Subtleties
by
Anna S
Part Four
Nine Inch Nails. James Brown. Black Flag. Sex Pistols. Blondie. The Clash. Chuck Berry. Aretha Franklin. Dusty Springfield. Billie Holiday. Bruce Springsteen. Nirvana.
Schizophrenic vampire with headphones and an AmEx card, thinks Xander, passing through the living room where the other man is jamming imperceptibly to musical static, painting his toenails a violent red, watching Howard Stern with the volume turned off, messaging Dawn on the iMac, drinking Jim Beam, and tracking Xander without lifting his gaze.
So much for the soul of adulthood.
Clearly, Spike doesn't know what to do with himself, yet within a week he's managed to find a hundred ways to waste time during Xander's daily absence. And I'm paying for all this, Xander thinks. Often.
But he decides he may like the red toenails, which are the latest Hollywood fashion for men, or so Dawn has told them both. The polish was her welcome-home present to Spike, and so he is dutifully applying her gift so that the next time she sees him, she'll beam in that luminous, toothy way. At least that's Xander's guess for Spike's motives.
Hours later, and Spike is staring at his red toenails with a displeased or maybe uncertain frown as he sits on the rail of the deck. Waves crash just out of sight, and they talk about something or other. When a vampire hurtles over the rail to attack, Spike is amazed, laughs, then sits there cracking jokes and watching while Xander bats the intruder around and finally stakes him with a piece of driftwood.
After which they have great sex, Xander nailing Spike over the edge of a crude, wooden patio table workshopped sometime last year, Spike's jeans shoved down around cool pale thighs, his ass slick, ready to be used even though they've been apart all day. Disturbing on a certain level, also crazy-making, driving Xander to fuck him harder, rock the table, unable to get deep enough. Change jingles in his pockets, belt ends swing loose, and he goes bareback, which he's never done with anyone else. If this were a movie, firecrackers would be going off. And as Xander's fucking he's thinking of his exertions, the vampire he just dusted, and how tight Spike's ass is, how beautiful his shirt-stripped back is, and those arms, posed like a swimmer's above his head, and his own back is sweaty but he gets sudden chills at how Spike is folded across the table, unmoving, untouched, ass flush to Xander's hips, letting himself be used. Hair on his neck lifting, excited, it's all Xander can do not to come as he figures out how perfectly Spike has read his own unspoken fantasy. It's scary. It's too much. He comes with forceful thrusts up that tight ass, taking exactly what he wants with the pretense of power: a rich human, calling the shots, totally in control of his dependent, obedient toy.
But when he's done, he kisses Spike's neck and gets him off with the laziest possible touch, with the palm and rolling heel of his hand, fingers stroking wood, lifting and squeezing Spike's balls. Spike is always startlingly easy to please. Xander thinks that someone so old and tired of existence as he often seems to be would find it hard to come, but he's got a knack for sex, a well of orgasms on tap, and he seems to like Xander's touch, leaning back against him the way a woman slides into a coat as you help her.
Years ago, post-soul, Spike had been looking pretty ragged. Now he looks twentysomething and fine, smooth and immortal. He looks like exactly what he is: a body kept hanging on the last breath of life, a piece of art preserved by lack of sun.
Days go by, and he takes Spike out at night, burning the candle at both ends. Sometimes to kill things, sometimes to shop, sometimes for nachos and flicks. In malls and on certain streets, Spike draws eyes like a movie star and doesn't notice. Sunnydale has attracted a Hollywood element during the last few years, which in a world of bizarre improbabilities still manages to make the short list, but there are now chic weekend bungalows cropping up like mushrooms along the shore, and the town feels the occasional ripple of an industry party that isn't publicized but somehow leaks to the locals. Spike comes across as one of those visiting exotics. He's a creature, but his breed is confused with a more ordinary one. His accent makes waiters straighten up and clerks shift into deferential mode the way Xander's money never has. It's pretty funny.
They go to Willow's for dinner, visit Dawn at school, drive by Revello to look at the old house, break into the rebuilt Hellmouth High School and wander the halls. Fuck in odd places around town that Xander always wanted to fuck in. He thinks of Buffy sometimes, and what she'd say if she knew about this. It's bizarre.
