Chapters <<<< 22 23 24

Subtleties

by
Anna S

Part Twenty-Two

Every Tuesday and Thursday Xander drives Spike to his writing class at the university and picks him up again when it's over. Not because he has to, but because he gets a kick out of that moment a few minutes before ten when he arrives and steals a glance through the door and sees Spike sitting in one of those school-room desks: legs slightly spread and feet planted on the linoleum tiles, fluorescent lights making his hair look whiter than usual, face squinched up into a frown as he listens to someone talk.

I could be a writer, Xander thinks when he stares at Spike, and it's untrue, but his eyes write without words: black leather shoes on the dull white speckled floor, slight curl at the jeans cuffs that Spike bitches about but refuses on principle to iron flat, and the slinky shape of hips and torso and the throwback of shoulders against the undersized desk. One hand holding a classmate's story, the other resting on his thigh, leather bracelet clinging to the wrist. He is real and so very unreal--vampires? writing fiction? taking night classes?--that Xander sometimes has a brief, strange uncertainty about whether his own life is real or not, whether the things he remembers have actually happened. Sunnydale childhood, fateful meeting with Slayer, failed wedding with vengeance demon, dead boyfriend. It all coalesces in the surreal here and now.

Boy meets world. At these moments, Xander feels like he's seeing it for the first time. He loves Spike and this twice-weekly ritual, loves driving him home afterwards and talking about class, sometimes stopping for coffee at the Espresso Pump. It's like foreplay. Not just for sex, but for the rest of their life together.

Spike sometimes looks over and catches Xander watching through the classroom door, gives a faint smile. His blue jeans, his shirt, the buttery tufts of his hair: he has style, he's brilliant and alive, the most living dead man Xander has known.

Like just about every other human being on the face of the planet, Xander takes what he has for granted ninety percent of the time. And even the other ten percent of the time, there are still many things he never says to Spike. Daily life is a habit and you don't want to get too clutchy or co-dependent. If Xander walks into a room and notices how Spike's jeans fit and thinks, sweet holy fuck, he rarely says it aloud. How many times does Spike want to hear that? Some people say that compliments never get old. But Xander feels he'd just be babbling the same boring, unimaginative thing over and over, forcing Spike to think up a reply.

Spike doesn't seem to worry about this in reverse. Xander has never been with someone who gives so many compliments. He isn't sure if Spike's just one of those natural romantics, or if Dru--the original Lady Die--needed constant reinforcement, but Spike is verbal, and will tell Xander over and over how sexy he is, how edible, how juicy and hot and good. But it's not just a sex thing.

"You're a good man," he sometimes says, tender and warm, when Xander installs a safety handrail in the girls' house for Becca, or helps Willow with business taxes, or reassures Dawn that one bad, drunken night doesn't make her a loser slut doomed to a tragic and vampiric end. Xander's family taught him to take praise with a tight and distrustful smile, but he can't do that with Spike, who will wrap himself around Xander from behind and murmur regards against his neck, so that the words sink in--or, even harder to take--will say them right to Xander's face. Spike's gaze takes no prisoners. He'll stand close and stare with passionate admiration into Xander's eyes, or sometimes with a kind of deep wonderment. He has the super-power to melt human brain cells into pudding.

Xander has a hard time saying stuff in general. Spike's influence is starting to loosen his tongue, but not everything makes it out of his mouth. You're amazing, he thinks to Spike when he watches him through the classroom door: I'm so proud of you. How do you say that aloud, though, without sounding as if you're talking to a four-year old? You probably have to add fucking: I'm so fucking proud of you. A manly, adult pride. Except then it's kind of extreme, as if Spike's not just attending night class but battling cancer or taking a shuttle trip to orbit.

A few times they've gone to coffee with some of the students from Spike's class. Most are what Xander thinks of as real adults--over forty, with kids and paunches and grey hair--a category he doesn't count himself into yet. There's also a handful of aimless thirtysomethings in need of a creative jump-start, and one young guy, a short-order cook, who's already been published. Xander can't see any common factor among them, except that they like Spike, who bonds with the EMT over the difficulty of estimating blood loss volumes, reminisces with the lesbian lawyer about the sixties Berkeley scene ("Yeah, my mum was always telling stories"), and trades trivia with the cook on the methods and hit counts of famous serial killers.

