Chapter Five
Buffy slept late the next day, knowing Spike wouldn’t be waking up before early afternoon and not sure if she would be welcome at the shelter anyway. She spoke to Dawn and promised her she would try to get him to talk to her on the phone. She repeatedly reminded her sister that he didn’t remember them or anything about them but eventually gave in to Dawn’s pleas. Now that her sister was growing up, she rarely used her whining voice to get her way and Buffy couldn’t fight it the way she used to.
“Fine, Dawn!” she finally huffed in irritation. “I will torture myself by walking back into the home he is sharing with someone else and suffer the embarrassment of knowing they know how I feel, just so you can find out for yourself that he doesn’t know you either.”
Ignoring everything except the part that said Buffy was going to get Spike to call her, Dawn cheerfully replied, “Okay, great. I’ll be waiting for the call.”
In spite of her promise to Dawn, Buffy put off calling or going to the shelter for several hours until she realized that the longer she waited, the more likely Spike and Anne would be back in their apartment. Having no desire to see any more domesticity than she already had, Buffy quickly left her room to run to the shelter and try to catch Spike before he went upstairs with Anne.
Luck was with her (Well, here’s a first. Something goes right for Buffy romantically.) she thought wryly when the first volunteer she asked told her Spike was in the basement and that Anne had gone out for supplies with one of the other volunteers. She quickly tripped down the stairs to the basement of the old shelter and looked around for the vampire. A string of colorful British curses led her to the area where he was trying to wrestle an old armoire across the room.
Buffy watched with a smile for a few seconds, knowing that he was more than strong enough to carry the large piece of furniture, but was having trouble getting the right grip on it. After she’d watched him struggle, and listened to him swearing and sounding very much like himself, she quietly stepped to the other side and picked up one end of it. He threw a startled glance up as the load became lighter and easier to control, then nodded briefly as though strong blonde girls helped him every day. He gestured toward the far wall and said, “It’s going right over there, pet.”
With both of them carrying it, the reluctant closet was soon sitting against the wall waiting for someone to put something in it. They stepped away from it and stood awkwardly, facing each other from a few feet away.
“Thank you, luv,” he said automatically. He was not looking at her and missed the way her face lit up, but not the increase in her heart rate. Realizing what he’d said, he quickly tried to backtrack.
“That wasn’t…I didn’t mean…”
“It’s okay, Spike.” She smiled at him sadly. “It’s just how you talk to women. I know that. I promise not to make anything out of it.”
Thoroughly embarrassed, he put his hands in the pockets of his jeans and shuffled his feet.
“I wasn’t sure I’d see you again,” he said softly. “After last night. I thought you might not want to come back here.“
“I didn’t,” she said flatly. “But I promised Dawn I would ask you to call her. You won’t remember this, but when she starts whining for something it’s just in everybody’s best interest to give it to her and not drag out the agony. It’s only postponing the inevitable anyway.”
“Gets her way a lot, does she?”
“Well, with you, she certainly did. You couldn’t refuse her anything.”
Buffy’s lip had unconsciously snuck out in a small pout as she complained about the way he catered to her sister, and once again his eyes were riveted on it.
“I suspect there wasn’t much I could deny you, either, Slayer,” he said dryly, tearing his eyes away from her lips.
“Not much,” she agreed softly. “You always give—gave me whatever I wanted or needed.”
“Pussy-whipped, huh?” he said with a self-deprecating smile.
“You are such a pig, Spike,” she snorted automatically.
He grinned and came back with, “So where is this creature with the powerful whine? Can I call her later tonight?”
“Well, She’s in England. So if you wait too long, it’ll be the middle of the night. She said she’d wait for your call- but that was a while ago….”
“I don’t have a cell – we could go up to the apartment—“
“No!”
The raw emotion in her voice made him cringe and he cursed himself for being an insensitive fool.
“I’m sorry, pet. That was…I’m a stupid git. Let me get my coat and we’ll go somewhere else to make the call….”
Mortified that she’d let Spike see how affected she was by his new life, Buffy blinked back tears and said as calmly as she could, ”No, I’m sorry. I need to…to accept the situation and learn to deal. To move on.”