At one point he gets some bills in the mail and stares at the figures and thinks: no way. No fucking way. Then when he intends to confront Spike, he sees that depthless lack of joy, that need for distraction, and he pays them and says nothing. It has nothing to do with being used or manipulated, or with love--not yet anyway, because they're not on any kind of wavelength for that. It's just that, why fight? He can afford it. It's extravagant, keeping a pet vampire, but after all--
"How'd you get so rich, anyway?" Spike asks early on, as they're shopping.
Xander: "I try not to think about that." Off Spike's look: "It's nothing...it's, okay, I had this conversation once with Will, and then months later I win the lottery, eight point seven million, and ever since then I just, I can't stop making money."
Spike, brows lifting: "She worked the mojo for you?"
Xander: "She says she didn't."
Spike, clearly shrugging the whole issue off as he fingers a shirt: "Yeah. Gotten good at lying, hasn't she."
Lottery, business investments, fortunate stocks, and here he is.
He can afford Spike, and worrying about being taken advantage of is pretty lame, when you get down to it. Despite his mercenary claims, Spike--it's clear--doesn't give a flying, shit-flinging monkey about money except as a means to buy things to pass the hours. He never looks at price, just hands over the plastic, lets Xander pay the bills on the backend. Gives his backend up for bills. No complaints.
It's a workable arrangement, strangely, and it sustains itself for more than two weeks. Xander keeps waiting for the other shoe to drop. Thinks he'll come home one day to find odd demons milling about and drinking his booze, house trashed, privacy violated, Spike with that old dark gleam in his eyes, a ferocious hatred that he's been hiding up to now, a desire to inflict wounds.
But Spike does nothing like that. He's restless at times, yeah, but he just drinks, and lets Xander lead him into the night to kill stuff. Battles he no longer goes looking for on his own. He doesn't go off alone to bars, never postures or picks fights. Is polite to the service class. Tips well if he's the one paying. Now and then Xander looks up to find Spike watching someone--a waitress, a businessman, a kid. His face blank as a photograph of a face, something you'd flip by in a men's magazine. And Xander has no idea what's going in his head. Not the tiniest fragment of a sliver of a clue.
He's got a mouth on him. Matter of factly says shit that makes Xander's hair stand on end, with a kind of horrified delight. But it's a tactic, he thinks. A way for Spike to goose the mark. Is he ever himself anymore?
"You're so good," Spike murmurs in bed, when Xander's dick is buried inside him. And he sounds raw, as if he means it, but who can tell.
Xander thinks about asking: "So have you thought about what you want to do?" as if Spike is just some aimless slacker, a seventeen-year old with a future ahead of him who needs to buckle down. But what sense does it make, asking him that, when he could be around a hundred years from now, lying next to some other guy, or doing things equally uncertain--sitting and smoking in a cafe on the Left Bank in Paris, lying on a soiled mattress in a New York tenement, ghosting along the edge of a Peruvian jungle, fighting side by side with cyborg soldiers in a bombed-out version of L.A. He's Spike. He'll survive when Xander himself is ashes.
I'm just renting him, Xander thinks. And not even rent-to-own.
One Saturday at the mall they meet a co-worker of Xander's, stop for introductions and idle chat, Spike mostly listening as they shoot the shit, bitch about work. After the guy walks on, Spike says: "Don't you have any friends?"
Xander, defensively, startled: "Excuse me?"
Spike: "You've practically got 'fuck off' tattooed on your forehead." He smacks the heel of his hand against Xander's brow as if he has every right to.
Xander: "I have friends."
Spike: "Who? Red? Dawn? Buffy? Bunch of chits who don't even know what flavor of porn you like."
Xander, heartfelt: "Ewww."
Spike: "You've got no mates, no one to drink with."
Xander: "I drink with you."
Spike, rolling his eyes: "Yeah. Real healthy. A man ought to be able to round up a poker game. You've got a social deficit, Harris."
Xander: "You should talk."
Spike: "I'm not the one breathing here."
And he's right of course. But he's annoying about it, as if he lifts all his insights from Maxim or The Man Show, and Xander finds it hard to take seriously the advice of someone so deeply lost.
