give up what you love (don't look back)

by SummerFrost

Summary:

Buffy looks at his heart and begs, "Why can't you just leave me alone?"
Spike cups her cheeks in both hands and kisses the crown of her head. "Maybe tomorrow, Slayer."

Or: Spike makes a wish on New Year's Eve. The stars listen.

Notes:

Hello. Hi. It's been like 1.5 years since I published anything. Hi.

Cannot express enough love and thanks to chasingfictions and alittlebitmaybe, without whom I probably never would've started writing this fic again, let alone finished it <3 thank you for all the beta and support!!

Title is from "Love from the Other Side" by Fall Out Boy which did you know they wrote about spuffy

The sun sets early on New Year's Eve. It kisses the clouds, turning them a whole mess of colors like rainbow sherbet–the kind Dawn ate a whole tub of the week after Buffy jumped, and she chucked it back up in the alley by the pier while Spike held her hair and thought shouldn't have done it. Shouldn't have bought her all that ice cream or let her eat it all in one go or taken her to the bloody carnival right after. Shouldn't have touched her.

It's a while after it happened–Buffy jumping. It's a while after her coming back, too, but you wouldn't know it to look. Not at the waning light hitting the creaking old Revello house or the smoke billowing off Spike's skin on his mad dash for the back door.

Or at the nibblet's face, tearstained with anger right through the split second she crashes into him at full tilt.

Spike shouts with surprise and drops his case of beer; the bottles smash all over the porch with a sharp sound and the sting of hops. The banister jams into his lower back with a groan.

Dawn yelps and the smell of blood joins the air. Blinking away the shock, Spike jerks forward to nab her off the broken glass before she gets any more cut up, only to–

"Son of a–" Buffy cuts off irritably, shoving Spike away from her and rubbing her temple where she knocked it into his elbow. "Spike."

"Ow!" Dawn sniffles, wincing, carefully toeing away from the mess on the ground. Her feet are bare and she's wrapped up in her bathrobe, hair damp and smelling like Buffy's shampoo. 

She really ought to start using her own again, now that it's over. Hasn't there been enough haunting?

"Sorry, bit," Spike tells her, frowning gently. "How bad is it? Lemme see."

Buffy's feet crunch up the glass (gonna be a bitch to clean off the wood) as she stomps between them, her eyes burning at him. "Haven't you done enough?"

His skin is still steaming, under the awning. He ate two hours ago and his mouth still waters–at the blood or the cut of her voice. 

"Right," he says curtly. "Sorry for not bein' able to see the future, your highness."

Dawn mutters, "Whatever," and shoves past both of them, nursing the cut foot as she hobbles her way into the house. "I'll fix it myself."

Buffy says, "Dawn–"

The door slams in her face.

She lowers her reaching hand. She looks tired, like she has ever since. It's in the eyes.

She never looks at him when they–

"What the fuck are you doing here, anyway?" Buffy asks him, crossing her arms.

Spike smirks coyly and reaches for the hem of her skirt.

She swats him away hard enough to make it sting. "Spike."

His mouth changes shape without his permission. Stupid. All the beer's soaked into the wood; he'll notice the smell for weeks. He should get a look at her shampoo while he can.

"Bitch of a year is finally dying," he says, too honest. He's always being too honest, or lying so well it seeps into the bones, and she's never looking close enough to tell the difference. "Thought you might use the company."

She never looks at him. A breeze catches her pretty short hair, curling it in wisps, and it's coconut. He knows that much.

Buffy tells the shards of glass, "Why can't you just leave me alone?"

There's a bruise on the inside of Spike's sternum. He steps forward, all in her face and feeling her tremble, and asks, "Why can't you make me?"

There's a moment–second worst of his life–when she hesitates. Trying to work up the nerve to call his bluff. She's always trying to call his bluff.

She leaves the door open a crack when she flees inside.

Not today, then. The lump in his throat shudders. At least it's not today.

Spike uses the cardboard from his ruined six-pack to sweep up the glass as best he can. He gets a few nicks on his fingers, gathering up the littler pieces, but it's alright. She might forget it's out here.

Inside, there's a smeared trail of blood across the kitchen floor leading to the bathroom. Buffy and Dawn aren't in sight, but he can hear their terse voices if he strains. He grabs a rag off the kitchen counter and starts mopping up the stains before they set.

"Aw, Spike, did you spill your dinner again?" Xander snarks from the doorway, leaning jauntily against it like the bloody prick he is.

Spike's nostrils try to flare. He suppresses it and says, "Dawn cut herself."

"What?" Xander asks, panicky. "Again? Is she okay?"

Spike rolls his eyes. "Not that kind. There's broken glass out on the porch. Think I got most of it, but you can find the broom if you wanna be helpful for once."

Xander's mouth opens and closes irritably, but he stamps down to the basement and comes back with the broom and dustpan, the heads out back without another word.

Spike rinses the rag and squeezes it out in the sink. It smells like blood and old bleach and faintly musty, and it's rough with use. He pictures it in Joyce's hands, pruning her fingertips, and shuts the water off with a pang.

He's almost got all the blood up by the time Buffy walks back in.

"Oh," she says, shifting her weight awkwardly. Her hair is pulled back in a tiny ponytail now. "Um. Th–"

"Buffster!" Xander says. He dumps the last of the glass in the trashcan. "Everything okay?"

Buffy's smile stretches wide and plastic. "Everything's great! Is Anya with you?"

Spike looks down at the blood, which is turning tacky. He scrubs a little harder.

"Nah, she's still in work mode," Xander answers. "She said she'd drop by later, though. I swear she loves that store more than me."

"Not hard to do," Spike mutters.

"What was that?" Xander asks.

"She's got a lot to do?" asks Spike.

"I guess," Xander says, leaning the broom against the far wall. "I told her to take the day off and celebrate the holiday with us non-insane people, but she went off on some speech about how New Year's Eve has ritual significance for many Anglo-Demonic cultures she needed to sell shit to and I backed away slowly."

Buffy raises an eyebrow. "For many what now?"

"Hey, I remembered it once," says Xander. "Don't make me say it again."

Spike stands and tosses the rag in the sink. 

Buffy asks, "Okay, but does she think there's gonna be, like, stuff happening tonight? Because Giles never made me patrol on New Year's Eve."

"It's mostly flash from what I can tell," says Spike, drying his hands on a different towel. "Bit like your ball drop–welcome in another year of carnage and all that. All the real power comes with the old calendars."

Buffy squints at him. "Like, from the '70s?"

He rolls his eyes. "You think the Big Bads from back-when used the humans' way of keeping time? They followed different rules–different stars. That's what they believed in, and the believing's where the power is. Or it's just another bloody sunrise."

Buffy and Xander stare blankly.

Xander turns to Buffy and asks, "Does it wig you out when he knows things, too?"

She shrugs. Spike's throat burns.

"Speaking of knowing things," Xander says. "Where's Willow?"

"Uh, she's not feeling great," Buffy says. "I think she's still sleeping."

Xander frowns. "Uh, not feeling great like 'I'm having magic withdrawal because I'm still clean and it sucks' or not feeling great like 'I'm having magic withdrawal because I went out and did a bunch of spells?"

"Hey," says Buffy, pouting. "With the judgy."

"I'm not judgy!" Xander says, putting his hands up. "I'm Judy-less. I'm just saying, you know, we're not out of the woods. We've gotta check on her, make sure she's hanging in there."

Buffy crosses her arms over her chest. "I did check on her! She's fine."

Xander grimaces. "That's not what I meant. You're being a great friend, Buff, I just mean–I'm not here all the time, okay? I worry."

"Willow's a grown-up," Buffy says. "You don't have to babysit her."

"I'm not–" Xander sighs in exasperation. "I just mean–just because I'm not around as much, with the wedding and the job and the… wedding, doesn't mean I'm not here to listen when she needs someone, you know? Like, say, if things were secretly really bad and she wasn't saying anything because she didn't wanna worry me?"

Spike opens the fridge in search of beer.

"... Are we still talking about Willow?" Buffy asks.

"Depends on if you're in a punchin' mood," says Xander.

There's no beer. Damn, he really wishes he hadn't dropped the six pack.

"I'm fist-free," says Buffy, pointedly ignoring the eyebrow raise Spike immediately shoots her. "But I–I'm fine. I'm better? It's good."

He wishes he could touch her. Run his fingers soothingly through her hair, press a kiss to the top of her head.

"I mean it," she says, her voice a little smaller than it should be.

She wouldn't let him even if they were alone.

"... Okay," Xander relents. "That's–okay."

Spike realizes the fridge is still open. He shuts it, awkwardly and too loud, and they both turn to look at him like they'd forgotten he was there. Xander looks vaguely embarrassed to see him. 

Maybe the Watcher left some decent whiskey around before he skipped town. Spike's throat burns like he's had some, but he says, "You guys wanna play cards?"

"Sure," Xander says, at the same time Buffy says, "I guess."

Spike smirks triumphantly. "Still got that deck, Slayer?"

"I think it's upstairs," she answers.

"I'll nab it," Spike offers, making for the staircase.

"Uh, Buff?" Xander says as soon as Spike turns the corner. "Are you sure he's not gonna get into a little recreational panty-snatching while he's up there?"

"Oh, please," Buffy says flippantly, coiling Spike's shoulders. "He knows how dead he'd be."

Spike stops in the bathroom first. The bottle she uses is green, sitting on the edge of the tub with the cap flipped open. He squeezes it gently, taking a deep breath with a tightness in his chest that he ignores.

With his eyes closed he can almost feel her there–her mouth against his, cruel beautiful fingers sliding under his shirt.

(Not cruel, once. Such tenderness, then, sweet lips against the bloodied corner of his mouth, and he'd known she wasn't the bot from the way it hurt him where a soul should be. And from the shampoo.)

She's almost there. Down in his throat and the cavity of his chest and, god, even farther back. In the forgotten crack in his spine where she used to live, forever sixteen and beautiful like a curse, and if he could make her that girl again he would. Not for him, no–but he thinks maybe she was happy then.

She'll never love him like that. He wonders if she thought about damning the world for Angel, like she did for Dawn. Did she hesitate?

If his chip were broken–not just for her, but for everyone–would she give him the months she gave Angelus? 

Would she mourn?

The smell of coconut is an open wound. He carried her for one hundred and forty-seven days, in the knuckles and his teeth and the splinters in his palms, but he never could get over coconut in Dawn's hair.

He hopes she'll find him in cigarette smoke, when he's gone.

He's been up here too long. He memorizes the shampoo label and slips out of the bathroom. The playing cards are on Buffy's desk; he pockets them and hesitates outside Dawn's bedroom door, which is shut and largely muffling the sound of sniffles.

After a moment, Spike knocks. "Hey, bit. Fancy a spot of Rummy?"

"Go. Away," she grits out.

"Fine," Spike says, his shrug audible in his tone. "If you think you can't beat me."

There's a pause, then the heavy thump of feet. Dawn yanks the door open in her favorite pair of pyjamas, her hair frizzing as it dries.

"If I win, you've gotta do my chores for a week," she says.

Spike raises an eyebrow. "You know I don't live here, right?"

"You'll figure it out," she says, breezing past him towards the stairs.

That he will.

Buffy and Xander are sitting cross-legged in the living room with a can of soda each. It's too early for the holiday programming, but the TV is playing MTV down low. 

Buffy looks up at Dawn with surprise. "Oh… are you gonna join?"

"What," Dawn asks flatly, "do I need your permission to go to a party in my own house, too?"

Buffy purses her lips. "That's not what I meant."

Dawn sits down on Xander's other side and crosses her arms.

"Slayer," Spike asks, "you got anything stronger in the beverage department? Seeing as my contribution to the household is currently intoxicating the deck."

Buffy massages between her eyes. "Um, maybe there's wine in the basement."

"Bah," says Spike, and sits down next to her instead.

Xander asks, "Okay, what're we playing?" as he cracks his knuckles.

"Rummy," says Spike, shuffling the cards.

"Again?" Xander gripes.

"I like Rummy," says Dawn.

Buffy shifts awkwardly, her nails picking at a loose thread on the carpet. "Wow. Everyone's all Rummy-chummy."

It occurs to Spike that he's never seen her play.

"Better go over the rules again, for Harris's sake," Spike tells Dawn. "You know he's a bit slow."

"Hey!" says Xander.

Dawn rolls her eyes and looks at Buffy. "It's easy. You're just trying to make groups of cards. You can make a sequence, which is three cards from the same suit in number order, or a set, which is all the same number from the different suits, see?"

"Um, okay," Buffy says.

"There's also jokers, which you can use sometimes, but one of your sequences has to be pure which means you can't use a joker," Dawn continues. "Once you've got a combo, you can lay it down in front of you. That's important because every turn you have to draw a new card and discard one of your old ones."

Spike starts dealing out the deck.

Dawn says, "Oh, you can draw from a facedown deck or from the discard pile in the middle, so if you–"

"Man," Buffy interrupts, her voice light but strained. "When'd you have time to learn this stuff? Don't they give you homework?"

Spike's chest tightens. Xander's shoulders are a hunched line of tension.