He tilted his head at her and studied her resolute face. Once again, he was as impressed with her emotional strength as with the physical. He’d only known her twenty-four hours and already he understood that when she loved it was fiercely and passionately. And, clearly, after almost two years of thinking he was dead, she still loved him. He felt a sudden pang of regret that he didn’t remember this amazing woman and what she meant to him.
(Bloody hell, what did I do to earn this kind of loyalty from a woman like this? There’s no way I’m fit to carry her coat. I’m beneath her.)
“I have my cell with me,” she said into the silence. She pulled it out of her pocket and held it out to him. “There’s no signal down here, though. We’re going to have to go outside.”
“Alright then,” he agreed, taking it from her. “Let’s go turn off the whine machine.”
Smiling, she led the way back up stairs, only to find an angry-looking Anne on her way down.
“What are you doing down here?” she demanded coldly. She made no attempt to hide her feelings from either one of them and Buffy reacted in true Slayer fashion by hardening her own expression.
“I was talking to Spike,” she said with a challenge in her voice. “Dawn asked him to call her.”
“We’re just going outside where the phone will work, love,” Spike tried to mediate. “I’ll be right back.”
“That’s what you said last night,” Anne replied stubbornly, still standing between them and the top of the stairs.
“I came back,” Spike said in a tone she’d never heard from him before. He stepped around Buffy, trying to ignore the way his body reacted to her warmth, and gently turned Anne around and urged her back up the stairs. When they all reached the top, Buffy pushed past the taller blonde with a glare.
“If it’s all right with you,” she ground out. “My little sister would like to talk to the vampire who cared for her when I wasn’t able to. You know, the one she loves? The one she thought was dead?”
“He isn’t going to know her any more than he knows you,” Anne said, knowing she sounded like a petulant child, but unable to help herself. Spike’s surprised frown did nothing to help her mood, and she walked away before she said anything else she might regret later.
Another uncomfortable silence ensued while Spike looked after his girlfriend in confusion and Buffy smothered homicidal urges. Then they turned as one and headed for the door. While Buffy’d been inside, the sun had begun to sink into the west and there was plenty of shade in which Spike could stand while he talked on the phone.
Buffy found Dawn’s number for him and pushed the button to make the call before handing the phone back to him.
“What do I call her?” he asked hurriedly as it began to ring.
“Call her Dawn,” she answered quickly. “If I tell you her nickname, she’ll never believe you aren’t…you.”
She watched his face carefully as Dawn answered on the second ring, searching for any sign that her sister’s voice could evoke something hers hadn’t. But the vampire’s face remained smooth and calm as he said carefully, “Dawn? How are you, pet?”
From the look on his face, Buffy could tell Dawn had launched right into a rant about what a jerk he was for letting them think he was dead and she smiled as he grew more and more uncomfortable when the voice on the phone became shriller and shriller. He was holding the phone slightly away from his ear and said jokingly, “Hey, you’re being a little hard on the vampire hearing, Bit. Think you could tone it down?”
There was blessed silence for several seconds and then the sound of sobbing came clearly through the phone. He turned bewildered eyes to Buffy, only to find her eyes filling with tears also even as a smile trembled at the corners of her mouth.
“Oi! I’ve had just about all the female tears I want for the rest of my unlife in the past day,” he said, shoving the phone at her. “Here, do something! I don’t know what I said to set this off.”
“You called her ‘Bit”, Buffy said softly, never taking her glistening eyes off of him. “You called her ‘Bit’.”
She took the phone from him and talked into it softly. “Yes, Dawnie, I heard him. No, I don’t know. Yes, I will. Yes. Yes it is. Yes. Me too. Okay. I’ll talk to you tomorrow morning. Yes. Yes. Love you too. I’ll tell him.”
She closed the phone and held it tightly while Spike shifted around nervously.
Hoping he was right, and knowing he wasn’t, he asked, “So, I called her a ‘bit’ and made her cry. Does she not like that word, or something?”
Raising one eyebrow in an unconscious imitation of him when he heard something patently ridiculous, she just looked at him until he lowered his gaze and said, “Guess not, huh?”
