TWELVE

Buffy hadn’t been able to get her mind off Spike all evening because the SITs wouldn’t let her. Since his little presentation, four of them had decided he was “totally hot” and wanted to change teams and were speculating about who might be induced to swap. This incensed Kennedy, who was still mad about Spike teaching her the finer points of getting repeatedly smacked while attempting to push a rolled newspaper at an impassive vampire not occupied with twenty-some other Potentials this time while she did it. Kennedy was not about to admit Spike scared her, so she flailed out with every hateful speculation about him she could think of, ranging from the insane and impossible to the almost-true. This naturally was tantamount to treason to Molly, Carol, Kim, and Lisa, the would-be defectors to the Hotness party. Meanwhile Joanne had been trying to play peacemaker on the way back and naturally, with the insane logic of teenagers, everybody was now mad at her. Joanne kept bursting into conversations with, “But I only said--”

It was such a relief to pull into the driveway and see Spike and Dawn on the steps.

Buffy managed not to break the key turning the engine off, nor did she break the car door in shutting it. In fact she felt she shut it with great care. A definitive masterpiece of shutting. She was the Reigning Queen of Shutmanship.

She gave the SITs plenty of time to get inside before starting across the moonlit grass to where Spike stood waiting for her.

“I think,” she said, “we have firmly established that there is an airport. It occasionally even has planes. Not on any useful schedule, but there are planes. So I am of the opinion there may actually be a world beyond Sunnydale, hard as that is to believe.” Buffy couldn’t help noticing that Spike looked particularly delicious tonight: plainly tired, and still willing to find her jokes amusing. What more could any reasonable person ask? She also noticed that he’d come a few paces forward to meet her, and that Dawn had had the uncommon tact to stay on the porch. “I hope you and your team had an exciting outing, since I have been informed by experts that my outing sucked major rocks, in the most boring, mosquito-bitten űber swamp of suckiness ever.”

“Hullo, pet. Thought I might report. We ran into Bringers. Five wounded, no dead, one in hospital, our side. There--”

“Let’s do this tomorrow morning, when everybody’s here to plan our coordinated-to-the-second, clockwork-perfect mission to rescue Giles and three more houseguests,” (Buffy stuck out her tongue expressively) “from the utter boredom and disgusting restrooms of Sunnydale airport.”

“Whatever you say, Slayer. Rona’s not hurt bad, I hear. Just have to get the bleeding stopped. Some stitches, likely.”

Buffy felt obscurely criticized for not having immediately demanded the details of Rona’s hospitalization. In any case, she had them now, and there was plainly nothing to worry about by his account. And it wasn’t his fault if his patrol produced sexy wounds and hers, mosquito bites.

Whatever the Potentials might think, she and Spike were not in competition for the hearts, minds, or trim teenaged limbs of the SITs. It was all one team, she’d said so, and if tonight Buffy had assigned herself the sucky patrol, tomorrow (assuming Giles ever called back) they’d have a patrol in dead earnest, everybody pulling their weight, and it would go well, and Giles would be back (joy unconfined, when he heard about the Declaration of the Teamness of Spike), and the ambient fumes of teenaged hormones would level out again. Eventually.

Buffy put her arm through Spike’s and strolled a bit farther from the porch. “Thought you should know: Molly, Carol, Kim, and Lisa are really impressed by your total hotness.”

The corners of his mouth quirked. “Yeah. Well. Little birds are easy to impress. When they find out they got to actually work, an’ sweat, and break nails an’ all, they’ll cool down soon enough.”

“Are you doing some kind of thrall thing?”

“Hell, no! Is that what--?” He clamped down on himself. “Y’don’t need to worry about me collecting a bunch of brides like that ol’ bugger Drac. Seems like one woman at a time--”

”Brides?” Buffy demanded in something much closer to a horrified squeak than she’d intended.

“Well, what with the total hotness, an’ all. Pet, you got me mixed up with Dru. If I could do thrall, I wouldn’t’a had to pitch you through a wall to get your attention, now would I?”

Buffy couldn’t believe he’d actually said that. From his whacked-from-behind-with-a-brick expression, neither could he.

It seemed that recollection had been mined, and setting so much as a toe back onto the shrieking take-no-prisoners ferocious brass-bound kamikaze fuckfest of their previous relationship was enough to set off the whole assemblage.

Buffy felt as though every cell in her body had flipped and realigned. Maybe werewolf Oz could have described this feeling--how, suddenly, everything turned. As if, at a touch, she’d shatter and reform into an entirely new creature. Or, just as likely, into a puddle of molten goo.

She could see the moon in his eyes. That meant something.

The clack of the back door shutting could equally as well have been the beginning of something or the end of something. Spike apparently took it as a signal of ten seconds left before the countdown hit zero and absolutely everything went irretrievably pear-shaped. He didn’t seem all that eager to transform into a new creature or perhaps only regress to the old one who came up with creative uses for handcuffs, toothbrushes, and grape jelly and whose unbroken record was making her come twenty-seven times between four in the afternoon and six the following morning not counting aftershocks.