"Um," Dawn says, her eyes cast downwards and abruptly wet. "We played it a lot while you were…"

Buffy says, "Oh."

Someone should cut the tension. There's an acrid taste in Spike's throat that he doesn't trust; feels like it'll spew out if he tries to speak. He remembers how it felt. Curtains shut against the dying sun. Shut against the other dying thing. The heat seeping in and feeling like nothing but making Dawn sweat. 

Remembers is the wrong word. Implies the feeling left. He looks at Buffy now–touches her, fucks her, her heat seeping through the cold dead of him–and he still tastes the word Rummy on his tongue. 

Rummy, the way Dawn said it the first time she beat him square. Rummy. Spike, do you wish she'd let me jump?

"Jeez," Buffy jokes, loud enough that Spike flinches. "I take one little extended nap and you turn my baby sister into a card shark?"

Spike recovers, clearing his throat. "Wasn't much good on TV."

"How's about that wine?" Xander asks, slapping his knees and moving to stand.

He's two steps towards the kitchen when Willow comes down the stairs.

"Oh," she says, glumly taking in the half-dealt cards spread around them. "You were playing without me?"

Buffy is back to picking at the carpet. "Um," she says hesitantly, "I thought you wanted to sleep."

"Not if there's partying," Willow says, a little petulant. "I can still party."

"We can deal you in no problem, Will," Xander assures her, abandoning his vye for the wine and taking his seat again. "See–we haven't even started."

Willow says, "I guess," and completes the circle between Spike and Dawn.

Dawn scoots pointedly towards Xander.

"Oh, Dawnie," Willow asks, turning to her, "didn't you wanna go to Janice's? Aren't you gonna be late?"

"I'm not going anymore," Dawn mutters, glaring at Buffy.

Willow frowns in confusion, following her gaze.

Buffy tells her, "Dawn's still in trouble from Halloween, remember? No parties"

"Oh." Willow's frown deepens. "Um, sorry. I guess I thought–with the it being two months and all… I mean, um, I guess I should've asked."

"Yeah," Buffy says flatly. No bone-throwing to be had tonight, it seems. 

Spike deals Willow a hand. She picks up her cards and asks, "What version are we playing?"

"The easy one," Dawn says, and turns back to Buffy. "So anyways, like I was saying, you've gotta draw and discard every turn, but you can draw from the deck or the face-up discard pile, so if you want something from there that's fine, but you can't just discard a card and pick the same one back up because–"

Buffy turns to Spike and asks, "Wanna go patrol?"

Spike blinks at her. 

"... What?" Dawn asks.

"Yeah," says Xander. "What she said."

Buffy rips a full two inches of carpet thread out of the floor; it makes a harsh sound that causes all the humans to flinch. She tells Spike, "I just think maybe it's a good idea. You know, with the angular demons or whatever, like Xander was saying."

"I wasn't–"

"Yeah," Spike agrees, because Christ help him he's already getting hard. "Better safe than sorry and all that."

"I can't believe you!" Dawn shrills, tossing her cards at Buffy in a vicious flurry. "How come I have to stay at this lame party when you don't?"

Buffy looks at her evenly and says, "Because I'm the grown up, and also because I'm not sneaking out to go parking with a vampire in the woods."

 

~*~

 

"Harder," Buffy gasps, the bark splintering against her back.

Spike growls, dizzy with her. Feeling the tree groan. Wonders if they'll break it, the lumber giving way in one final snap, if she'll just keep fucking him after like she did with the house. 

She was ashamed after. 

He doesn't wanna think about that. She's so wet. Her body on fire, claw marks down his back even through the shirt. She left him to burn in the wreckage and he thought about killing himself then, he did, but it wasn't the worst day of his life.

She's breathing.

Harsh in his ear, humid and desperate and she can't be pretending with the way she begs him for it. Whatever else she says, however long it takes her to go (and she will go, he knows, but right now he's got her pinned to the tree), she means this. She wants him. 

He won't be able to smell coconut without wanting to drive a stake through his sorry rotten heart, but he'll remember that sometimes she wanted him.

"Don't come in me," she hisses. Must mistake the change in his breathing for pleasure.

"You want me to," he tells her, and tightens his grip on her hip.

Another chunk of bark cracks and crumbles. Buffy says, "There's nowhere to– ah –clean up."

She's so warm. So alive. Her body flexes and tightens around him and there are stars under his feet with his palms rubbed raw against the wood.

"You want it that way," he says. Threatens, maybe–his voice low and predatory. "Wanna feel me after, sticking to your thighs. Soaking your knickers. Tell me you don't love the thought of it."

Buffy's voice cracks. "I–"

"Can't fool me." He bites the shell of her ear, digging his thumb into her hipbone until she whimpers. "I know you want me to ruin you. Let me, Buffy."

"Spike," she whispers.

He presses his nose to her hair and inhales. She smells more like his cigarettes than anything. "Want you to go back there with your cunt aching. Squeeze your pretty thighs shut and smile for your little friends with your pussy dripping with my come. Want you to wonder the whole night if they can smell it on you."

She tightens around him like a vice grip and sobs, nearly ripping his hair out by the roots and letting her lungs heave, big ugly sounds that make him sure she isn't faking. She wants him.

He comes, undignified and too close to weeping, teeth catching in her hair. Always too close to weeping. He doesn't want her to go back. Doesn't want her anywhere else. He'd carry her home–to his own sorry home, cold stone and secondhand candles–and clean her up and hold her close and he'd beg for that if he thought it'd work, but it won't and at least she let him come.

"I hate you," she says shakily, when he lowers her to the ground. There are points of high color on her cheeks and even the tip of her nose, tilted up at him while she glares and snatches her knickers out of the dirt.

"You need me," he tells her. Praying to God he doesn't sound tired.

Buffy takes a few steps and wrinkles her nose. There's a damp spot on the back of her skirt that makes his mouth water.

"I'm not going home like this," she says, and there's an edge to her voice dangerously close to fragility. "Is my stuff still at your crypt?"

Spike's throat is dry. "I mended your trousers."

It was the least he could do for ripping them off her.

She doesn't look grateful, but she walks in step with him the whole way there.

 

~*~

 

Buffy turns the jeans over in her hands, her expression carefully inscrutable.

"Wow," she says faintly. "Like new."

Spike clears his throat without having anything to say.

She glances at him with half a second's worth of patience, then back down at the trousers. 

There's a resilient strip of bark in her hair. Knuckles aching, Spike reaches out and plucks it free.

Buffy says nothing. Twitches a little, maybe, into the brush of his fingers, but it may've been a trick of his held breath. She doesn't shimmy out of the skirt or pull off the ruined underwear, damp and smelling so much like himself that for some reason Spike almost feels sick. Doesn't do anything.

He's working up the courage to ask if she's alright when she finally says, "Sorry about your beer."

It hangs heavy and out of place. 

Spike clears his throat again and manages, this time, "I nicked it anyway."

"We could get you more," she tells his concrete floor. "On the way home."

"... You want me to come?" Spike asks.

Buffy says, "They don't want me there."

He very nearly laughs. It strangles in his throat and comes out in a bewildered cough.

"And Rummy is fucking stupid," says Buffy. "Get on your knees."

 

~*~

 

After, he gets her a bottle of water and a rag and she scrubs herself clean of him, from cunt to even below the knee. She puts on a dry pair of knickers he admits to having stashed under the pillow, scowling at him in disgust and leaving the ruined ones half-kicked under the bed, and the like-new pair of blue jeans. 

She's pulling her hair into a fresh miniature ponytail as he trails behind her into the moonlight, but she drops her hair tie and swears when she looks at the moon.

"Fuck," she says. "It's gotta be close to midnight."

The streets are crowded and the lights are all off in the Magic Box when they stride past it on the walk back to Revello. There's a gathering at the Espresso Pump with all the TVs set to watch the countdown, which is still a good fifteen minutes away.

They'll make it home with time to spare. Buffy's lips are pursed. She rubs absently at an arm as they walk, keeping pace and not talking and partially obscuring the fingerprint bruises he left there that her line of work will allow her to explain.

It occurs to him that she forgot her coat. At the house or his crypt–possibly even the woods–he isn't sure. He thinks to offer her his. 

He's sure she'd rather have the goosebumps.

"Want my coat?" Spike asks.

She laughs darkly and speeds up.

Joyce's house is all lit up downstairs. Spike can hear the laughter from down the block; he's sure Buffy can hear it from the porch, at least. Xander, Willow, Dawn, and Anya are all in the living room, dancing and giggling to whatever bloody obnoxious band is playing on MTV. 

Buffy stands watching, lit up all golden from the windows and still rubbing stubbornly at her arms. Her mouth is bitten to the point of bruising and her eyeliner is smeared from the round she went facedown in his pillow, giving it to her so good she snapped the headboard, and he can feel the place a soul isn't in his chest. 

"It's not midnight yet," he reminds her.

She turns from the light and climbs to the roof.

Spike follows, careful to keep the gutters from creaking, and sits tentatively beside her.

Nothing happens for a long moment. 

She shivers. 

Spike drapes his coat over her shoulders. She scrunches up her face in obligatory displeasure, then wraps the smoke-seeped leather tighter around her body in the comfort of the night. 

Buffy's face tilts up to the sky. The moon is almost full–just a sliver short and shrinking away from perfection, and her cheeks are being kissed by the eerie white light.

"Imagine having to be a werewolf on New Year's Eve," she says lightly. "That would blow."

Spike chuckles. "Little hard to explain to the missus."

"You never really met Oz," Buffy says, then tacks on an, "I guess."

Spike frowns. "Short bloke, used to go with Red?"

Buffy hums.

"Seemed like a decent bloke, 'fore he split," Spike says carefully.

"I get it now," Buffy says. 

"The leaving?" Spike asks.

She doesn't answer. The wind buffets her hair and the coat creaks when she hugs it even closer. 

Spike wishes he could feel the cold. Make his sacrifice means something. All he has is the unbearable absence of weight.

"Do you think wishing on stars is a real thing?" Buffy asks suddenly.

Spike wets his bottom lip and finds it chapped. "Suppose it could be."

"I don't think so," she says.

"Alright," says Spike.

"I used to," Buffy continues, erring dangerously close to wistful. "When I was a kid. Isn't that stupid?"

Spike feels so incredulous that it circles back to flat-toned. "You're a vampire slayer. Your best friend is quite possibly the be–most powerful witch on the continent, and you're shagging a demon."

Buffy looks at him like he's an idiot. "Nothing good comes from any of it."

It settles like a wound. And he pictures her, then–young like he only knew her to be in Joyce's photos. Pigtailed hair with a tiny hand in Dawn's even tinier one, looking up at the stars and wishing for a good life. For a thing that feels so foreign now that she can't even put it to words.

And he loves her, and he thinks if he had a soul he'd be disgusted with himself for being glad she ended up miserable enough to let him touch her, and a bloody fucking meteor streaks across the sky.

The night goes still. Her breathing stops a split second before the countdown rings out from beneath the eaves.

"You gonna make a wish?" Spike asks quietly.

Buffy says, "I told you I don't believe in that stuff anymore."

Spike, God bloody help him, closes his eyes.

 

Again?

Glass shatters across the deck. The stench of beer fills the air and mingles with the scent of blood. Spike nearly topples over the railing in shock.

"Ow!" Dawn yelps. She scrambles and hops around barefoot, her voice clogging with tears as she finally gets free of the shards and whines miserably, "Ow, Spike, it hurts."

Spike swallows against the way his mouth is watering and pushes away from the banister, blinking roughly to clear the sense of deja vu. He steps forward to take her arm and get a look at her and nearly walks directly into Buffy, who's creeping out onto the deck.

"What–" She side-steps away from him with a wide-eyed anger in her expression. "What did you do?"

"What?" Spike asks, looking between her and Dawn and trying to piece together– "Nothing! Bit came outta nowhere. Sorry, bit."

"Whatever," Dawn mutters, shoving past them both. "I'll fix it myself."

Buffy turns towards her as the door slams, but her eyes seem distant. "Sorry, I just–had a weird feeling."

Spike narrows his eyes. "Like what?"

Buffy rushes into the house without another word.

Bloody hell. Spike sighs, glancing dejectedly at his ruined booze, and walks inside to look for a broom. 

He's waylaid by the trail of blood smeared across the kitchen floor; better to clean that up first.

"Aw, Spike, did you spill your dinner again?"

Spike's head snaps up. The hairs on the back of his neck prickle coolly and his stomach, rumbling a second ago with an animal's thirst, suddenly turns sour.

"What'd you say?" he asks Xander.

Xander puts his hands up and says, "Sheesh, someone's testy tonight."

"No, I–" Spike squeezes the blood-soaked rag tightly. "Bugger it. You gonna help clean or not?"

Xander snarks, "What am I, your maid?" but goes under the sink for another rag.

"No, there's glass outside," Spike tells him.

"Nothing I do is ever good enough for you," Xander complains melodramatically, a hand to his forehead as he heads for the basement where the broom is. "Don't you love me anymore?"

Well, that's definitely not how Spike half-remembers it. He chalks it up to having slept a little off and gets back to scrubbing. With Xander sweeping outside, he can hear the faint murmur of Buffy and Dawn's tense conversation in the bathroom.

