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quinaraWell, that's all she wrote, gang. I hope it's been OK! This is more like a light and sugary dessert course to round the whole thing off than anything else, but cross-fingers no one will hold that against me...
Turn and Face the Strain.
[Sequel to The More Things Stay the Same and As Good as a Rest.]
When Buffy thought about falling in love again, she didn't expect it to be nearly so complicated as it actually turns out to be.
Also, she didn't expect it to be Spike. (She's not sure he did either.)
[Notes + Chapter One: I'm Not a Political Animal, But.]
/
[Chapter Fourteen: Welcome to the Doublemeat Palace.]
.
Chapter Fifteen: Epilogue.
The happy bubble Buffy found herself in took about a week to burst. As was the way with bubbles, she didn't realise it was there until it was gone, but it was pretty blissful along the way. She and Spike had returned to Sunnydale on Tuesday evening, leaving Cordelia in charge of Angel’s mood swings, since it seemed like that was her full time job anyway, and the days afterwards gradually unfolded into something resembling normality.
Soon enough, it was the day of Xander and Anya’s wedding and, for the most part of the day, she bubbled along quite nicely. She greeted all the guests as they came in and avoided Xander’s Uncle Rory; humoured Halfrek and D’Hoffryn; had a sneaky, I’m-twenty-one-and-legal drink from the bar and found herself positively whisked into a sneaky corridor behind the function room, where her live-in vampire lover didn't even try and smudge her lipstick.
He was nuzzling her neck instead, hands smoothing satin around her waist and lower back. “Do you have any idea how beautiful you look today?” he was telling her. “The glow on you, could burn a man alive...”
It was hard not to give in to compliments like that, so she didn’t even try, let her hands wander across his waist and down into his belt region. Sure, she was dressed in radioactive green, so the glow was probably artificial, but she wasn’t about to protest at the response. “It’s a happy day,” she said, breathing in all the Spike-smell she could as she closed her eyes, cigarette smoke and everything. “I’m in a good place; my friends are getting married; you’re looking totally hot…”
And he was, even. As he pulled back to smirk at her, she was able to take it all in again. There was no kind of persuasion on earth that would have got him in a suit for Xander’s wedding, but she was pretty happy with how he’d scrubbed up. She’d given him a fifty-dollar loan out of her first policing paycheck and he’d given it back in double a few days later, promising her that he was only multiplying funds out of ‘legal, safe and boring’ gambling – and after that he seemed to find enough to get by.
OK, so she wasn’t entirely sure if he was up to anything dicey, but she was happy enough to hope whatever scams he was running weren’t about to blow up in their faces – nor anybody else’s. Maybe that meant she was turning into one of those naïve and nagging girlfriends from the TV, who didn’t like living with a cat burglar but never left them anyway, but… Well, she had a feeling that anyone Spike was taking money from felt like they wanted to give it to him, at least by the time the transaction took place. So – maybe that wasn’t so bad?
Whatever the implications, which she was trusting weren't that terrible, he was getting into a semi-comfortable place with money again, and that meant she’d been able to take him shopping. Not only that, but she’d been able to convince him it was perfectly normal to have more than one jacket in a wardrobe, so he could own both a new khaki jacket and the woolsy-tweed thing he’d had his eye on the last time. Not every item of clothing had to be loved and treasured to the exclusion of all others, so she had tried to impart. Slightly stunned by this revelation, he’d nonetheless followed her advice, and was currently teaming his jeans and boots with a silky black shirt and the blazer.
It hadn’t really looked that good in the mall – she’d mostly encouraged him to buy it as a point of principle – but now, after they’d already fooled around a little bit back at home and she’d messed up his hair, she couldn’t stop running her hands over it, with its seams and its darts and its lapels. Her Spike was all lines and angles and – hands, running shivers up her arms to her brace-free, cap-sleeved shoulders. OK, those were better than jacket. “I can’t ruin my make-up,” she informed him in a very important non-sequitur. He smirked at her, eyes dancing like she was wicked and he loved it. “I have to look picture-perfect.” Really, she was mostly trying to convince herself. “For the pictures.”
“Fine,” he replied, even as he stepped around her shoes and crowded her back against the wall. “But I think we can both accept you’re looking far, far too comfortable.” Hands that had been on her shoulders were trailing down her collarbones now, his right hand only pausing slightly at the puckered scar she was likely never to lose. Inches remained between their faces, enough for a long, intense stare as her breathing started picking up, as he leaned a forearm by her head to shield the view of any intruders.
She enjoyed her private stare, not least as his hand moved a little further down.
But then, “I should move out, you know,” he mumbled, like he’d been working himself up to saying it. “Find my own place again.”
“Why?” she asked, not worried yet as she rested her arms around his shoulders. It wasn’t like he’d moved in officially after all – and it was only temporary. “I know we said a few days, but, really, you don’t need to rush.” It had been nice having him in the house – and not much had changed, really. She still spent the day working on her own and they still patrolled together. So, now their sleeping together included a lot more actual sleeping and he was there for practically every mealtime, but she liked that. “I mean,” she conceded, accepting the bizarre possibility, “unless you want to…”
He sighed, seizing her around the waist and knocking their noses together three times – gently enough, she hoped, that she wouldn’t have to powder. “If I had my way neither of us would go anywhere,” he began. From the serious expression of his eyes, however, she knew there was a ‘but’ and, sure enough, it came. “But it’s your house, your house, and I don’t think Willow…”
All right, she could accept that. Willow spent a certain amount of time harrumphing. But – “Willow knows the rules,” Buffy was adamant all the same. “If she’s unhappy about something with the house, she has to say it out loud so we can discuss it. Like when we changed the wheaties.” That had been a tenet of the Buffy-Willow cohabitation agreement since college and there had been no revision of the contract. Unlike her one with Brian, which he said was in the mail. “When I ask she says it’s fine,” she told Spike, eyeing his eyes with hers and feeling sexy enough to find the blue erotic. “So it’s fine.”