Late one night he wakes up and walks to the kitchen and finds Spike leaning against the counter, staring down at the floor tiles, just as naked and alone. He thinks the vampire might be heating up a cup of blood, but he isn't. The lights are on but he isn't doing anything that requires him to be in the kitchen at three a.m. Xander is tired but it gives him shivers.
"Hey," he says. And there's a forgettable exchange of words, and some kissing, before Spike comes back to earth and relaxes against him. On call again. But Xander isn't interested in taking what he's paid for. Not exactly. He holds Spike's hips loosely and tastes the shape of his mouth and the kitchen lights are disorienting and dreamlike and then they go back to bed, leaving the bedside lamp on, and Xander bites lightly across Spike's chest and shoulders, making him smile in a rather amused way, some private joke or wry old knowledge, and they are up far later than they should be, or later than Xander should be. But he's a rich guy. He's an owner. He can go in late. He can indulge his vampire.
Part Five
It had been surprising when Buffy finally left. Xander had suspected she might back out at the last minute, unwillingly to part from her sister. It had only been four months ago, when Dawn started college, that she'd made the move, and she'd been planning it for over a year, selling off the house at last to score enough for double tuition. Even so. Freaky. A Buffyless Hellmouth.
Willow ruled the school now, powerful enough to keep a spider web of magical protection across the town, every shiver of a strand alerting her to invaders who would fast become prey, sometimes with goofy expressions of surprise as they died. But webs had holes. Webs were in fact mostly holes, and she stressed herself out trying to cover them all, even with Becca at her side, serving as another soothing sidekick, not unlike Tara in many ways. It was a little scary watching that play out again, especially after the whole Kennedy meltdown, clash of the lesbian Titans, an entire freaking year of stormy weather, sometimes literal. But they'd never taken it to that edge Xander had feared, and in retrospect he saw how much more in control Willow had been. With every repetition of a pattern, things seemed to get smoother, and this time around she might just have it down.
Once more, with less feeling.
Oh, she felt real affection for Becca, he could see that. But not the passion she'd worn for Tara, or even the tension--ego fighting ego--that she'd built up with Kennedy. And maybe it was for the best. She needed some serenity. Stable was good.
She corresponded all over the world, and beyond: with witches, warlocks, and the new crop of watchers who were rebuilding in London. The world felt safer and smaller with that network in place, and the threat of an apocalypse would now bring people scurrying to help--planes delivering visitors with their crisp accents and shabby suitcases, cars winding up from L.A., portals dislodging oddballs at them from dimensions adjacent to their own.
Buffy, calling him at work, making a few minutes of conversation, then: "So how's he doing?"
Xander: "Spike? He's hanging in there."
Buffy: "You know, we didn't mean for you to adopt him." Dry.
Xander: "Yeah, I know. But it's cool, having someone around." Like a pet, he almost said. But the word stuck on his tongue.
Buffy: "Uh huh. I called him the other day, and got a big wave of def jammed in my eardrum. And what's he doing, just mooching around your house all day? He was watching Days of Our Lives."
Xander, getting annoyed: "So what?"
Buffy: "So, you need to kick his ass into gear. Find him something to do."
Xander: "Why? I thought the point was getting him here. He was already doing something."
Buffy: "Kishoi, Xander." Disgust. "Sucking off suits to pay his Elvis-sized bar tabs? Yeah, that's a real savvy career choice." Her voice is sharp. Her most dangerous edged weapon. It's hard to tell how much she still cares for him and how much she simply feels responsible for all the lost causes and head cases she's collected over the years.
Xander, wandering to the window to gaze out at his little slice of view: "He wasn't trolling the streets or noshing rats." Nearly as sharp.
Buffy, dismissively: "One step up." Still judgmental as hell.
Xander: "More like thirty stories."
Buffy, amazement dawning: "Oh my god! You're sleeping with him!"
Busted, he tries to figure out if he can summon plausible deniability, and the hesitation nails the coffin shut.
Buffy: "Don't even think of denying it, Xander Lavelle Harris."