He's almost got all the blood up when Buffy reappears. She stands and stares at him in the doorway for a beat too long before managing a quiet, "... Thanks."

Spike looks up. His nose is stung raw from the smell of old bleach and his fingers ache with longing for a mug to wrap around, and he thinks, again, of Joyce.

Again.

Buffy's mouth turns downwards with confusion, but before he can muster an answer, Xander walks back inside.

"Buffster!" he says, dumping the last of the glass into the trash. "Everything okay?"

Buffy blinks and says, "Um… fine? I mean, yeah." She stretches a smile across her face. "Fine!"

"Are you sure?" Xander asks skeptically. "I mean, whose blood is this?"

"Dawn's," Buffy says. "Um, is Anya with you?"

"Huh?" Xander puts the broom down. "Uh, no, she's still in work-mode. I swear she loves that store more than me."

Spike mutters reflexively, "Not hard to do."

"What was that?" Xander asks.

"She's got a lot to do?"

Xander shrugs. "I guess. I told her to take the day off and celebrate the holiday with us non-insane people, but she went off on some speech about how New Year's Eve has ritual significance for many Anglo-Demonic cultures she needed to sell shit to and I backed away slowly."

"Um," says Buffy. "Yikes?"

Spike rinses the bloody rag out one last time in the sink. He turns to her and asks, "Is Dawn okay?"

"Um," Buffy says again, furrowing her eyebrows. "I think so. Did you–"

She cuts off, looking between the two of them. 

"Nevermind," she says. 

Spike goes out on a limb and asks, "Are you worried about patrolling tonight?"

"What?" Buffy asks, turning quickly. "No! I mean–should I be?"

Spike is getting a bloody headache. Irritably, he says, "Last time you–"

Buffy and Xander are both looking at him like he's off his rocker.

"Uh," he says, "you know, on Christmas. Last holiday. You were worried if you should patrol or not."

Xander says, "Jeez, Spike, get a life."

Now Spike's temper properly flares. "Christmas was a bloody week ago, you git!"

"Oh, please," Xander snarks back. "We all know you're just looking for an excuse to get Buffy alone. It's pathetic, man. She's never patrolled on New Year's Eve before–give it up."

"That's not even what I–"

"Oh my God," Buffy snaps. "How is this happening?"

Their mouths snap shut guiltily.

Xander says, "Sorry, Buff."

She says nothing in return. 

After a prolonged moment, Spike ventures, "You guys wanna play cards?"

 

~*~

 

He bribes Dawn downstairs with the temptation of a bet in her favor, an offer he remembers in the back of his throat. He lingers in the stairwell and goes back to smell the shampoo, just in case. 

Dawn explains the rules to Rummy, quickly and blithely, while Spike proceeds through the oft-familiar motions of dealing out cards. He waits, maybe, for Buffy's remark. Something about all the games she missed while she was gone–but it never comes before Willow gets downstairs.

Dejectedly, she asks, "Oh, you were playing without me?"

Buffy says, "Um, we were gonna let you sleep."

"While there's partying?" Willow asks. "I can still party, can't I?"

"Of course you can, Wil," Xander reassures her. "We can deal you in no problem."

Spike adds, "Have at it, Red," and deals another stack of cards.

Willow sighs dramatically, but sits down between Spike and Dawn, who pointedly scoots closer to Xander instead.

"Oh, Dawnie," Willow asks, turning to her, "didn't you wanna go to Janice's? Aren't you gonna be late?"

Dawn scowls and says, "I'm not going anymore."

Willow shoots Buffy a quizzical look.

Buffy purses her lips and reminds her, "Dawn is still grounded. No parties."

"Oh. Um, sorry. I guess I thought–with the it being two months and all…" Willow hesitates, taking in Buffy's expression. "I mean, um, I guess I should've asked."

Buffy doesn't answer at first. She picks at a loose thread on the carpet instead, tugging and tugging with a quiet stubbornness. "It's… fine."

Willow chews restlessly on her lip. She asks, "So, um, which version are we playing?"

Dawn says, "The easy one," and turns back to Buffy. "So anyways, like I was saying, you've gotta draw and discard every turn, but you can draw from the deck or the face-up discard pile, so if you want something from there that's fine, but you can't just discard a card and pick the same one back up because–"

Spike listens to the explanation with the same nagging sense of recollection. His stomach stirs restlessly, feeling uncomfortably like a rabbit in a pen. Over-observed. He glances at Buffy surreptitiously. If it's real, if he's been here before–

Buffy puts her cards down face up on the carpet. "Maybe you guys should play without me. Um, just for a round."

His shoulders sag.

"Um, okay," Dawn says. "I guess that would help. There's a lot of rules."

Spike puts his cards facedown and stands. "You got any booze in this place?"

Buffy blinks up at him. "Um, there might be wine in the basement."

"Good enough," says Spike. 

He slinks away, listening half-heartedly to the sound of Xander reshuffling Buffy's hand into the deck. He creeps down the stairs and leans his head against the rough wall. 

It wasn't real. These memories, the lingering feeling–melancholy, he thinks to call it. But hungrier. 

A dream, maybe, is what it was. To be with her, learn something of her childhood. See his coat around her shoulders. A useless, pathetic wish for a little more time. 

She doesn't want him. Not enough. She'll steal away to shag him halfway through a double shift, or on patrol, but she'd never leave her friends for him. Never choose him given any real choice. 

He remembers before she jumped. The gentle kiss she pressed to the corner of his mouth. Pity, most likely, but it didn't taste like it then. There wasn't the bitterness to it. Maybe she'd have chosen him then, if she'd lived–not to love, no–never to love. But maybe he could've been good, with a little more time.

But she jumped, and her body rotted in the ground, and she came back different. He could've told her little friends as much before they did it. You always come back different. 

The stairwell door opens; Spike jumps a little.

"Hey," Buffy says, quiet but impatient. "Are you playing or what?"

Spike is muttering, "Suppose I'm not," and knocking his shoulder hard enough into hers that the chip should fire before he fully realizes he's done it.

He regrets it immediately after, when he turns to see the impassivity on her face, but he's too proud and smarting to take it back. 

"Uh," he says instead, stiltedly. "I'll get that patrol in, I guess."

She says, "Fine."

Spike shuts the back door too hard. The whole deck shudders and he apologizes silently to Joyce, who he prays to God hasn't been watching the past few months. Hopes she expected better of him.

He hears Buffy's footsteps crossing the kitchen, towards the door. Like she could be going to open it.

The demon was supposed to hollow him out, when it took him. Sometimes he thinks it missed something deep in his marrow, red and meaty with too-alive blood; sometimes he wonders who's haunting who.

The poet imagines, for a moment, that the kitchen light spills onto the deck. Longs for her to call his name and bring him back into the glow. 

Spike lights a cigarette and lets the smoke be the thing that waters his eyes.

 

~*~

 

He patrols downtown, preying on the vamps who are preying on the partygoers all down Maple Court. The Magic Box's lights shut off just after eleven and Anya bustles down the street in a charming peacoat with matching hat.

Spike keeps his distance. He slinks back towards Revello Drive closer to midnight, scanning the Espresso Pump crowd one last time on his way out. He thinks he catches sight of a familiar head of dirty blonde hair huddled around a table with two other young women, but he doesn't linger. 

By the time he makes it back, Anya is long inside and sitting with her arms crossed on the couch, her back to the windows. Xander and Buffy are talking quietly near the TV; she glances over and frowns thoughtfully in his direction, though he doubts she can see him in the dark. 

Spike slinks away anyway, hands shoved deep in his pockets, and settles on the porch swing. The wind blows like it'd be cold tonight. 

The front door creaks open, but it's not Buffy in search of him. Dawn leans against the porch railing and says, "Oh. Hey."

"Uh, hey," he says, glancing towards her. She's got her pajamas on and thick socks on her feet, muffling the faint smell of lingering blood. "You alright?"

"I'm okay," she says unconvincingly.

Spike lifts a mouth corner. "Sorry your party didn't work out."

"It's whatever." Dawn shrugs. "I guess staying here wasn't so lame. It's kinda fun to finally beat Buffy at something."

Spike teases, "Bet you didn't even have to cheat."

"Puh-lease," Dawn says, plopping down next to him on the swing. "You don't show your best moves on day one. I learned that from you."

That she did.

Spike wants a smoke. His fingers itch restlessly and wrap around his lighter, but he doesn't reach for a cigarette–just clicks it open and shut in his hand. The school sent home a complaint in August. Said the bit was always smelling like smoke. It settles over everything.

"It would've been cooler if you were here, though," she says. She's staring out over the yard; picked up her sister's habit. 

Spike laughs humorlessly. "Pretty sure you're the only one with that opinion, bit, but thanks."

"I don't think so," Dawn tells him. She glances his way. "Buffy was all mopey for a while after you left. I mean, she didn't say anything, but I could tell."

Buffy's always mopey, Spike doesn't say. 

Then why didn't she ask me? Spike doesn't add.

Dawn says, "Anyway, maybe some people miss you."

Spike looks at her curiously, a question lifting his tongue, but she turns to look him full in the face and asks, "Do you still love her?"

(Rummy, she'd said.)

"Of course I do," Spike says, his tone some pathetic bastardization of wretched and offended.

"It's just that you're never here," Dawn continues. "Not really." Quieter, she mutters, "No one's ever here."

Spike can taste his spine. He tries, "Got a whole household of people in there who'd beg to differ."

"It's not the same!" she snaps, abruptly leaping to her feet. "God, you're just as self-absorbed as the rest of them."

(She smelled like burnt tobacco. Draped in her dead sister's clothes, bloodstains and all, and the security guards followed him around the mall while she stuffed trinkets in her pockets. She nicked him a ring from Hot Topic that leaves a rash on his pinky whenever he wears it.)

He rubs at his blistered knuckle. He still says, "I'm sorry."

Dawn wraps her arms around her middle and turns away, head drooping. She seems to change in size; towering and crumpled all at once. Genetic trait, perhaps.

"Look," Spike says, finding his throat raw with desperation, "give a bloke a chance, will you? Let me make it up to you."

Dawn glares at him wet and warily. "How?"

"I'll do those chores for you anyway," he supplies. "And we'll go to the mall after. Buy you whatever you want."

She inhales deeply, her nostrils flaring.

"Or–whatever you wanna do," Spike offers. "We'll play cards, watch TV. Hell, we'll just talk."

The night is quiet. The unblinking moon, barely in eyeline from under the porch, peers inquisitively down.

He feels stripped bare by it, by the searing whiteness of its glow and the righteous loneliness in his nibblet's eyes. 

"Didn't mean to leave you alone," Spike says softly. "Didn't think…"

A flash in his vision, suddenly, of Buffy's bared teeth. Stop coming around here when Dawn's home. She's the last person I want to see me with you.

"Didn't think," he says.

Finally, Dawn relents and sits back down. "I guess I can't blame you too much. Everyone knows you're an idiot."

Spike smiles with relief. "That I am, bit. That I am."

The stars are as bright as he remembers them–or as bright as he'd imagined them. It feels good, gazing at the distant lights with her. 

"It'll be different, though," he promises. "Come tomorrow, you'll get a better Spike. Swear on–"

"Holy crap!" Dawn says, sitting forward with a jolt. "Is that a shooting star?"

"Bollocks," says Spike.

 

Again.

Glass turns to shrapnel across the deck. Spike scrambles for his bearings and jumps forward to grab the yet-again barefooted Dawn off the shards, whisking her back to safety just before–

"Son of a bitch!" Buffy shouts over the sound of cartilage crunching.

Spike stumbles against the impact; Dawn yelps when he lets her slip from his grip, hopping sideways with the clink of glass shuffling under her feet.

The smell of blood is nauseating in its temptation. Buffy pulls a glistening hand away from her gushing nose; she scowls at him with a mouthful of teeth that immediately stain red.

Well, Spike's definitely not getting shagged this time around.

The kitchen door slams shut.

Spike grins salaciously. "Since you're already bleedin' and all–"

"I don't have time for this," says Buffy, and follows Dawn back into the house with a plaintive, "Dawnie, wait!"

Spike snorts at the irony. Then giggles, high-pitched and embarrassing if anyone were around to hear, not that they'll remember, and crumples in half with a barely-smoking hand braced against the railing while the laughter wracks through him.

I wish this'd never end. If any of it's real, just don't let it end.

This night. That moment.

Sometimes she wanted him.

He laughs so hard that the sound stops and leaks out his eyes instead. Remembers her coat–his coat, on her–the sound of bark cracking off a tree. Her fingers in his hair and coconut, coconut. They could play cards. He could kiss her in front of everyone, just to see how it feels once. 

He looks down at the mess on the deck, his ruined case of beer glistening like the slit throat of a sacrificed pig–the one eternal casualty, perhaps. Small price to pay.

"Holy shit," Xander says from inside. "What happened in here?"

Spike scrubs at his face and crushes glass under his boots on his way inside. Dawn's blood is smeared across the kitchen floor.

Xander eyes him warily. "What's with the happy? What'd you do?"

