Subtleties
by
Anna S
Part Sixteen
Buffy: "Are you in love with him?"
They're sitting having coffee together. Xander is starting to think that being a grown up is all about the coffee. Not the coffee per se, but the whole social ritual of drinking coffee and having serious, life-like conversations. He wants to rewind to high school, when they all drank pop and gossiped about the horrible fashion sense of their doomed classmates.
Rewind to high school? Jesus. Let that one go. Adulthood, he thinks: I embrace you.
Xander: "Did you get script coaching from Willow? I'm hoping so, because otherwise you're Willow in Buffy's body, and I think we've played that scary movie out."
Buffy, lowering her eyes with a small half-smile: "It's natural for us to be curious, don't you think?"
Xander has a meditative look for his own coffee cup. "Because it's Spike." Who'd be a scary person to love, no matter how you sliced it.
Buffy's kind, gentle correction: "Because it's you."
Xander gazes through the open cafe wall to the street, where cars ease by, kicking up splashes in the unexpected rain. "I look at him sometimes," he says absently, "and I think of that saying--about repeating past mistakes?" He catches her eye again, and she nods just enough. "Fell for a demon, fucked that up," he notes. "It's the been-there, done-that dance. Except it's not the same. He's not Anya, and I'm...not even me. Not the me I was." He tips his head, thinking about stuff, and rather than breaking in, Buffy waits him out. It's a new restraint for her. Or an old one he's never noticed before now. "I look at him sometimes," he says again, "and it's..." He gropes for words. "...it's like my life is rewiring itself."
Buffy, reaching to try and make a connection: "Is that the," uncertainty, "the gay thing?" She asks this with the caution of the indelibly hetero. Meekness, almost.
Xander smiles. Her social efforts are usually far more endearing than her heroic ones. "It's the Spike thing." His eyes grow more intent on her, and he has to ask: "Did you love him?"
Buffy considers, head posed at a slight twist: "I don't know. I was so messed up then."
Xander doesn't force his gaze against hers, drops it. Thinks it might be best not to dredge too deeply into the past. "Do you think it's love," he asks, "if you just have the little stuff and not the big stuff?"
Buffy: "What do you mean?"
Xander: "Like the other day. I'm telling him about some stupid mix-up with a shipment of some insulation. And I'm getting my bitch on, and all of a sudden I tune in, and--he's asking me about fiberglass versus rock wool, and composite versus foam, which has nothing to do with the issue, but god. It just about killed me." The memory makes his overfull heart squeeze against his ribs; he feels as lucky as when he won the lottery. More. "No way did I tell him that stuff." Xander shakes his head. "He must be going online, reading up. That shit's boring even to me and he's talking shop like it actually matters."
Buffy seems strangely subdued by this. "He cares," she says, half-lost in her coffee cup again.
Happy thoughts are pressing up like dogs at a window, wagging for Xander's attention, distracting him: "I like being with him. It's the dumbest stuff he does that kills me." A faint smile. "I think he's writing a book," he confides, unaware of his diffident pride, "but he doesn't want me to know."
It's a far cry from New York City, from a flash life of clubs and tricks and contemplations of the eternal.
And later, driving home, Xander's still thinking of Spike. That thing with the insulation, and so many other conversations he hasn't paid attention to, have been slipping gently by him. Spike has been trying hard to make it all look natural.
Xander doesn't always miss the obvious. There are times when life folds together, sweet as a pie--they're deep in the cherry filling and the universe is warm--and he wants to pull Spike close and bring the universe to an abrupt end, so he can be certain that Spike will be the last thing he feels.
Xander more and more thinks love is beside the point, except when he panics and decides love is everything.
It's the most common word.
I love blueberry muffins, Xander thinks. How stupid is that?
Sometimes he trades a dry, wordless look across the Magic Box table with Spike, when Willow is complaining about the difficulty of finding decent clerks or how Anya's new web sites are sucking away their own share of online ordering. Their eyes know how to talk to each other now. Days pass, rise and fall like a tide, and Spike's still around.
So with all that, it should be easy to lay the word on Spike, to give it like a gift, a fancy bracelet--or, if not that, then a magazine you've picked up at the supermarket. Something casual, spur of the moment, stripped of its heavy significance. But Xander doesn't say the word, because he overthinks it. He has two modes: thinking too much, and thinking not at all. When he doesn't think at all, long periods of time can pass.
He says it anyway, one day. He's not forcing the issue, doesn't work it out beforehand. It just happens. Impulse purchase. No fancy bracelet.
Xander: "I love you."
Spike is dripping with demon goo, standing in the middle of a graveyard--headstones splayed out like broken teeth all around them. He stares uncomprehendingly at Xander. He's holding an axe and his face wears a confused frown: he's been slapped by surprise. Xander's gut turns over with fear. You can't take words back.
Spike, lowering his head slightly to process the words: "Love." The briefest pause. "Me." He seems to be having trouble with the basic concepts.
Xander braves it out: "Yeah."
There's a moment of frozen uncertainty, and then Spike actually turns around to look behind him, as if acting out some comical--and yet heartbreakingly terrible--imperative. He's not making a point, he's just unable to help himself. He's trying to find the audience, the laughtrack, the joke.
"You," Xander whispers, and it drowns him.
Love changes everything. But it does it slowly and you usually don't notice, and by the time you say the word, it's far too late. Saying the word is the last step. It changes nothing.
Xander doesn't expect Spike to claim love back, leap to meet him over the abyss. It's enough that Spike nods at last, smiles a little: the right signs to show he's not going to freak out, pull back. Leave.
