Your Horoscope for Today

by
Anna S

Part Six

When Xander woke up he was staring into Spike's face. Asleep, Spike was a guy in his twenties who went to the University of Sunnydale, whose parents called him once a week and sent him checks from England. A grad student or a late bloomer. He must have died at twenty-five, six. A good age to die, if you were going to wind up immortal.

Xander left him on the floor covered in an afghan he'd inherited from his own parents, took a shower, and fled.

He bought doughnuts, blood, and a newspaper, none of which he had to drive his reroofed car more than three blocks for. Running these errands made him feel like a grown-up, like when he first moved into the apartment with Anya and had to buy bath towels and tinfoil and water glasses. I am a man who buys his own paper, and blood for my houseguest. That sort of thing.

With the blinds drawn, his living room was dim and Spike was just a longish lump by the foot of the couch, like a sleeping afghan-colored python.

A strange Saturday morning lay ahead, unplanned. For a while, Xander sat and read the paper and ate cereal, occasionally glancing over at Spike, who didn't snore or even twitch.

Dead snakes make the best pets.

"Meow," said something next to Xander's foot. He levitated right off his chair, banged his toe, and hopped back out of reach. The thing leap-frogged to his deserted seat and then to the table, where it began licking the milk from his cereal.

"Good kitty," he muttered, raking an agitated hand through his hair. "Not at all a fiend of darkness." But he did have one on the premises, he thought. At which moment the phone rang, threatening to raise the dead. He scooped it up before it could bleat again. "Xander's House of Pain, how may I help you?"

"Ahhhh, yes," Giles said, as if uncertain he'd reached the right number. He nailed that dubious tone so well Xander couldn't help but admire. "I called to see how things were going, and whether you needed anything."

"Couldn't be better. Brought Spike home, cleaned him up, had hot twisted sex with him for two--maybe three hours--then got a good night's sleep."

From the other end of the line came the sound of silence, followed by a delicate cough. "Yes, well. I assume you'll be all right on your own for a while then."

"Oh, sure. Tonight I'm taking him to see Les Miserables and then a late dinner, if he feels like eating. Always iffy with vampires."

A sigh signaled the ritualistic cleaning of prescription lenses. "You really do have an extraordinary gift for irreverence. Sometimes I almost believe--what? Oh yes, several, though they've a tendency to breed if you overfeed them. Excuse me, Xander, I've a customer. Do call if you run into any problems. No, no, you should dehorn them first."

"Wait--almost believe what? Giles?" Answered only by a dial tone, he shut off the phone in resignation. His life would remain a mystery.

Part Seven

"I bought the tickets in advance," Xander said while they waited in line at the theater that night. "I was going to surprise Anya, a late Christmas present. Three hundred bucks." He paused, teetering on the edge of the bitter dark pit that was his heart. "Figured I might as well not waste them."

Spike, dressed in Xander's clothes, studied him with a wordless frown, then flowed into his personal space and kissed him. Loaded with blood and roofie-free, he'd become more like his old aggressive self over the course of the day, but impromptu nuzzling had never been in his arsenal before now.

Held fast, Xander waved his hands in a parody of spastic befuddlement, aware of heads turning, of murmurs and giggles, before he grabbed Spike's arms. He meant to thrust him off, the way you'd dislodge a dog from your leg, but he noticed how nice the kiss was, and that was his downfall.

"Nice" was the word his mom used to describe a baby shower or a Mother's Day present of cheap earrings. When he used it himself, he used it sarcastically.

But now his whole body was chiming nice, nice, nice and meaning it. It was a kick, letting Spike try to kiss everything better in the middle of a line for Les Mis with the good people of Sunnydale looking on.

For just a moment, as the doors opened to let the crowd in, as he held Spike's arms through the borrowed blue shirt, as a February breeze touched his neck, he loved the craziness of his life instead of hating it.

They went in and watched the show and afterwards he took Spike to dinner and explained to him that he liked onion rings.

"Yeah?" Spike said doubtfully, but accepted Xander's assurance and ate some. His face brightened when he tasted them. "Bloody brilliant," he said with feeling, holding a ring in his fingers to marvel, then looked up at Xander with a real smile, eyes trusting and fanning out in tiny crinkles at the edges.