"Nothin' you'll remember," Spike says gleefully.

"What," Xander asks blankly.

"Was an accident," Spike says instead. "There's glass on the deck."

Xander wrinkles his nose and says, "You smell like burned-up hotdog," when he brushes past Spike with the broom.

Spike glances down at his hands–a little burnt from lingering in the fading sunlight. Nothing a little midnight won't fix.

He grabs a rag and starts scrubbing the floors. Buffy seems to like that.

"... Thanks," she says, when she comes back in. She's got wads of toilet paper stuffed up both nostrils and bruises forming all under her eyes like a halo and he wants to kiss her. "Reset my nose."

There's a charming crook in it where Spike's elbow broke the cartilage. He rinses his musty-bleach rag in the sink and slinks towards her with a pleased smirk. "You sure? Think it suits you."

"Gross," she answers, and wraps a hand around his upper arm to grip with when he reaches for her face.

"Count of three?" Spike offers.

Buffy snaps, "Just do–" 

Spike crunches her nose back into a straight line.

"Asshole," Buffy hisses, twisting up the leather coat in her fist.

A little fresh blood starts seeping through the wads of paper. 

"Sorry," Spike says softly.

Buffy releases her grip and shakes her hand out.

"Is Dawnie okay?" Spike asks.

Xander walks back in before she can answer, his feet clomping oafishly as he asks, too-loud and grating, "Jeez, Buff, what happened to you?"

"Spike happened to me!" Buffy says, sickeningly cheerful, and shoves him away from her with a vindictive push on his ribs.

Spike winces when the countertop corner jams into his lower back. He gripes, "Not like it was on purpose, you clumsy bint."

"Oh, I'm clumsy?" Buffy demands, wheeling on him. "Who broke an entire thingy of beer all over the deck?"

"Your battering ram of a kid sis had somethin' to do with it."

Buffy tells him, "Don't bring Dawn into this."

"She barrelled into me!" Spike answers defensively. "What was I supposed to do, not be standing on the porch?"

"I'd take that as a win," Xander interjects.

Buffy snaps, "I–I dunno! Just–why couldn't you do something?"

Spike rolls his eyes and snarks, "Sorry for not bein' able to see the future, princess."

She takes it surprisingly hard on the chin, blinking at him with a peculiar sort of confusion. 

"You're right," Buffy says, wind out of her sails. "... Sorry."

"What," Spike and Xander ask at the same time.

Buffy straightens her shoulders and asks, "Xander, where's Anya?"

"Ugh," Xander says, and Spike skulks away as the familiar rant winds up.

He's a bit out of order, but he heads up the stairs anyway and knocks on Dawn's door.

"Who is it?" she asks dully.

"It's me," says Spike.

Dawn says, "Come in."

He pushes open the door and leaves it cracked behind him, stepping forward–

"Close it all the way?" Dawn says.

Spike frowns, but does like she asks. She's sitting up against her headboard, comforter pulled up around her shoulders; he stays near the door.

"I won't tell anyone," she tells him.

He stares at her blankly.

"About the chip," she explains tentatively. "You hit Buffy and… it didn't go off, did it?"

"Oh," Spike says, half relief and half ache. "Listen, bit, that's not–"

"You're not gonna hurt anyone," Dawn says, confident at first, but then– "Are you?"

Spike drags her desk chair around and sits down heavily. "No," he says. "No, I'm not."

"I don't think everyone else would understand," Dawn tells him. "They don't get what it's like."

Spike frowns at her. "What what's like?"

"Being dangerous," she says. "Even when it's not your fault."

Spike's chest spasms painfully. He says, "You're not dangerous, Dawn."

"I'm not stupid," she says hotly, nostrils flaring. "I know some of them probably wanted to–" She cuts off, looking down. "And it's what they'd do to you, isn't it?"

They'd put him down like a rabid dog. Xander, gleefully. The rest pragmatically. Willow might hand-wring but she'd toss Buffy the stake all the same.

"I don't think Buffy noticed," Dawn continues, swallowing up the silence. "I… kinda tried to bring it up and she brushed me off. She was just super mad about her nose."

Spike's head throbs like his nose was the one broken. None of this matters, really. The day'll reset and he'll keep her from seeing tomorrow, somehow. He doesn't think she did before. But he wants to know how this feels. Yawning ache and all.

"You don't have to protect me, sweet bit," he tells her gently, looking up at her with head heavy and arms braced on his aching knees. "I'd never ask that of you."

"You don't have to," she answers stubbornly.

This brave girl. This sweet child. Dressed in her best pajamas and smelling like beer-stained blood, meeting the eyes of a killer like it's worth something. Like he's worth something.

Spike's vision blurs. He thinks about telling the truth–that chip works on everyone else. But he doesn't want her to look at her sister that way. Can't soil the image, even for a day.

"You've got no idea what it means," he says instead. "Thank you."

"I do," Dawn insists evenly. "You'd do it for me, wouldn't you?"

(How could you think that? he'd begged.)

The tips of Spike's fingers sting with phantom papercuts. "You know I–"

There's a knock at the door; Buffy asks, "Hey, can I come in?"

Dawn hesitates, looking at Spike, then says, "I guess."

Buffy walks inside, leaving the door cracked behind her, and blinks when she sees Spike. "Oh. What're you guys doing?"

"We're just talking!" Dawn says, too defensively. "God, am I grounded from talking now?"

Spike winces. Buffy stutters a bit in response, saying, "Wha–no, I mean–" She crosses her arms. "About what?"

"Just about how lame you are," Dawn snarks.

Buffy's nostrils flare, glancing at Spike with questioning hurt; he shrugs helplessly, all, She's putting words in my mouth, but he can't come out and scold the bit either.

Woundedly, Buffy says, "I just wanted to see if you wanted to play a game or something."

Dawn relaxes marginally. "Really?"

"Yeah." Buffy produces a passable smile. "I hear you got, like, really good at cards."

Did she? Xander must have said something about it while they were downstairs.

"I'd fancy a game of Rummy," Spike olive-branches.

Dawn sits up straighter in bed, shoots Spike a very obvious we're getting away with it grin, and says, "Totally! Yeah! I'll get the cards."

Buffy rolls her eyes at the sudden enthusiasm and tells her, "See if Willow wants to play, okay?"

Dawn is already bolting (as much as she can on one good foot) for the door.

Spike joins Buffy in the eye rolling and gets to his feet. Over the sound of Dawn knocking on Willow's door, Buffy asks him, "Is that really what she said?"

He frowns a little. The toilet paper is gone from her nostrils, which have stopped bleeding, but the bruises are darkening around her nose. She looks as tired as she feels at last.

"Uh, no," he says quietly. "I just came to check on her–uh, apologize for her foot."

Buffy snorts bitterly. "I'm sure she didn't even care that it was your fault. You can, like, do no wrong for some reason."

(She threw things, one night. Trashed half the living room and left a bruise on his hip where a textbook grazed him just right and screamed herself hoarse asking why it had to happen, why couldn't he have done something. Why he'd let it happen. I hate you, I hate you, 'til her throat got so raw it started to sound like I'm sorry.)

Spike quirks his lips and says, "No accountin' for taste."

Buffy rolls her eyes anew. She shifts half-heartedly towards the door. "C'mon. Let's play stupid rugby."

"Rummy," says Spike.

"Whatever." Buffy steps into the hallway at the same time Willow's door shuts with pointed force.

Dawn looks at Buffy with her arms crossed. "Yeah, she's, like, majorly cranky and says she told you she's taking a nap. Shoot the messenger, much?"

Buffy mutters something that sounds suspiciously like fuck and sake.

"Can't win for losing, eh?" Spike observes.

She blinks at him.

"Whatever," says Dawn. "It's not like the lame party is gonna be more lame without her."

"Oi," says Spike. "It's not lame when I'm here."

Buffy snorts derisively, then makes a quiet hiss of pain and touches the back of her wrist to her nose. 

"Karmic," Spike teases, following Dawn down the stairs.

Buffy shoves him into the banister.

 

~*~

 

Dawn calls Rummy for the second time in a row. Xander tosses his cards down in exaggerated exasperation, which only makes the bit laugh. They're four turns into the third round when Willow at last emerges and asks, "Oh, is it too late for me to play?"

Xander collects up all the cards and reshuffles the deck.

"I had a good hand that time," Buffy mutters irritably.

"What was that?" asks Willow.

Spike slaps his knees and stands up. "You got any booze in this place, Slayer?"

"There's wine in the basement," she answers.

"Good enough," Spike says.

The stairs creak in the same places, he thinks. Wonders how much he'd have to adjust his gait to make it different. He lingers at the bottom of the stairwell, hoping she'll come for him. See if he'll do it better this time.

The minutes drag on, but she doesn't come. Spike sighs and rummages halfheartedly for the wine–can't even get that right, because it's nowhere to be found.

He pokes his head around the top of the stairwell and calls, "You got another basement I don't know about?"

Buffy's long-suffering sigh would be audible even without the supernatural hearing, but she appears in the kitchen and herds him back down the steps.

Then she hefts a massive tower of plastic bins out of the way to reveal three dust-covered bottles set on the floor in the corner.

"Right," Spike says drily.

"It's for Dawn-proofing," Buffy explains. Her duh remains unsaid. She kicks the bins and adds, "It's just rocks."

Spike snorts fondly. "You ever heard of a liquor cabinet, love?"

Buffy sweetly answers, "Someone who's very dead to me taught her how to pick locks!"

"Wretched stuff, lockpicking," says Spike. "Never touch it myself."

Unimpressed, Buffy bends over to inspect the bottles. "Red or white or other red?"

Spike is enjoying the spectacular view of her ass.

"Fuck you," says Buffy.

Spike grins. "Yeah."

He slides his hands up the backs of her thighs, squeezing roughly and feeling her shiver, for a moment, before she whips around and shoves a bottle against his chest.

He blinks, reading the label. "This's a right vintage. Where'd you get this?"

"... It was Mom's," she says.

Spike tilts his head at her, eyebrows furrowed softly and chest wrenching with a faint throb. "You sure you wanna open it?"

"Why not?" Buffy brushes off, pushing gently past him on her way back up the stairs. He doesn't follow her, overcome by something he can't place, but she turns back to look and asks, "Are you coming or what?"

For her, his feet revive. He follows behind as she veers for the cutlery drawer and rummages for the corkscrew, ill-used in comparison to the jarringly posh bottle opener Dawn filched for him from a downtown boutique. He can crack a beer open just fine with his teeth, but she doesn't smile so much then.

"Here it is," Buffy declares triumphantly, then wiggles her hand for bottle. "Gimme the thingy."

The old merlot is covered with a thin layer of dust. He sets it on the counter and feels, with a writhe in his stomach, that he's dirtied the thing where his grip left a wiped-clean palmprint behind. 

Buffy stared at it numbly.

"Can find something else to drink," Spike offers softly.

She stabs the cork clean through and twists.

It pops audibly, liquid sloshing, and she nearly bashes her nose back in when her hand yanks upwards. Spike catches the bottle before it topples.

"Shut up," Buffy mutters, even though he's forgotten to laugh. She opens two sets of cabinets for glasses and finds them lacking, propping a fist–still clenched around the corkscrew–on her hip with a huff.

Joyce kept her fine stuff–the polite company stuff–in a china cabinet in the dining room. Of course, no one's touched it. Waiting exactly as she left it, for all the good it did the one who came back, currently pouring 1981 Bordeaux into two red plastic cups.

He'd tell her, maybe. If she'd remember. He doesn't think it'd be a kindness to make her feel poorly about forgetting–doesn't think he's supposed to care about such. 

(He used to pry up bottle caps with his crooked Cockney teeth. He used to sip brandy in the sitting room while his mother sang.)

Buffy takes a sip, wrinkles her nose as she spits it back out and says, emphatically, "No?"

Spike brings the cup to his lips, nostrils flaring delicately to welcome the taste to the back of his throat. He closes his eyes with a terrible, toe-curling ache that feels insultingly like shame. Fucking pathetic. Bloody fool.

"Maybe it's too old," Buffy posits skeptically, frowning at her thoroughly backwashed cup. "Does wine get too old? I thought it was supposed to get better when it got old, like that Bond guy, or Paul Newman."

Spike swallows a second, useless time.

"This wine is so not Paul Newman," Buffy decides. "This wine is, like, Marlon Brando."

Spike says, "I met Marlon Brando once," which is not true. "Try it again."

Buffy says, "You did not," and drinks.

"You'll never prove it," says Spike, watching her face.

Her eyebrows scrunch. She gulps with her entire body, snorts into the cup, and takes a third drink.

Buffy says, "It's better than your stupid whiskey."

"I'm offended on behalf o' the wine by the comparison," says Spike.

She side-eyes him. "You like it?"

Spike shrugs. 

"I dunno how you still get weirder," she tells him. She leans back against the counter for a moment, then trades her cup for the bottle, tracing a thoughtful finger along the edge of the label. "... Is it really fancy?"

Spike clears his throat awkwardly. "I'm no expert."

Buffy narrows her eyes at him and accuses, "Why are you being weird?"

"Me? Weird?" Spike scoffs. "'m not–"

Buffy is thoroughly unimpressed.

