Subtleties

by Anna S.

I am bored. I would like Spike to go to NYC and kick around in a funk until one day--needing money and blood, too souled to kill, too grumpy to fight the good fight any more--he decides to sell one of his few marketable skills and contracts himself out to an escort service, where he plays the bored role of stony-eyed rough trade to an unending series of eager businessmen.

A few years later, Xander is sent to find him, because they need him once more for a mission, that's the story, and Spike just looks at him and blows cigarette smoke in his face. They palaver a bit in the hotel bar, and Xander says, "So men actually pay you to what--sit on their face?" Spike says, "I _can_ punch you now, you know." Xander shakes his head. "I'm out of the closet and I still wouldn't fuck you on a bet, Spike."

Spike: "I _knew_ it. Damn. Red owes me ten bucks."

Xander: "So come collect it."

Spike: "You don't need me."

Xander: "Right, because I would have flown three thousand miles across country on my own dime to find you if we didn't?"

Spike studies him for several moments, then says slowly, "You're lying. Angel told you I was here, didn't he? Bastard. I told him not to--" Not to _what_ Spike abruptly doesn't say. "--well you can fuck off, hear?"

Xander, dropping all missionary pretext for his visit, says simply: "The girls want you home. I'm your--well, actually I'm your escort."

Spike talks about the idea of home. Sunnydale isn't home. "This is home now." Blah de blah.

Xander: "You know, I've heard that line in a hundred movies, and it never gets less lame."

Spike: "Sod off."

Xander: "Hey, I actually _paid_ for this date."

Spike: "Right. So is it I sit on your face then, or you sit on mine?"

Xander: "It's more of a face-to-face thing where I talk until I wear you down and you--hey, where are you going?"

Spike says he has a room upstairs and they jaw a bit more before Xander trails after him. Upstairs they crack a bottle and each takes a drink, and Xander wanders out onto the balcony, which has an unexpectedly posh view of the city. Spike leans in the doorway and Xander turns and leans against the railing and studies him, and it's cool and night of course, and there's a high, light city breeze, with all the lights spread out below. Spike's wearing expensive black trousers and a white silk shirt unbuttoned in a way that should look sleazy but doesn't, and he's suddenly barefoot. Cuffs of the shirt rolled up. Stupid gold chain at his neck, a different one, and his hair is that kind of gold now, and Xander stares at it. He's a different Spike, with his different hair, but still the same. Souled and jaded, very old, this vampire. Lonely and difficult to figure out. Behind him Xander can see white carpet and shiny chrome furniture and big paintings on the walls, and there's also a bookshelf filled with books. Xander realizes Spike lives in this hotel room--more like an expensive apartment--the way a hermit crab inhabits some random shell it finds.

Spike's eyes are different, as if he's slowed down enough in the last few years to give things a lot of thought and ended up thinking too much. There's a lot more going on in there--Xander thinks this just for a moment, and then he looks again and it's like a trick of light, and Spike is bored and flat-eyed again, and possibly there's nothing all that meaningful or deep going on in his head, not really.

They end up talking for hours, about Sunnydale mostly, and every now and then Xander tries to wrap it up and convince him to return home and Spike digs in and refuses.

Eventually, Xander sighs and leaves, but he's back the next night, paid in full. "What are you, made of money?" Spike asks in annoyance. Xander says yep. They wander out, strolling through the city, seeing the sights, drop in at a few clubs where Spike knows everyone. Xander watches him in his element. It's effortless, but facile, empty. Spike has no friends, and a sense of the other man's utter aloneness seeps into Xander and depresses him, makes him take a few more drinks than he should.

When they get back to the hotel, Xander comes up again, comes inside and stands there, shifting his weight from foot to foot, rambling about this or that or maybe trying to make plans to bring Spike home. When he focuses, Spike is matter of factly undressing. Xander is more or less frozen, watching, asking what the hell, as Spike trails expensive clothes toward the minimalist bedroom.

When Xander gets to the bedroom, Spike is naked and expressionless and staring at him. Challenge or warning in his eyes: you're in or you're out.

Xander can't quite make himself move, but within a minute of terse conversation, Spike is standing by him, unbuttoning his shirt, undoing his belt, and Xander is wanting it--if only for the novelty, he tells himself. Vampire. Spike.

Xander: "I never had a thing for you. Just so we're clear."

Spike: "I know."

Xander: "You were annoying, and when you were at your most evil, I hated you."

Spike, looking at him with cool, unreadable face: "You hated me when I was at my most human too."

They're soon kissing, tongues untied, and Xander's got his arms around Spike, and Spike's hair is soft now, filling Xander's palm along the hard curve of the skull. And when they fuck, it's not bad. It's not earth-shattering true-love sex. At first it's the kind of sex you get when you're paying good money for it, and Spike is closed-off, clearly unwilling to show any vulnerability even when Xander blows him and kisses him. But after a while he's getting into it, there's more friction and breathing and a frantic, hungrier need building, and when Xander fucks him, Spike works his hips and takes it so prettily that Xander nearly loses it, and he gets why men shell out serious money for this, and he thinks he could get used to it.