It gutted Xander.

"Try them with ketchup," he said, when he could catch his breath.

~*~*~*~*~

Later that night, during back-to-back episodes of Farscape, Spike grew restless and stroked Xander's thigh until he was successfully distracted from the vision of Aeryn Sun in slick black leather, a minor miracle, a victory for vampire pheromones.

"What's up?" Xander asked, already knowing the answer.

Spike straddled his lap and popped his shirt buttons and introduced Xander to his tongue again. By this point, Xander was feeling pretty friendly toward it. He kissed back, holding Spike's hips, pushing his shirt up. A whoosh of cotton came between them for a moment, then the shirt was off and the kiss back on.

Piano-fingering his way around all that naked skin, he discovered that healing had progressed further during the past twenty-four hours; every place he touched was nearly smooth.

Sex should have been the cherry on top of the evening, but the intensity of Spike's need was off-putting.

Xander eased him back. "I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I think you may be under a spell." Spike unbuttoned both their jeans at once, in an impressively ambidextrous way. Xander took a breath. "Or two."

"Yeah?" Absent tone.

"A sex spell," Xander spelled out. "And the amnesia--at first I thought you'd bumped your head, but now I'm not so sure."

"Figured it was something like that." Spike pushed their cocks together and rubbed with the full force of his hips. Boy Scouts couldn't have started a better fire.

"Don't you care? This whole this," he gestured at their jutting organs, "might not even be you."

"Told you." Spike massaged Xander's shoulders and gyrated in his lap, eyes half shut. "I know who I am," a thrust, "and what I want. Didn't lose all my marbles."

Now was probably not a good time to mention that Spike had paired off with a dolly-loving girl vamp for a hundred years or that until recently he'd had a crush on the slayer. He looked supremely uninterested in pursuing this existential dilemma. Plus, speech was becoming a challenge.

"Okay then." Xander let his head fall back on the couch. "As long as you're--oh, fuck--sure. But tomorrow I'm taking you to Giles. If you've been whammied, we've got to--got to--oh man, yes, yes, yes--"

Part Eight

"I don't see why," Giles said, sliding his hands in his pockets and studying Spike through his glasses from across the magic shop. Dawn was teaching the vampire her version of rummy, which involved jelly beans and arm punches, and his ruffled head was bent over his cards as he frowned and listened to her explain the rules.

Xander tried to assimilate the watcher's words. "Um, excuse me? Come again?"

Giles glanced at him, expression mild but eyes so cool as to be scary. "It's not as if he has free will, Xander. He's a demon. Self-determination, liberty, even the most basic right to exist that every human being takes for granted--these don't apply." His voice lowered and gentled. "You know this."

"So we're just going to leave him like this and, what, auction him off as a houseboy?"

That at least seemed to discomfort Giles. "You said he was, er--"

"Horny. Every night. Like clockwork."

And the glasses come down, ladies and gentlemen, and the handkerchief comes out. "Yes. I see where that could present a problem."

"Not from where I'm sitting," Xander said, earning a sharp look. "But he's not going to be too happy when he comes to his senses."

"Xander," Giles said slowly, "when I called yesterday and you said that you'd, that you and Spike...oh dear lord." Watching the truth strike was like watching a bug hit glass, but funnier. He put his glasses back on and squared his shoulders. "Perhaps it would be best to find out what's affecting him." He shot a tiny nervous once-over at Xander. "I'll just--I'll just get my books."

"Good call."

"Rummy," Spike said from across the room, and drew Dawn's jelly bean pile toward himself with both hands, smirking while she huffed in pique.

Xander wandered over and clapped a hand on Spike's shoulder. "How's it going, Big Bad?"

"I've got all her beans," he said with satisfaction.

"Excellent." Xander affected a guttural accent and rubbed his hands together. "The first step in our plan is complete. You, puny human," he caught Dawn in a glower, "will soon bow down before the combined might of the two most powerful criminal masterminds the world has ever known."

"It's funny." Dawn cocked her head. "You're a lot nicer when he has amnesia. What's up with that?"