Drugstore. Xander's shopping for the boring, necessary stuff--the supplies that get you through life, things you'd gladly do without if your existence were simpler, if you were, say, a Neolithic cave-dweller. Shaving cream. Soap. Minty mouthwash. Dental floss. And while he's there, he meets up with Susan Pilgrim for the first time since junior year of high school. Could there be any woman more oblivious? She's Classic Sunnydale Lite, but hadn't she moved away? And how the hell did she remember his name? He'd been a non-entity then to everyone but Willow, Buffy, and Giles. Cordelia, if you wanted to get technical, but he tries to block that out. Yet here Susan is, a chick who shared only one English and one Health class with him in four years, her face a high-beam of recognition. "Xander!"
Xander: "Oh...hi." He's blank, no memory at all. At first he thinks she's the wife of an employee.
Susan: "How are you?!" She seems so absurdly delighted, and what that says about her life is terrifying. Her last name is actually Jerome now, he learns. She wants to catch up on old times, and invites him over for some kind of cocktail party or housewarming. It isn't very clear.
Xander thinks in bafflement: The hell?
Bemused, he allows her to press her number and address on him, words looped onto a piece of paper. It's pink, lined paper from a small notebook she carries in her purse. He has no plans to attend, and their meeting seems almost Twilight Zone to him, but then at work, Jack asks: "Are you going to be there Friday?" At Susan's, he means, and it turns out that she's social with a lot of people at his company, and that's maybe why she feels like she knows him better than she does. It starts to come clear, and Xander's Hellmouthy radar, ready to peg Susan for a demon, is apparently off for once.
He's not planning to go, he tells Jack, but somehow by the end of the conversation his no gets arm-twisted into a maybe. Xander can tell Jack thinks he's stand-offish, and it's kind of funny that he's now a guy people try to persuade to parties. His geeky high school past seems firmly dead and buried. Of course, in this town, that means nothing.
When he talks about the party with Spike, it's clear the vampire's interest in attending is located slightly south of the Marianas Trench. He's not horrified or anything. It's simply that Xander's remarks about the party don't seem to penetrate.
Finally, Xander has to get explicit and say: "I was thinking of going...you want to come?"
Spike looks up, his tiny distracted frown giving way to full focus on Xander. There's this pause, like a car jumping the air across a broken drawbridge, and then he says: "Yeah, all right." And turns back to his laptop.
It's a hellishly anxious hour of preparation to get ready for the party, and when he's done, Xander realizes there's still another hour before they even have to leave. Disgusted with himself, tense, he gets a beer and bides his time alone in front of the TV, trying to run his brain down to empty. He doesn't want to be in the bedroom, because he's afraid he'll drive Spike bugfuck the way he's driving himself.
With fifteen minutes left to go, Spike comes into the living room, readied for the evening's social experiment.
Spike is wearing expensively fine suede shoes, dark brown. Faded blue jeans that rest on his hips in a way God never imagined: not especially tight, but following the line of his legs. A belt that looks right, without catching the eye too closely. A dark-blue fitted shirt, cuffs rolled up, the top few buttons undone. His leather choker. His leather bracelet. His white-blond hair stiffened by hair gel to a nervous mix of curls and tufts, but looking stylish and strokable.
Xander stares, gaze lifting from feet on upward to take it all in. That's my boyfriend, he thinks with dumb wonderment.
They go and it's about what Xander expected. Pricey house in Beechwood with a lot of pastel wall art. People mingling, some known to him, most unfamiliar, all with drinks firmly in hand. A few stray children lurking and mugging on the fringes. Cheese, crackers, wine. Jack coming up to him and clapping him on the arm. Conversations about work, about rezoning, about the Oscars. Spike wanders, looking perfectly at ease. Hangs by Xander's side from time to time, goes to stare out over the landscaped backyard, studies a few bad paintings, buzzes the buffet, gets himself a drink. At one point when Xander looks, Spike's cradling a cut-glass tumbler in his palm, whiskey over ice, and talking in a laid-back way to some woman Xander doesn't recognize. One of the many women who gravitate to him during the course of the evening.
Another time, Xander searches for him and sees Spike by the stairs, looming over a few children who are sitting on the treads. They're gazing up at him, he's gazing down, chit-chat going on. Spike always enjoys being a bit scary, likes to play with an easy audience, and the kids seem transfixed by whatever he's saying. Xander isn't entirely sure he wants to know and hopes that none of the adults overhear.
Xander has been "out of the closet" for a while now. It's a catchphrase, not meaningful when you examine it. He's had few relationships with men lasting longer than a month, which means he's rarely reached that point where it's time to tell co-workers and more casual acquaintances that you're seeing a steady someone. At the office, no one asks if he's gay or straight, but also--on the spectrum of identity--he's just not the kind of guy who drops mention of his orientation into small talk.
Tonight he makes no attempt to hide, and that's a kind of turning point for his dealings with several people in the room. He calls Spike his partner when introductions are being made. It seems the right word when you share a checking account with someone. Spike gives him an odd glance on the first introduction that makes Xander realize they should probably have talked about this beforehand, but then seems to accept it.
After they've been there a few hours, they find themselves on the rear deck, half-hiding in the shadows. Light filters through the nearby trees and shrubs from a few torches. Good taste shows in the design of the backyard. Xander thinks it can't have been Susan's. There are people here and there on the grass, voices carrying to the deck only as murmurs along with the faint smell of cigarette smoke.
For a few minutes they talk, an easy space between them as they relax by the deck rail.
Xander: "Thanks for coming. I know it's boring."