“Fair enough,” he replied, glancing away but holding her closer while he did it. “All the same, I…” He hesitated, looking uncertain about whether she was going to be understanding about what he said next. Of course he went for it anyway. “I wouldn’t mind getting in some stuff, you know: books, music, maybe a bit of furniture. Your whole life’s in that room,” he added, and not for the first time she felt bad about making him seduce her while surrounded by old Dorothy Hamill memorabilia. “Wouldn’t mind somewhere where I feel like things belong to me.” And then he was nuzzling her neck again, because apparently both of them knew how easy she was. “Somewhere I can lure you proper into bed,” he described, so she was suddenly imagining dark sheets and throws, gothic candlesticks she’d never thought she’d miss, all her comfy cotton work clothes teased into a heap and replaced by a black silk nightie – no, midnight blue or green – bought especially for these long nights in. “The charm’s wearing off feeling like your soccer dad househusband.”
She knew what he meant. Even if he saved lives now, he was never going to be comfortable in a world of flowery wallpaper.
Still, it didn’t mean she couldn’t miss him when he was gone. “But…” It was all Dawn’s fault, Buffy decided. If she hadn’t made it so clear that she knew what had been going on in Buffy’s room, then they wouldn’t have felt the need to get all sensible and quiet and functional about things. “You’ll come back sometimes, right?” she asked, not caring if she sounded a little desperate. Sometimes Dawn stayed at Janice’s, after all, and if Willow and Tara kept making eyes at each other the way they were, houses were going to be free all over the place. “I’ll miss having you around…”
Unashamedly smelling her hair like a weirdo, he snorted. “You’re not getting rid of me that easily,” he scoffed, like she’d got the wrong impression entirely. “Told you once before, I’m rather fond of having you around to warm up my bed.” And she remembered, suppressing the urge to tell him he made a nice mattress ornament. (He did, though: he balanced out her sense of empty space and was nice to look at when she came back from the shower.) “It’s a bit like your two jackets business, innit?” he suggested, which did make her laugh, or actually giggle, which was embarrassingly more accurate. “It’d give us a choice about how we want to play things. And give me some space to put all my gear.”
“I did try to find you some room in my drawers,” she defended, pulling back to check he wasn’t actually upset about that. It wasn’t her fault it had been a losing battle against all the sale items she’d bought over the last couple of years; she couldn’t quite give up on them yet. “You’re the one who said piles would be easier.”
He was smiling. It was definitely a good look; she was going for it too. “It is easier,” he told her. “Last thing I want is to be smelling of those lavender coat hangers your mum insisted on filling the house with.” She swatted him for that, mostly because it was fun to find excuses to swat him, especially when it made him jump. “Doesn’t mean a man of my – sartorial elegance,” he continued, laying it on thick, “should be expected to live like that forever.”
Finally, she managed to translate the Spike-speak into English, and worked out that he was actually suggesting little-to-no reduction in the amount of time they spent together, only for her to come back to his ‘place’ sometimes, wherever that would be, so they didn’t always end patrol by having to decide whether they needed to get any shouty sex out of their system before they found somewhere comfy to roll around. Also, he wanted somewhere to accrue nicknacks and plan his not-so-nefarious schemes with a glass of bourbon, listen to his ugly music and read his smelly books. “OK,” she said at last, happy to see the crinkles in the corners of his eyes as she made him happy too. “That’s all fine with me.” After all, it sounded like the only thing she needed was a nightie, and she could manage that.
Neither of them could quite resist sealing their newly defined chapter of domestic happiness with a kiss, but that was the curse of bubbling. By the time she realised she was going to need to reapply at least some lip gloss there wasn’t any point in not letting it continue, so she made the moment worth it, trying to show her appreciation for the househusbanding with her lips and tongue alone. He, apparently, just wanted her too distracted to bridesmaid properly – and it was working. Even as the distraction contrarily reminded her that she was meant to be entertaining, it didn’t seem all that important.
At least, that was, until, yep, the bubble burst. “Buffy!” someone said, accompanied by the sound of a doorway bursting open. “Oh – you’re here.”
It was Kate. She was wearing dress pants and a fancy shirt, but it was definitely still her. As Buffy pulled back and Spike pulled out of her space, she could see that the other woman did not look like everything was going OK back inside. Even if they had different styles, they were getting a good colleague-type relationship going, so she could read that. “What is it?” Buffy asked.
“Willow’s looking for you,” Kate informed her, and Spike as well as she glanced his way. He was wiping lip gloss off his face, but even so Kate’s expression remained deadly serious. “Xander’s missing.”
She looked at Spike. He looked at her. All the world came rushing in like a flood.
In one of those really annoying coincidences, it was raining when Buffy bustled outside in her dress, completely not sure where Xander would have gone. He had a tendency to deal with his problems the way the movies had taught him, so she hoped that a walk in the rain had seemed the like the perfect answer to any crisis he was having – and that it was a blippy crisis they could deal with, rather than some sort of demon kidnapping where they’d lose the reservation and she would have to fight in the awful mermaid skirt she was wearing. Possibly wear it again.
Although, if it was a crisis, she didn’t know where it had come from. She remembered Anya’s crying jag in the Magic Box on her last day at the DMP, but that had only been stress, Buffy was certain. And she was sure both Anya and Xander had bonded with the Finns over their various marriage worries. They were solid. They had to be solid. They’d always been more solid than her.
Around the corner of the Bison Lodge’s main building, Buffy found a man in a tux leaning against the wall with one hand. He looked slightly overweight, had chubby cheeks, and he was vomiting into the water that was starting to run through the dirt and rubbish on the ground. He didn’t look anything like the Xander Buffy knew at all, but when he raised his head, which was pale and waxy, full of fear, she recognised that it wasn’t anybody else. Any last remnants of her bubble were shot all to hell. “Xan?” she asked, shivering as she felt the water falling on her. “What’s going on? Are you OK?”
“I can’t do it,” he told her, trembling. His stare was fixed on a point somewhere over Buffy’s shoulder and his words were barely coherent. “I can’t do that to her; I can’t do it.”