Buffy shook her head. “Nope. That was your name for her. ‘Bit’ or ‘Niblet’ or ‘Bite Size.”
“I still don’t remember anything, Buffy,” he said quickly. ‘I don’t know where that came from, but it didn’t suddenly make my memories appear.”
“I know,” she said softly. “But it’s a start. It shows you’re in there somewhere.”
“Don’t go making more out of it than it is, Slayer,” he warned, his desire to remember the woman in front of him at odds with his reluctance to hurt Anne any more than he already had.
“Okay,” she agreed, much too readily. He sent her a suspicious look but she just looked back at him innocently. “Spike doesn’t love Buffy any more. I got it.”
“Just so we understand each other,” he grumbled, not sure if he liked the way she agreed so easily.
“I’m going patrolling later. If you’d like to come. If it’s a slow night, we should have time for me to fill you in on some more things from your past.”
“I’d like that, pet,” he agreed eagerly. “Meet you at the cemetery? About 9:00?”
“It’s a date,” she said cheerfully and strode off down the street.
“It bloody well is NOT a date!” he shouted after her, not noticing Anne standing in the doorway until he turned around.
She said nothing, just went back into the building and back to serving the evening meals. With a sigh, he went up to the apartment and fixed himself a mug of blood, gulping it down quickly. He warmed up another one and sat down to watch the news and enjoy that one in a more leisurely fashion.
When Anne came up stairs later and watched him putting on his coat, she said nothing, just put her dinner in the microwave and sat back on the couch, holding the book he’d found the night before.
“That was written by humans, love,” he said quietly.
“So?”
“So they don’t know what they’re talking about any more than those morons you used to hang out with in Sunnydale knew what a vampire really was. Don’t go reading that and thinking you know about vampires. Don’t need my memories to know that.”
She didn’t reply and after an exasperated minute he left without saying anything other than, “I’ll be back later.”
Spike approached the cemetery to find Buffy engaged in fighting a very large, very drunk Fyarl demon. He waited by the gate, admiring her grace and athleticism until he saw the Fyarl throw her against the wall of a tomb. It wasn’t until Buffy groaned and struggled to get up that he realized she had no weapon but the stake in her hand. She’d been fighting the demon on its terms because she had no other options and her arms were too short to do serious damage with the stake.
She staggered to her feet, only to be carried back to the ground under the angry demon’s weight. With a roar, Spike grabbed the Fyarl and yanked it up and off the slayer, meeting her accusing eyes with an apologetic shrug before kicking the demon back and away. He quickly pulled Buffy to her feet, muttering a “sorry, pet, got caught up in watching you fight,” before they both turned to face the still angry and attacking demon.
With no more communication than a nod, the two blonds attacked as one – Buffy driving toward the demon’s knees and Spike burying his fangs in its throat. Between having its throat ripped open and the stake Buffy was able to drive through its heart, the demon was quickly dispatched. They stood up, panting slightly and stepped away from the still-bleeding corpse.
While Spike gagged and spit over the demon blood he’d ingested, Buffy put her hands on her hips and glared at him.
“The Spike I know would never pass up a chance to join a fight just to watch,” she said angrily.”
“The Spike you know is used to seeing you in action, pet. He probably wouldn’t have been so gobsmacked at how beautiful you are when you’re fighting.”
The sincere compliment took the sting out of Spike’s delayed reaction to her need for back-up and Buffy tried not to sound as mollified as she actually was when she responded, “Well, now I’m all bruised and dirty and….”
“And, what?”
“And I wanted to look pretty for you tonight,” she mumbled, fingering a rip in her jacket and wrinkling her nose at the Fyarl blood all over her pants.
“You look bleedin’ beautiful, Buffy,” he said softly, sounding so much like her Spike that her heart jumped. She looked up quickly only to find his eyes filled with the admiration of a stranger. There was appreciation, definitely; and more than a trace of lust, but the love and recognition she was looking for wasn’t there and she sighed tiredly.
They’d been walking for several minutes before Spike realized Buffy was limping and wincing with each step.
“You’re hurt, Slayer! Why didn’t you say something?” The concern on his face was genuine, if more impersonal than she would have liked.