She won't remember. 

The dust will reclaim his fingerprints, the cork will forget her brutality. And still the shame. Still the poet's ghost.

"I miss her too," he says at last, too quiet. "She meant something. You won't let me, but I miss her too."

Buffy shares his quiet. Her hair falling in frazzled wisps–her bruised veins smelling sweeter than the wine, throbbing runes beneath her hallowed eyes.

There's a lurch in the air, a precipice of tenderness, and then a sudden violence in the way she pushes past him without touching him at all.

"Keep the wine," she says, and dissipates.

Spike listens to her rejoin the card circle; hears her say to go on without him, he's skipping a round, and the shuffling resume without regret.

He stares at the wine, its casual butchering. Wonders what she'd been saving it for. 

Most humans think they have more time. Gently, the plastic creaking between his fingers, Spike pinches the lip of his cup into a spout and pours the liquid back into the bottle. He does Buffy's cup too, and wriggles the tattered cork back in best he can. Takes the bottle in his hands and thinks of nothing.

Laughter from the other room. Spike smashes the glass against the counter.

Someone shrieks; someone else yelps for Jesus and skitters around the corner–Xander, with a useless bloody arm thrown out to keep Dawn and Willow back, who are both rushing in behind him anyway.

Buffy comes serenely after, long enough behind that Xander's already finished asking, "Dude, what the hell?" by the time Spike can look her in the eye.

The wine is dribbling onto his boots with a grand determination. Half the bottle is still tightly in his grip, ragged and deadly even in less capable hands, and the flash in her eyes is, briefly, immutable. Hatred, perhaps. Recognition. And he thinks he'd like to kill her. The bottle in her throat, or his teeth–no, maybe a hand around it. He used to love the crunch; only a human neck really makes the proper crunch.

(He'd wanted to be the one to carry her, but he couldn't stop weeping and the sun was keening itself awake. Her head lolled too far to the side in Xander's useless arms.)

"Just go," Buffy says tiredly. 

It was a damn good Merlot.

 

Again,

Spike asks, "You got any booze in this place, Slayer?" 

 

Again.

"Red or white or other red?"

 

And again

she reaches for the plastic cups, and this time he says, "Be better in a real glass."

Buffy crosses her arms with a huff and says, "Well, there aren't any, so tough luck."

"They're in the dining room," he says gently. "Remember?"

She blinks at him. There's a lot she'll never remember. Months of lost time, better left unseen. 

(Must've been left unseen, or it couldn't have been heaven.) 

Months of this. Years of this, if he's lucky. He hopes she'll still lead him to the china cabinet; hopes she'll make the same face at her first taste. 

"It's still gross," she says, but she doesn't spit it back into the glass now. "What the hell?"

Spike shrugs. "Not for everyone, I expect."

"What makes it special?" Buffy asks thoughtfully, tilting her glass and watching the liquid slosh. "Like, what makes this, 'let it get all dusty in the basement' wine and not 'drink it straight out of the bottle crying in a bathtub' wine?"

"Other than the price tag some greedy sod slapped on it?" Spike asks drily.

Buffy says, "We don't even have other wine. If we had other wine we could do, like, a blind taste test."

"Could pop over to the shops," Spike suggests.

"Nah," Buffy answers with faint dejection. "I just wish–" She glances at him here, quick to the point of furtive, and hesitates. "Um."

He takes another swig. It feels odd to breathe, worse to not. The wrongness lingering over the act, though less oppressive with time, making his tendons taut.

"I don't get it," she says quietly.

Laughter in the other room. They do that right about now with or without her.

"There's all this stupid stuff I'll never be able to ask her," she continues, heedless now that she's started. So very like herself. "I keep waiting for the time–like, shouldn't it make me feel closer to her, somehow?"

Spike drains his glass and says, "Maybe you'll like the white."

"Maybe," Buffy allows, but she doesn't move for it. He broke her nose again this time; he still hasn't managed to get Dawn off the damn glass before it wounds. Only some days it makes him hungry. "You wanna get out of here?"

 

Again.

"Ow, Spike, it hurts!"

 

Again.

"You want me to get the white?" Spike offers, watching the displeased curl of her mouth around the taste.

She looks at him oddly. No bruises this time; he misses them, but he can't always get the angle right to land a good break. Her mouth opens, his hips quivering with anticipation–

"Jeez," Xander complains, and Spike snorts in disappointment. "How long's it take to–wow, with the rude?"

They talked for too long. Happens sometimes; he'll try again tomorrow. He's getting bloody sick of the movie though.

"You don't even drink," Buffy tells him, rolling her eyes. "Which, lucky? This stuff is gross."

"Yeah, but I like smelling other people drinking it," Xander answers, leaning against the doorframe. "It brings back good memories of normal childhood violence. You know, before all the freak adolescent violence. Also, we're waiting to deal you guys in."

Buffy leaves her mostly undrunk glass on the dining room table, next to the bottle. Spike drains his and leaves it besides hers, following her back to the living room.

Dawn looks sullen as always and Willow is dour, flicking at her cards impatiently. Spike really wishes he'd nudged Buffy towards that shag in time.

"Oh," Willow says, disappointed and likely judgemental. "I thought you were getting wine?"

Buffy says, "We didn't find any."

Xander shoots her a look, which she smoothly ignores. 

"Alright," Buffy says, cracking her knuckles. "I'm totally gonna win this time."

 

~*~

 

They play two more rounds, neither of which Buffy wins, and then Xander says, "How's about a movie?" 

Spike enters into his traditional bargaining with Dawn about how and when he'll do her chores–useless endeavor, but he likes letting her gloat–while the others argue about what might be on TV. 

Spike knows what's on TV. He's seen most of it at least once. Steered them towards the DVD collection a few times with intermittent success, though it usually works better when Buffy's nose is broken and she argues for a romantic comedy.

He leaves it up to inertia this time. The loop tends to settle itself the less he meddles, and he could do with a kip. He hasn't slept in days.

"You can sit next to me, Spike!" Dawn offers, patting the seat next to her on the couch.

He smiles. "Thanks, nibblet. Think I'll take up residence in the armchair this time."

Willow says, "I wanted the comfy chair."

Spike falls backwards onto the chair, creaking its old wooden bones on impact.

She makes a sour face at him and sits next to Xander.

"I'll sit with you," Buffy tells Dawn, trying for a soft smile. "Want me to braid your hair?"

Dawn blinks, wobbling between holding the grudge. After a beat, she says, "Um, yeah. Thanks."

Buffy's expression is triumphant. She briefly disappears upstairs and comes back with a hairbrush and a blanket–looks around the room, hesitates, and comes back again with two more. The first is handed to Xander and Willow; the second–

"Uh," Spike says, mimicking Dawn's blinked confusion. "Thanks, Slayer."

So much for things settling. He rubs a thumb along the seamed edge of the blanket a little distantly, his chest tight. What did he change? What could he have done to earn such a kindness?

His throat is warm. How might he repeat it?

Buffy offers him nothing else–no you're welcome, not so much as the barest nod. He doesn't care, watching her thin fingers begin to card through Dawn's hopelessly frizzled hair until, feeling the girl wince away, she switches to the brush. 

Her nails are bitten to the quick. Were they done so before? 

Spike wriggles in his seat to get the worn-out chair cushion to settle just right underneath him. Clothes, coats, linens–these human comforts, a warm fire or cold drink in the summer heat–they do nothing to his body, no method of changing the careless homeostasis of the already dead. 

Only blood arrests decay. Alleviates hunger. The fried onion at The Bronze is playing in a dollhouse. He paints his nails, fills his lungs with oxygen and exhales it unchanged. He clutches the blanket tightly around himself, their eyes all to the last turned away, and falls asleep before they finish channel surfing. 

 

Again!

Glass smashes on the wood. Dawn yelps in pain and Buffy rushes onto the porch, and Spike is standing with his back jammed into the banister and no air in his lungs.

They let him sleep all the way to midnight.

There's a bird singing. Has it always been?

"Spike?" Buffy accuses.

He blinks. "Sorry, nibblet. How bad is it?"

"I'll fix it myself," Dawn mutters, and shoves inside.

Buffy shoots him another furrowed-eyebrow look, then follows her, as always.

Spike cleans up the blood, as always. He knows exactly how hard to scrub in the worst spots, where she smeared it or it pooled. 

Xander says, "Aw, Spike, did you spill your dinner again?"

"You and me," Spike asks, "we're not friends."

"Oh, thank God," Xander says. "I was getting worried for a second there, with the friendship bracelets and hanging out all the time? Filed under, 'duh.'"

Spike's fingers are turning pruned and sticky with blood. He asks, "Why not?"

The absolute git stares with his mouth hung open for a full beat, then snarks, "How much time ya got?"

 

Again.

 

Again.

 

Again.

 

Again.

"Did she even like me?" Spike asks.

Buffy is swirling her wine around in her glass. She looks up.

"Joyce," he says. Swirls his wine too, watching it glint in the light. "Did she…"

Buffy says nothing. He broke her nose this morning and she missed a smear of blood on her cheek where she'd swiped a hand across.

"Do you even like me?" he asks, sick with maudlin and half the bottle.

"She liked you," Buffy tells the good company china, or perhaps her reflection in the glass. 

It hurts. He hates that it hurts, hates that his hand is shaking or that he wants to put a fist through the china cabinet and his shoulders won't move in the right direction.

"Yeah, well," he says, eventually, "'ccording to you, she had a streak of shit taste," and touches their glasses together in a toast.

"Maybe I'd like the white," she answers distantly.

Spike's wine stutters on its way to his mouth. "What'd you say?"

She glances up at him, a peculiar glow in her eye that strikes as mournful–no, wistful, he hadn't seen the curve of her mouth–and asks, "Will you go get it for me?"

 

~*~

 

She's gone by the time he makes it back up the stairs. He climbs to the roof and chain smokes until midnight.

 

Again.

"Harder," Buffy gasps.

 

Again.

"Harder," Buffy gasps.

 

And again,

Buffy gasps, "Harder."

(He likes giving it to her. He likes making her ask.)

 

Again.

"Maybe you'd like the white," he tells her, and she asks, "Wanna get out of here?"

 

And again–

"Where're we going?" Spike asks, his head craned around stupidly. He'd turned left (they always turn left, towards Restfield) and she turned right, away, newly away, to–

"Just c'mon," Buffy says.

He follows. They skirt Maple Court and cut through a different cemetery, pass The Bronze with its festivities, and that's when he puts it together. 

They've cleared up most of the debris. The last time he was here, there were still snake bones shattered and scattering the broken hallways. There is, remarkably, a lingering smell of charcoal and chemical burn regardless.

"You hear they got plans to rebuild this place?" Spike asks, picking his way across the remaining rubble.

"Xander's company got the contract," she answers. Trails her fingers along a warped row of melted lockers. There're holes blown in the walls wide enough to shortcut, but she walks the proper way, all the way down through the halls and out the hollow carcass of a set of doors towards the back.

Half the turf grass on the football field was scorched to hell in the blast; some of the bleachers were shattered, but most of them are still standing. Weeds have grown up all along, obscuring the lower seats and swaying in the December wind.

Buffy rubs at her arms; she forgot her coat. Spike drapes his over her shoulders. 

She hugs it tighter and climbs the bleachers until the grass can't reach, then sits with her knees pulled to her chest.

She looks young. Her hair was about that length, he recalls. Can picture her so clearly with the ache in his spine. He reaches across her huddled body, arm brushing the swell of her breasts, and takes his cigarettes from her coat. 

"What did you think of me?" she asks. "Back then."

The question startles him. She smelled like coconut and menstrual blood, and lemon under the fingernails. Smelled like Angel, too. She danced. Her mother was alive. He lights a cigarette.

The smoke billows in the air. His lungs don't do much these days besides feed him nicotine and pollute the air. Still a killer, in his own way.

"Was I better?" she asks. Her voice is fragile and small.

Spike turns. The wind is blowing in her direction; he lowers the cigarette so the ash doesn't blow into her hair and says, "You're still her, Buffy. You're just tired."

She laughs ruefully.

There should be more to say. He wants to tell her he was already half in love, sick with it and drooling down the back of his throat. That she was beautiful then and more beautiful now and miserable enough to touch him and back then her goodness was a bludgeon and thank god, thank god he broke himself against it. 

I wouldn't give you back, he wants to say. Wouldn't give myself back.

But the cigarette is burning down and the leather duster creaks when she wraps it tighter, and the poet bled out in an alley a hundred years ago. Probably not much blood, when Dru was done with him. Nothing to stain the cobblestones. And she won't remember.

"What would you do if the chip stopped working?" he asks. "Really stopped."

"I'd kill you," she says. "Can I have one of those?"

He puts the cigarette between her teeth and lights it. She splutters and coughs around the acridness and he does not touch her, doesn't move at all, and thinks too late that he should've told her she wouldn't get the chance. 

(He would've done the woman in the alley. Nothing to stain the asphalt.)

He would've.

"I realized something the other day," Buffy says, her voice hoarse and streaked with ash like the forgotten halls below. She sounds so unlike herself he thinks he might be able to kill her, if he didn't have to look.

