EIGHTEEN


The in-service had stretched on and on, all stuff about lesson plans, grading curves, “test-based teaching” and “proactive remediation”: nothing that connected with her, or her life, or her job, or her calling, or any other damn thing about her whatsoever because she wasn’t a teacher. But she’d had to go anyway because she had “student contact.”

Pulling into the driveway, Buffy thought savagely that sitting through it better have earned her karma points because otherwise it had been no damn use at all and she just didn’t know if she could keep making herself do useless, meaningless things every morning, every day, every night, without respite or hope there’d ever be an end to it short of dying. She was sick, almost literally to death, of duty.

As she turned off the engine, her eyes lifted to the lighted porch. Spike was sitting there, smoking, slowly leafing through his notebook.

It seemed no more than an instant before she was standing by the bottom step: in touching distance but too terrified to reach out and try for fear the one good thing that’d happened in she couldn’t remember how long would vanish.

“Hullo, love,” he said, and turned a page. He had a pen stuck behind his ear. “How you doing, then?”

Buffy found herself sitting on the very edge of the steps. “How…? Did Willow…?”

“No, it was Bit who put me to rights, seems like. Went all Harry Potter, our Dawn: done a spell with some of the other children. Blood magic--tricky stuff. Went somewhat more wholesale than I imagine she intended. Still, can’t complain. What with the chip and the soul and a hundred twenty-odd years of this ‘n that, I expect I needed sorting out. So long as the important stuff’s still there, no complaint from yours truly.” He took a drag on the cigarette, a smooth, reflexive gesture. Natural. Without thought. His hands inexplicably intact. “Seems like I made myself more of a dog’s dinner than I knew, the other night. Sorry, love. That must’ve given you a nasty turn. And one more helpless git to look after. ‘S’not the way I meant it to be. On the positive side, I don’t seem to be nearly so crazy, so maybe I can finally be a bit of use.”

Buffy sat looking at him. Nothing he’d said made the slightest scrap of sense. She put out trembling fingers and touched his arm. He was here. He was real.

“Yeah,” he said, glancing around with the edge of a wry, momentary smile. “Don’t blame you. Hard to know what’s what anymore. Very strange.”

Buffy blurted defensively, “I came back as soon as I could. I had Giles and the new girls, I couldn’t just leave them, what I want doesn’t matter compared--”

“Who’s lit your tail?” Spike interrupted, looking around again: amused, slightly puzzled. “You mean the airport do? That’d be real bright: turn the point back to collect the rearguard, then everybody’s in it, nobody gets clear. ‘S’not the way to do. Who’s got after you, dumb idea like that?”

“But you were hurt!”

“An’ now I’m not. So it all worked out fine.” He took the pen, wrote something in the margin, then suddenly seemed to notice his restored hand. “I’m still left-handed. Ain’t that a thing. They tried to beat that out of you, in school an’ all. And to think, that was right all along.” He suddenly went to game face and raised a hand, obviously checking. “An’ no change there. You’d’a thought that would’a got sorted out. Evil: demon, an’ all. But I s’pose that’s bedrock now: past undoing. Get rid of that and you’ve got rid of me. Can’t be right. Just unavoidable.”

When his face relaxed to human contours, he was still frowning. “I wonder what it’s done to the chip. Pity Harris is gone. Nobody else I feel like slugging at the moment…”

“Spike, we’re not on the same page here. Not even in the same library. What the hell are you talking about? What do you mean, ‘sorted’?”

“You think it’s confusing from the outside. You should see what it looks like from in here. My mistake, tryin’ to come at such a thing sober.” He swiped the keys she was still holding, spun her around, and started walking her back to the SUV.

“Spike--!?”

“Not another word.”

Claiming the driver’s side, he slammed the car into reverse and backed onto the street without checking for traffic.

Neither of them could tolerate the other’s driving. Not that Spike wasn’t competent: he just wasn’t willing to concede that anybody else had a right to be on the road when he was. And Buffy found it such a shock to find him behaving what she considered normally that she didn’t dispute the matter.