He looks comfortable among them, except that he clearly wants to smoke with the smokers, and Xander feels a twinge of guilt when he catches Spike's fingers twisting straw papers into intestinal designs. Spinning coins. Bending fork tines back and forth until they break off.

Ginnie, the EMT: "Good lord, you're strong, honey."

In the diner they frequent, Spike looks unnaturally pale--which he is--and his female classmates joke that he's a vampire. Ginnie tries to take his pulse while Xander looks on in rising alarm, but Spike is meeting Xander's eyes across the table and smiling slyly. He does flirtatious things with his hand to evade her grasp. "Now, now," he purrs. "I've got a jealous boyfriend, you know. I have to be careful." The women coo, and tease Xander with approval.

Talking to normals has apparently required some interesting fabrications on Spike's part, and Xander is always careful not to accidentally trip him up.

One night as they're heading home, Xander says, bemused: "You told them you worked for a mortuary?"

Spike: "You'd be amazed how often that cover story comes in handy."

Xander, with a slight, wry head shake: "No, I really wouldn't."

Spike glances at him across the front seat of the car then looks off to the side where the trees are rolling by outside his window: "I'm a wicked man." His tone is strange and absent.

Xander: "Good man, wicked past." He almost reaches over to caress Spike's thigh, but they're taking a curve on the beach road and he needs both hands on the wheel.

A half-hidden smile directed out the window--harbor lights flashing by between breaks in the trees--then Spike offers: "Still got a wicked fashion sense."

Xander, after a thoughtful nod: "Killer smile."

Spike: "Bloody awful temper."

Xander: "Cold feet. Warm heart."

Spike: "Unbeating, though."

Xander: "Plus, you're drop-dead gorgeous."

Spike, glancing over again: "You been holding that in reserve?"

Xander: "Nah, I'm the soul of spontaneity."

A week or so later, spontaneity nearly makes Xander suggest that Spike invite his classmates over for dinner or drinks some night, but he holds that thought, figuring if Spike wants the company, he'll figure this out on his own.

Life has its little moments. Xander, reading from the bag of Cheetos: "You know, if you call snackfood puffy and cheesy, it's a good thing. If you call people that, it's a bad thing."

Spike: "Makes you think."

Xander: "You're just saying that."

Spike: "No, really. Snackfood, people--usually lump them in the same category." Off Xander's dry, lazily-lidded look: "Used to, anyway."

The class is dredging up things. Writing exercises spark memories, Spike tells him. He shares these with the class in the guise of fiction, and impresses the others with a skill for morbid detail. In one piece, he describes a scene in a tenement in the nineteen-thirties, the smell of blood and the necessity of dismemberment. Flies, flesh, bonesaws. It's like Xander is right there, with Dru laughing in her bloodstained gown--smearing hearts across face and lips, peering dreamily into disconnected eyes, playing patty-cake with piles of severed hands--as Spike fills suitcases one by one with newspaper-wrapped body parts. An air of boredom and inconvenience rises from the page.

Xander thinks he will have nightmares after reading some of Spike's writing, but doesn't. Spike does, though. He thrashes one night, muttering into his pillow, waking Xander toward four a.m. Vampires are strong, and Spike has never had a nightmare before, so it's a toss up where Xander's instincts might land him--sit up and turn on the light first, or just wrap his arms around Spike and try to ease him awake.

Instinct says embrace him, and Xander does. Spike shudders and twists away and is suddenly standing by the side of the bed, naked and in game face. Scarier in the darkness of the room. A low growl comes from his throat--thunderstorm in the distance--and Xander shifts to snap on a lamp. "Hey," he says.

Everything above the neck is twisted and snarled and monstrous, and the familiar choker at the neck is like a borderline separating this from the normal human body below that still shows signs of sex and Xander's mouth. But it's all the same, all one thing--a continuation of Spike.