Xander: "I didn't--I'm not!" Deep breath. "Denying it."
Buffy: "I could hear the denial fairies massing to attack."
Xander: "I really hope you're not going to claim prior attachment." The words are weirdly formal, but they come out of some drawer in his mind like a loaded pistol he's kept ready.
Buffy: "What does that mean?" She sounds thrown off.
Xander: "I...don't know. Just, don't try to claim he's got fuck-exempt status." He doesn't often talk that way to her, but it doesn't even slow her down.
She has her own train of thought: "I've been down this road more than once, and I'm telling you," urgent tones of friendship rising, "no good can come of it."
Xander: "Did you just say 'no good can come of it'?"
Buffy, deflating: "Okay, that's a bit more Victorian-melodrama than it sounded in my head--but, Xander, he's damaged. He'll bring you down. He may not even try to, but he will."
Yadda, yadda. They talk some more and she keeps worrying at him, chewing at his thoughts like a tiny Buffy rat. Gives him the benefit of her experience with total earnestness, and it's really laughable, but he's not that mean, so he takes it with a smile she can't see and lets her lecture him as he goes to his desk. There's an e-mail from Spike with pasted spam asking: "DOES THE SIZE OF YOUR PENIS REALLY MATTER? Yes… More than you can imagine." And a photo of a horse and a jockey he's found somewhere online. Xander stares at it for a minute with stoned fascination until he realizes Buffy's still talking and he's on the phone with Buffy staring at horse porn, and he ends the call quickly and puts his head in his hands and sighs and thinks about the Spike problem, like, is there one?
How weird is it that--almost without noticing--he's slipped into white knight mode for the vamp he once wanted to dust? Is that some proof of adulthood? You get up each day, squeeze some orange juice, go to work, move on with your life. It's not what you'd call easy.
He goes home, they say dirty horse-porn things as foreplay, they lick each other.
The cat comes to visit them mid-fuck, which is startling--it's done nothing but lurk in closets and under furniture since Xander bought it a year ago. Poor pet-shopping logic: picking the one that shies away from your hand because you feel sorry for its geeky social awkwardness.
Some things change, though.
The cat is removed but after sex it comes back and settles on Spike's chest, folding itself up, paws tucked in. Furry collapsible luggage. Spike stares at it like a feline mirror, eyes to slitted eyes in some meaningful silent dialogue.
Later, Xander pets Spike's head with an owner's touch, and is aware of doing it. He likes the sway of Spike's naked torso, his unbuttoned jeans, his bare painted toes. He's been waiting for things to go wrong, sex and money, but it's still okay. It's still an unbearable turn-on sometimes, too. Spike lying across the couch, head resting on Xander's thigh, turned to watch the TV. So post-coital and cozy.
Yesterday Xander came home and found that Spike had ordered a carton of cigarettes with the delivery groceries for the first time since his arrival. He was standing in the open door, blowing smoke out toward the deck as the sun died. "I don't want you to smoke," Xander said and took the cigarette from his mouth, threw away the pack and the carton. As if he had a right to. Didn't ask, didn't second-guess himself. And it made him hard. He came back hard and kissed Spike's smoky mouth until Spike yielded and grabbed his waist and rubbed against him. Spike was very accommodating. He liked being handled. There was no hitch of uncertainty there when Xander pushed Spike's shoulders down, unzipped himself, guided himself in with a hand on the back of Spike's neck.
He gave gaspy cries as Spike blew him, as they did this unbalanced, dangerous dance.
Tonight he is disturbingly contented and feels good. The constant sex is beginning to soften him, abrade away the shell he's grown around himself over the last few years.
A breeze from the open window teases the back of his neck and the TV's laugh-track roars softly and he enters a deep place of calm as he strokes Spike's hair. Regular strokes, petting. He hopes that it isn't just money that makes Spike lie there so quietly and accept his touch, and when he looks down he sees Spike's eyes have closed, which he takes as a good sign. The sigh of waves around them all the time may be working their mojo on Spike, even if he's trying to drown their lull out with loud, obnoxious music.
Kick his ass into gear, Xander thinks in Buffy's voice. Find him something to do.