"Yeahhh," Spike drawled, sliding an arm around Xander's waist to reel him in. "What's up there?"

The vampire's leer was level with Xander's crotch and he tried to pull away before Dawn noticed.

"Nothing at all. At the moment."

He stepped safely out of reach behind Spike and immediately reestablished contact, massaging the slope of his shoulders. One hand slid up into the thicket of Spike's hair and was teasing it into new and interesting shapes when he caught Dawn's wide eyes on them. Quickly he moved away.

"I'm going to go drink a latte, or maybe seven," he said, already feeling jittery. "I'll be back. After."

He left the shop and paused a moment to suck in some fresh air and sunshine. No hell gods around, no trolls with attitude, no defecting or defective girlfriends. And possibly he had himself a boyfriend, which, wow. Head go blooey.

He'd had a girlfriend who'd killed and cursed thousands of men, and he'd dealt with that, because she'd gotten a soul, she'd been humanized and retired. But now he'd hooked up with the real deal, an active demon who probably only needed a chipectomy and a hard slap to set him off on a killing spree.

Maybe Giles was right. Maybe Spike would be better off if they left him spelled under, ignorant of all the things he'd done.

It was the kind of thought that could make your mind go around in circles.

Part Nine

"You have a funny-shaped head," he said, tracing the edge of Spike's face and pushing back loose curls for a better view.

"I do not."

"How do you know? It's not like you can look in the mirror."

"You expect me to trust your word?"

"Have I ever lied to you?"

"Well, I don't bloody know, do I." Spike pursed his lips slightly and assessed Xander as if looking for flaws.

"Your ears stick out."

"Of that I am aware."

"And you've got big pores," he said triumphantly. "On your nose. And little bumps, alllll over."

"I missed my guava-avocado facial mask this week," he said as Spike licked the length of his nose. "Ewww," he added in a perfunctory way, betraying himself with a smile. He hid it against the pillow and pretended to rub his nose clean. Meanwhile the two of them were rubbing in all sorts of other good places, knees and hands and thighs. "You've got Ginsu-blade cheek bones."

"And that's bad?"

"I didn't say that."

"Mmm. Your upper lip does this...thing." Spike salaciously licked it and then flicked his tongue a bit further in.

"Bizarre, freakish thing," he murmured at the next pause. "Dunno what it is exactly. Like a harelip."

"But is it a sexy harelip?"

"'S all right."

"I could get myself a club foot to go with it. And a hump."

"No worries 'bout that last."

~*~*~*~*~

It was getting harder for Xander to ignore the trauma, the whimpering sounds of distress, the wounded eyes.

Buffy's, that is.

"You're having sex with Spike."

Shoulders hunching, he continued to hammer the shelves he was making to replace the troll wreckage. "I've said it like fifteen times. I should just print tee-shirts."

"But you're having sex...with Spike." To be fair, she always gave the words a slightly different emphasis, as if by varying the frequency she could translate them into something meaningful.

"Look, you don't have to picture it. You don't even have to think about it."

"Oh," Buffy moaned unhappily. "You said 'picture it.' Why did you say that?"

He sighed and began placing shelves on their supports. "Hey, did I mention that 'sex' is the hot new slang for 'arm wrestling'? Picture that," he said soothingly, "a manly bout of wrestling, followed by beer, spitting, maybe a game of darts, and some Christian hymns to round off the evening."

"It's too late." She was pouting, with a side order of panicky. "It's in my brain now, like an earworm, and I'll never get it out--it's worse than that Disney song."

"What Disney song?"

To his utter bafflement she began singing, "It's a world of laughter, a world of tears, it's a world of hopes and a world of fears--"

From all corners of the shop the others suddenly sprang into sight, converging on Buffy.

"Stop, stop!" Willow cried, shaking her hands with a no-no-no gesture, horrified. "Oh my god, are you trying to get us all killed?"

"What? No! I'm trying to get Xander's gay sex out of my head!"

Giles gazed at her with a serious expression. "Buffy, no matter how justifiable the cause, the Magic Kingdom theme song is a powerful tool of evil. It can summon creatures more savage and dangerous than we've ever faced before." He paused. "It's also very annoying."