But it's just one of those high-pitched orgasm thoughts. Afterwards, everything is tense and unfun again, and the idea of sex and money and Spike is unsettling and kind of sad.

"Come home," Xander says.

"Hellmouth doesn't exactly support the lifestyle to which I've grown accustomed, mate."

Xander: "You can stay with me."

Spike: "That right?"

Xander: "Not like that."

Spike: "No? Fuck off then. Why should I drag my ass all the way back to Sunnyhell--so I can fight big nasties for you? Pick your pockets for blood money, nick fags from the Super-Mart? Fuck you."

They fight with rough, angry words, Spike getting ever more cutting, until Xander rather wants to punch him, but he balls up his fist and grips his temper tightly instead.

He leaves. And comes back the next night. Spike is sick of seeing him, or is pretending to be. He flings a few mean, angry jibes at Xander, who after taking it for a bit, hands Spike a check. "What's this?" Spike asks. Xander says it's an advance for the first month of his services. "I need you to house sit," he says blandly, with a facade of suavity and calm. "During the day. When I'm not there."

Spike tears it up into little pieces, staring at him coldly all the while, flings them at Xander's feet in fluttering bits, then goes upstairs. A few minutes later, Xander is knocking.

Palaver follows where Spike informs Xander that he's called his manager at the agency and said he doesn't want any repeat visits. Xander says he's paid up for the night. They sit in silence for a while, Spike fuming, Xander trying to figure out what will convince Spike to come back. He asks the question outright: "What can I do--there must be something that'll convince you to come back."

Derision. "Why, because I'm so soft on you lot that I can't live another day without seeing your shining, happy faces?"

Xander: "Look, I know you could stay here. We both know that. You're doing good for yourself." A pause as they both contemplate this, trying to decide if it's the truth or a lie. "But Dawn misses you, and there's monsters to kill, and I'd like to come home once in a while to someone else's mess, not just my own."

Spike: "So get a cat."

Xander: "Got one. He gets bored too."

Spike, patience thin over impatience: "So get a bloke. You're not altogether monstrously unshaggable. Don't need me pissing away the hours on retainer, watching Oprah and drinking up your beer."

Xander: "Yeah, but...you're dependable. On the beer-drinking thing. And...other things." Spike gives him a dry look, but Xander has a sense that he's dragged Spike to the brink, that Spike might be teetering somewhere inside, contemplating the jump, and there are words he should say at this point, persuasive words, nice words, but--

Xander: "Have you _really_ developed a sense of pride? Because I have to say, it's pretty poorly timed." Another pause. "I'll pay more."

Spike blinks, and they stare at each other for several moments, and then: "How much more?" The merest hint of a smile.

And Xander dips his head just a little with a sense of relief, hair falling into his dark eyes, and he can smile without hiding it. "Everything you're worth."

----------------------------------------------------------------------

When Xander gets Spike home, there's that whole suspicious-cat vibe going on. Spike picking his way around Xander's house, expression wary, ears pricked, eyes busy, all the while sniffing things out Xander's not sure he wants sniffed out. Dustiness of his house. Total absence of lover spoor. Xander's had several lovers--boyfriends? whatevers--since coming out of the closet, but he's been in a dry stretch for a while. He's got an expensive house. Beachfront property, with his own renovations, totally unlike the house of his parents or any of his relatives, who are never invited to stay. He has lots of excuses, always ready.

It's not a tidy house except right after his weekly housecleaning service comes in. He likes to give them something to do, and he's a guy, after all. He tracks in sand from the beach on his wet feet--from beach to deck, from deck to tiles, the ceramic tiles of his kitchen. Up the beach, up the zig-zagging, boarded steps, through the tall dune grasses and sagebrush and verbena, and all sorts of other things Willow knows the names of and sometimes comes to pick, across his weathered deck, through the sliding door. It's messy mother nature and it seems right to let the outside drift in. It laps at his threshold, some of it getting inside, some of it staying out on the deck. Wood and seashells. Salty sneakers with knotted laces. A kayak paddle he found floating in the waves one morning, propped in the deck corner.

It's how they enter the house.

Spike inspects this without much apparent interest, gaze skating over the debris of the world and the accumulated junk of Xander's life. Stereo system, boat-sized leather couch, and all his other toys--the pinball machine, the pool table, and the work-out machine he bought off the TV one night, which looks like some kind of bizarre sexual fetish equipment, and kind of is.

Xander starts to remark about the house, "It's kind of..." And Spike is looking at him, waiting, and he just finishes, "...home." Not sure what he meant to say. Just fill-in-the-small-blank talk, for those empty moments while Spike prowls around and Xander wonders how dumb it was bringing him back here. Pretty stray cat in his living room, hands in his trouser pockets, and it's very unSpikelike of him to come to a halt and stand there like a motionless male model, bland, no snark. The duffel slung at his feet is ratty and the expensive clothes he brought are probably wrinkling at this very moment. Xander can't bring himself to care.

Xander: "You want a drink?"

Spike: "Nah." Then, changing his mind within seconds: "Yeah."