Spike took a hike and the door clacked again, this time with finality.

Wandering like a dazed survivor, Buffy paced the yard, swinging her arms, blinking. Wowser! Where the hell did that come from? And where the hell is it going? Wowser! Total hotness? They got NO idea!

The following morning, Buffy found that Spike had acquired an entourage: the SITs had decided to take matters into their own hands and cut his hair. Dawn supervised. Dawn apparently had the final word on how Spike-hair was supposed to look.

Waiting for a call from Giles gave Buffy an unassailable pretext to hang around in the hall, watching. Somehow Willow needed three trips to slop enough milk onto her Grape Nuts to achieve the proper degree of crunchy indestructibility. Willow declared the proceedings “cute,” and got an appropriate gesture from Spike in response. Willow laughed and the SITs giggled. Spike looked resigned. He couldn’t fool Buffy: he was eating it up.

And it was no accident, she thought, that the chaperonage had become denser by something like a factor of four. Buffy couldn’t decide between amusement and annoyance. No reason she couldn’t choose both, with a side-dish of vague puzzlement over why he bothered.

When the kitchen got too bright (it was already too crowded), the makeover crew removed itself to the front room to finish, and Dawn pronounced. Then there was the heated discussion of the merits of plain peroxide as opposed to Miss Clairol #17, which eventually produced a mass exodus to the drugstore three blocks down. Without Spike, of course. He shook the catch-towel over the carpet and came into the hall trying to brush cut hair-ends off his neck.

He presented himself before Buffy, giving her sides to look at. “Did they do me bald anyplace?” He didn’t seem worried--of course not, not with Dawn, the New Number One, supervising.

Following the thought, Buffy said dryly, “That would be telling.”

“So it would. Feels better. Been doin’ it like this for forty-some years. Get used to it, a time like that.”

With grave deliberation Buffy performed the delicate operation of removing a scrap of cut hair from his left ear. She wanted to see if the Wowser factor was still in effect. Apparently not. But his eyes told her he knew precisely what she was doing and why and didn’t, at the moment, mind.

It was an interesting exchange of gazes, and their minds must be running along similar lines, because he remarked, “Educational.”

“Very,” said Buffy. “We’ll have to discuss it sometime.”

“I’ll consult my social secretary. ‘M sure there’ll be some afternoon free. This month or next.”

“When you grow up, you’ll come to appreciate quality over quantity,” Buffy said, and he leaned forward and Meeeow’d in her face. Then he wandered past to where he could look into the kitchen, calling, “Red, could you pour me out a cuppa? Bints wouldn’t let me finish my brekker.”

After a minute Willow emerged with a mug. “Here you go, Mr. Popular. How does it feel?”

“To be frank, damn strange. But better than the alternative, I s’pose. If it’s between bein’ took for a bloody rock star and getting yanked into cats’ meat like sodding Orpheus, I know which one I opt for, no question. An’ I expect it’s kind of novel for them to be around a bloke they don’t have to worry about breaking.”

With considerable effort, Buffy suppressed any comment whatsoever. Willow looked at her, and the corners of her mouth twitched, but she also said nothing.

It’s not the words, Buffy reflected, it’s the subtext that’ll get you if you’re not careful.

She wondered what further minefields remained to be discovered.

The purchasing expedition returned some ten minutes later, and Spike had to be firm about doing the rest for himself, no little birds going to help him in the shower, the mere thought scandalized him and shame on their wicked minds for suggesting it. And Buffy noticed that the SITs didn’t for a second mean it seriously, only teasing, and that Spike had begun to extend to them the playful, absolute gentleness he’d always shown toward Dawn. Not rock star adoration but something much closer to genuine liking, much more relaxed and knowing on both sides than Buffy had originally thought.

Blocking the stairs while Spike went up, Dawn wore her new authority with dignity and fizzing happiness, and so far nobody seemed to resent her elevation. She called them into conference in the front room, thumping to assorted awkwardnesses on and around the couch, beginning, “I asked Spike if it was OK that I explain a few things, about what he’s like. Vampire, and all. And maybe there are things you want to know, that you’d feel funny asking him right to his face. So here we go: Basic Vampire 101.”

Her audience seemed riveted and she, comfortable, instructing them in Spike lore as the acknowledged expert.

Watching, Buffy thought that in many ways, Dawn had evolved into his go-between, interpreting to him and for him to the human world. Maybe the Potentials were taking their cue from Dawn. Somehow Buffy thought it would never occur to Dawn whether Spike was totally hot, one way or another. They were long past such things having any meaning at all.

It was sad that her own relationship with Spike had to be so jagged and problematical. She wondered if being a grown-up was ultimately worth what it cost.

Buffy hung around by the doorway, listening. She figured she might well learn something.

Dawn was in the middle of the Tale of the Chip, and how it worked, and what it meant, when the phone rang. Since she happened to be nearby, Buffy grabbed it on the second ring.