Spike pauses, head tilted as if he's considering possible replies, and then: "What doesn't kill us makes us stronger." A curve of mouth. "'Sides, all the tortures I've been through, not sure I'd rank this top of the list. Somewhere above Sally Jesse, below flaying."
Xander feels a wash of small, ridiculous tenderness and can't stop staring into Spike's eyes, loving the way they speak back to him. He puts his hand out without thinking about it, cups the side of Spike's neck, plays his thumb up and down. Just because he can. And Spike lets him, which is amazing. All that cool flesh, living by magic, standing still for him. A demon with ordinary habits. His close companion with a soul.
If you set your expectations of a relationship low, every small thing is a surprise and a gift. Xander can't do that. He wants a lot. But he's getting a lot already. He thinks about how he once punched Spike's nose hard enough to make it bleed, the vicious thrill in his own knuckles, and the tight fury of humiliation in Spike's eyes as they spoke to Xander, promising that one day he would exact his revenge in the most thorough and painful possible way.
Spike: "Susan wants us to come over for dinner next week--she tell you? Already decided the menu. Told her I like chops." Dry tones. "Should be interesting."
Xander, shaking his head and feeling strangely peaceful: "Not the word I'd use."
Part Seventeen
Xander's lying belly-flat between Spike's legs and sucking dick, a heavy, silky roll of flesh that forces his tongue down, while its head strokes and tickles the roof of his mouth like the swab of a paintbrush. Thick, moist. He can get it some of the way in and then he always begins to choke a little. He used to be embarrassed, imagining what Spike thought of him--talentless gay boy here, who sucks at sucking--until he began to associate his own half-choking sounds with more urgent upthrusts of cock and harsher noises from the vampire's own throat, and realized that Spike liked it. Likes it, maybe identifies it as a sound of helplessness. Sick puppy.
Sometimes now Xander is even clumsy on purpose, slurpy and eager, scraping his teeth along the side--and Spike really likes this, rewarding Xander with anxious snarls, bursts of pre-come, thrashing and groans. It took Xander a while to trust Spike's encouragement, because--teeth--so not his own thing, at least not down there, like that. No, sir. But now he knows that teeth make Spike go off into his private head space. That after a while, wrists latched above him, Spike will sink into himself, sightless, no longer making words, only sounds, unless Xander stops what he's doing, drags his teeth off, and then Spike will beg over and over, rough-voiced and as mindlessly repetitive as a doll. When he's like this, Xander can tease him, say things, but whatever he says flies off target, because Spike is deaf to him, locked tight in his own need.
Spike's like that tonight, halfway there. Xander scrapes upwards with his teeth until he's tugging on the foreskin. Sucks hard enough to draw the skin over the crown and works his tongue in one spot for several moments--heavy, focused shoves. Spike shudders. "More." His voice is hoarse. Xander keeps sucking, then pushes his mouth on deeply, then draws it off again and begins chewing everywhere. He always starts off lightly but Spike takes anything he can give, up to heavy mauling. It's almost scary. Xander doesn't draw blood, but the dark skin reddens even more wherever he nips.
When Xander is working his teeth harder than usual, forcing a roll of skin up and down over the wet head, he has a sudden certain thought, a bad thought. A dark part of his mind imagines how you might torture someone--say, Angel--and thinks, you could rip the foreskin right off and it would be a fucking brutal kind of pain, like a scalping, but worse. And he knows then, without needing to ask, that this is something Angelus did to Spike, maybe more than once. Because if Xander Harris, ordinary human, can think this up, then there's no question it would be among a psychotic vampire's repertoire of tortures. He will never ask Spike. He's learned that Spike is right and there are things he doesn't want to know.
Spike isn't going to get hurt again except in the good way, for as long as Xander is around.
That's one night, one type of blow job, and Spike is a beautiful sprawl of pale dead man when Xander is done with him.
Other nights, he just lets Spike drive. Lets all that heavy flesh bump and grind its way around his mouth until Xander's whiting out in a back room of his mind and drooling, while down below his hips work on their own: small, rhythmic thrusts as he frustrates his dick against the sheets, ass clenching, thighs trembling to drive the head into a punishing groove, making it sore and wet and raw, all of him swollen with that frictiony, never-gonna-come feeling that could go on for hours--and he wants it to, wants Spike to keep him like this, hand resting on Xander's head without force but letting him know he's helpless and wouldn't be allowed to stop even if he tried--and then Xander's hips hitch, drag him painfully against the sheets--he's desperate to get off, it's too good, he's shoving harder and faster, quick and sharp and frantic, and finally comes with a relief that makes him want to cry.
Cocksucking leaves him so breathless that his face grows red and hot, and when he collapses afterwards, Spike will usually stroke his curls with gentle, lazy fingers until Xander returns to life, and massage his jaw back into working order when asked.
The longer they're together, the safer Xander feels. Barriers slide away one by one, and it seems dumb not to take full advantage of a lover this fucking sexy and perversely inventive. One night Xander hands a blank check over to Spike--a metaphorical one this time. He says he wants to do something for Spike, whatever they haven't done yet that Spike's been wanting, that turns him on. He's talking kink now, without saying the word. He can tell he's got Spike's interest.
Spike: "You know, there're some things you just can't dish out till you've learned how to take it." He gazes at Xander from under his lashes with lewd, sly fondness and his mouth is a smile.
Xander works this out. "Oh," he finally says. "Like...what?"