At least it sounded like the ‘it’ was something other than ‘not going through with the wedding’, Buffy thought. “Do what?” she tried to get him to explain a little more, asking gently. “What’s wrong?”
As if he’d only now realised she was there, Xander’s eyes slipped to hers and Buffy’s heart broke to see all the swirling uncertainty that was filling them. She knew she must have looked the same at some point in the last year, if not in the last few weeks or days, if not for days at a time, but she never expected to see the look on somebody else, let alone her best friend. “I’m gonna hurt her,” he said, hopeless. “I’m not ready for this.”
Then he was crumbling, so she trailed the train of her dress through the mud to catch him, taking his weight easily as he collapsed around her shoulders and sobbed into the rain. “What’s happened?” she asked again, still not able to work out how it had all gone wrong. He and Anya had made it all the way here from prom; that was so huge. Riley had come and gone, Tara had appeared, moved in and moved out. Spike had… He’d been after the Gem of Amarra when Xander and Anya had started going steady. That was like a lifetime ago, a literal lifetime and some years. “You and Anya are so great.” They had a beautiful love, didn’t they? She remembered thinking that once.
“I’m not worth it,” Xander dismissed, shaking her head against her shoulder like he was trying to block out the world. She was getting really, really damp now. So much for her attempts to look perfect today, even in the dress of doom. “I don’t know how to be with someone like her. I can’t do it.”
“Sure you can,” Buffy insisted, patting his back as the first twinge of worry came in through the surprise and confusion. It sounded like Xander really was thinking about not going through with the wedding and that, that wasn’t allowed to happen. She couldn’t force him, obviously, but her heart was already breaking for how Anya would feel if he didn’t come back. How he would feel in a few days’ time. Hell, how he was feeling now. “Just turn around and walk back inside, one step at a time; keep things short and tell her ‘I do’.” There was still time, wasn’t there? Buffy had no idea how long they had. “It’s easy,” she promised, even though she knew it was probably a lie. She could still remember how hard love could be, after all. If dimly.
“I don’t know how…” Pulling back, Xander looked like he wanted to throw up again, as pale as any vampire she came across, distinctly yellowish against the white of his shirt collar. “I saw the future,” he explained at last, if that was really an explanation. “Future Me came back and showed me what I do, what I become.” He squeezed his eyes shut, swallowing down whatever wanted out of him before he spoke again. “And I’m him, I’m my dad. I want Anya to be my mom, meek and… But she won’t, because she’s Anya, and she’s perfect, won’t put up with me – and I hate her,” he confessed, looking at Buffy like he wanted her to hate him too. “I hate her so much for it.”
This was the moment, Buffy decided – the moment more than any other moment that she hoped her SAT scores hadn’t been telling a complete lie, because she really needed to figure out a way not to screw this up. “OK,” she said, breaking it down. “First of all, Future You is not you.” And who the hell was this Future Xander? That wasn’t a question for now, but she was filing it away for later. This was Sunnydale; she would ignore it. “I don’t care what he said –” Or who the hell he is? “– but it sounds like he’s some twisted guy who’s ruined everything good about his life, and that’s not you.”
Xander looked her, completely not convinced. Looking at him, looking at the dingy surroundings and the raincloud, the sick on the ground, she wasn’t sure she was convincing herself.
Hoping she would end up somewhere sensible, Buffy rambled on. “What is the future anyway? I mean, when was the last time you read a prophecy that it wasn’t possible to completely subvert or whatever…?” No, that wasn’t getting anywhere either. Another tack: “I could go back in time and tell Past Me hipster jeans come into fashion and all the money she spends on leather pants is gonna be wasted when she only wears them a couple times – and that she should have saved for, you know, food. But – but that doesn’t change anything. That doesn’t mean she shouldn’t buy high-waist leather pants. You know what I mean?” That was a point, wasn’t it? “She loves those pants when she sees them twenty per cent off.” Waving a hand through the rain, she tried to draw her really tenuous analogy to some sort of conclusion. “It just means maybe she should treat them better, wear them more before their time is up. Not waste other money on other stuff… Right?”
Xander wasn’t following her. Even though the parallels were pretty clear as far as she was concerned, she could tell he was lost from the blankness of his face. At least he’d moved on from all-encompassing despair, but the confusion wasn’t a particularly good look for him either.
“What I’m saying is…” She tried again, rubbing water droplets into her arms as her hair plastered to her head. “Sure. Maybe you’ll screw up. But you can screw up in so many ways that there’s no reason to think about some specific one, especially if you know what it is and can try not to do it.” If you don’t wanna be your father, then don’t be him. Could she say that? She wasn’t sure if that was just too obvious to be helpful. “What if this is you messing up right now?”
Suddenly and a little wildly, Xander laughed. “Oh, don’t worry,” he said. “I figured that part out already.” He sounded more like himself again, which Buffy was grateful for. She just couldn’t be sure what sort of decision actually-himself-Xander was going to make, nor how she was supposed to know what the right one was. She didn’t know about relationships; she and Spike had pretty much been a total fluke, as far as she could tell – hadn’t they? “I just…” Xander kept on going, distracting her back to the situation at hand. “How can I get married now? I’m not ready. I really know I’m not. Look at me.” He held out his hands, showed off one ruined tuxedo jacket. “What kind of loser acts like this on his wedding day?” He shook his head, bitterly. “I’ve already failed.”
“No you haven’t,” Buffy told him quickly, insistent as he looked down. “You really haven’t.” This much she knew, even if the rest of her advice was crap and mostly amounted to stupid thoughts she had in the shower about the money she’d wasted on leather over the years. “You don’t fail till you give up and go home…” Seriously, she knew this. “For god’s sake, Xan,” she added, trying to shout him out of his torpor. “Anya loves you!” He was forgetting that part, she could tell. When she said it he looked up. “All you need to do to make her happy is be with her. Everything else is a bonus. It sucks a little bit, because it isn’t fair at all, but the worst thing you could do to her is leave.” Really, that was what he had to understand. “She’s not gonna care if you come back now, all soggy Xander – if you don’t have any vows to say, if you’re afraid. She just won’t. She’ll marry you all the same.”