Leaving the motor running, Spike spent maybe three minutes inside Willie’s and then came back with a fifth of something uncapped and already drinking before he opened the door. He didn’t offer Buffy any, and she didn’t ask.

When they hit the city limits, Spike turned west. He switched on the radio and fiddled with it until he found eighties hard rock. He turned it up so loud Buffy had to open her window; his was already open.

From silent and still, he was visibly building up speed inside, gearing himself up to something. The image came to Buffy of his old motorcycle (she wondered what had become of it), him on it doing laps around a block, checking balance and momentum and how everything was working, and when he was satisfied, when he was ready, he’d go blazing up some ramp and try to jump thirty-seven cars, or a lake of fire, or off a cliff.

Even though he wasn’t talking to her, she could tell he wasn’t mad--just preoccupied, focused inside on something else. Something, she thought now, he was afraid of but was going to do anyway.

It had been a long time since just being around Spike was a rush: fast, all out, absolutely unpredictable and vaguely scary. But the SITs had plainly felt it and been moved by it after the park patrol. After he’d walked out on her, out in the yard. It had taken them hours to come down, settle, afterward. And they’d risen the next morning and given him an enforced, adoring haircut to shape him closer to their dream and their desires. And he’d let them. Buffy had been sad and a little jealous that he’d show them what he denied to her. But Buffy wasn’t sixteen years old anymore, and she’d thought that maybe that’s all it had been: that they’d seen for the first time what it seemed she’d known forever and it was only the newness that had power.

Nothing could have been better refutation or a better antidote to a mind-numbing in-service than feeling Spike build up speed and wondering what the hell he planned to do with it and why he’d required that she come along.

He turned onto the coast highway going north, doing about ninety, drinking steadily.

He got out a cigarette one-handed and lit it, then snapped the radio off. Only the sound of the wind.

“So about the spell,” he said abruptly, resuming the conversation just as if there’d been no lapse, which meant he’d been thinking about it the whole time. “Dunno a whole lot about magic, but some. Enough to know nobody--not Red, not fucking Nostradamus--can catch hold of blood magic and have any notion how they’ll come out on the other side. Or what they’ll turn loose. What it’ll do. With the children, a plain case of know nothing, fear nothing. They never should’a tried such a thing an’ I’ll make sure Bit knows never to do such again. It got away from them. Always does. Meant it as some sort of healing spell, I s’pose. It did that. But then it went on and went through me like some kind of goddam forest fire and burned off, changed, healed, whatever it counted as wrong. Sorted me proper. So there’ll be no more Dru dropping in for a chat, no more instructive conversations with people who aren’t there. No more need of chains or minders. My own damn dog again. Some fucking explosion out of noplace and here’s me picking through the wreckage, tryin’ to suss out what the hell happened as per usual, but that’s what I make of it.

“What with the blood and the magic, that basement’s got a half-life of about a thousand years on it now, far’s I’m concerned. Toxic. Maybe it can be got out enough for you lot to use again but to me, it’d be like tryin’ to have a nap in what’s left of a battlefield after the war’s moved on plus nuclear crater, watch your fucking bones go luminous. Can’t go down there again. Can’t be there anymore. Gonna have to move, love.”

Buffy simultaneously clenched against the idea of him leaving and felt deeply let down to think he’d been working himself up for no more than this: for facing what he knew would be her opposition.

Before she’d thought of anything to say, Spike jammed on the brakes and spun the SUV into a 180 across the other lane. It came to an abrupt rocking halt at the far edge of a turn-around overlooking the moonsilver sea a couple of hundred feet down.

Turning toward her, his face changed and his grin had fangs.

He tapped her shoulder.

“Tag, love. You’re it.”

Then he was out the door and gone.



Buffy wasn’t dressed for a game of vampire tag up and down a cliff, grabbing hold and spinning off the contorted branches of stunted trees to change direction, out on the beach and racing along the packed sand at the surf line with the cliff high and dark above, Spike a good four paces ahead her and drawing effortlessly away. On the flat, he outran her easily even after she pitched the shoes and hiked the skirt higher to open her stride.