He looks her in the eye.

"I don't wanna be more like Mom," she says. "Take off your belt."

 

Again.

He's fucking her facedown in the mattress until she's hyperventilating, gasping for air with her face pressed into the pillow and barely turned enough to get a sliver of breath, and he's thinking, Kill her. Just once, just to finally know how it feels you fucking coward kill her just–

And she uses every wisp of air he gives her to gasp, "Spike–"

And–

 

Again

he buries his face in the crook of her neck and sobs.

 

Again.

"How's about a movie?" asks Xander.

Dawn offers, "You can sit with me, Spike."

"Thanks, bit," he says. "Think I'll take the comfy chair."

 

Again.

"Get out!" Dawn shrieks, punctuated by the slamming of her door. More faintly, Willow whines, "Hello, sleeping up here?" and Buffy's footsteps stomp down the hall.

Spike is still mopping up the blood. He frowns, twisting the rag thoughtfully in his hands. What could've done that? 

He didn't get her off the glass in time, of course. Can never seem to get her off the glass, but she usually lets Buffy bandage her, even if they brass her off on the deck. He was slower than usual, maybe–or said something off-color to Buffy? He slept the night before and they woke him up for the ball drop, that time, leaving him groggy twice-over when–

"Hey," Buffy says tiredly. "Wanna get out of here?"

 

~*~

 

"Harder," she gasps, on her back with her legs a vice around his torso, claw marks down his back. "Harder," again, begging. Her cunt so wet he's slipping out as it is, everything covered in her and the smell of sex overpowering even the smoke and his words gone, all gone, and she's begging, "Harder."

He whines. No longer cares what he sounds like (she won't remember) and unravelling, and she's saying please please just fucking– and she's dragging his hand to her throat.

(Nothing but a human neck makes the proper crunch.)

Spike is sitting on the edge of the bed. He's not breathing, gargoyle-still–monstrously still–and she's looking at him with her chest heaving dangerously and her nostrils flared.

(It's what you'll always be, his mother said.)

Is he even hard anymore?

"What the fuck is your problem?" Buffy asks, her voice wavering.

They killed the poet. They killed it and someone paved over those cobblestones, anyway, and Spike asks, "Are you–"

Nothing.

"Are you hoping I'll kill you?" he asks, eventually. Forces himself to look. "Is that what you want? Is that why you–"

Buffy swallows thickly, nostrils still flared. Her jaw is set harshly and her breasts are dripping with sweat, splotched and itching with blood from how they bounced while he fucked her. A minute ago he was fucking her.

Spike asks, "Is that why you touch me now?" 

Buffy says, "Get out."

"It's my crypt!" Spike snaps, wheeling fully around to face her.

She fumbles off the bed and starts grabbing her clothes in a sniffling rush, taking gulps of air that sound selfish and wrong.

"What's wrong?" Spike asks, half-rising to his feet. "What're you doing?"

She barks out a laugh in disbelief and puts her frayed knickers on backwards. "Just–just let me go. It doesn't matter, okay? None of it fucking–"

Bits of the wall crumble when he shoves her into it. His fangs are out, flashing around a snarl, and he can feel the bruises forming underneath his grip on her shoulders. He presses his forehead to her temple and closes his eyes against her shocked glare. Breathes slowly with the effort clawing his tender lungs.

"Is this what you want?" he asks softly. Promises himself his voice will stop shaking. "The monster?"

Buffy's answer is wet. "What else is there?"

His demon fades. Doesn't mean for it to, of course, but there's this ache. No room for both. She won't remember, of course.

He looks at her. Her eyes are welling with tears and her chin quivers but he's holding her shoulders back. He doesn't want to picture his own face.

"I'm tired," she says, and again, "What else is there?"

"I've tried, you know," he tells her. "I'm sorry I can't–"

Buffy kisses him softly. A sweet press of her lips and her fingertips brushing, brushing.

"It's okay," she whispers. "Can you try again?"

(He'd known it wasn't the bot.)

His hands caress her arms. Blunt nails scratching her hip bones, scraping back up her ribs. He bites her bottom lip with human teeth. Then inhuman. She gasps, moans. Cuts her tongue on him and drips the blood down his throat. 

His chest burns. She smells like she's gushing for it again, or never stopped, and he's so hungry. When was the last time he had something human?

She knots her fist in his hair and drags him back to the bed, full strength, and he growls and stumbles and rips her knickers off clean with the hunger. He's sucked the last of the blood off her tongue and she's too careful now, with the teeth, but her cunt is pulsing around him.

He barely remembers sliding inside her. Feels like he was always there, or she was always there. Her hands are reopening the scratches on his back. Did he break her nose today? God, he wishes he'd broken it. He could do it now but she wouldn't get the joke.

"You said you'd try," she whispers. Reedy and desperate and almost childlike in its earnest longing, except for the way she clenches her fucking masterpiece of a cunt around his cock when she says it.

Just once. Just to know. His ribs like a maw and her throat an altar. The blood spills as easily as anyone else's.

She cries out–pleasure, relief? Her body convulsing as she comes and comes and sobs into his hair, curling around his hold on her, wrapping limbs around him when he tries to pull away and still coming–

She says it. Says, Spike, I'm coming, I'm–

As if he could mistake it, as if anything compared in the world, and he knows exactly how long a bite takes to kill a Slayer. She's not his first.

And–

"I love you," he's saying, his mouth wet with blood and her breath still coming hot against his cheek. "Buffy, I love you," again, as if anything compared in the world. "I love you."

"You promised," she croaks, accuses, but she doesn't push him away. Hiccups a sob. "Spike."

"I'm sorry," he says. "I love you."

What else is there?

"I can't do it," she's saying, and he's realizing that he came from the scent in the air, and she's trying to burrow into his chest. "I can't… can't make it–right. I can't do it right."

"What?" Spike asks, as delirious with bloodlust as she is with the loss of it and his chest–it's empty, she should fit if it's empty, but she can't get through the sternum and she's sobbing uselessly against the entrance with her neck bleeding all over the sheets. "Do what right?"

She sobs harder. Wails a little, holds him as tightly as she can manage, so weak it makes him feel sick and his ribs crack anyway, and he's still hard. All the blood, preventing decay.

"Shh," he soothes, petting her hair. Feeling a sick sense of pleasure, that she lets him. Kisses the top of her head and strokes her back, all the knobs of her shaking spine, and says, "It's alright, love. It'll be alright."

She won't remember.

 

Again.

"You got any booze in this place, Slayer?"

And Buffy says, "There's wine in the basement."

 

~*~

 

He fucks her in the woods. She doesn't put his hand to her throat and he doesn't show his teeth.

He walks her home and hides out on the front porch, nostrils flaring around fat hot tears for three, maybe four minutes, before he can muster the bollocks to go back inside.

Anya turns down the block the moment he stands to brush the cigarette ash off his jeans. She catches sight of him and waves cheerily, brisking her pace to meet him on the porch.

"Hello!" she says, doing another mechanical wave even though he reciprocated the first one. "How was your evening?"

She's always a bit formal after leaving the shop. Takes effort to turn it off, he expects. It does for him.

"Had better," he says. "Had worse. How's business?"

"It was beautiful," Anya says, her eyes nearly sparkling like Xander's Saturday morning cartoons. "I made so much money. Oh, you should have seen it! I ordered five boxes of pickled Gzmarian snails and Xander said–" she mimics his voice here, "'Jeez, with the snails!' but I knew that a flock just moved into the sewers, near the college, see, and they'd be homesick this time of year, and then I put them on sale for the holiday and–"

"You sold out?" Spike finishes wryly.

"I sold out!" Anya says, clapping her hands ecstatically. "Oh, where's Xander? Is he inside? I have to tell him!"

This will, of course, not end well. Spike opens the door for her and follows.

"Xander!" Anya chirps, practically skipping into the room and darting in front of the TV, where the climax of Die Hard is playing. "Xander, I sold out of Gzmarian snails!"

Xander cranes his neck to the side. "That's great, sweetie."

"Why don't we pause the movie?" Buffy offers.

"It was amazing!" Anya says.

No one answers her.

"Xander," she pouts, crossing her arms. "I told you an interesting fact about my night. You're supposed to ask a follow-up question."

Something explodes on the screen behind her. Xander says, "Just a sec."

"How was your night, Anya?" asks Buffy.

"It was wonderful, thank you for following the social contract by asking!" Anya says, loudly and passively-aggressively. "I was very busy. It would have been very helpful if some of you had come to help, but I am being very magnanimous by not holding it against you."

Buffy winces.

Dawn asks, "You wanted help tonight?"

Anya looks at her. "Yes, of course. New Year's Eve is our second best night for business, besides Halloween. Xander told you."

Willow, who has dark bags growing under her eyes and a mouth full of popcorn, says mercilessly, "No 'e didn'"

"Shit," Buffy mutters, and, throwing her hands up, flees the room.

Spike sits down next to Willow and steals a handful of popcorn. Looks like it'll be a good one.

"Listen," says Xander, "I can explain."

"How's tricks, Red?" Spike asks.

Anya says, "I just asked you for one thing, Xander! I didn't say anyone had to come help!"

"Okay, I guess," Willow says. "They make me feel better about dying alone."

"Cheers," says Spike.

"It's a little much, sweetie," Xander tells her. "It's your store. These guys don't even get paid. And I told you it was nuts to stay open on New Year's–"

"It wasn't nuts!" Anya cuts in. "I sold out of Gzmarian–"

Dawn asks, "Why does everyone here hate each other?" and stomps out in the opposite direction Buffy did.

"Great," Xander snarks. "Now Dawn's all mad."

"Whose fault is that, Xander?" Anya shoots back.

Xander says, "You wanna know something? I work hard too. I shouldn't have to go work at your job on my day off."

"I didn't say you had to!" Anya says. "I just wanted you to ask!"

"Who?" Xander retorts. "The violated child labor law? Or the demon slayer who already works two jobs and, in case you haven't noticed, is barely keeping it together?"

"I'd've gone," Spike offers cheerfully.

"Shut up," say Anya and Xander.

Xander continues, "The point is, if any of them had gone, I'd have had to go too or looked like a big jerk, and now I look like a big jerk anyway but at least no one has to spend all night selling gizmos to chicken people."

"They're more like crow people," Spike points out.

Xander says, "Nobody asked you, dead boy."

"And that's another thing!" Anya says, wheeling back to him. "I don't like how mean you are to Spike."

"What?" Spike and Xander ask.

"You're always insulting him for being a demon." Anya juts her chin out. "I'm a demon."

Xander says, "That's different."

"How is it different?" Anya asks. "Because Hallie said–"

"The scary demon lady who hates men?" Xander asks in exasperation.

Anya protests, "She doesn't hate men, she hates–"

"Spike," Buffy says quietly, hovering in the doorway looking vaguely ill. "Can we get out of here?"

 

~*~

 

They climb to the roof and stare up at the moon, a sliver short of full and peering back. Spike waits for the breeze and drapes the coat over her shoulders.

"Some racket down there," he observes.

"Do you think they fight like that all the time?" she asks.

Tonight, almost always. The trick, he suspects, is in the movie selection, but he hasn't been bothered to test it with any formality. Beyond tonight–

It's been tonight a long time.

"Not all the time, I expect," he settles on. "That one's been brewing a while."

"What do you want from me?" Buffy asks suddenly. She's staring out over the roof, the moonlight washing out the curve of her mouth, and the wind is catching in her hair. Coconut. He hasn't looked at the bottle in ages; he'll never need it. "What am I supposed to do?"

Spike stares at her, dumbfounded. He feels sick and hollow, husk-like and useless. 

(He'd known it wasn't the bot.)

"Doesn't matter, does it?" he says. "We both know you can't give it."

"Yeah," she agrees quietly. Still not looking. She never looks at him. "But you're here anyway."

Helpless. She won't remember and it doesn't matter; still helpless with the ache. If only she knew.

"There's no one else," he says. "Nowhere else I'd rather be."

She stands, abrupt and animal-like in the lunging motion, and for a moment he thinks she'll pitch herself off the roof. Wouldn't kill her from this height and wouldn't matter if it did, except he'd have to remember–but then, he already does.

"We're done," she says. "You and me. It's over."

He snorts. "I've heard that tune, love."

"Spike," she says, and he looks. His jacket around her shoulders, slithering into her arms when she shrugs it off. Her hair lying still in the dead air. "I'm sorry."

The worst day of his life has already happened. It happened a long time ago, when it was warm. Not that the weather meant anything at all.

She lays the coat in his lap when he can't bring himself to take it. A little extra weight. 

"Buffy," he asks the crumbling shingles. "What's a soul feel like?"

She hesitates, to her credit. Her lips come inches from his temple and fade away with the rest of her.

Somewhere across the sky, a star falls.

 

Again.

Glass shatters on the deck. The smell of beer, the smell of blood.

"Ow, Spike, it hurts!"

He believes her, but it doesn't feel like much of anything from where he stands, really.

"Dawn," he says. "I–"

"Are you okay?" Buffy asks, subdued when his elbow isn't aimed at her warpath. 

Dawn snaps, "Obviously not!" and storms inside with the glass shimmering all around her. 