They don't jump right into the heavy stuff then and there. Days pass. Xander wants to uphold his offer but he has to process, and Spike doesn't push, so that accounts for some time. When Xander says he's ready, he leaves it up to Spike, and they have to arrange a night, so there's a little bit of formality which hangs Xander up somewhere between anticipation and nervousness. Because: formal sex night. He's done this with Anya, and it never went well. And it's about this time that Xander, slow to admit it to himself, realizes that he and Anya had really amazingly bad sex. At least for him. A man doesn't like to think that. And a man also doesn't want to share his suspicions with anyone else, so it can remain uncertain, unprobed. The tooth can't be bad if you don't go to the dentist. Besides, all sex is good sex, right? So he's told himself for a long time.
In the bedroom, Spike, demonstrating his always surprising practical side, has bolted a sturdy and well-made set of manacles to the wall.
Now there's some wall art you don't see every day, Xander thinks, staring at them and wondering what they'll do with them afterwards. Leave them up for guests to see? Cover the bolt-plates with artfully hung pictures? Make them into plant-holders, maybe? Something to decide later.
He trusts Spike. He's known this for a while, but it comes even clearer when he's shackled and facing the wall, naked and nervous. This is the big time. This is stuff that million-dollar industries specialize in. And he waits to feel foolish, a mental stage he always has to pass through when they're pushing the envelope: the suspicion that doom must be just around the corner. But the other shoe never drops, and eventually he relaxes. Spike strokes his shoulders, back, and neck, thumbs their lines in a way that starts the current humming through Xander's body. Stands close behind Xander and skims his hands everywhere, says reassuring things, lets them escalate into smoother, nastier things as his touch wanders down. Nips Xander's neck and nudges a hand sidelong between his legs, knuckles brushing the crease of his body, thumb flickering across his asshole, a word Xander considers not at all sexy, for an area that sure as hell shouldn't be, and yet he's thrusting back for more of the good touch. Spike spends a few minutes slicking Xander up, fingers rude. By the time he draws away Xander is hard, flushed all over with sweat. They turned the heat up before they started, and it feels good. He's beginning to get it. Get into it.
He's seen the cane, or rod, or whatever it's called. Asked questions about it to try and appear nonchalant. Spike ordered it over the net, of course. Rattan, nylon. Xander can't remember the fine points of Spike's description. It's straight and it has a handle. And Spike is teasing its length across Xander's back, getting him used to it. He's so slow and good about it, and Xander can't see him except in his mind's eye, standing behind him with his shirt off, jeans on, barefoot. He's going to be good at this, Xander tells himself. It'll be okay.
That's not an especially good word for what it is. Xander doesn't intend to tell anyone about this, so he's never going to need to describe it, and that's fine, because there'd be no way. He stands braced when Spike begins to kiss his skin with the cane, across his ass, thighs, back. It's so light at first he almost thinks Spike is mocking him--or, not mocking, but maybe as a vampire Spike's out of touch, doesn't have a sense of how much a human can take. But it's just warming him up, and Xander learns this because Spike tells him so in a low voice, steady as the strikes across his back. Sometimes he talks and sometimes he doesn't, and the braid of his tones with the blows begins to make Xander buzz everywhere. The force increases, but it's achingly slow, a tease, a cruelty, and it makes him tremble as the white wall in front of him blurs at the edges of his vision. He can hear his own breathing getting louder, ragged. The blows sting like horseflies against his slick back. He wants more force, and asks for it with a gasp.
The pain never jumps to a sudden, new level he can't take--every level is better and better, and he can see nothing but whiteness now as his body sways under the blows. His skin feels raw, a tongue licking up pain and pleasure. He wants to rub off, but can't.
Sometimes Spike stops and comes over to him, cups his ass or strokes his dick. The sudden touches make Xander cry out in shocked ecstasy. It's only then that he feels how close he is to coming and how much he needs to. But Spike pulls away with murmurs and a few kisses to his shoulders, and then he's flicking that torment across Xander again. There comes a point when Xander thinks he can't stand for it to stop. It's wave after wave of heat spreading into his bones and muscles and blood. He's making sounds he's never heard from himself before. His hair is clinging in slick tendrils around his face and his throat is rough and his dick is pressed against his belly, a single strand of pre-come ribboning its length like melted wax. He might be speaking in tongues for all he knows, and when the blows stop he breaks open and begins to cry. Spike is behind him at once, thumbing open his slick hole, thrusting inside with his own ragged sounds of need. When he's buried to his balls, the rasp of zipper and denim against Xander's ass makes him start to come in hot wet jerks, and then Spike is gripping him, helping him finish, drawing him into a dark wash of surrender.
Twenty-four hours later, Xander is still boneless. He never entirely got that word before--except in relation to a few species of demon that he tries never to remember--but he understands it now in relation to his own body, because he feels like a handful of chicken meat before you toss it on the grill. Says this to Spike, decides it sounds gross, doesn't care. He's lying on the couch with his head in Spike's lap, his entire body so relaxed he's nearly past speech. His entire day has been quieter than usual, with stretches of time where nothing needed saying, nothing needed to get out. He brought a book down to the beach around three in the afternoon and just sat with it open in his lap as he stared into the waves.
Pain lingers in his body somewhere, the softest possible pain, a sponge soaked through by a sea of endorphins.
He loves how his neck feels draped across the bulk of Spike's thighs, his head resting in that sweet groove. Spike's hands: one resting on Xander's chest, the other twined through his hair. It's enough to make him want to have sex again, but his body--the big chicken--is not boning for him any time soon.
There's something on the TV, but turning his head would be a crying shame and, besides, he thinks he'd have trouble seeing anything beyond a flicker of colorful lights, hearing anything but noise.
Xander: "I'd let you do anything to me."
Spike, quietly: "Don't say that." He's very serious.
Xander, eyes closed: "Hmmm."