But he has no ideas. He's not so much the idea man these days. He's the getting-by-on-luck man. He surfs the wave.
Spike turns fully onto his back and opens his eyes upward. Xander writes on his forehead with his fingertips, invisible letters. H-O-R-S-E.
Spike: "We going out tonight?"
Xander: "Feel like killing things, Pinky?"
Spike: "Don't mind."
Xander: "We'd have to move."
Spike: "Terrible thing, moving."
Xander: "Bad."
Spike: "Tragic."
Xander: "You have a very hard head."
Spike: "I'm often told."
Xander: "Move your head back like--oh yeah." He shifts his hips up and nearly groans.
Spike: "You have a very hard...horse." And he's rolling his neck, shoving his head around in Xander's lap as if he can't get comfortable, the perfect picture of frowny restlessness, but the lines of his jaw and neck are like paintbrush strokes in motion and Xander wants to take his dick out and rub off in Spike's hair. In a minute maybe he will.
Xander, talking to delay gratification: "Do you need anything?"
Spike: "Need?"
Longing tugs at Xander then as he realizes he has nothing to offer. "I want to buy you things," he says. "Expensive, stupid things." If Spike were Anya, she'd be having orgasms already.
Spike: "Mmm." A thoughtful, shut-eyed pause. "Don't have a watch." Frown. "Then again, don't really need a watch."
Xander strokes Spike's jaw and neck, handles him, moves his head to different angles. Every angle is photogenic and every one feels so damn good it stuns and slows down his entire central nervous system. "I like what you do for me," he hears himself say.
Spike opens his eyes, smiles like a flirt, and says in that low voice with vibrations fast and light as hummingbird wings: "And what shall I do for you now?"
Part Six
Another week and Spike's secrets are leaking out. That first ridiculous credit card statement was, Xander learns now, a finagled funds transfer to pay gambling debts. Not even his own, which is the real shocker, but a friend's--a human friend's--from back in New York. Spike has apparently been waiting for Xander to bring it up, but winds up volunteering it himself as part of a longer, rambling story about the things he's been doing for the past few years, the people he's known. Musicians, whores of all genders and species, boxers and bookies, demons and fixers, poets, shady dealers, and suits. A whole underworld Spike wandered the edges of until Xander spirited him away in Cinderella fashion.
Xander broods a few times, wondering if any of that world will follow Spike here. Don't buy trouble, he tells himself.
Xander: "You were pretty generous with my money."
Spike: "Pocket change to you now."
Xander: "Yeah, but..." But nothing. His two-week old outrage is as stale as duck bread, and Spike is curled up against him, the knobs of his spine almost like peas pressing up from within their pod as Xander traces them.
Spike says to Xander's chest: "I know. Ask next time."
Xander: "No, screw it. You're right. I have the money. But if you go over six figures I'm going to have to spank you."
He feels Spike's smile. It's probably a smirk, but he'll think of it as a smile. "And here I thought you were vanilla all through."
Xander: "That's a terrible and...annoyingly accurate thing to say. I have sprinkles. Though, no cherry."
Spike: "I'd like to have seen your cherry. Could've popped it for you, real sweet." He's licking Xander.
Xander: "Sorry. If I'd known." He waves a hand that Spike can't see, then lets it slide down the other man's back.
Spike: "Hope he took care."
Xander: "Yeah, it was all right." Different things are on his mind. "So, what...you think I need some new tricks. Handcuffs, sex toys..." He's trying to come up with other stuff for a list, but he's already running out of ideas. Vanilla. Back in the day he'd worked hard to keep up with Anya, but now he remembers that time as a blur of bad plans and worse execution whenever they strayed past the basics. He does consider himself good at the basics, though.
Spike: "Whatever turns your crank, love." Within seconds he's straddling Xander and very seriously looking down at him. "Rates you're paying, it's the full-service menu." Leans in with his arms propped on either side of Xander's head, all fluid muscle and floppy hair. He's got that smile, the one that says he really has no inhibitions, four syllables unnatural to his body. Xander knows that even a vampire must have a few but they'd be things he'd never want to do himself, so...so.