"I'm sorry. I didn't know."

Moving to Xander's side in a show of loyalty, Willow asked, "And what's wrong with gay sex, anyway?" Her tone was a little hot.

"Nothing! In theory," Buffy said defensively. "But in Spike--"

"Please don't finish that thought," Giles interrupted. Wearing a pained look, he retreated to the back of the store. Buffy skittered off in the same direction, but toward the training room.

"Well. I've had my love life compared to a Disney ride and driven my friends away--" Xander unbuckled his tool belt, a gunslinger hanging up his gear. "I think my work here is done."

Willow squeezed his arm. "It'll take a little while to adjust," she said, voice pitched low. "But it's not like you're setting a precedent, dating a vampire and all." Always seeing the bright side, that was Will.

"No. Just an unsouled one."

He laid the last of his tools back in their box and went to find Giles, who'd settled in at his desk in the alcove by the training room. He had a book open in front of him and was peering at it with a magnifying glass. Something in the tension of his body suggested that he was aware of Xander's presence and uncomfortable. Xander stood off to one side until the other man's gaze reluctantly flickered up.

"Yes?"

"Thought I'd see how it's coming."

Giles put the magnifying glass down and leaned back in his chair. "It's not," he said. "I'm no further ahead than I was an hour ago, or a week ago for that matter. I'm sorry, Xander, but I can't reverse a spell I can't identify. Unless this wizard turns up to share his secrets, I'm afraid Spike will have to make the best of his fresh start."

"And that's it? That's all you're going to do."

"I'm not sure what more you'd like me to do," Giles said carefully. "The brain is a delicate and complex organ, even a vampire's. Tinkering blindly will only cause more damage."

Faced with this dead end, Xander would have liked to offer a retort or a sudden, brilliant idea, but he'd run dry of both and had to walk away. Giles didn't try to follow, but Willow intercepted him. By her face he knew she'd overheard, or more likely had already known how things stood, since she'd been helping with the spell research for the past week.

If a witch and a watcher couldn't come up with a solution, he supposed it really was a lost cause.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I know you wanted to help him."

That wasn't quite the extent of it and he wasn't even sure help was the right word, but it didn't matter. "Sure. I wanted to help."

"You have to admit, he's not so bad right now," she said, smiling up at him. "And it's kind of sweet, how he gets all puppy-eyed around you."

"I think you're imagining things." He grabbed his tool box in one hand, letting its weight pull him off balance, a perfect excuse to leave, leave, leave. "Besides. It's not really him."

"What do you mean?" Her face was squinching in concern.

"I never thought I'd say this but...I kind of miss the old Spike. He was a son of a bitch who tried to trade me away like a bag of poker chips, but I knew where I stood with him. I mean, yeah, he hated me, but this Spike doesn't even know me."

"So he'll get to know you," she said, as if problem solved.

"Will, it's not real. Him crushing on Buffy, that was real."

Willow's face was appealingly earnest. "How do you know it's not real? You don't know what's a spell and what isn't--it's like once a cake is baked. You can't cut it open and pull out an egg or a cup of sugar. And if a spell makes things better, how is it wrong? Would you rather be with a guy who'd kill us all for a half-time snack if he got a chance?"

What could he say to that? It was too complicated for words, at least for simple, Xander-sized words, which were all that fit in his mouth. "He doesn't watch American football," he said instead.

"Okay, point very much missed."

"I hear you." He ducked his head. "I guess I just want the cake, and the eating of the cake. Funny old Spike: nice new, snuggly Spike." With accompanying sign language he tried to convey cake and Spike and a balanced diet of both, but his hands were empty.

And there you had it. And there he didn't.

Part Ten

The moon was high, the air balmy, the hour late.

"So we do this often? Tramp around town in our fighting clobber, doing our bit for God and country?" Spike, who'd easily rediscovered his smoking habit, lit a cigarette as they entered the graveyard side by side. Despite a lifelong hatred for his dad's Lucky Strikes, Xander found the waft of tobacco strangely agreeable.

"Well, this isn't your country and you're not on speaking terms with the man upstairs, but mostly yes."