As Xander stared back at her, Buffy realised that, out of all of them, he was the one who’d never had somebody walk out on him. Cordelia had dumped him, obviously, but he’d been cheating on her with Willow, so that was kind of predictable. He didn’t actually know what it was like to try, try really hard, and still have the person he loved decide that he wasn’t enough on his own. She hoped she could make him understand, if only what a gift it was that Anya clearly believed in him.
“I can’t,” he began, before swallowing again, hair all matted across his forehead. “I can’t go back there and pretend I’m ready. I can’t – go back to my family and pretend that everything’s fine.”
“You don’t have to be ready,” Buffy told him, shaking her own head, her rain-ruined hair starting to fall out of its pins and tendril down her neck. “You don’t have to be fine and you don’t have to be… You don’t have to be perfect to be happy.” She knew that, didn’t she? She’d worked it out?
It was possible she’d managed to convince him. He slumped, almost like demons did when she’d stabbed them in the stomach with a sword. “I don’t ever wanna hate her, Buffy,” he confessed in one last expression of hopelessness, rubbing his eyes like she hadn’t already seen him cry.
Now, however, she finally understood. “Well, you aren’t ever gonna know that,” she said, straight out. “Not with anyone. What you’ve gotta decide…” Oh, no, she realised as the thought crossed her mind of what she was meant to say – this was going to sound hokey. She had to say it anyway, but hopefully Xander wouldn’t realise she was doing some sort of Lifetime thing where she shared the lessons she’d learned with the world before she went off to raise orphans somewhere dusty. “You’ve gotta decide whether or not you trust her not to make it hurt. You know, the love.” There, she said it. Could they please get on with this wedding now? She was getting really cold out here.
“Is that your advice?” Xander asked her, starting to look not only like Xander but a little more like he was alive, which was nice to see. It was possible he’d seen through her cunning façade. “Please don’t tell me you worked that out with the Evil Dead – else I think I’m gonna puke. Again.”
She was giving him a pass on that comment, just because they were in exceptional circumstances. Though, really, she shouldn’t let him get away with it. “You puke all you want,” she patronised, eyeing him to make sure he could take it. “It’s only Anya who’s gonna smell ya.” And, yeah, that was a bad comeback anyway. She should have quit while she was ahead.
But then she was anti-quitting today, wasn’t she? Yeah, she was right on message, sticking to her guns. So there.
The wedding was not, by any stretch of the imagination, perfect. Under the circumstances, however, Buffy didn’t think it went too badly.
When she and Xander walked back in through the main entrance of the lodge, they found something quite a lot like a massacre, with Spike in his element where he stood over one dead robe-wearing demon. A wide circle had formed around him, but he was oblivious, licking yellow blood off his fingers and tilting his head to one side as if to say ‘not bad’. Clearly, she couldn’t take him anywhere.
Anya was standing a little to the side, looking dishevelled and teary, but not nearly so dishevelled as Xander, who immediately rushed to within three feet of her – before remembering, apparently, that he’d been about to leave her at the altar and should probably be acting a little more conflicted than devoted. After a couple of seconds, however, he seemed to decide he didn’t care and pulled Anya into what was likely a very damp hug. Her dress was going to suffer.
Swishing a slow, dishcloth-style path in her squelching dress shoes, Buffy moved further into the room to take a look around. There was some sort of argument going on, possibly a brawl, all noisy and disordered. Harrises and demons were facing off in the aisle, even though Kate seemed to be giving Uncle Rory a talking to like he’d never had before. Tara was standing on the dais at the front of the room, looking nervous and awkward with Willow by her side. It mostly looked under control?
“Hello love,” Spike said then as he caught sight of her, stepping over the demon to greet her by a large display stand of flowers. “You’ve missed the best bit of the party.”
Snorting, Buffy decided she could leave the fighting for the others. At least for right now. “And I thought Xander was the only mess here…” But he did look kind of dashing, didn’t he, with that post-fight grin on his face? “What happened?”
“Some old curse-ee of Anya’s showed up,” the vampire she loved explained with a shrug, taking in her damp appearance. “Pretended to be some old man to try and ruin her big day – and you look bloody freezing,” he interrupted himself. “Here,” he added, peeling off his jacket and throwing its warm tweediness around her shoulders.
She pulled it around her, tucking her arms into the sleeves. The lining made her shiver, but that was only because it was good lining. And a good jacket. It already smelled like smoke. “Oh, right,” she realised a moment later, just as she was smiling at Spike’s frown to thank him. “That’s what that was. Future Xander.”
“Eh?” Spike asked, but he didn’t push it when she shook her head. Nodding over to where Present Xander and Anya were talking intensely, enough that more tears were smudging around Anya’s eyes, he changed the subject. “Was he trying to do a runner, then?”
“Kinda,” Buffy confirmed, sadly. “But I think I may actually have talked him out of it.” And, honestly, no one could be more surprised about that than her, after the event. “With talking and everything.”
With one bark of laughter, but very wisely making no further comment, Spike took one more look at her shivering body before he put an arm around her shoulders and scooped her sideways into his embrace. All of their arms ended up crossed over her front, her back pressed up against his chest; it was surprisingly warm. More than that, let let them both keep an eye on Xander and his gesturing.
“I used to think they had it all worked out,” she commented as they watched, still not sure she could believe it wasn’t true. “Every time I fell apart, they’d still be going strong. Solid.” Spike mmmed his agreement, rubbing the chill out of her arms. He was keeping watch over her friends, but it was hard to tell whether he actually cared, or if he only cared about her. In the end, she wasn’t sure it made a difference. “I figured they were the light at the end of the tunnel or something, you know?” she continued, leaning back a little more, content. “Only now we’re here, and they’re as close to the edge as I’ve ever been.”
“Yeah, well,” Spike murmured, sounding like he was distracted by another flare up of the brawl in the congregation. “Things change, don’t they?”
“I guess so,” she replied, accepting. Because that was pretty much the truth of it.