Xander would hate to be scared of Spike. He isn't now, and moves across the bed without a thought. "Hey," he says. "Easy." Runs his hands up Spike's body as he rises to his feet, and feels a twitch of awareness that's followed by the melting away of demonic features. And Xander must have it bad, like Willow says, and maybe he needs to be needed, because the way Spike lets his neck bow and head rest on Xander's shoulder--the feel of his nape, the slope of his muscles, and the tired, heavy drape of his body--folds together everything vampire and human until the difference is meaningless.

His hands rest on Xander's hips and he cracks into soft, broken sobs.

Xander wouldn't recommend it to people, loving vampires. This is the only one worth loving, in his opinion. And it was one of those wacky, unlikely things--it's not as if when your loved one dies and is born again as a creature of darkness you can say: "Stick a soul back in so I can take him home, please." It's sad, but it's random. Spike was just the one. Right place, right time. Fate and stupid moves and a perverse streak--whatever the hell went into it, he's here now.

Xander, a week of nightmares later: "So, I'm just saying, any time you want a change of scenery, let me know, okay? I can take the time. Wherever you want to go, we'll go. A day's notice." Spike, rubbing garlic sauce on chicken--cutting board, kitchen island--looks up and smiles at him, his eyes showing bluish shadows. He is wearing one of Xander's oldest tee-shirts, the one that makes him look like a twenty-year old drummer instead of a hundred-year old vampire, if you don't look at the eyes too closely.

Spike, in a low, sultry voice: "You trying to spoil me?" That voice would go right to Xander's dick like a buzz if the other man's deep tiredness weren't so obvious.

Xander: "Always."

Writing classes seem a stupid reason to Xander to stick around when they have no other real schedules anchoring their lives. Or they would, except that they're important to Spike. Xander doesn't push. He will be understanding, and he's not going to push. He lets another week pass, and the time is usefully spent.

At the end of the week he takes Spike on a ride. Thinks about making him close his eyes as they approach their destination, but it's not necessary; they're coming at it from a back access road, and Xander parks by a set of anonymous outbuildings, and Spike is still curious and poking him with questions that Xander smiles at but won't answer. They crunch across asphalt and grass, around the building, and Xander unlocks a door in the chain-link security fence and there they are.

Spike stares.

Xander: "It was such a steal, I'd have been an idiot to pass it up."

Spike stares at him, eyes slightly wide, amazed.

Xander, mildly, hands in pockets: "It gets good mileage."

Spike stares at him.

Xander: "Okay, granted, it's going to depreciate in value, and I can't write it off for business if we use it for personal trips. And of course it's probably a tool of Satan. But--"

Spike: "Have you lost all your chips?"

They stand and look at the plane sitting fifty feet away. A balmy night wind sweeps the smell of fuel and tar lightly across the tarmac, and in the greater distance, a small commuter jet eases loose of the airport and rolls toward the runway, lights blinking.

Xander stops pretending to be casual and, focusing, takes Spike's hands in his own: "I don't want to have to worry about flight times and sunlight if we want to go somewhere. That's all."

Spike, helplessly: "Christ, pet--'s not like we're bloody rock stars."

Xander: "So? Millions of people have private jets nowadays."

Spike stares at him, eyebrows reaching new heights.

Xander: "Okay. Hundreds, at least."

It's decided that when you're a vampire, you've got plenty of time ahead of you to write, but a jet has a more limited shelf life--you don't just want to leave it sitting around unused, collecting rust. So they close the jet windows against the sun and head to Paris, a strange land filled--like everywhere else--with people far younger than the world they live in. Spike is one of a very select group, a small number of people who've seen the city before the turn of the century. He doesn't have as much to say about that as Xander expects. Has some stories, but they seem tinted with darkness, and he lives more in the now than in the past.

They wander Paris at night, and go places Xander will forget the name of, and eat things that are too rich, and see trees and gravestones and the Eiffel tower and people and dog shit and books and chic dresses and pigeons and long loaves of bread, and one night Spike breaks into a small museum he's fond of, and they wander its halls without tripping any alarms, which is just one of those perfect things you don't question too closely.

Spike, as they leave the museum: "Maybe I'll write about this."

Xander: "You should."

Part Twenty-Three

He's thought more than once about why Spike's here--one of the survivors, the redeemed. It was easy to hate Spike before the soul, but now Xander sometimes has to wonder: was he always a demon with character?