“Yeah,” she admitted, stopping to sit down on a tombstone. “I think I might be done for the night. I’m sorry,” she added apologetically. “I thought we’d get a good patrol in, but…”
“Nothing to apologize for, luv. If I hadn’t been such a git, you wouldn’t be hurt. ‘S my fault. Can just sit and talk if you like. We can patrol some other time.”
Buffy smiled happily at the suggestion that they would be out together again, then looked at her ruined clothes and bit her lip.
“Do you think that we could go back to my hotel and sit there?” she asked timidly. “I’d really like to get cleaned up and maybe put some ice on my hip.”
She held her breath, waiting to see if he would refuse to be alone with her in the more intimate setting, but he just jumped up and replied, “Of course, pet. Let me help you.”
Buffy swallowed the automatic “I can walk myself” when she realized he was planning to carry her. The vampire scooped her up, marveling once again at how someone so tiny could be so powerful.
They were both very stiff as he began striding down the sidewalk, Buffy not wanting him to think she was taking advantage of the situation and Spike worried that she would notice the effect her nearness was having on him and misunderstand his intentions.
(It’s nothing to do with her, really. Just a reaction to the fight – that’s all.) he told himself silently as he tried to deny the way his body was reacting to her scent and the feel of her skin. When he tried to shift his grip so as not to be touching bare skin, he almost dropped her. Buffy gave a small “eep!” and threw her arms around his neck.
“Sorry, luv,” he almost gasped as he realized his attempt to keep his distance now had her holding on for dear life.
“It’s okay,” she said, equally breathlessly, using her closer proximity as an excuse to rest her head on his chest. “I’ll just hang on a little tighter.”
“Oh yeah,” he tried not to groan. “Good idea. Bloody good idea.”
With Buffy giving directions, they were soon in front of her hotel and he set her down carefully, keeping one arm around her waist as she pulled out her key and opened the side door. Spike held the door for her and she limped past him with a grateful smile. As soon as she was in and Spike spotted the elevators, he picked her back up and quickly strode to the nearest one.
Buffy smiled with embarrassment at the elderly couple sharing the elevator with them and blushed when she heard them as Spike stepped off on her floor, “Isn’t that sweet? They must be newlyweds.”
In front of her door, Spike once again reluctantly set her down, telling himself he was just worried that she’d fall. (It’s not like I really want to keep holding her like that. Just trying to keep her safe is all.)
Buffy limped into the room and grabbing some sweats from a drawer she said, “I’ll be right back.”
The bathroom door had barely shut behind her when Spike grabbed the ice bucket and key and went searching for ice. By the time a cleaner Buffy emerged from the bathroom, he was back and wrapping the ice in a pillowcase.
“Here you go, luv,” he said gruffly. “Put this on that hip.”
Her grateful smile and whispered, “Thank you,” sent a warm rush through his chest and he smiled back at her affectionately before catching himself and walking over to the only chair in the room. Buffy gingerly climbed onto the bed and propped herself up on the pillows before settling down with the ice pack on her aching hip.
They sat in surprisingly comfortable silence for several minutes before Spike ventured, ”So, pet. Since we aren’t going to be beating any more big bads tonight, how about you tell me what you know of my life before you?”
‘What makes you think you had a life before me?” she teased gently.
“Ha, bloody ha, Slayer,” he growled without real menace.
“I asked you before, Spike,” she said, suddenly serious. “Are you sure you want to know all this?”
“Let me have it, Slayer. Give it to me good.”
“’K, then, let me tell you about a shy poet and how he became a part of the scourge of Europe.”
Buffy talked for over an hour, pausing to answer Spike’s questions when she could; apologizing when she couldn’t. Sometime during the recitation, when she’d attempted to reach out to him with a comforting hand and hurt her sore hip, Spike had moved to the bed. He sat beside her, leaning against the headboard and listening intently, but not touching her. When she said her mouth was dry, he absently handed her an ice cube from the bucket, shivering a little when she took it from his fingers with her mouth.
When Buffy had run out of facts about his past both as human and vampire, and Spike had run out of questions, they rested side-by-side while he tried to find something familiar in all the information she’d given him. He growled softly in frustration as his damaged brain refused to respond to any of it.
