of the rounder and more earnest of the SITs and the tallish lanky homely one: Amanda. Everybody else looked as if they’d sooner be in hell, but didn’t dare let Buffy catch them slipping out to go there.

And as he listened, he was further puzzled: if this was supposed to raise morale, all rah rah and Slayers United, he’d seen it done better at funerals.

“She’s terrible,” Dawn confided.

“Needs practice, maybe.”

Dawn rolled her eyes. “Every night? Please!”

“Well, there’s that. Anything doing, pet? Any news for me?”

Dawn jabbed her pointy little elbow into his ribs and he realized Buffy was staring at them, at him in particular, and looked not at all pleased. He thought about being annoying, it wasn’t as if didn’t know how, but then again he seemed to be doing that nicely without trying and so might as well leave it. Contented himself with admiring her ferocity. Wasn’t altogether sure what she was being fierce about, but at least she didn’t seem to be enjoying it too much, which was probably for the best.

Would’ve been nice to have had her down in the sewer with him, and the two demon bars afterward he’d decided to look in on, since he was out and trolling for information and all, but she probably wouldn’t have enjoyed it and the Slayer’s presence did have a dampening effect on conversation. And his Slayer was, truth to tell, a mean drunk. Took some people that way. So best that he’d kept his visits solo.

Some other night, maybe. Go to the Bronze, shoot some pool, that’d be nice. Dancing, maybe.

“Yeah,” Dawn whispered when Buffy was safely turned away. “Some. Later. If…”

He found Dawn looking at him like he was the pup.

Didn’t take much thought to figure what she’d choked up on. “No, seems not. Didn’t pass muster, quite.”

“But you’re OK?”

“Except for the being dead, yeah….”

She gave him the elbow again. Little bit of a thing, he…didn’t want to think about things he’d done to girls about the same size and shape as her. Done was done. Had nothing to do with him and the Bit. He set a hand on her shoulder and she kicked his ankle but let the hand stay, which was probably progress.

That was when he decided to patrol on his own after everything settled down.

The night was young.

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