The confusion sometimes breaks Xander's mind, a big stick thrust into his bicycle wheel to send him flying. Demons are demons are demons, and most of the toothier species kill and eat humans, and they're just not worth knowing when they inhabit that side of the world. The underworld.

But Spike crossed over to the other side. Xander wonders about this more now than he ever did back when Spike's soul was oven-fresh. What is Spike, a freak of nature, a guy who can turn himself inside out, and will do it just to kick back at the universe?

He's a man who still has some secrets.

Xander and Spike maintain a busy boy-slayer hobby. They're not like other couples--okay, Batman and Robin, maybe--and there's a big gap to fill in the Sunnydale Justice League these days, even with Riley back. Buffy is doing her thing across the country, Faith has her own duties that don't often bring her to the unfashionable Hellmouth, and Willow has long preferred to "patrol" from the comfort of home, cozied up on cushions while she gets her magical buzz on, though that's a tenuously upheld duty these days. Becca's ongoing depression distracts her.

They patrol and Xander wonders, which is just a thing he does now and then, about how it affects Spike--killing his own kind. Because isn't there still some kinship under the skin with other demons?

"What, like ethnic solidarity?" Spike says when Xander asks. He's dry, amused. "Thought you knew better than that by now."

Xander: "Are you kidding? What do I know? I know what Buffy knows, and that's not a hell of a lot. I mean, don't get me wrong, I respect Giles, but the guy tossed out the slayer handbook, gave her a stake and said 'kill'. Watchers, man--they tell you just enough to get by. Too much info, you might start questioning the mission, and we can't have that."

Spike: "Aren't you the cynical one these days."

Xander: "I've earned it."

Spike: "With interest."

Xander: "And now they're rebuilding watcher lore from just about nothing--stone knives and bear skins. I say that makes you an expert in the field."

Spike, dismissively: "Huh. Expert on nothing but myself, pet." They stroll along the docks, looking for the slimy thing that's been cleaning out the seagull population and menacing fishermen. After a minute: "What do you want to know?" But he goes on before Xander can answer: "Vamps come in all flavors. Not a lot of loyalty among us." Us, not them, Xander notices. "You've got family lines--sometimes that means something, other times not so much."

Xander: "But you've got a vamp code."

Spike: "Yeahhh. For what that's worth. More honored in the breach."

Xander: "So what happens before you get, you know, embodied?"

Spike: "What d'you mean?"

Xander: "Well, in hell, when you're just hanging out waiting to suit up."

Spike's face has slackened with faint amazement. "D'you mean to say all this time you've been thinking--"

Xander shakes his head: "Wondering. I almost asked you about it once, back in the day--that time you emptied my dad's liquor cabinet and got me stinking drunk."

Spike: "Don't remember needing to pour it down your throat."

Xander: "You were a bad influence."

Spike, smiling: "And look where it's got me." A pause. "Someone sold you the crooked dope there, pet. Demons are born--incarnated, like. Same as humans, if you go by some religions."

Xander: "Yeah, but--what, there's just some baby demon in the driver's seat? Okay. That actually explains a lot." He hesitates, then stops Spike as he's walking by taking his hand. They pause near a tomb in the grass of the Fisherman's Graveyard, nothing stirring to distract them. "I know I've asked before, but, I'm still trying to figure it all out--demon, not-demon--"

Spike: "Half cup of one, third of the other, toss in some currants. Right." He's wry, indulgent of Xander's curiosity, but his eyes cut away with familiar evasion. "Don't know about most vamps. I've heard a few life stories, yeah, but existential debate doesn't come up as cocktail party conversation often as you'd think. Not really our bag."

Xander thinks that moonlight is the only place you can ask: "So do I love the demon, or the man?"

Spike's eyes are hard to read. "I'm baked, love. It's all one in the mix." He's silent as if waiting, then goes on: "Dru turned me and I woke up. I knew who I was. Same life, same loves, new eyes. Reborn, is all."

Xander: "Reborn. So how do you know you're a demon?"

Spike: "Just something you know."