When he goes to work on Monday, he's still in the zone of mellow. His entire body hums with the awareness of having had the best sex in the universe. He's a tuning fork: struck three days ago, still vibrating with gently diminishing returns. Work doesn't hold much interest. For the first time he wonders why he keeps coming back when he could take an early retirement tomorrow. He holds down a job, that's what a man does. So he's always thought. But this job?
He pauses in the middle of a hallway to stare out its window at the park across the street, and thinks: I could do anything, go anywhere. Right now. I could be one of those guys. Those boat guys. He's picturing the nifty yachts moored down at the marina, and the type of men who own them. Rich men, like him, but wearing white caps. Some are just weekend sailors; others have crossed the Pacific, sailed around the world and back.
Him, yachting? And more to the point: Spike? Well, no. That won't work.
They're researching warlocks that week, tabled together in the Magic Box most nights. It's like a book club, this after-work routine. A book club of people shaping the history of the world in secrecy, with occasional bloodshed. Once, Xander finds himself staring from under his lashes at Willow, idly wondering whether she's ever done anything sexually adventurous. Lesbians, he thinks, and his imagination conjures up the sex toys, the...actually, his imagination exits there, because he's still looking at Willow, and it's hard to believe she'd go very far. He doesn't see Becca and Willow heading off to some dykey orgy with a bag of strap-ons.
His entire life, he's been obsessing about sex. Ever since he was three minutes old. Maybe earlier. He's owned dirty magazines and porno tapes, watched a lot of late-night cable, gotten it on with women and men and demons. He's always thought that hard-core kink is for sad bastards: a whole lifestyle of custom-made leathers and leashes, carried out in clubs and back rooms where you wanted to be careful where you stepped. Years ago there'd been a sex shop out on Pismo Avenue, Kelly's, that Xander stopped by once in while. It used to creep him out though, how he'd see the same dozen guys every time, bellied up to the video shelves, working over the skin mags, disappearing into the curtained hallway with old sandwich bags of quarters for the pussy peep-shows. When he was with Anya, he felt superior to all that.
Okay, he kind of still does.
What he gets now is that you can do serious stuff, deep and amazing and wild, that has nothing to do with some uncomfortable subculture of middle-aged swingers and lonely people and men who size you up with fixed, empty eyes as if they've got a van around the back, with mattress, knife, and rope waiting.
And oh yeah, there's this demented warlock gearing up for the big showdown. Buffy is already home from school, ready to stand with them, and planning to stay the summer at Willow's after the ass-kicking. But the epic battle of good versus evil hasn't got Xander's full attention. Things are on his mind. Sex. But also life, and Spike, and the future. It's a dangerously distracted state of mind to be in, and there comes a point when he has to snap out of it and focus.
Bad shit goes down when the face-off finally comes. It's one of those big tornado blurs of a battle, magic raging everywhere until that ozone smell hangs heavily around them. When it's all over, the warlock is banished into some hell portal, and Willow is shocky and bloodlessly pale, looking to Xander as if she shouldn't be moving, though she's keeping herself on her feet. Becca's left arm beginning just above the elbow now descends abruptly into a stump of twisted flesh, hand entirely gone. Blasted by magical blowback. Buffy doesn't have any wounds except for the look in her eyes. The warlock toyed with her: put her through hoops, danced her like a puppet. She looks as if she's seen her own helplessness against magic and hates it. This time it was Willow who got to save the world.
Xander just feels lucky, as usual, that he's not toast, so that he can help pick up the pieces. And this time some of the pieces are Spike's. Flung high into a tree by a casual sweep of hand, and that witchy bastard had obviously hoped the vampire would be dusted with a heart-blow on one of the branches. But Spike also has more than his share of luck. If you can call it that. Tornado forces can embed a straw deep into a telephone pole like it was a nail. Spike is pinned and gutted on branches, one through his shoulder, the other through his belly. By the time the fight is over, he's managed to break the limbs, drag himself off, and tumble himself like a wet sack of bones to the ground below. Blood mats the grass around him, less than there'd be if he were humanly alive, but enough to send a wave of dizzy horror through Xander.
I hate this shit, he thinks fleetingly amid the chaos, his internal tone a kind of hysteria. Year after year--there's no way their luck can hold out forever.
Call it luck. But Spike is a mess. Shredded, fucked up, filled with splinters and twigs. Some of his inside stuff on the outside. You shouldn't have to push your lover's guts back in, but Xander does, bloodying his hands in gore as Spike lies white-lipped and shut-eyed, braced against the pain. The lower branch must have missed his spine by millimeters.
Spike, weakly, confirming mobility of his legs: "Good thing. Not sure I'd be up for Roller Derby again."
It's incredible to Xander that a body can heal from that, but it does. He takes Spike home and puts him to bed, pours liters of blood down his throat for days, tries to think of ways to coddle and spoil him.
When Angel comes up to visit his convalescent offspring, Xander is one big mass of conflicting impulses that cancel out and leave him strangely passive. He stands motionless off to the side as Angel sits on the edge of the bed and talks with Spike. A few times Angel glances his way as if he's hoping Xander will take the hint and leave, but Xander just stares at him with eyes like stone.
Angel to Xander in the front hallway, with inexpressive face but uncertain voice: "Are you mad at me?"
Xander: "Why would I be mad at you?" He's visualizing plunging a stake through Angel's black sweater, a collapse of dust pattering to the carpet. "Well," he allows, "centuries of torture and death, trying to end the world, killing Giles's one true love, and that time you punched me in the face that I've never really thanked you for. But that's all behind us." His mouth moves in the cold mockery of a smile. "Right?"