Spike scoured a tiny puff of disbelief from his throat. "What the hell am I doing this for?"

"We've been asking ourselves that. You like to kill things. And swagger. Still, that doesn't explain why you'd kill and swagger on the side of the angels."

"Can only kill demons, right?" "Yeahhhh, but--"

"Suppose I could set myself up," Spike said thoughtfully. "Get some minions and a fancy moniker--'Spike the Scary', 'Spike the Very Bad Fellow'--and wage the smackdown on the local riffraff."

Coming to a halt by the gravestone of Hattie Maxwell, 1913-1999, Xander hoped for a tone of authority. "Right now? Not such a good idea."

Spike's face was the same luminous white as the marble behind him as he tipped his head and smiled. "Nice to know you're looking out for me, pet." He pitched his cigarette, took a theatrical and mesmerizing step closer.

"You always looked out for me?"

His vampire was close now, and Xander felt his heartbeat start to rabbit against his ribs, his throat tighten. "Not so much," he said with an honesty he often regretted. "We used to be mortal foes...mortal foes who shared a room and did each other's laundry, but still."

"Yeah?" Spike made minute adjustments of his head, homing in for a kiss, gaze lowered and fixed on Xander's lips. "I like that. Mortal foes. Has drama." He kissed Xander, slow and fine and wrong.

This was what so often got him in trouble. The kissing thing.

He hadn't even hit double digits in the number of people he'd lip-locked, but it was still the most dangerous hobby around.

Narrow the tally to people who did it well and the list got even smaller.

Spike, hands down: kisser numero uno.

Especially with hands down, hands on his waist, sliding up and down his sides, under his shirt, down to his ass. It wasn't the gay apparel--at least Xander didn't think so. It was just that he did it so. fucking. right. How embarrassing was that? He'd staked his pride on ridiculing Spike, back when that meant something. Now he was a grade-A sucker for those deadly dead lips.

Please go back to being a murderous loser, he thought, as if this would incant a spell to save him. It didn't. The same details he'd once found sleazy were now sexy, and the fear he used to feel whenever he remembered what Spike was now transmuted to something else in his belly and balls. That undead neck was smooth and corded, the hair rough, the body hard and sleek as a surf board on a high wave, something to grip and ride. And Jesus, they were practically humping on top of Hattie Maxwell.

Xander grabbed the back of Spike's head and tongue-fucked him desperately, spurred by Spike's hands. One thumb was outlining the shape of his erection through denim, working down toward the root. He felt his zipper undone--it dragged along his shaft like soft teeth over a layer of cotton--and then Spike went to his knees and shucked him out and sucked him in, massaging the head of his dick with a slick tongue. He came in about ten seconds, hips stabbing forward, hands wound into Spike's hair.

"Sorry," he murmured afterwards when Spike had gotten to his feet. "You want me to--"

"Er, not now," Spike said and shoved him sharply to the side.

Stumbling, Xander didn't have time to misunderstand before a heavy-set vamp roared into combat with Spike.

He took a breather and watched them scrap, gaze following the slung punches, the kicks, the twist and flex of Spike's body as he pummeled the crap out of Big and Dumb and Soon to Be Dust.

In an admirable move, Spike vaulted lightly onto Hattie's headstone and pivoted to kick the other vamp's jaw, then leapt off like a cougar and drove him to the grass. After a few more punches, he staked the goon then stood, dusting off his jeans. Xander applauded.

"Now that's fun," Spike said, twirling his stake like a six-gun before pocketing it.

"Good clean fun," Xander agreed as they resumed their walk.

"How many vamps you reckon this town holds? Fifty, a hundred?"

"Hard to say. They come and go. The Hellmouth is a hot vacation spot."

"Tell you one thing. Someone ought to be funding this operation. We're doing a public service here--like cops. Ought to be a bounty, say fifty a head." He caught Xander's look. "Too low? A hundred then. Hell, five hundred. We're saving lives."

Xander smiled. "I could get behind that. But somehow I don't think the city council's going to be appropriating funds for vamp hunts any time soon."

"Hmm," Spike grunted, and lit another cigarette.

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