Xander: "Yeah, but how? If you remember everything before you died--" A pause. "Okay, see, it's too confusing. You died, but you're a demon. And now you've got soul. A soul. His, yours--"

Spike: "Give it up, pet." His voice is kind, sad. "No answer's going to satisfy you."

While they were in Paris they'd met vampires Spike had known decades ago. They bred a different type of demon in Paris--or the city attracted and held them. These had been languid creatures, civil and fond of the arts, with stock portfolios and patrons. They held salons, mingled with humans, drank blood without killing. Not all the time, Xander felt sure, but enough so that he didn't feel too creepy hanging with them for a few hours.

"Bunch of effete housecats," Spike had said in derision. "Balls snipped, collared to rich buggers who show them off at parties--all of them hoping to star in the next Anne Rice novel."

And Xander, blinking, had glanced over at Spike's irritable profile and realized that he was (a) honestly contemptuous of the Parisians, and (b) utterly unaware of any irony.

Other people's blind spots can be exasperating and Xander hopes he'll never feel impatient with Spike's as he did with Anya's. As they rubbed shoulders with the Paris vamps, Spike described to Xander old grudges and slights, his inability to fit in with their "set." It was clear that the snubs rankled him even now, years later. Well, okay, there wasn't much guesswork involved, since he actually said: "Still rankles." Spike is often helpfully unsubtle.

The Paris vampires prey on Xander's mind weeks later. He tries not to think about this proof that vampires might vary, might paint pictures and attend the theater and contribute to society while sucking only the willing. It fucks with his worldview, which is clearest when the unsouled fiends are gamefaced and vicious, reeking of grave dirt.

Buffy comes home for a visit, and when Xander picks her up at the airport, she says: "You bought him a jet?"

Xander: "Just a small one."

Buffy: "You bought him a jet."

Xander: "And it was on sale."

Buffy, arms crossed, head cocked skeptically: "All over the world, orphaned children are starving, so you thought, 'Hey, I know what I'll do! I'll spend thousands of dollars on a big flying machine shaped like a penis!'"

Two million, Xander thinks, but it's probably better not to mention that. "It gets good mileage," he says helplessly.

Buffy stares him down, then her mouth twitches and her face is suddenly like ice cream on a hot day, melting and slipping off the cone. She throws her arms around him, and he hugs back with relief. When she pulls away he sees that her eyes are brimming with tears, but she's got a smile wedged on tight, her lower lip full of indulgent pride. "And the Olympic gold for the boyfriend freestyle goes to Xander Harris."

"Thanks," Xander says, smiling gently, a bit confused and off-balance.

Buffy's head hangs. "I'm so out of touch with the teasing," she apologizes, a huge sadness pulling at her small body. "I practiced that orphan line twenty-three times in my head." And then her lip trembles and she bursts into tears.

There's a horrible few minutes where Xander thinks that he's the one making her cry, that their relationship is so shaky that she can't see him without water-works. But then she gushes like a hydrant, and he learns that she's broken up with her boyfriend and eaten a gallon of mocha ice cream and found out she's pregnant, all within the last twenty-four hours.

It's a strange and difficult visit. Buffy stays with Willow and only comes over to the beach house a few times, and only when Xander is home. She also makes all arrangements through him. ("I thought I might stop by tonight, if you guys feel like hanging.") He wants to tell her it's okay, not to fret about formalities and the past when she's got other things to worry about. But he doesn't, because her being here like this--pregnant and alone and needy--puts him on edge, and he still has an instinct to keep Spike to himself. When she does stop by, the conversations between the three of them are awkward. Some serious social drinking might have helped, but none of them indulge.

He tells Spike about the pregnancy as soon as he gets home that first night. They're getting ready for bed, and they've been talking about it on and off for hours. When Xander comes out of the bathroom, Spike's outside on the deck, gazing out toward sea. Xander comes up behind him and cups Spike's left elbow in his palm, then slides his hand down until their wrists overlap, their hands mesh on the railing.

Spike, after they've talked a bit more about Buffy: "You're not getting the urge to spawn, are you?" His tone is wary, and maybe other things, but Xander hears only the wary.

Xander: "Oh dear god, no."

Spike, relaxing: "Didn't think so."