Angel: "You tell me."
Xander burns a gaze into Angel's, finally says: "We're family. And as a member of my family, I'm sure you won't be surprised when I tell you to get the fuck out and keep your distance for a while. When he wants to see you again, he'll call. When I want to see you, I'll call--except, oh wait. I won't."
Angel's posture changes very slightly--not straighter, not slumping further, more a twitch of his shoulders: "I guess you've been talking about the past. It's not--"
Xander: "Okay, here's a thing it'll help to understand: when I say get the fuck out of my house, I mean now. Or at this point," he glances at his watch, "twenty seconds ago. Which in unwanted guest time is about twenty years too long. It's kind of like dog years." He has no smile now, but his face feels frozen in a facade of psychotically pleasant calm. "You like dogs, don't you?"
Angel leaves.
Xander returns to the bedroom, suppressed adrenaline making him nauseous, and curls up next to Spike on the bed, piling up pillows so that he can look into his face without Spike having to turn. He's flat on his back like a big vampire pancake.
Spike: "Had a nice chat, did you?"
Xander, a conversational tone: "Any time, say the word. You want him dead, I'll do it."
Spike gives him an unreadable look, then says: "Don't go blaming Soul Boy. You off him, might as well take me out too. I've done more than my share of ills that men endure."
It sounds like a quote to Xander, but he doesn't know it. Doesn't care so much. He isn't up for this conversation now. "So I have a double standard," he says, trying to keep it light so that he is not swallowed up by utter darkness from the inside.
Spike's face changes to something gentle, dry, and indulgent, but he's still serious when he says: "Long as you understand that I've made my peace there."
Xander: "Sure." There's not much else he can say.
Spike: "'Sides. Heard you say he was family." He pauses, frowns skeptically. "Bit much, isn't it?"
Xander's mouth twitches. "Well, I figured, sire-in-law. Thanksgiving dinner is out, though. I'm just telling you now. But in return, you do get to shun a member of my own family." He skims a hand across Spike's chest, adds mildly: "Or, like me, you can just shun them all."
Spike: "Hmmmm." The humming sound seems amplified by his entire body, almost a purr. His eyelids are heavier as Xander strokes him with feather-light fingers in the places he's not hurt, but then there's a moment where he seems to be staring right into Xander, blue eyes and one of those smiles that make Xander's heart flip over, both overspilling more warmth than a vampire should contain. "Don't know if I've mentioned...I'm glad you're on my side."
Whatever Spike's meaning is hinges on one word, "my," and it's hard to tell if he's saying that Xander would make someone a dangerous enemy, or if he's just saying thank-you. In the good-versus-evil show that's been running in Sunnydale for the past ten years, Xander knows that his own role is small. He doesn't strike fear into the hearts of men or vampires or warlocks. He's a supporting character, the clown that distracts the bull from the real matadors.
He can't help but think briefly of all this before he lets the thought pass on. It's not important, and it doesn't matter exactly what Spike means. It all comes down to the same thing. It's a no-brainer. As if answering a child's questions before sleep, Xander runs a hand along Spike's face and says:
"You're my guy."
It's the kind of thing you just know at the end of the day.
Part Eighteen
Xander's having doubts. He's had a dream with all kinds of symbolism in it, and he doesn't know whether it's Freudian or not, but it's right there, symbolism tall and erect as sequoias. Obvious as wood. In the dream, he's on one of those moving sidewalks, carried along in an airport: slow, steady, heading to his final destination at a level pace. All of a sudden Spike is next to him and he's been talking for a while, and Xander looks up to find they're riding on an escalator. "Stairway to Heaven" is playing on the airport speakers.
As Xander lies on his side of the bed piecing together his dream, he's amazed that his brain came up with this: is he very brilliant, he wonders, or common minded?
The thing is, the escalator isn't taking them anywhere. It just keeps going and going and somewhere up there is the next floor, but it will take hours to reach it--he knows this in the dream--and after a while he glances to the side and sees they've started to move down. Backwards.
He associates this dream with certain feelings he's been having lately. There's no question he's had his ups and downs in the last few years, but on the whole it's been a steady ride, a ride of money, friends, independence. Security and the ability to make choices. And then along came Spike, and Xander looked up: here was this whole new level of happiness, a possibility coming into view above him. And he rose, with Spike next to him. Being with Spike gets him high.
But where the fuck is this going, Xander wonders. He looks over at the white curve of Spike's shoulder and the muscles that braid his arm. The other man--so beautiful, like a demon prince from a tawdry fantasy novel--lies facing Xander, still asleep. Sheet draped over his hip, hair sleep-licked, face calm in death. His right hand rests between their bodies, a bony fan with a slight curl to the fingers. Xander's eye is drawn to the leather choker at Spike's neck, its brown twist and simple beads. He never takes it off.
Shouldn't that be enough?
It's a killing thing, how Spike wakes up: lashes lifting, head shifting on the pillow as his gaze finds Xander. And it's always an open question whether he'll smile or not, which is why Xander often slips out of bed early, so that he won't be around when Spike opens his blue, blue eyes.
Vampires are moody bitches, and Spike is no exception. He can be amazingly calm for long periods of time, lull Xander into a sense that all is right with the world. If they fall asleep blissed on sex and pillow talk, Xander expects to wake up to a contented bedmate. It isn't always the case. Sometimes Spike opens his eyes and meets Xander's and he doesn't smile; looks tired instead, disturbed by his own dreams, by existence. It tears away Xander's heart, piece by small piece. It's in his own nature to smile good morning--that's what he wants to believe of himself. He wants to be steady, a rock. And when Spike's insides are showing on the outside, through his eyes, Xander wants to be strong enough to reach out and stroke the curve of his head: the shell that holds all those dark, unhappy thoughts. But he's not perfect by any means. He's only human, and not immune to the infection of other people's moods. So sometimes they wake up and don't say much to each other, and Xander goes to work a bit pissy and on edge.