Buffy looked at him curiously when he growled and he shook his head and gave her a small smile.
“Sorry, pet. It’s just so bloody frustrating not being able to recognize anything or anybody with all those new facts to gnaw on. Didn’t frighten you, did I?”
Buffy’s snort of derision reminded him that he was sitting next to the longest-lived slayer in history and he ducked his head in embarrassment.
“Right. Sitting next to the slayer who used to kick my arse regularly. Forgot there for a second.”
“Need a reminder?” she teased, pretending to be throwing a punch at his face. Spike’s automatic response was to throw a hand up to protect his nose and they both froze at the clear reminder that somehow his body knew her even if his heart and mind didn’t.
Spike looked away from her hopeful eyes and muttered,” So my nose is your favorite body part, eh, Slayer?”
“Only when I’m trying to hit you,” she said with a shrug, peering at him through her lowered lashes.
“What about when you aren’t trying to hit me?” he asked huskily, berating himself for the leading question, even as he met her flirtatious gaze with a heated look of his own.
“It depends,” she answered breathlessly, leaning forward just far enough for him to feel the heat of her body. “Sometimes I think it’s your lips.” She ran the tip of one finger around his mouth lightly, shivering when he wrapped his lips around her finger briefly. “Sometimes I think it’s your cheekbones,” she continued, stroking the side of his face gently. “Or,” she went on, growing bolder, “it could be your nice flat tummy.” She ran her hand down his chest, over his suddenly tensed muscles, stopping when she got to the top of his low-cut jeans. Sliding her hand under the hem of his tee shirt, she ran her fingers across the soft skin of his lower abdomen to touch the ridge of his hip, then back across the silky expanse of skin to the other prominent hipbone.
The vampire was almost quivering in anticipation, the bulge pressing against the zipper of his jeans aching for her to continue her slow litany of her favorite body parts. Instead of touching him where his mind was insisting she shouldn’t go, and his body was screaming that she had to, she moved her hands to his arms and stroked his biceps and forearms, moving down to his hands and linking her fingers with his.
“Or, it might be your hands. Your hands that have pulled me to safety so many times, the fists that you’ve used to defend me and mine, your fingers that know all the right places to touch me…” She stroked his hands with her thumbs and ducked her head to plant soft light kisses on his knuckles.
The vampire’s audible groan and the way he shifted uncomfortably on the bed told her she’d done all she could to awaken his body’s memories, and giving his hands a little squeeze, she let go and sat back against her pillows with a satisfied smile.
“You pleased with yourself, Slayer?” he growled, making no attempt to hide the way he was adjusting himself in an attempt to relieve the pressure in his pants.
“You know you liked it, “ she responded with grin. “You love it when I tease you. It gives you an excuse to get all growly and rough”
“And do you like it when I’m growly and rough?” he asked, trying to put memories of the care he had to take with Anne from his mind and failing utterly. The thought of making love with a woman who not only welcomed the demon in him, but could take whatever the demon dished out and meet it blow for blow was making him harder by the second.
“Oh yeah,” she admitted, cutting her eyes to the side to watch his reaction. “I think your growl is really sexy. I thought that even when you were trying to kill me. When you had me pinned down and you growled, it made me tingly all over.”
Images of having Buffy pinned to the ground with his body flooded his brain and he was speechless for several seconds imagining how it must have felt to be pressing her to the ground with his fangs on her throat. He had to clear his throat several times before he could get out, “If I’ve had you down with my teeth on you, why the bloody hell aren’t you dead?”
“Good question,” she said cheerily. “Maybe it makes you all tingly too.”
Suddenly serious, she looked at his tortured face and whispered, ‘Wanna find out?”
He groaned and fought the urge to throw himself on top of her, demon to the fore. “You’re playing with fire, here, Slayer. You don’t know what you’re doing to me.”
“Yes, I do,” she said seriously. “I know your body. Just like you know mine. I know what you like. I know what makes you moan, and cry out and what makes your demon come out to play.”
“And the point of this is?”
“I want you,” she said honestly. “I really want you to remember me and love me and want me the way you used to. But if I can’t have that, I’ll settle for your body. It’s been too long, William. I want—I need to feel you again.”