Buffy looks at Spike. He looks at her (and it's the ache that does it) and says, "I'll clean up the blood."

She goes. 

He cleans up the blood. Thinks of Joyce (supposes he could visit the grave one of these days) and slams the back door when Xander says, "Aw, Spike, did you spill your dinner again?"

Hands in his pockets, into the night. All this ache and he should kill her. Should've killed Dru when she left. What's it all for? A hundred years and–

(It's what you'll always be, she said.)

The liquor stores are still open. He could pay for the bottle–won't need the money–but it feels better to take it. Takes two, for good measure, two bottles of old scotch the bloody old man would still be sipping in that posh flat if he weren't a coward. And she's a coward, and Dru, and at least he's never been that. 

Maybe the poet was. Better to be a fool. Better to cut the ache out and hand it to her bloody than pretend it isn't there. And his heart shouldn't hurt if it's dead, anyway. Must be something wrong with it.

He drinks the whole first on the way. Finds out there'll be fireworks on the pier and keeps walking all the way to the end, past the crowds and the place they'd held that carnival (shouldn't have done it) to the last payphone he can find. 

Drinks half the second to have the courage to pick up the phone. Sits slumped against the pole with the dial tone buzzing in his ear, drinks half of what's left and puts the quarters in.

"Angel Investigations," chirps a vaguely familiar voice. "We help the–"

"Where is he?"

"Um, rude," says the voice. "Who wants to know?"

Spike says, "It's about Buffy."

Quiet, for too long. Then, "One sec."

"Hello?" answers the ponce. "Buffy?"

"It's me," says Spike.

"... What happened?"

Spike takes another swig. "What's a soul feel like?"

"... What?" asks Angel.

"Is it–" Spike jabs a finger into his own chest. Then all five, knocking on an empty door. "Is it in there? D'you feel it?"

Angel says with irritation, "Spike, I don't have time for this."

He giggles. Hiccups a little and giggles more.

"Okay," Angel snaps. "What the hell is going on?"

"You won't remember!" Spike says gleefully. He's choking back laughter with the tears leaking out. "You've got all the bloody time in the soddin' world an' so do I."

"Are you drunk?" Angel demands.

Spike says, "You won't remember, you great poof, so what's it feel like?"

"I–I don't know!" Angel says defensively. "What's it matter? I don't wanna talk about this with you."

Spike tilts the bottle in his hands. Amber liquid, less like blood than the wine. Expensive glass, harder to break. He really thinks she'd like the white.

"'F no one can tell me how it feels," he says slowly, "how d'I know I don't got one?"

Silence. Would it be warmer in the city?

"I won't remember?" Angel asks.

"You'll wake up 'round half past five," says Spike. "New Year's Eve."

Angel says, "How do I know you're telling the truth?"

Spike answers, "Why else I'd say any of this to you?"

He can hear them laughing, down the pier. All dressed up in glittering clothes like they're borrowing the stars and gooseflesh pebbling bare legs. He can hear the waves, crashing. Can hear all the empty beating against his ribs.

Angel says, "It hurts," and hangs up the phone.

 

Again.

"You wanna get out of here?"

 

Again.

"Ow, Spike, it hurts!"

 

Again.

"Think they're wrapping up a movie in there," Spike says. "Let's pop over to the shops and see if there's any bubbly left. Celebrate your big night, yeah?"

 

Again.

"I hate you," Buffy says, and snatches her knickers out of the dirt.

 

Again.

"Fuck!" Buffy shouts, clutching at her nose. He got her worse than normal, maybe; the blood is gushing past the protective curl of her fingers and her left eye is already swelling. "That's it."

Spike says–

She decks him square on the jaw; he feels it crack. Spits a tooth out onto the blood-slicked glass and snarls at her in confusion.

"Oh my god!" says Dawn, who bolts around them into the house, just in time to miss the fist he closes in her sister's shiny sheared goldilocks hair, and him using it to toss her against the slammed-shut door before she can swing at him again.

"What's gotten up your arse?" he snaps, spitting another mouthful of blood onto the wood.

"Me?" Buffy demands, gesturing with a glistening hand at her face. Still gushing blood, not yet bruised, and she wanted him to hurt her. At the crypt, in the woods. Begged him to try, begged him to mean it, didn't she? Didn't she want it?

And the ache. The one she put there, said wasn't good enough. Said he couldn't love with it right. Couldn't love him back. Like a little cartilage compares.

Spike says, "It was an accident, you stupid bitch," and there's the sound of shattering again. A different sort. And the ache. 

A different sort–a cracked rib, a lung that don't fill right anymore. Not that he needs it. 

She's taken him right through the banister and the wood's splintered into more pieces than his forgotten case of beer, scattered around them like a halo with three shards stuck all up her arm and leaking blood.

He's hungry. There's a thin stake the length of her forearm through his chest.

Buffy's hands are shaking. She keeps one cupped over her mouth, eyes shining with horror and too wide, a child's eyes (her mother was alive), and the other reaches for him.

"'S alright, love," he says softly. Tries to smile, but damn if it doesn't hurt. "You missed my heart."

She tries to smile too, around the edges of her fingers, and grips the stake. "On three?"

"Bitch," he says again, when she pulls it out on two.

She tossed it to the side; it clatters against a tree root, or the side of the house maybe. He thinks the worst of it might be the way his head cracked against the not quite frozen ground. The edges of her glow.

He sits up, with effort. Prods with a wince at the wound–clean through. A little to the left of where it should be. She's beautiful and blood streaked, her hair littered with splinters and pretty shirt torn up, skirt askew and knickers peeking through.

Buffy stares at her hands.

"It's alright, Buff," he says again, more firmly. Takes her by the wrist and hauls her to her feet. "Let's get cleaned up, yeah?"

They pick their way back onto the deck and slink into the house, the screen door swinging behind them.

"Jesus," says Xander. "What the hell happened to you guys?"

"Each other," Buffy says distantly. Her wrist is still in Spike's grip; she drifts up the stairs, him dutifully in tow, leaving the baffled Xander behind.

Dawn is in the upstairs bathroom, sniffling miserably while she picks bits of glass out of her foot. She looks between them–the bloodied mess of them–and limps away without a word.

Buffy's plaintive, "Dawnie," is vaguely half-hearted. She lets the door shut and, with a wet sigh, sinks to the floor. 

Spike takes a washrag from below the sink and wets it under the faucet, letting it run warm, and begins dabbing at her face first. Blood and dust, and the eye looks a state. Got her too high up, he thinks. That's the difference. It's swollen so she can barely see out of it, most likely, and she whimpers when he touches it.

"It'll be alright," he says. She won't remember. "You'll clean up just fine, Slayer, always do."

(They kept the curtains shut against the heat.)

Buffy touches the edge of his wound. Explores it with a numb curiosity, feeling his body tense. Presses two fingers into it the way he pleasures her and whispers, "Sorry," when he chokes back a cry.

He wets the cloth again, drags it tenderly down the side of her neck–down the place he sank his teeth, like he's cleaning that too. Angel got to leave a scar. Her throat quivers unmarred at his touch. 

"It's alright," he repeats. "Had worse."

"Have you?" she asks.

He tugs the splinters free of her arm methodically, dabbing the droplet wounds away with each one. "Your soldier boy, once. Right through the heart he did."

"What?" Buffy asks blankly.

"After the brothel, with some kind of plastic. Wanted to feel like a big man, I expect," Spike says, and wrings the rag out in the sink before tending to her hair. He smirks wistfully and adds, "Poor sod thought I was in love with you."

Buffy says nothing. Her fingertips glisten with a little fresh blood–his.

Spike clears his throat and says, "Might want to hop in the shower, love. Your hair's buggered."

"I need new shampoo," Buffy answers. "Dawn keeps taking mine."

It hurts chest to throat. Spike says, "I like your shampoo."

Buffy asks, "What would you do if the chip stopped working?"

"Try to kill a woman in an alley," says Spike. "And come home to you."

Buffy's good eye is wet. She looks at his heart and begs, "Why can't you just leave me alone?"

Spike swallows the poet. He cups her cheeks in both hands, which ruins them again, and kisses the crown of her head.

"Maybe tomorrow, Slayer."

 

Again.

They're three-quarters of the way through She's All That when Anya comes in and says, "Xander, I sold out of Gzmarian snails!"

The Summers sisters have She's All That on DVD. Buffy grabs the remote and hits the pause button.

"That's great, sweetie!" Xander says. "Was it a good night?"

"It was beautiful," says Anya. "You guys missed the best cash register dance ever, oh, you should've been there!"

Dawn says, "Aw, that would've been fun."

Buffy sighs loudly and turns to Spike. "You wanna get out of here?"

 

Again.

The glass shatters,

 

And again

the moon peers down,

 

And again,

her mouth against his, and she'll never leave. Always this moment–

 

Again.

The glass shatters on the deck and he tries to pull Dawn off it and her bloodscent fills the air when Buffy crashes into them instead.

Buffy hisses, "Son of a–" and backs away. He caught the edge of her jaw.

"Ow!" Dawn whines, hopping away from the mess on her good foot. "Spike, it hurts."

"Sorry, little bit," Spike says, offering her an arm. "How bad is it?"

Buffy wraps an arm around Dawn's shoulders and steers her away. "I've got her."

Spike watches them go, as always. He finds his rag and gets to work on the bloody floors, scrubbing with useless determination. It'll be back tomorrow, but Buffy likes when he does it.

"Aw, Spike, did you spill your dinner again?" Xander taunts from the doorway. 

Spike says, "It's Dawn's. There's broken glass on the deck."

"Yeesh," says Xander, but he goes to the basement for the broom. "Someone's in a mood."

Buffy takes Xander's place in the doorway and says, "... Thanks."

He glanced up at her. "How's the bit?"

"Buffster!" Xander says, dumping a load of glass into the trashcan. "Everything okay?"

Buffy smiles woodenly. "So okay. Some would say good, even. Hey, where's Anya?"

"Oh, she's still in work mode," Xander answers. "She said she'd drop by later, though. I swear she loves that store more than me."

Spike wrings the rag out in the sink and heads upstairs yet again. Behind him, he hears Buffy ask, "Oh, does she need help or anything?"

"Nah," says Xander. "She's got it covered."

Spike knocks on Dawn's door and says, "Hey, bit, it's me."

"Go. Away," she answers sullenly.

"Fine," says Spike. "If you think you can't beat me at cards."

The door swings open. "If I win, you've gotta do my chores for a week."

Spike quirks his lips. "You know I don't live here, right?"

"You'll figure it out," Dawn assures him, breezing past with her bad foot dragging awkwardly off-pace. 

Buffy meets her halfway up the stairs, pressing up against the railing to let her pass, then nods to Spike before turning to knock gently on Willow's door.

"Hey, Wil," she calls softly. "We're all hanging out downstairs whenever you're ready."

Spike tilts his head. Has she always done that?

A very in-character grumble from inside the bedroom suggests most likely.

Buffy rolls her eyes and goes back downstairs. He follows after he snags the deck of cards off her desk.

"What's up, Dawnster?" Xander is asking.

"Cards," says Dawn. "Prepare to be obliterated."

Xander says, "Wouldn't have it any other way. Soda?"

"Ooh," says Buffy, wiggling her fingers. "Carbonate me."

Spike sits down besides Dawn and asks, "Rummy?"

"Literally duh."

"Rummy chummy," Buffy agrees.

Spike tells Dawn, "Best go over the rules again so Harris can keep up."

"Hey!" Xander says.

Dawn turns to Buffy and says, "It's easy. You're just trying to make groups of cards. You can make a seq–"

"Oh," says Willow. "Did you start without me?"

"We're just going over the rules," Buffy tells her. "You know Rummy, right?"

"Ooh." Willow plops down between Xander and Dawn and steals Xander's soda. "We're little rummy-chummies."

Dawn scowls and scoots closer to Spike.

Willow turns to her and says, "Oh, Dawnie, didn't you wanna go to Janice's? Aren't you gonna be late?"

Dawn mutters, "I'm not going anymore."

Spike slaps his knees and says, "You got any booze in this place, Slayer?"

"Basement," she says. "Dawn's still grounded from Halloween."

"Oh," says Willow. "Um, sorry. I guess I thought–with the it being two months and all…" 

Spike makes his way down the stairs, familiar creaks rising to greet him. He brushes his fingers across the wall, glancing idly up at the ceiling. How long ago was it this place flooded? Four months? 

A year or more, depending on the calendar. A lifetime removed from it. 

He counts the minutes. Shouts back up the stairwell, "You got another basement I don't know about?"

Buffy emerges with a sigh, brushing past him to the plastic bins in the corner.

"Right," Spike says drily.

"It's the only thing Dawn-proof since someone taught her how to pick locks," Buffy says cheerfully.

Spike fondly offers, "Have you considered she's a menace of her own making?"

Buffy is staring at the cluster of bottles on the floor. 

"Slayer?" Spike asks. He moves closer when she doesn't answer, touches her shoulder. "Buffy?"

Buffy asks, "Do you think the white one's any good?"

He frowns at her thoughtfully. Not once has she ever–

"Maybe that's it," she says. 