Grunts keep them stitched together: animal sounds of greeting, acknowledgment. It helps to reassure Xander that there's a subcurrent of being-togetherness that never entirely goes away. Communication below the surface.
When Spike's eyes meet his this morning, Xander wants to see a sunflower opening and turning to face its source. Despite himself, he measures Spike's actual smile against his hope and tries to decide if it's full enough and if it's for him, or whether it's a shade too brief, the exercise of habit unconnected to anything deeper. A smile without any roots.
This morning, the smile is sexy, and Spike's hand works south on his own body, waking himself up with a few lazy pulls. Xander smiles back.
Every morning should be like this.
Not every morning is. Not every day is easy. And there are the doubts. He doesn't know where they came from, because last time he looked everything was good and right in his world. Maybe it still is good. If nothing has changed, though, where are his doubts coming from?
Okay, he thinks. Here's the problem: he needs to get over this whole stupid escalator thing. Life isn't going up. It's going steady. And that's what he's got.
On the other hand...what if he's not enough for Spike?
Moodiness. The Harrises also breed it into their spawn. In the middle of the afternoon, Xander is at work and someone ticks him off and he raises his voice, then retreats to his office like a grizzly to its cave, guilty and testy. As he broods he feels it all come together for a moment: it's not just Spike. It's work and Becca's arm and Willow's misery and Buffy's distracting presence and his own insecure fears. And he catches himself wondering if, while he's sitting here, Buffy is visiting his house and hanging out with Spike, talking and...talking.
I am a dumb man-thing, he thinks as he stares at a photo on his desk: Spike posed in an armchair almost as if someone gave him a shove and sent him sprawling--limbs loose, sexual akimbo, head tipped as he gives the camera a look, white shirt unbuttoned and showing a hint of chest, jeans showing everything. A picture that makes female employees sneak into his office in tiny herds to show new hires the Mysterious Boyfriend.
Xander doesn't want to admit that he's jealous, that his own tightly-wound bitchfest is all about that, but self-awareness is trying to surface, pounding at the underside of consciousness like a drowning child trapped beneath a sheet of ice.
When he goes home that night, he's tired and grumpy despite himself, and there's his house: a comfortable but elegant stucco gem almost completely hidden behind layers of trees and shrubs, up a short but winding drive. The realtor hadn't needed a hard sell; the house is a marriage of perfect bone structure and taste, architecture and design, and oh man, he is so very gay about it. It's a manly kind of gay, he often assures himself. He loves his home. Tonight it soothes him, and as he turns in the drive, he waves to the gardener, who is working late. Parks, pauses a moment to absorb the ambiance: flagstones and rich green frondy bushes and the wind chimes that were a housewarming gift from Becca and Willow. He lets himself relax into the evening breeze and goes inside, tosses his keys on the hall table, steps out of his shoes.
Inside, Spike and Buffy are hanging out in the living room, and it makes him immediately tense. They're laughing and drinking beers and there's music on and they look just too, too cozy. He gives them a brief smile and goes to take a shower--makes it last a while, lets it beat down on his nape as he stands bent and propped against the tiles. When he comes out again Buffy is gone.
Nothing else special about that night, and life goes on, and there are a few more incidents--are they incidents? Hardly. A few more chance social overlaps like this, of him and Spike and Buffy and sometimes Dawn. He feels older than all of them and has no idea why. Maybe because he has a job, pulls the usual nine-to-five while the girls take the summer off and Spike just...does his thing. Whatever that is.
A month or so into summer, he's feeling sore and out of sorts. He's not doing much to change things. It just seems like a thing, a thing you let happen that will eventually pass. Moods, shifts in relationships, a randomness of wind chimes. They go to a carnival one night, everyone--even Becca, blouse discreetly pinned. It's fun, it's a wild, warm, starry night and he and Spike ride all the rides and Xander smiles at the right moments and feels a kind of contentment, and if there's a strain of melancholy underneath it all, that probably just has to do with the nature of summer. A fleeting season, even in California. Time, not weather.
But it's around this time that little things start to change. He comes home one night and Spike is in the kitchen. He's got that whole barefoot, blue-jeaned, tee-shirted thing going on; a greyish-blue tee that drapes over his muscles, a teasing sight which still makes Xander's mouth go dry, makes him want to sink his teeth deep and not let go. He looks so fucking good even from the back--Jesus, especially from the back--and he's--
--making stir fry.
Xander blinks and comes over. He's been trailing the smell since he hit the front hall, figuring Buffy is getting domestic on their behalf, but he doesn't see her. He comes up behind Spike and wraps his arms around him and lays a bemused kiss on the side of his face. Spike, relaxed, lets himself be cuddled and continues shoving his wooden thing--to Xander, kitchenware is just a collection of nameless things--around in the pan. In the onions and chicken and other fine stuff.
Xander: "What's this?"
Spike: "Thought it'd be obvious. Food meets skillet, does that sizzly thing. 'S called dinner." He turns a little to find Xander's eyes and says, "All the cool kids are doing it." His voice is a blend you could never bottle: rich and low and teasing and warm.
Xander, surfing on a wave of dazed pleasure, a trigger of goofiness: "Since when do you cook? Did I miss a memo? Because I checked the fridge--" Where they keep their post-its, he means. "--and I saw no memo. There was no memo." It's his Bill Murray impression, which is wasted on Spike.