She bit her lip and tried to maintain eye contact as she laid her emotions bare before him. Buffy knew she could have kept teasing and flirting and probably lured him into making love to her, but something told her that she needed to be honest with him and let him make the decision.
When minutes dragged by and he remained precious inches away, clearly fighting his body’s obvious desire for her, she felt her eyes begin to fill with tears and she looked away, blinking rapidly. The vampire had seen the wetness and smelled the tears, though, and he cursed himself for letting things get to this point.
(What kind of a wanker am I, to let these two wonderful women shed so many tears over me? If I could just remember! I know what Anne means to me; but this one…she pulls on me in ways I never thought I’d---but I can’t love somebody I don’t know.)
Spike fell back against the headboard, cursing softly under his breath and trying not to feel the bed shaking with Buffy’s now audible sobs. The only sounds in the room were the slayer’s soft crying and the vampire’s muttered curses until Spike’s innate inability to listen to a woman’s crying forced him up. He rolled to his side and gently pulled Buffy toward him, taking care not to hurt her injured hip as he did so.
When his arms went around her and he began to rub soothing circles on her back and whisper comforting nonsense in her ear, she clutched his shirt and let out the pent up grief she’d been trying to contain for two days. He held her as tightly as he could while her body was wracked with hard, gasping sobs. Eventually, exhaustion set in and her sobs tapered off to gulps and sniffles, allowing him to loosen the tight grip he’d kept on her while she allowed her emotions free rein.
As Buffy’s breathing evened out and went back to normal, she relaxed onto his chest and he realized that she had cried herself to sleep. He settled back onto the pillows behind her and let her sleep on his chest while he tried to imagine a way out the situation that wouldn’t cause pain for either of the two women. He didn’t love the girl in his arms; didn’t remember loving her, but he was already sure that he didn’t want to do anything to add to the pain she’d clearly suffered in her short life.
(I could love her, that’s for bloody sure. It would be so easy, wouldn’t take more than another day or two. Or a good shag. I’d be hers, no question about it.)
While he mulled his options, his senses were soaking up her scent, the sound of her heartbeat, the feel of her silky hair on his face. The even beat of her heart and the soft sounds of her breathing had a soothing effect on his battered emotions and he drifted off to sleep himself, his arms still wrapped around the tiny blond slayer.
He awoke to awareness that dawn was only a few hours away and he carefully extricated himself from the warm body curled into his. Buffy murmured in protest when he slid his arms out from under her, but didn’t wake up. Not sure why he did so, Spike dropped a soft kiss on her forehead before moving to the door and leaving the room.
Spike entered the apartment quietly, noting with relief that Anne had not waited up for him this time. He quickly shed his clothes and eased into the bed, turning on his side to face away from the woman pretending to be asleep beside him. Anne frequently forgot about Spike’s vampire enhancements and was unaware that he could tell she wasn’t really asleep. However, since it enabled him to pretend right along with her, they remained in silence until she could no longer bite back her anger.
“You might at least have showered before you got in bed with me.” Her tone was bitter and colder than he’d ever heard from her.
It took him a second of guilty thought before he realized that, unlike another vampire would have been, she was not reacting to Buffy’s smell being all over him, but just assuming he’d been having sex with her. The human woman had no way of knowing there was no trace of sexual contact on his body.
“Nothing to shower off, pet,” he began in a conciliating manner. “Nothing happened. She told me all about my poncy human self and about Angelus, Dru and Darla and some of the things we did together. It wasn’t pretty and it took a toll on my soul to hear about it. Especially knowing that there are still decades of killing she couldn’t fill me in on. I feel asleep, is all. When I woke up, I came home.”
“Why not?”
“Why not, what?” Spike asked, genuinely confused as he’d already forgotten the first part of his speech.
“Why did nothing happen. And why should I believe you?”
“Because I promised you it wouldn’t,” he replied with a touch of anger. “And you should believe me because I don’t lie to you.”
There was no response to that and he eventually allowed himself to relax and fall back asleep, staying in bed well into the afternoon.
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Author's Chapter Notes:
Still no real Spuffy, but we're getting warmer....