It's Willow who drives Buffy to the doctor's office where she gets the abortion. Xander doesn't see her at all that day, though he talks to Willow on the phone for a few minutes, gets an update in soft murmurs pitched so that Buffy won't hear. She's been crying, Willow tells him, and then as she talks Willow starts crying too, wet whispery sniffs that fill Xander's body with tension and helpless rage against the guy who isn't around to deal with all the shit he's caused.

After Xander hangs up, he holds the phone for a while and works on his rage, and wonders if he personally could have done anything differently, given Buffy other options. He'd talked to her over coffee--given her the choices talk, been the supportive guy friend of old--but his help had never quite gelled. His mind doesn't want to look where the possibilities pointed. It's too late, and he's not father material, and she hadn't expected more of him than he'd given.

Buffy is old, for a slayer. As the years pass Xander is beginning to feel a chill if he thinks about this too closely.

The abortion itself doesn't seem to count for much with Spike, doesn't make him angry or sad on the unborn's behalf, but Xander can tell he feels for Buffy. He's writing again, and there's something in the line of his mouth, the lowered brood of his eyelids.

A few weeks pass. Buffy goes and Dawn visits them more often for a while as if instinctively seeking comfort. The breezes from the beach are growing cooler at night. Riley comes over for dinner one evening and the three of them end up in the living room afterwards, talking late over too many beers, music playing low. The Spike CD mix. Nirvana. Buddy Holly. Norah Jones. Riley sleeps over in the spare room--they won't let him drive--and in the morning Spike treats him more or less like a normal guest at the kitchen table. They're starting to take each other for granted.

Xander feels out of sorts for a while: everything he does, it's as if he's fumbling. He can't get a grip at the office, he's distracted during patrols, and his workshop projects are shaping up into misshapen messes. Sex is good, but there's something building inside him like a sneeze he can't quite get out. All the ordinary things he usually handles without even thinking about them feel off, clumsy in his grasp.

It's like a fever breaking with relief when one day Spike comes out to the workshop on some errand, and stays to fuck him. He's got Xander bent over the workshop table and Xander's left hand is braced on the splintery surface while his right grips the edge so hard he thinks the wood might crumble like gingerbread. Xander's jeans are around his knees, and Spike rides him from behind with rough, merciless thrusts, every upstroke driving Xander onto his toes and lifting the nearest two table legs off the ground, every downstroke letting the table thud back to the floor. Each jarring smack knocks a cry from Xander's throat, and every few thrusts Spike twists his hips and nails him somewhere deep inside, prodding a live current at the base of Xander's spine.

"Yes!" Xander shudders and grinds back, trying to take more.

Spike's hips move at a slightly off-kilter angle, a skidding heaviness of hipbone against Xander's ass. He's got an arm around Xander's waist, Xander's balls in his hand, and he's working them, tugging and rolling and massaging.

"I need you--oh fuck," Xander gasps. "Please--" Spike skims his hand up and then down again, up and down, up and down, and then suddenly fists the head of Xander's cock into a tight, slick cap--thumb, forefinger, heel--and pulls it over him again and again. A blur of pleasure rises into pain and then breaks like glass.

"That's it," Spike says thickly, his own hips starting to lose rhythm, a sweet fuck, like popcorn jumping. He comes with a shout, face pressed into Xander's hair.

Waves crash, days wheel by, fall wanders in.

Xander doesn't often surface from his life. It's hard to explain, but he's submerged in daily existence, and it's not often that he kicks up, breaks gasping into the strange upper air, and thinks: Huh, so I'm a human being--what the hell is that? How fucking weird is it that he's this bipedal, soft-organed creature capable of abstract thought, a member of a race that builds skyscrapers and dreams up moving pictures and tosses rockets at the moon once in a while? Did the human race just invent itself, or were they created by a god--some big Brain Guy who contains multitudes and must be at least partly responsible for prime-time television? Evolution seems highly questionable given what Xander knows, but the idea that Darwin and the monkeys could be batting for the losing team is pretty fucked up, when he thinks about it. Which he rarely does, thank you very much.

Human existence is bizarre, science-fictionally bizarre, but when you add in demons and the implication of angels, the power of the holy cross, an eyewitness testimony of heaven--it's all a mystery he thinks someone should explain.