Outlasting him, tiring him out, wasn’t even a remote possibility. She’d never been able to do that. And he had the advantage of not needing to breathe.

He could see better, hear better, smell better. He knew when she got close without having to look and would dive into a roll or a backflip or a side-spinning cartwheel, out of reach again and running, sometimes even insultingly backward, golden eyes shining, still with breath for laughing at her, mocking her as old and slow and plainly past her best, out of fighting trim for lack of anything but children and inept fledges to make her stretch herself, which was infuriating.

But on the cliff they were even, his longer stride no advantage, and a couple of times she nearly caught him there, sudden handholds and angled leaps and drops, measuring out the space and the surfaces like a couple of monkeys, all spring and catch and go and God, she’d missed this!

He pushed away from the rock and dropped, twenty feet or more, and they hit together. He was an instant longer changing his balance point, so she was right behind, barely a step off, no time for him to dodge off to the side. She ran him straight down the slope into the water ahead of her, knee-deep and slowed by the breakers that hit him first and harder. Lunging, Buffy slapped his elbow: tag. And Spike spun and slapped her back. They were trading slaps and then elbows and then fists, in and out of the surf, too fast to see anything coming and block, all instinct now and rhythm. Knowing because of how he moved how he could move and where he’d be by the time her fist or foot arrived. No longer striking at him but at where he was going, the instantaneous sense of his movement and momentum and her own, all balanced and perfect without any hesitation at all.

Finally and splendidly dancing together, Slayer and vampire, all-out, nothing held back, pure motion and ferocity and joy and he could have had her then, bitten and drunk her life away and she wouldn’t have cared; or she could have staked him and watched him explode into dust and it would have been the same thing, the same exultation of what they were meant to be to one another. But of course they were a different thing, a diminishing spiral, the blows become pats and the pats, embraces, still moving even when they were still. Moving into one another and searching for how they fit and where the best blaze was and doing that, more of that, no hesitation, knowing one another so well that they were one creature immediately from the very start. And everything was moonlight and bright stars.



It took them four times to even begin to slow down and even then they hadn’t got back to words, only a different line of motion. Spike hauled her up and they went down into the sea, out into the deep water. Stroking, weightless, in three dimensions, turning and rolling like dolphins or seals, and only afterward did Buffy realize she’d had no problem breathing because before her need for air became acute she’d been lifted to the surface long enough to take what she needed and then down again, without pause, what she needed always there for her so her body forgot it and concerned itself with other things.

More explosions there, an endless series. When her feet touched bottom her legs wouldn’t support her. But there was no need. Spike swung her up into his arms, carrying her easily even losing the water’s support so that she felt her own weight again. Too heavy to stir or think. Almost too heavy to breathe. Before she realized Spike was gone he was back and gathering her into the Official Designated Emergency Blanket from the back of the van, he’d gone up for it and brought it back. And the bottle. And his cigarettes.

But she was happy he still had his priorities straight. Once the blanket was around her he made himself a chair for her back, all four knees lined up together. She rested against him while he played with her hair and kissed her cheek and the back of her neck, not really doing anything, just there.

From his mouth against her, she realized he’d dropped game face but couldn’t remember when that had happened. And then she thought it didn’t matter. And the following thought of how strange it was, for it not to matter.

<I>There</I>, she thought: That wasn’t so scary, was it?

She didn’t realize she’d said it aloud until he laughed. “Love, you have no idea.”

There was something shaky in his laugh, and in his voice too, that carried the memory of very old hurt. And she remembered they’d never actually done this before--not like this. Not without her savaging him afterward or even during. Hammering him down. Refusing his tenderness or any softness at all.

She said, “Let’s not do dumb stuff anymore,” and got one of his speaking silences that made her remember he’d always been a lot farther from the dumb stuff  than she had been. But he wasn’t going to say that now. Because this was a new thing. All you could do with the dumb stuff was hope to survive it. And they had. And that was enough for him.