.
[End.]
Turn and Face the Strain.
[Sequel to The More Things Stay the Same and As Good as a Rest.]
When Buffy thought about falling in love again, she didn't expect it to be nearly so complicated as it actually turns out to be.
Also, she didn't expect it to be Spike. (She's not sure he did either.)
[Notes + Chapter One: I'm Not a Political Animal, But.]
/
[Chapter Fourteen: Welcome to the Doublemeat Palace.]
.
Chapter Fifteen: Epilogue.
The happy bubble Buffy found herself in took about a week to burst. As was the way with bubbles, she didn't realise it was there until it was gone, but it was pretty blissful along the way. She and Spike had returned to Sunnydale on Tuesday evening, leaving Cordelia in charge of Angel’s mood swings, since it seemed like that was her full time job anyway, and the days afterwards gradually unfolded into something resembling normality.
Soon enough, it was the day of Xander and Anya’s wedding and, for the most part of the day, she bubbled along quite nicely. She greeted all the guests as they came in and avoided Xander’s Uncle Rory; humoured Halfrek and D’Hoffryn; had a sneaky, I’m-twenty-one-and-legal drink from the bar and found herself positively whisked into a sneaky corridor behind the function room, where her live-in vampire lover didn't even try and smudge her lipstick.
He was nuzzling her neck instead, hands smoothing satin around her waist and lower back. “Do you have any idea how beautiful you look today?” he was telling her. “The glow on you, could burn a man alive...”
It was hard not to give in to compliments like that, so she didn’t even try, let her hands wander across his waist and down into his belt region. Sure, she was dressed in radioactive green, so the glow was probably artificial, but she wasn’t about to protest at the response. “It’s a happy day,” she said, breathing in all the Spike-smell she could as she closed her eyes, cigarette smoke and everything. “I’m in a good place; my friends are getting married; you’re looking totally hot…”
And he was, even. As he pulled back to smirk at her, she was able to take it all in again. There was no kind of persuasion on earth that would have got him in a suit for Xander’s wedding, but she was pretty happy with how he’d scrubbed up. She’d given him a fifty-dollar loan out of her first policing paycheck and he’d given it back in double a few days later, promising her that he was only multiplying funds out of ‘legal, safe and boring’ gambling – and after that he seemed to find enough to get by.
OK, so she wasn’t entirely sure if he was up to anything dicey, but she was happy enough to hope whatever scams he was running weren’t about to blow up in their faces – nor anybody else’s. Maybe that meant she was turning into one of those naïve and nagging girlfriends from the TV, who didn’t like living with a cat burglar but never left them anyway, but… Well, she had a feeling that anyone Spike was taking money from felt like they wanted to give it to him, at least by the time the transaction took place. So – maybe that wasn’t so bad?
Whatever the implications, which she was trusting weren't that terrible, he was getting into a semi-comfortable place with money again, and that meant she’d been able to take him shopping. Not only that, but she’d been able to convince him it was perfectly normal to have more than one jacket in a wardrobe, so he could own both a new khaki jacket and the woolsy-tweed thing he’d had his eye on the last time. Not every item of clothing had to be loved and treasured to the exclusion of all others, so she had tried to impart. Slightly stunned by this revelation, he’d nonetheless followed her advice, and was currently teaming his jeans and boots with a silky black shirt and the blazer.
It hadn’t really looked that good in the mall – she’d mostly encouraged him to buy it as a point of principle – but now, after they’d already fooled around a little bit back at home and she’d messed up his hair, she couldn’t stop running her hands over it, with its seams and its darts and its lapels. Her Spike was all lines and angles and – hands, running shivers up her arms to her brace-free, cap-sleeved shoulders. OK, those were better than jacket. “I can’t ruin my make-up,” she informed him in a very important non-sequitur. He smirked at her, eyes dancing like she was wicked and he loved it. “I have to look picture-perfect.” Really, she was mostly trying to convince herself. “For the pictures.”
“Fine,” he replied, even as he stepped around her shoes and crowded her back against the wall. “But I think we can both accept you’re looking far, far too comfortable.” Hands that had been on her shoulders were trailing down her collarbones now, his right hand only pausing slightly at the puckered scar she was likely never to lose. Inches remained between their faces, enough for a long, intense stare as her breathing started picking up, as he leaned a forearm by her head to shield the view of any intruders.
She enjoyed her private stare, not least as his hand moved a little further down.
But then, “I should move out, you know,” he mumbled, like he’d been working himself up to saying it. “Find my own place again.”
“Why?” she asked, not worried yet as she rested her arms around his shoulders. It wasn’t like he’d moved in officially after all – and it was only temporary. “I know we said a few days, but, really, you don’t need to rush.” It had been nice having him in the house – and not much had changed, really. She still spent the day working on her own and they still patrolled together. So, now their sleeping together included a lot more actual sleeping and he was there for practically every mealtime, but she liked that. “I mean,” she conceded, accepting the bizarre possibility, “unless you want to…”
He sighed, seizing her around the waist and knocking their noses together three times – gently enough, she hoped, that she wouldn’t have to powder. “If I had my way neither of us would go anywhere,” he began. From the serious expression of his eyes, however, she knew there was a ‘but’ and, sure enough, it came. “But it’s your house, your house, and I don’t think Willow…”
All right, she could accept that. Willow spent a certain amount of time harrumphing. But – “Willow knows the rules,” Buffy was adamant all the same. “If she’s unhappy about something with the house, she has to say it out loud so we can discuss it. Like when we changed the wheaties.” That had been a tenet of the Buffy-Willow cohabitation agreement since college and there had been no revision of the contract. Unlike her one with Brian, which he said was in the mail. “When I ask she says it’s fine,” she told Spike, eyeing his eyes with hers and feeling sexy enough to find the blue erotic. “So it’s fine.”