And when the subject is picked up again after a half hour's fun and sweaty interruption, Spike lists all the things he's done, and all the places he's done them, and all the people--and things--he's done them with. It's a numbing inventory. Some of it requires other languages to describe. He says he liked most of it, and Xander is wavering on the edge of feeling intimidated, dick-shy, but Spike shrugs into the crook of Xander's left side. "It's all body parts," he says with no real enthusiasm, and Xander senses that comparisons won't be made and some animal angst begins to unknot again.
He thinks about the list, and makes mental checks by certain items.
Xander doesn't sit and watch Spike like some perv at a peep-show, like a stalker in his own home. But over time moments and impressions collect. Spike is like one of those guys you see in bands. Devon comes to mind. Devon used to write musical notes on his arms, hum to himself, lie on the bleachers and commune with the sky during classes, and was permanently stoned just above baseline, just below adult radar, for five straight years until, to everyone's startlement, he graduated. And then went to be Devon elsewhere.
Actually, Spike is nothing like Devon. But Xander is trying to pin down what it is that makes Spike Spike, and it has something to do with his wrists and hands, his frowns, his attunement with whatever it is he's doing, even when there is no sound to the universe except its dial tone, its static, a background hiss of massive boredom that makes Spike's eyes go blank. He is so far from zen, he's like the anti-zen, but he's got some trick of being in the moment that fascinates Xander. And he's hard to define. Is he smart? Xander doesn't consider himself that smart, so he finds it hard to tell about others. Willow--easy call. Buffy--a different kind of smart. But people who bottle up their thoughts and always match their level of conversation to yours, what's that about--is it disguise?
That's kind of what Spike does, and it makes Xander flounder, because he realizes after a few stray hits that if he talks books or music or history, Spike is right there with him riding shotgun, quoting unexpected poetry and spinning yarns about the jazz age that Xander only half believes, but wants to. He's got more in his head than he's bothered to unpack, and Xander thinks that maybe if Spike finally makes himself at home somewhere, settles, he'll start to leave bits of himself lying around.
One day they play pool and before long they're playing almost every night, and it strikes Xander that--though Spike might well be playing alone during the day--he's never the one to suggest a game. He loves pool, it's obvious in how he handles the cue and works the angles, eyes busy, but he always waits on Xander. And never said the first word on arrival--let weeks pass, most nights walking with Xander by the room where the table is kept as they went upstairs.
Was Spike always like this before? Is it soul trauma, new and wrong, or was he deferential to Crazy Dru without her even noticing--did he try to match Buffy's needs at her every whim? Did he hide a small self under a big, bad coat of brashness?
Maybe. But honestly, Xander isn't sure.
Spike makes a cup of tea now and then, and some of his gestures are precise and some of them are sloppy. Dunking the little strainer, stirring in milk: precise. Tossing the leaves and missing the trash can: sloppy.
"Gives the maids something to do," Spike says of the flung tea, a splat drying on the wall, clump on the tiles.
Xander: "Do they bother you?"
Spike: "What, Patsy and Edina?" Xander is confused, because their names are Marta and Trish. "They let me be."
Most of Spike's blood supply is in a special storage room, in a locked fridge.
Looking for small gestures of his own, Xander buys Spike jewelry. First, he gets it wrong. He gets it embarrassingly wrong. He buys Spike stuff grossly expensive and Spike murmurs thank-yous with raised brows and wears it politely. Desperate, he tries to find out what Spike really likes. He fears he knows--death metal rings and dog collars, god help him. But Spike digs in, claws to carpet, like Supercat when he's poised to fight or run, and makes Xander do the heavy lifting, tells him to pick out whatever the hell he wants. It's a wrangle, and funny--Xander suddenly wonders if he has any taste of his own. Why did he buy Spike stupid gold bracelets? He doesn't like them either.
On the way to the movies one night he sidelines Spike to one of those leather kiosks and buys him a choker and a bracelet, both cheap, both so perfect he wants to take Spike into the mall bathroom and lick him all over.
They don't do that, but they grope during the movies, and in darted glances at Spike's profile he can see that the other man's lips keep up a steady series of smiles--twisty, kind of goofball, as if he's trying not to laugh--right up to the credits.
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