"What's what?" Spike asks, but she's already heading upstairs with the bottle.

By the time he shakes the unease enough to follow, she's pouring into two red plastic cups.

"Be better in a real glass," he says.

"I want it like this," she says, and hands him a cup.

Spike stares down into it–the pale cream against the unnaturally white plastic, the bubbles fizzing to the surface. 

Champagne, 1981.

"Should be saving this for midnight," he jokes weakly, but she's already tipping back her cup.

Buffy sets her drink down on the counter. She wipes the back of her hand across her mouth and says, very quietly, "It's the year I was born."

"What is?" Spike asks, blinking.

"It was in her will and everything," she says, heedless as always. "That they're for me. 'To be opened on my eldest daughter's twenty-first birthday.'"

Stupidly, Spike says, "Your birthday's next month."

She smiles pristinely. "Wanna get out of here?"

"Buffy," says Spike. "What's wrong? What'd I do?"

Buffy blinks at him, says, "Nothing. I mean, it's not like you can see the future."

Spike says, "Are you–"

"Jeez," Xander complains, "how long's it take to–wow, with the rude?"

"You don't even drink," says Buffy, rolling her eyes and pushing the wine bottle further away.

"Yeah, but I like smelling other people drinking it," Xander sasses back, propping an elbow against the doorframe. "It brings back good memories of normal childhood violence. You know, before all the freak adolescent violence. Also, we're waiting to deal you guys in."

Spike takes the bottle in the crook in his arm and makes for the door.

"Where're you going?" Buffy asks.

Xander says, "Don't look a gift vampire in the mouth, Buff. Wait, gift absence-of-vampire? Let the guy leave is what I'm gettin' at here."

And she does.

 

~*~

 

They buried Joyce in Shady Hill. Idyllic little place during the day, he expects. Newer. Not yet full. Nearly half the graves in this town are empty, Giles postulated once, but the stones stay spoken for. 

You'd think more people around these parts would extol the benefits of cremation.

There's nowhere to get flowers; feels wrong to steal them. Spike pours a measure of champagne beneath the headstone and sits, quiet, for a long time. The grass is kept too short to sway in the breeze. 

"Not sure why I came here," he says eventually, and stands abruptly. "Be seeing you."

He makes it to the curb before he stops, almost turns back. Feels sick in his partially decayed heart. Two, three days in the ground before he came back up and too late for some of it by then. 

(There'd been four bottles in July. He'd come home to find Dawn half-drunk on the first glass and stubbornly clutching the second, nostrils flared in the Summers way.

It's not like she needs it anymore, she'd slurred defensively, and upturned the whole bottle on the upholstery when he tried to take it away.)

He left the bottle. It'll be back tomorrow. He can try again; understand why.

(He'd carried her to bed and tucked her in. Her head lolled to the side and he'd had to turn away with a sob dead-rotting in his throat.)

It'd be cold tonight. He wishes he could feel it, but that ache is old. The people all scurry by in their drawn-tight coats.

(When he went up to check on her the next morning, he'd found her across the hall, cheek against the robot's whirring chest.)

It's been tonight a long time; it'll never be warm again. Doesn't make much difference to him.

The lights are still on in the Magic Box, but there's just the lone figure inside–Anya, dancing alone. Spike keeps walking with his hands in his pockets and face turned away from the moon. He strides past the Espresso Pump and then, by some flash of impulse, turns back to go inside.

"Hot chocolate," he tells the barista. "With marshmallows, if you got 'em."

He pays in cash and leans against the pickup counter to wait.

"Um… Spike?" asks a tentative voice.

He turns, blinking, and finds Tara. She's clutching a steaming mug of what smells like tea, hair half falling in her face when she turns to gesture reassuringly to two women at a table near the corner.

"Er," he says stiltedly. When was the last time he spoke to anyone new? "Hi."

"Is–is everything okay?" Tara asks, peering at him anxiously. "Dawnie said you were going to–to the thing at… Willow's."

"Oh," says Spike. "It's nothing–I was. Am. Just took a breather is all."

Tara's shoulders creep downwards. "Oh, okay."

A beat. Spike asks, "So, uh, how's the night?" at the same time Tara ventures, "How's she… oh, no, you go first."

"... She's clean, we're pretty sure," Spike answers anyway. "Damn near killed her to do it, but she's clean."

Tara looks down.

"She's over at the house playing Rummy," Spike adds, gentler. Something bruise-like in his chest. "Real fickle to be around, with the withdrawal, but they deal her in every time."

"Th-that's good," Tara says wetly. "Um, she should be… happy."

The barista sets Spike's hot chocolate down at the other end of the counter. It even has the little marshmallows.

"Are you?" he asks.

"Oh." Tara glances up again. "Not really. Not tonight, anyway–but it's almost midnight."

She smiles at this. Spike is too busy swallowing–throat dry, suddenly–to return the favor.

"I should go," Tara says, nodding at her friends in indication. "But I hope you have fun, if you go back to the party. And, um, Happy New Year."

"Cheers," says Spike.

She shuffles away and takes her seat again. Seems to bloom as soon as she does–her shoulders opening, wide-toothed smile from the welcome she receives. He doesn't remember her looking like that much around here, but it's been a long time.

Spike grabs his hot cocoa and goes.

 

~*~

 

Anya's beat him back by the time he gets there; he sees from the window that a fight was had again, her arms crossed on the couch. Buffy's head perks up when Spike approaches, but she doesn't go for the door.

Spike settles on the porch swing and drinks.

A few minutes later, the front door creaks open and Dawn slips onto the porch.

"Oh. Hey," she says, leaning against the porch railing.

"Hey, nibblet," Spike says, and gestures with his cup. "I'll split it with you if you get a mug."

Dawn squints at him. "Did you steal that from the Espresso Pump?"

"Paid for the cocoa," says Spike. "Nicked the mug."

She sits down next to him, the swing swaying lightly under her weight. "Just let me drink out of there. What're you afraid of, cooties?"

He hands it over.

"Where'd you go?" Dawn asks.

"Espresso Pump," says Spike.

She huffs and crosses her arms.

"Just needed some air," he says. "Didn't think I'd be missed. You have a good night here?" 

"Whatever." Dawn mutters darkly. "Like you'd care, anyway."

He turns to her. "'Course I do. What's all this?"

Dawn asks, "Do you even love her anymore?"

(Rummy, she'd said. Spike, do you wish she'd let me jump? )

"Of course I do," Spike says. With the ache, and his hollow chest, and the wrong set of teeth. "How could you think that?"

(How could you think that? he'd begged her.)

"You're never here anymore," she accuses wetly, nostrils flaring and still near-steaming mug shaking dangerously in her hands. "None of you are–not really."

Spike pries the mug from her clenched-white knuckles gently, setting it aside. They've had this conversation once–twice, maybe. Not for a long time. He can't remember how to get it right.

"Got a house full of people in there who'd beg to differ," he tells her.

"It's not the same," she says. Jumps to her feet and paces–tries to, whimpering when her cut-up foot touches the ground and hobbles back onto the other. "God, you're just as self-absorbed as the rest of them."

He can still smell her blood–scab torn open, maybe, bleeding through her woolen socks. They've got little piglets on them; used to be Buffy's, he knows, because she griped about it however many nights ago.

"Forgive me," he says. "I didn't mean to leave you alone. Didn't think–" Swallows. His mouth is watering, from the blood. It always waters. "... Didn't think."

Dawn wavers, shifting her weight, and doesn't sit.

"I'll make it up to you," Spike promises. "We'll spend as much time as you want, alright? Do whatever you want. Starting–"

It's been tonight for a long time.

"Spike?" Dawn asks, peering down at him. The moon peering down. "Starting when?"

(But if you could choose, she'd said, sounding like she'd tried to eat her sister's grave. Between me and her. Don't you wish it'd been me?)

He never did figure out how to get her off that glass. 

"It's been a shit day for you, hasn't it, sweet bit?" Spike asks roughly. His throat scraped raw by the sound.

"... I guess so," she says, warily subdued. "I thought we pretty much covered that with the… covering it. Why are you so wigged?"

Never could get a better answer out of Angel, either. It hurts all the time. Never stops her from leaving.

"Spike, it's gonna be okay," Dawn tells him worriedly. "Don't–don't be mad, okay? I'm just being stupid, please don't be mad at me."

"I'm not mad, pigeon," he says, smiling faint and warm. He clasps her hand in his and squeezes, pushing to his feet. "There's just something I've gotta do before midnight, yeah? Will you give me 'til then?"

"For what?" Dawn asks in bewilderment. 

"You'll see in the New Year," he promises. "I'll make it better then– be better then. Swear it, yeah?"

Dawn looks into his eyes a long time. Then says, "I believe you. Weirdo."

Spike huffs out a laugh. Leaves her the mug and the porch swing, slipping inside on his own. 

Buffy's standing off to the side, leaned against the wall and watching the festivities on the TV with a distinct lack of interest. He touches her elbow and she inclines her head in surprise.

"Can we get out of here?" he asks.

She blinks. Glances at her friends and back at him, then nods.

"The roof," he tells her. "Meet you there."

There's not much time, he thinks. He follows her towards the kitchen and waits in the stairwell until he hears her window slide open. 

Her shampoo is in a green bottle on the side of the tub. Coconut, he knows that much. He closes his eyes and lingers, while he can. 

(He could almost feel her there.)

She's rubbing at her arms already when he joins her on the roof. Crumbling shingles, his jacket over her shoulders and creaking leather being wrapped tighter.

"What's up?" she asks. Squints at him suspiciously. "You're being majorly weird."

"Been hearing that a lot tonight," he says, and offers nothing further.

Neither does she. He doesn't need it, really. Just wants to linger, while he can. He'll have to do it right in the morning.

"I do love you," he tells her. "You'll never believe me. Never want to. But I do."

She pulls his cigarettes out of her coat. He takes the one she offers him and squeezes his eyes shut with longing when she strikes the flint for him, too.

A shooting star blazes across the night.

"Make a wish," Buffy says softly.

And Spike says, "Already did."

She turns to him, wide eyes shining with the moon.

"I wished tonight would never end," he says. Surprises himself with having to swallow before he can continue. "And it hasn't. But if I'm right, telling you'll–"

The two-minute countdown starts below. Buffy cups a hand over her mouth and sobs.

"Buffy?" Spike drops his cigarette in favor of her wrist. "I see now, love. I know I shouldn't have done it. I'm gonna–"

"I wanted to get it right," she tells him.

Spike's shoulders straighten. "Get it–"

"It only works if you believe, right?" Buffy asks. Her eyes are welling with tears, but her mouth curves wistfully upwards. "Or it's just another sunrise."

A faint pop of fireworks, all the way from the pier. Spike says, "You remember."

Buffy says, "So do you."

"Bloody hell," says Spike. "Buffy, I–"

"You wanted to stay?" she asks hoarsely. Then, when he nods, "Why?"

"There's no one else. Nowhere else I'd rather be," he says softly. Reaches out, trembling, to brush the hair away from her damp cheeks. "You should know that by now, Slayer."

Buffy presses her knuckles to her mouth again and protests, "But it was awful. Spike, it was a shitty, awful day and I got Dawn hurt and I was mean to Willow and I–and you–"

He waits, patiently. It hurts, of course, but it always does.

"I can't give you what you want," she finishes in a whisper.

"In my defense," says Spike, "I didn't think you'd remember that bit."

Buffy looks him in the eye. "Was it the truth?"

He wets his bottom lip. Tries to find words, find anything at all, someone else's numbers ringing in his ears.

(They killed the poet.)

"You're here," he says at last. "That was all the wish was, in the end."

Buffy swallows thickly. The countdown reaches single digits. She presses her lips together and asks, "Spike?"

He tilts his head. She leans in–the smell of coconut, her nails flicking the cigarette out of the way and the moon up above, finally swelling, swelling closer to full when the cheer rings out, and–

(He'd known it wasn't the bot.)

Buffy whispers, "I believe in that one too."

"Gonna be one hell of a sunrise," Spike murmurs, his nose brushing hers, and she snorts against his mouth. 

"I can't believe any of this worked," Buffy says. Bumps his temple gently with her forehead and then bursts into giggles. "This place is so stupid. Oh my god, did you keep breaking my nose on purpose?"

Spike says, "Er."

She lifts her head. "Did you know telling me would break the wish?"

"Hoped," he says. "That's how the superstition goes, innit?"

"Majorly pretending I thought of it first," says Buffy. "And if anyone asks you better go along with it or I'm telling them about the nose thing, you freak."

Spike says, "That's fair, yeah."

And then, blinking, she asks, "But–why'd you do it? If you're so afraid I'll leave–?"

The front door creaks open downstairs, sound spilling out with the light onto the porch. Dawn calls, "Guys, is Spike in there? He said he was coming back."

Spike smiles and says, "Made a promise to a girl," and–

 

For once,

he gets to keep it.

 

(And he'd looked at her, what he'd thought'd been a winning hand slipping from his fingers, and said fiercely, I wish she'd let the world burn.)

 

Notes:

Not even sure what to say for myself at this point but you can find me on Tumblr!