“Fair enough,” he replied, glancing away but holding her closer while he did it. “All the same, I…” He hesitated, looking uncertain about whether she was going to be understanding about what he said next. Of course he went for it anyway. “I wouldn’t mind getting in some stuff, you know: books, music, maybe a bit of furniture. Your whole life’s in that room,” he added, and not for the first time she felt bad about making him seduce her while surrounded by old Dorothy Hamill memorabilia. “Wouldn’t mind somewhere where I feel like things belong to me.” And then he was nuzzling her neck again, because apparently both of them knew how easy she was. “Somewhere I can lure you proper into bed,” he described, so she was suddenly imagining dark sheets and throws, gothic candlesticks she’d never thought she’d miss, all her comfy cotton work clothes teased into a heap and replaced by a black silk nightie – no, midnight blue or green – bought especially for these long nights in. “The charm’s wearing off feeling like your soccer dad househusband.”
She knew what he meant. Even if he saved lives now, he was never going to be comfortable in a world of flowery wallpaper.
Still, it didn’t mean she couldn’t miss him when he was gone. “But…” It was all Dawn’s fault, Buffy decided. If she hadn’t made it so clear that she knew what had been going on in Buffy’s room, then they wouldn’t have felt the need to get all sensible and quiet and functional about things. “You’ll come back sometimes, right?” she asked, not caring if she sounded a little desperate. Sometimes Dawn stayed at Janice’s, after all, and if Willow and Tara kept making eyes at each other the way they were, houses were going to be free all over the place. “I’ll miss having you around…”
Unashamedly smelling her hair like a weirdo, he snorted. “You’re not getting rid of me that easily,” he scoffed, like she’d got the wrong impression entirely. “Told you once before, I’m rather fond of having you around to warm up my bed.” And she remembered, suppressing the urge to tell him he made a nice mattress ornament. (He did, though: he balanced out her sense of empty space and was nice to look at when she came back from the shower.) “It’s a bit like your two jackets business, innit?” he suggested, which did make her laugh, or actually giggle, which was embarrassingly more accurate. “It’d give us a choice about how we want to play things. And give me some space to put all my gear.”
“I did try to find you some room in my drawers,” she defended, pulling back to check he wasn’t actually upset about that. It wasn’t her fault it had been a losing battle against all the sale items she’d bought over the last couple of years; she couldn’t quite give up on them yet. “You’re the one who said piles would be easier.”
He was smiling. It was definitely a good look; she was going for it too. “It is easier,” he told her. “Last thing I want is to be smelling of those lavender coat hangers your mum insisted on filling the house with.” She swatted him for that, mostly because it was fun to find excuses to swat him, especially when it made him jump. “Doesn’t mean a man of my – sartorial elegance,” he continued, laying it on thick, “should be expected to live like that forever.”
Finally, she managed to translate the Spike-speak into English, and worked out that he was actually suggesting little-to-no reduction in the amount of time they spent together, only for her to come back to his ‘place’ sometimes, wherever that would be, so they didn’t always end patrol by having to decide whether they needed to get any shouty sex out of their system before they found somewhere comfy to roll around. Also, he wanted somewhere to accrue nicknacks and plan his not-so-nefarious schemes with a glass of bourbon, listen to his ugly music and read his smelly books. “OK,” she said at last, happy to see the crinkles in the corners of his eyes as she made him happy too. “That’s all fine with me.” After all, it sounded like the only thing she needed was a nightie, and she could manage that.
Neither of them could quite resist sealing their newly defined chapter of domestic happiness with a kiss, but that was the curse of bubbling. By the time she realised she was going to need to reapply at least some lip gloss there wasn’t any point in not letting it continue, so she made the moment worth it, trying to show her appreciation for the househusbanding with her lips and tongue alone. He, apparently, just wanted her too distracted to bridesmaid properly – and it was working. Even as the distraction contrarily reminded her that she was meant to be entertaining, it didn’t seem all that important.
At least, that was, until, yep, the bubble burst. “Buffy!” someone said, accompanied by the sound of a doorway bursting open. “Oh – you’re here.”
It was Kate. She was wearing dress pants and a fancy shirt, but it was definitely still her. As Buffy pulled back and Spike pulled out of her space, she could see that the other woman did not look like everything was going OK back inside. Even if they had different styles, they were getting a good colleague-type relationship going, so she could read that. “What is it?” Buffy asked.
“Willow’s looking for you,” Kate informed her, and Spike as well as she glanced his way. He was wiping lip gloss off his face, but even so Kate’s expression remained deadly serious. “Xander’s missing.”
She looked at Spike. He looked at her. All the world came rushing in like a flood.
In one of those really annoying coincidences, it was raining when Buffy bustled outside in her dress, completely not sure where Xander would have gone. He had a tendency to deal with his problems the way the movies had taught him, so she hoped that a walk in the rain had seemed the like the perfect answer to any crisis he was having – and that it was a blippy crisis they could deal with, rather than some sort of demon kidnapping where they’d lose the reservation and she would have to fight in the awful mermaid skirt she was wearing. Possibly wear it again.
Although, if it was a crisis, she didn’t know where it had come from. She remembered Anya’s crying jag in the Magic Box on her last day at the DMP, but that had only been stress, Buffy was certain. And she was sure both Anya and Xander had bonded with the Finns over their various marriage worries. They were solid. They had to be solid. They’d always been more solid than her.
Around the corner of the Bison Lodge’s main building, Buffy found a man in a tux leaning against the wall with one hand. He looked slightly overweight, had chubby cheeks, and he was vomiting into the water that was starting to run through the dirt and rubbish on the ground. He didn’t look anything like the Xander Buffy knew at all, but when he raised his head, which was pale and waxy, full of fear, she recognised that it wasn’t anybody else. Any last remnants of her bubble were shot all to hell. “Xan?” she asked, shivering as she felt the water falling on her. “What’s going on? Are you OK?”
“I can’t do it,” he told her, trembling. His stare was fixed on a point somewhere over Buffy’s shoulder and his words were barely coherent. “I can’t do that to her; I can’t do it.”
At least it sounded like the ‘it’ was something other than ‘not going through with the wedding’, Buffy thought. “Do what?” she tried to get him to explain a little more, asking gently. “What’s wrong?”