Buffy heard all of that in his silence and decided he was right. They didn’t have to talk about that, sort out the blame and the whys. It seemed as if he’d been sorted quite enough for both of them and no more was necessary.

She told him smugly, “You can’t leave now.”

He kissed her ear. “Ah, but this is what lets me go. Can stand a little distance now without coming over all anxious. Won’t go far, pet--houses goin’ empty here and there all over town, had you noticed? ‘M sure I can find one within a block or two. Thought of goin’ back to my old crypt, but it’s all destroyed…. And that way, I can take some of the children off your hands, won’t be so crowded for you an’ the Bit. Red, if she stays. Be close by if there was need. Can’t abide the basement no more and your place…it’s your place.”

Buffy thought about it. Was prepared to think about it, listen to what he said. But she still didn’t like it. “You have minions now. What’s next: brides?”

“Those children? You’re joking. Couldn’t begin to keep up with me, what would I want with that when I got this?” He hugged her with his hands on her breasts. Beginning to stroke there, thumbs skimming the nipples.

That was nice, but Buffy thought about it some more. And thought of a new thing: “Is that what you want?” Buffy didn’t remember ever asking him that before.

When he went quiet, not even breathing, she wanted to see his face. Leaning out of his embrace, she hitched around in the sand to look at him. He’d turned his head and seemed to be considering the cliffside, although she knew he wasn’t. Of course he was hard again, that was a given, practically non-existent vampire recovery time. But at the moment he was paying no attention to that either. He reached out and collected the bottle, and it’d been decent of him to wait this long, and put the contents down another couple of inches, and there wasn’t gonna be any argument about which of them was driving home.

Buffy waited, because she knew he was nervous and upset, and he was going to tell her why just the same. But he needed to settle himself to it before going off that cliff. She’d assumed it was just the sex. But this had been behind it all the while, whatever it was. She’d set it off with her question, but he’d made his mind up to it driving up here and would have found another way to come at it if she hadn’t provided one.

“That summer you were gone, I started having a dream,” Spike began, not looking at her as though he couldn’t do both, look at her and say this both. “Not much to it, really. It’s just me, I see myself sittin’ on a crate or something in an alley. Seems like it’s the alley behind the Bronze, but no matter, doesn’t matter where the alley is…. An’ I’m crying, and I dunno what to do with my hands, like.” He began doing it: not showing her, just enacting what he saw in his mind. Strange, stiff gestures. Hands locked behind his head, bent forward. Hands tight around his knees. One arm thrown up randomly, fist then slamming back hard into his chest. Compulsive. She could see it: absolute agony. Once started, he couldn’t stop. Even after she grabbed his hands and held them still, she felt the muscles still twitching and firing, trying to continue.

They sat like that for quite a long while before he drew in enough breath to go on, “An’ it’s just that, seeing that. And some way, I know it’s one of you, gone. You or the Bit, doesn’t matter, I just know you’re gone. An’ I’ll never find you again. Wherever you’ve gone, I can’t go. And I can’t bear it, is all.”

Hands still immobilized and jerking, he leaned into her, sobbing. When she let his hands go to grab him around the back and hold him, the hands couldn’t be still or touch her in any purposeful way, contorting aimlessly like muscles of something dead firing off from current in a wire. It was running all through him. The hands were only the way it was coming out.

Whatever had been sorted out of him, this remained. She thought she’d never seen another creature in such pain. There was no possible answer for it except to keep on holding him, move enough to remind him she was there, wait for it to subside of its own accord, however long that took. Because it was plain Spike had no control over it. Could not separate himself from it. Utterly lost in it.

The sorting hadn’t touched this as it hadn’t touched his being a vampire, or his love for her, or any other deep thing that could not be removed and leave him intact and himself.

When the hands collapsed and fell, she knew they must be near the end of it. But it was a long time after that before he was able to quit sobbing or take a breath without it hitching in his chest.