Then he sinks back into life. The beach he lives on runs along the edge of Sunnydale, and he goes back and forth between two worlds, one where he battles the insane forces of evil at the insane whim of good, and another where he grills steaks and listens to the waves crash while Spike sits on the deck rail with a beer and reads to him from his latest attempt at fiction.

Spike is his normal life now. Things cross over. Xander is going to keep Spike with him here at the edge, where some evenings it almost feels safe.

Part Twenty-Four

Xander dreams that he's attending a Halloween party. He's there with Anya, winding through the crowd. It's perfectly normal in the dream that some of the guests are in costume and some are actual monsters. Demons, vamps, hairy shambling things no one has a name for. They nod to him, and he gladhands a few, like a politician on an election circuit. Everyone knows him, Xander Harris. He feels oddly at home. Leaning on his arm, Anya is bored and chatty but he can't isolate individual words. They flow by his ears, a river of girl talk.

In his dream, he's a pirate wearing an eye patch, but his eye is really missing. He walks with Anya out a back door of Lowell House and onto school grounds. The high school football stadium is a crater and they sit up on the bleachers like sweethearts and stare into its depths. Neither of them can move, and Anya is terrified of what's under the bleachers: at any moment now it's going to grab her ankles and look up her skirt. Dig its claws into her. Chew down to the bone. She's telling him this in gory detail, and Xander can hear the thing down below them, scraping as it climbs, and he begins to feel her terror. They stumble down the steps toward the field--if they fling themselves over the edge, into the Hellmouth, they can escape what's coming for them. But it's Anya who falls in, half pulled from his hands, dangling over the edge like a doll.

When Xander wakes up, his heart is pounding like something trapped inside a coffin, and the other half of the bed is empty. Disoriented, he scrubs at his face, hides behind one hand as if facing the world is going to take some effort. Stages. He fingers the socket of his left eye, and the soft skin there. He can see out of both eyes. Waking up is always good.

For some reason it's evening, and then he remembers the last few days, spent down in the sewer system on one of those creepy bug hunts best left to the professionals--movie stars, in other words, who get paid to fake it. Reality sucks. The bugs did too, sort of like giant ticks. He's heard Willow say 'probosces' too many times in the last forty-eight hours. He thinks it must have been giant ticks after him and Anya and he can suddenly remember the feel of ticks big as cats swarming all over his back--still the dream. That didn't really happen. Thank Christ.

Xander is naked, but not it's not a shucked and fucked sort of naked. He'd been too tired to fuck when he went to bed. He feels up to it now, though, and walks naked from his room and down the hall, toward the stairs.

The dream had been real. Very real. Xander finds his house reassuring. The carpet under his feet is soft and clean. Music from the television floats up from below. The second-floor landing used to be empty but as of a week ago it has a plant and a picture. He's not the art-on-the-wall type of guy, but he can adapt, and Dawn's getting into art, like Joyce used to be--she's drawing, painting, thinking about switching her major, and now one of her paintings is on the wall with a special light fixed above it, the kind you see in museums. She'd been tickled when he'd visited her school show and bought the painting, and he doesn't know if it's good or not, but he doesn't care. It's blue and red and he likes it, and so does Spike.

The window glass reflects the landing and makes a picture: the soft hooded light above the painting, the plant fronds, his naked body. He turns sideways and strokes his stomach, studying himself, and decides he has a good body, and hopes that there isn't anything down on the beach staring up at him from the darkness.

His feet carry him downstairs step by step. His house has a good and quiet feel to it. The music is the score to some movie, rising and falling with actorly voices. When he reaches the doorway to the living room, he stands in the dim hall and pokes his head in just a little. There's his living room mirrored in another window, nearly transparent: lamp and couch and flickers of television, but not the blond head of the vampire sitting there. He's not reflected by the world.

Spike looks up from his computer, aware of him lurking. "You awake, or wandering in your sleep?"

Xander: "Mostly awake." He comes in. "Bad dream."