As if he’d only now realised she was there, Xander’s eyes slipped to hers and Buffy’s heart broke to see all the swirling uncertainty that was filling them. She knew she must have looked the same at some point in the last year, if not in the last few weeks or days, if not for days at a time, but she never expected to see the look on somebody else, let alone her best friend. “I’m gonna hurt her,” he said, hopeless. “I’m not ready for this.”
Then he was crumbling, so she trailed the train of her dress through the mud to catch him, taking his weight easily as he collapsed around her shoulders and sobbed into the rain. “What’s happened?” she asked again, still not able to work out how it had all gone wrong. He and Anya had made it all the way here from prom; that was so huge. Riley had come and gone, Tara had appeared, moved in and moved out. Spike had… He’d been after the Gem of Amarra when Xander and Anya had started going steady. That was like a lifetime ago, a literal lifetime and some years. “You and Anya are so great.” They had a beautiful love, didn’t they? She remembered thinking that once.
“I’m not worth it,” Xander dismissed, shaking her head against her shoulder like he was trying to block out the world. She was getting really, really damp now. So much for her attempts to look perfect today, even in the dress of doom. “I don’t know how to be with someone like her. I can’t do it.”
“Sure you can,” Buffy insisted, patting his back as the first twinge of worry came in through the surprise and confusion. It sounded like Xander really was thinking about not going through with the wedding and that, that wasn’t allowed to happen. She couldn’t force him, obviously, but her heart was already breaking for how Anya would feel if he didn’t come back. How he would feel in a few days’ time. Hell, how he was feeling now. “Just turn around and walk back inside, one step at a time; keep things short and tell her ‘I do’.” There was still time, wasn’t there? Buffy had no idea how long they had. “It’s easy,” she promised, even though she knew it was probably a lie. She could still remember how hard love could be, after all. If dimly.
“I don’t know how…” Pulling back, Xander looked like he wanted to throw up again, as pale as any vampire she came across, distinctly yellowish against the white of his shirt collar. “I saw the future,” he explained at last, if that was really an explanation. “Future Me came back and showed me what I do, what I become.” He squeezed his eyes shut, swallowing down whatever wanted out of him before he spoke again. “And I’m him, I’m my dad. I want Anya to be my mom, meek and… But she won’t, because she’s Anya, and she’s perfect, won’t put up with me – and I hate her,” he confessed, looking at Buffy like he wanted her to hate him too. “I hate her so much for it.”
This was the moment, Buffy decided – the moment more than any other moment that she hoped her SAT scores hadn’t been telling a complete lie, because she really needed to figure out a way not to screw this up. “OK,” she said, breaking it down. “First of all, Future You is not you.” And who the hell was this Future Xander? That wasn’t a question for now, but she was filing it away for later. This was Sunnydale; she would ignore it. “I don’t care what he said –” Or who the hell he is? “– but it sounds like he’s some twisted guy who’s ruined everything good about his life, and that’s not you.”
Xander looked her, completely not convinced. Looking at him, looking at the dingy surroundings and the raincloud, the sick on the ground, she wasn’t sure she was convincing herself.
Hoping she would end up somewhere sensible, Buffy rambled on. “What is the future anyway? I mean, when was the last time you read a prophecy that it wasn’t possible to completely subvert or whatever…?” No, that wasn’t getting anywhere either. Another tack: “I could go back in time and tell Past Me hipster jeans come into fashion and all the money she spends on leather pants is gonna be wasted when she only wears them a couple times – and that she should have saved for, you know, food. But – but that doesn’t change anything. That doesn’t mean she shouldn’t buy high-waist leather pants. You know what I mean?” That was a point, wasn’t it? “She loves those pants when she sees them twenty per cent off.” Waving a hand through the rain, she tried to draw her really tenuous analogy to some sort of conclusion. “It just means maybe she should treat them better, wear them more before their time is up. Not waste other money on other stuff… Right?”
Xander wasn’t following her. Even though the parallels were pretty clear as far as she was concerned, she could tell he was lost from the blankness of his face. At least he’d moved on from all-encompassing despair, but the confusion wasn’t a particularly good look for him either.
“What I’m saying is…” She tried again, rubbing water droplets into her arms as her hair plastered to her head. “Sure. Maybe you’ll screw up. But you can screw up in so many ways that there’s no reason to think about some specific one, especially if you know what it is and can try not to do it.” If you don’t wanna be your father, then don’t be him. Could she say that? She wasn’t sure if that was just too obvious to be helpful. “What if this is you messing up right now?”
Suddenly and a little wildly, Xander laughed. “Oh, don’t worry,” he said. “I figured that part out already.” He sounded more like himself again, which Buffy was grateful for. She just couldn’t be sure what sort of decision actually-himself-Xander was going to make, nor how she was supposed to know what the right one was. She didn’t know about relationships; she and Spike had pretty much been a total fluke, as far as she could tell – hadn’t they? “I just…” Xander kept on going, distracting her back to the situation at hand. “How can I get married now? I’m not ready. I really know I’m not. Look at me.” He held out his hands, showed off one ruined tuxedo jacket. “What kind of loser acts like this on his wedding day?” He shook his head, bitterly. “I’ve already failed.”
“No you haven’t,” Buffy told him quickly, insistent as he looked down. “You really haven’t.” This much she knew, even if the rest of her advice was crap and mostly amounted to stupid thoughts she had in the shower about the money she’d wasted on leather over the years. “You don’t fail till you give up and go home…” Seriously, she knew this. “For god’s sake, Xan,” she added, trying to shout him out of his torpor. “Anya loves you!” He was forgetting that part, she could tell. When she said it he looked up. “All you need to do to make her happy is be with her. Everything else is a bonus. It sucks a little bit, because it isn’t fair at all, but the worst thing you could do to her is leave.” Really, that was what he had to understand. “She’s not gonna care if you come back now, all soggy Xander – if you don’t have any vows to say, if you’re afraid. She just won’t. She’ll marry you all the same.”