Spike: "Yeah, well. I'm not totally helpless, you know."
The seductive smell of friend onions is making Xander downright romantic, and he squeezes his arms tighter around Spike and reminds: "Yes, but those of our patients on liquid diets are not required to serve kitchen shifts."
Spike, mildly: "Thought it might be nice, having dinner ready."
Xander steps back several feet and does the classic finger-pointing screech, straight out of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the 1978 version. Spike looks confused and alarmed. Of course, it's only hours later as he's falling asleep that Xander realizes he had it backwards and that, in his impromptu performance, he's the pod person, but thankfully it's yet another pop culture reference that flies right over Spike's bleached head. His own geek cred remains intact.
Xander, dropping his arm: "Who are you and what have you done with Spike?"
Spike pauses a moment, then shrugs a shoulder as if he's copping to a failed conspiracy: "He's in the bedroom closet. You'll find a couple of bags there."
It's wonderful, Spike's stir-fry, and Xander eats it on the couch cuddled next to his vampire as they watch Hellbender, the latest Colin Farrell movie to hit cable.
Spike, as Farrell stumbles backwards from the bloody shower in a panic: "Christ. I'd eat that sweet ass like an apple."
Xander, forking up rice on autopilot, eyes fixed to the screen: "I'd help."
Things keep happening. Spike starts making dinner three or four nights a week, greets Xander when he comes home instead of clamming up with his laptop, stares deep into Xander's eyes at the most unexpected moments--his own wide, clear eyes saying things. Deep, deep things.
Xander is freaking out. Not necessarily in a bad way.
There's definitely a moment when he gets it, when he connects a dozen tiny dots like fireflies and figures out that Buffy has been talking to Spike. Coaching him or something. It's strangely girlish and he doesn't know what to think. Except, thinking: not so big on the thinking, not when Spike is gazing at him with luminous eyes and sliding his shirt off like a stripper. Sliding arms around Xander's waist, cheeking their faces together gently. Dropping to his knees, hands latched gently to Xander's hips.
Not when he's bringing Xander beers and doing dishes and trying to find out if he wants to try a new brand of toothpaste.
Xander: "Okay, stop." He has to wrench the toothpaste from Spike's hand, chuck it aside. It whacks into the sink. "What's going on with you?"
Spike, wide-eyed and startled, just dips his head a little and stares at Xander as if he's not sure he wants to engage the scary, crazy man.
Xander: "The cooking, the foot rubs, the toothpaste--if you're reading Cosmo I may have to deprogram you."
Spike looks self-absorbed, as if he's adding up the details of his own behavior for the first time, or maybe just trying to figure out what to say. "Just trying to contribute," he says at last.
Xander, lost: "Contribute?"
Spike, eyebrows drawn together, face uncertain but very serious: "To our relationship."
Xander is floored, can't really find a response. He knows Spike intimately on every level, but he is still turning to tapioca, so helplessly lost and in love he can't even form words. Had he ever in his life looked at Spike differently? In disgust and loathing? It's like he's broken free of the most foul fever. His life is marked by this moment: past and present and future. There's nothing in him now that could hate Spike again. He wishes a soul was something he could hold in his hands, a thick sweet body of flesh he could fuck into heaven.
But he's so stupid. It is.
He ends up with his arms around Spike, murmuring soft things into his ear, and Spike pushes like a storm's wind against him, something exotic and tropical and dark and endless.
It's around this time his tide turns, comes in. Luck and joy and laughter, things that only mean something when they're strung together in the gazes of someone else's eyes. Xander feels lost and helpless, and when they make love he can't focus on skill, can't do anything but kiss Spike wildly all over and force himself deep inside. His entire body is a cry.
I love you, I love you, I love you, his hands say.
Spike comes for him, eyes so wide they're seeing past Xander, right up through the atmosphere to the stars.
Spike figures out how to make the perfect sandwich for him, with ham and pickles and mayo.
Spike slides close to Xander's side of the couch and leans his head on Xander's shoulder and takes up residence in the cradle of his body as they watch the world go by on television.
One night at Willow's, Xander and Buffy are talking and he throws his arms around her and has to stop himself from crying, he's so grateful. She hugs back, head on his shoulder, a tiny shrimp of a girl with a terribly large heart.
Aware that it is absurd in countless ways, Xander takes Spike to a lesser known island in the Bahamas, rents a private villa in a place so secluded and exotic, it's like a hush has fallen over the world. They have their own bay, a huge overhang of cliffs, trees massing and whispering all around them. Spike loves the way it all feels by moonlight, wears nothing but white--or, if you want to get technical, fashionably expensive colors like oyster and eggshell.
It's the first time Xander has been anywhere this exotic, this amazing. He decides seventeen times during their trip that he wants to move there, dig his feet into the white sands and never leave. He eats fruit, he eats Spike in the lazy afternoon when the blinds are drawn.
When they return to Sunnydale, it seems smaller. Kind of tacky, dull, and doomed. But their home is familiar and it smells right.
Xander: "I'm going to go pick up Supercat."
Spike, flipping absently through the accumulated mail: "Poor little beast. Hope he doesn't crawl up your neck again, like that one time..." He leaves off absently, reading something or other.
Xander: "I won't be long." He steps forward and turns Spike toward him. Letters drop to the table from Spike's hand, some falling to scatter at their feet. Spike doesn't care. He's an armful for Xander, a pliant gift. His coolness is like home, no matter where they go.
The Hellmouth is no place to grow old, but if they can, this is where they'll be.
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