As he crosses the room, Spike closes the laptop and makes room for him on the couch. He's not wearing a shirt. Serious, pretty, creature of the night. Xander lies back between Spike's legs and puts his head in Spike's lap and lets himself be petted, upside down. Fingers in his hair, the curve of a palm under his jaw.

Spike: "What's got you dreaming?"

Xander: "Ticks. Giant ticks." A pause. "Anya."

Spike: "Right tick herself."

Xander, mildly: "Shut up." He could go back to sleep like this, sleep forever. "I dreamed I was at a party and the world ended, and Anya fell into the Hellmouth. I had just one eye."

Spike: "Yeah." As if he's heard this one before.

Xander: "It was really real. Unmonked real."

Spike, rubbing Xander's stubbled jaw with a deep, relaxing rhythm: "What's that mean?"

Xander: "You know, with Dawn, how the monks made her. Changed everything so that we knew her. It's just, sometimes it feels like...it might have been more than that. Like our entire lives have been rewritten. Don't you ever feel that?"

Spike, after an abstracted moment: "No."

Xander: "It's like 'Crisis on Infinite Earths', when the DC Multiverse collapsed and left only one universe...one earth. Maybe we're on one of the other earths, and someday it'll all be folded together. How do we know if this is where we're supposed to be? Maybe Willow really *was* supposed to be a vampire. Maybe I'm supposed to be dead, and you're supposed to be with Dru. Or with Buffy."

Spike, finishing the thought: "In some other reality."

Xander: "Or this reality. That's what I mean...is this the real reality?"

Spike: "You're making my head hurt." He cups Xander's chin so he can't open his mouth or talk any more. "We're here, aren't we?" Xander tries to answer, but Spike won't let him. "Don't have an existential meltdown. Leave that to high school students and the French."

His hand eases, and Xander says: "It's too good though." He runs his hand down Spike's shin, feeling up its firm length through denim. "Being here with you. It's too fucking good."

Spike: "So it can't be real?" An exasperated, maybe even sympathetic sound. "Christ. You Hellmouth kids. Every gift horse's a nightmare with you. Not even vamps are that pessimistic, love. So what, you want proof this is real? Everything bad makes it real, yeah? Well, you got Becca losing her arm and Dawn dating snot-nosed little tossers, and Buffy tearin' herself up over some bastard who deserves to have his testicles ripped off by Hrothar demons--you need more than that?"

He sounds angry and Xander swallows, ashamed. Aware of being naked and vulnerable and upside down, he shifts himself to sit up.

Spike: "Maybe you think you don't deserve what good you've got."

Xander sits next to him with his feet back on the ground, feeling tired: "Maybe." He can feel Spike looking at him, and then a hand slides between his legs. That's Spike, always looking for easy answers. But Xander begins to harden, and after a minute he leans back and spreads his legs a little, closes his eyes. His hands, resting against the couch on either side of him, clench.

"You deserve a lot more than what I can give," Spike murmurs after a minute, sounding pissed and sad.

Xander opens his eyes, removes Spike's hand and holds it. "Come here," he says. Spike climbs across his lap, straddling him. They don't say anything else for a while. Xander mouths Spike's neck and shoulders and chest, tonguing and then biting him. Spike shifts astride him, making those soft, ambiguous noises that Xander has learned mean: yeah. His skin is fine under Xander's hands, hair barely visible in the lamp light. After a while they end up on the floor, shoving the coffee table over, writhing like snakes on the rug until Spike is shed of his jeans. They rub off on each other, a bit dry and painful, but so good neither of them is able to stop. When Xander comes, Spike groans his name and copies him.

Later, Xander steals one of Spike's secret stash of cigarettes and smokes it on the deck, naked. It feels necessary to do something entirely out of character, different. He's going to leave a mark on the universe, even if it's not the universe it seems to be.

I could be totally imaginary, he thinks--though he doesn't think he is, because he can feel gritty sand under his feet and hear the wind in the reeds, and he almost but not quite needs to piss. It isn't the Matrix, and it isn't Jonathan's reinvented universe, and so what if a few monks played around with the forces of time and space, if it gave them Dawn.

He feels like he's in his proper place, as if he couldn't be anywhere else. And the night is dark and huge, and Spike is inside, showering. Xander thinks he should go join him.

The End

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