As Xander stared back at her, Buffy realised that, out of all of them, he was the one who’d never had somebody walk out on him. Cordelia had dumped him, obviously, but he’d been cheating on her with Willow, so that was kind of predictable. He didn’t actually know what it was like to try, try really hard, and still have the person he loved decide that he wasn’t enough on his own. She hoped she could make him understand, if only what a gift it was that Anya clearly believed in him.
“I can’t,” he began, before swallowing again, hair all matted across his forehead. “I can’t go back there and pretend I’m ready. I can’t – go back to my family and pretend that everything’s fine.”
“You don’t have to be ready,” Buffy told him, shaking her own head, her rain-ruined hair starting to fall out of its pins and tendril down her neck. “You don’t have to be fine and you don’t have to be… You don’t have to be perfect to be happy.” She knew that, didn’t she? She’d worked it out?
It was possible she’d managed to convince him. He slumped, almost like demons did when she’d stabbed them in the stomach with a sword. “I don’t ever wanna hate her, Buffy,” he confessed in one last expression of hopelessness, rubbing his eyes like she hadn’t already seen him cry.
Now, however, she finally understood. “Well, you aren’t ever gonna know that,” she said, straight out. “Not with anyone. What you’ve gotta decide…” Oh, no, she realised as the thought crossed her mind of what she was meant to say – this was going to sound hokey. She had to say it anyway, but hopefully Xander wouldn’t realise she was doing some sort of Lifetime thing where she shared the lessons she’d learned with the world before she went off to raise orphans somewhere dusty. “You’ve gotta decide whether or not you trust her not to make it hurt. You know, the love.” There, she said it. Could they please get on with this wedding now? She was getting really cold out here.
“Is that your advice?” Xander asked her, starting to look not only like Xander but a little more like he was alive, which was nice to see. It was possible he’d seen through her cunning façade. “Please don’t tell me you worked that out with the Evil Dead – else I think I’m gonna puke. Again.”
She was giving him a pass on that comment, just because they were in exceptional circumstances. Though, really, she shouldn’t let him get away with it. “You puke all you want,” she patronised, eyeing him to make sure he could take it. “It’s only Anya who’s gonna smell ya.” And, yeah, that was a bad comeback anyway. She should have quit while she was ahead.
But then she was anti-quitting today, wasn’t she? Yeah, she was right on message, sticking to her guns. So there.
The wedding was not, by any stretch of the imagination, perfect. Under the circumstances, however, Buffy didn’t think it went too badly.
When she and Xander walked back in through the main entrance of the lodge, they found something quite a lot like a massacre, with Spike in his element where he stood over one dead robe-wearing demon. A wide circle had formed around him, but he was oblivious, licking yellow blood off his fingers and tilting his head to one side as if to say ‘not bad’. Clearly, she couldn’t take him anywhere.
Anya was standing a little to the side, looking dishevelled and teary, but not nearly so dishevelled as Xander, who immediately rushed to within three feet of her – before remembering, apparently, that he’d been about to leave her at the altar and should probably be acting a little more conflicted than devoted. After a couple of seconds, however, he seemed to decide he didn’t care and pulled Anya into what was likely a very damp hug. Her dress was going to suffer.
Swishing a slow, dishcloth-style path in her squelching dress shoes, Buffy moved further into the room to take a look around. There was some sort of argument going on, possibly a brawl, all noisy and disordered. Harrises and demons were facing off in the aisle, even though Kate seemed to be giving Uncle Rory a talking to like he’d never had before. Tara was standing on the dais at the front of the room, looking nervous and awkward with Willow by her side. It mostly looked under control?
“Hello love,” Spike said then as he caught sight of her, stepping over the demon to greet her by a large display stand of flowers. “You’ve missed the best bit of the party.”
Snorting, Buffy decided she could leave the fighting for the others. At least for right now. “And I thought Xander was the only mess here…” But he did look kind of dashing, didn’t he, with that post-fight grin on his face? “What happened?”
“Some old curse-ee of Anya’s showed up,” the vampire she loved explained with a shrug, taking in her damp appearance. “Pretended to be some old man to try and ruin her big day – and you look bloody freezing,” he interrupted himself. “Here,” he added, peeling off his jacket and throwing its warm tweediness around her shoulders.
She pulled it around her, tucking her arms into the sleeves. The lining made her shiver, but that was only because it was good lining. And a good jacket. It already smelled like smoke. “Oh, right,” she realised a moment later, just as she was smiling at Spike’s frown to thank him. “That’s what that was. Future Xander.”
“Eh?” Spike asked, but he didn’t push it when she shook her head. Nodding over to where Present Xander and Anya were talking intensely, enough that more tears were smudging around Anya’s eyes, he changed the subject. “Was he trying to do a runner, then?”
“Kinda,” Buffy confirmed, sadly. “But I think I may actually have talked him out of it.” And, honestly, no one could be more surprised about that than her, after the event. “With talking and everything.”
With one bark of laughter, but very wisely making no further comment, Spike took one more look at her shivering body before he put an arm around her shoulders and scooped her sideways into his embrace. All of their arms ended up crossed over her front, her back pressed up against his chest; it was surprisingly warm. More than that, let let them both keep an eye on Xander and his gesturing.
“I used to think they had it all worked out,” she commented as they watched, still not sure she could believe it wasn’t true. “Every time I fell apart, they’d still be going strong. Solid.” Spike mmmed his agreement, rubbing the chill out of her arms. He was keeping watch over her friends, but it was hard to tell whether he actually cared, or if he only cared about her. In the end, she wasn’t sure it made a difference. “I figured they were the light at the end of the tunnel or something, you know?” she continued, leaning back a little more, content. “Only now we’re here, and they’re as close to the edge as I’ve ever been.”
“Yeah, well,” Spike murmured, sounding like he was distracted by another flare up of the brawl in the congregation. “Things change, don’t they?”
“I guess so,” she replied, accepting. Because that was pretty much the truth of it.
.
[End.]
(no subject)
Date: 26/05/2012 02:08 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 27/05/2012 18:36 (UTC)