She said to him quietly, “God, Spike!” She carefully let go to reach for the bottle. She had to hold it for him, he still couldn’t manage his hands. So she didn’t bother trying to get a cigarette for him, that would have to wait. She pulled him over to rest, head and shoulders, in her lap, and kept holding him, waiting for him to settle.

He couldn’t do that either and maybe passed out, maybe fell asleep.

Buffy hoped now that it had broken loose, now that he’d waited to let it out until she was here to receive it, this would be the end of it. An exorcism. But she remembered his saying <I>I started having a dream.</I>

So it hadn’t been just the once. And this waking, willing reenactment he’d put them both through therefore might well not be the last. Because he’d told her, he believed it was something she had to know. And she’d set it off by asking him what he wanted.

So there was more yet to come, of which this had been the necessary prologue.

Finally he started breathing again. Just every few minutes. And awhile after that, he came back into himself, blinking slowly. “Buffy, love, you still with me?”

“Absolutely. How you doing?”

“Absolutely fucking shattered. As per usual… You?”

“How d’you think?” she responded, but kept her tone light, knowing he was completely raw and without defenses and she wasn’t gonna do dumb stuff anymore.

“Yeah…. Any scotch left?”

“Don’t think so. Some got spilled.”

“Oh.” He dredged up enough energy to look up into her face. “There’s more.”

“I know. Can it wait?”

“Don’t think so.”

“All right.”

He concentrated on getting enough breath. Then he said, “First couple times that happened, I figured it was Glory’s tower. Figured it was because I couldn’t protect Dawn. Or save you.” He waited until he could, then went on, “Then you came back, an’ I sort of forgot. Thought I was all done with it, I s’pose. Because you were back. Then…after we started comin’ together, the way we did…it started up again. And every few months since. I’d just come off one that night. In your bathroom, an’ all. Not fit to be near anybody for awhile after. Even Bit’s learned to keep clear of me after. Should never have come, should’a known better--”

“No more dumb stuff,” she told him. “We’ve been through that. But I understand better now.”

“All right. Yeah. Since, I’ve figured out that it’s not what’s been. It’s what’s coming. Except that it won’t. Next time, it’s gonna be me. Gonna do it right. Me instead of you. Or me instead of Dawn. And that’s what’s gonna happen. So you mustn’t get too attached to me, love. Because it can’t be you in that alley. That’s not a choice I’m gonna give you.”

She thumped his forehead, just lightly. “Too late. If you go, we both go.”

He shoved and wrestled himself up to sitting. “No! That’s not right. You’re the Slayer. You gotta--”

“Shut up, Spike.”

“No.”

“Just shut up. Being the Slayer has already eaten as much of my life as I can stand and sometimes more. It’s not gonna eat this. Even when I was coming apart and doing all the dumb stuff, I knew: I need you to stay alive. To even want to stay alive. This is not negotiable. I have to learn to manage my Slayer like you manage your demon. It’s who I am. But it’s not all of who I am.”

“And getting between you and death is what I’m for. That’s not negotiable neither.”

She leaned over and kissed him. “Maybe that next time, maybe that’s not gonna be soon. Maybe I have time to make you admit there’s always another Slayer but only one William the Bloody and he can’t be spared. At any rate, it isn’t now. Agreed?” She probably would have described his answering expression as “sulky.” She added, “So arguing about it now would just be dumb. Wouldn’t it.”

“Yeah. I guess. Don’t like thinking about it, if you want to know the truth. It comes with extras. Special effects, like.”

“Some of the special effects, I think we can both do without. Others, on the other hand….”

“Oh, don’t worry. That comes free. Just…not now.” With some effort he leaned back to look at the cliff top. “Can you get the van down here, d’you think?”

“Nope.”

“Damn. Then find me my pants. Have to be around here someplace. Sun’s coming.”

While Spike shakily lit a cigarette, Buffy got up and began looking for his pants. Their eyes met, and they both started laughing.

Finis.