They're a pair of drinkers, no doubt about it, and it gives their hands something to do.

That's the first night, and the next day Xander goes to work early and leaves his house to the vampire. To _his_ vampire. His pet vampire? His whatever. Later, he'll call Willow and let her know they were back, mission successful.

When he gets home, Spike is on the couch watching TV as promised, as predicted, but he's not sprawled out like Xander would expect. He's got one arm up along the couch back and his legs are spread a bit--he's a guy, he takes up space--but he's also got both feet on the floor and an intent frown, eyes fixed absently on whatever show he's watching, and he looks somehow like a guest. Beer in one hand, propped on his thigh. The black trousers again. The white shirt.

Their eyes meet above the TV and Xander is tired and weather was hot and he was outside on the site all day, so he's got a salty, sweaty, sun-heated human thing going on that vamps seem to die out of, and he just wants a shower and a beer, and a blow-job, Jesus, he really badly wants a blow-job, and Spike seems to read his mind, because when Xander goes to the kitchen, he gets up and wanders in after him, empty beer bottle discarded somewhere, says--when Xander turns from the fridge with his own beer--"Guess I'd better start earnin' my keep then," and folds to his knees, cocks his head, looks up at Xander in a way that is hard to describe. Sort of calm and studious and challenging and sultry and ambiguous and many other adjectives, all captured in the planes of his face, and Xander lets the bottle drop from his hand and roll, drop and roll, and he grabs Spike's head and pulls him close as Spike's hands rise to cup his ass, and he's so sexy and always so fucking ready to fuck--at least, Xander hopes this is proof and precedent--and he's mouthing Xander's cock through the material and he seems darkly radioactive, glowing with amusement and satisfaction and other things opaque to Xander's comprehension. Vampire on the kitchen floor.

He really does suck Xander off. It's kind of a surprise. Here's his--what? houseboy? rentboy? sex tool? whatever, actually doing the job he's paid for, and Xander should really hate himself and oh god, Willow's going to kill him when she finds out, but at least he can say he got Spike back here to Sunnydale. Mission accomplished.

He's a man. Blow-jobs top his list of fun. He rides into it harder than he should, completely selfish, too hard to be nice, but Spike doesn't seem to mind, just plays tricks on Xander with his amazing mouth, busy and serious and slutty-eyed, eyes half-shut, lowered, servile almost, though Xander finds it hard to think of Spike like that, except in a good, willing sort of way. The way of sex. Busy tongue, down there. Hollowed, flexing cheeks. The way his head moves under Xander's hands.

Xander comes harder than he's come in a while, even with New York fresh behind them. A plane ride, a night's sleep, a day's work and some distance--thinking about things, not thinking--have honed him to a horny, nasty edge, made him willing to take advantage of Spike's professional services. He is a grown up now, and rich, the kind of rich bastard who pays for this sort of thing.

It's not bad. Sleazy, but...not bad.

After that, they shower. More sex. And then the cessation of sex, running out of sex like running out of conversation, so that they have to turn to conversation instead. Except they don't seem to have any. That's worrisome to Xander, as they lie in his bed.

They have small talk and big talk but no in-between talk. But maybe that's the kind of thing you grow into, Xander thinks.

It's night, and later they sit at his dining room table and Xander eats, and they discuss practicalities, blood and cars and credit cards. It's kind of a turn on, and Spike seems half-smiling all the time, and very watchful, eyes pinned on Xander, tracking him, making him heat from the balls up.

After dinner, after some TV, Spike strolls to Xander's room and is there waiting for him in bed, everything stripped off, though they haven't talked about this, though Xander has given him the guest room and his own dresser. And for a moment, Xander can picture him there in the future, propped up against the headboard and pillows, reading a book in his intense way--everything he does performed at an extreme of boredom or intensity--and like everything else about this day, it's strange and disturbing and sort of comforting.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Spike has been there for a few days, and Xander is getting used to it, in the small-details way if not in the big, existential, vampire-in-my-house way.

There's a reunion with Willow and Dawn, which is giddy and girlish and seems to bemuse Spike. More Spike body language: sitting on the couch, feet on the floor, palms resting flat on his thighs as if he's a patient stuck in a ticking waiting room, or as if like Uncle Rory he's about to say, _Well now,_ in a hearty way, and then stand up. He never does. There's a flight instinct lurking there, though, Xander can see it. But the vampire allows the girls to flutter and fawn, and he listens to various bits of history they impart, listens with his head tilted, eyes down to convey attentiveness, the mannerism of an actor. He meets Willow's new girlfriend, Becca, and is brusque and polite, and obviously assessing her steadily with those cool eyes that have quelled demons, until she just about loses her voice.

And he takes a phone call from Buffy, which from what Xander can tell after handing the phone over is full of stops and starts on her end, warnings and twisted, cryptic encouragement, the push-pull that she saws everyone with. Her wary sympathy and her silent disapproval. Xander can guess at all this, having talked to her about Spike not long before.

Spike gets off the phone looking...strange. Half lost in memory, broody and soulful.

Xander has had to remodel that word for Spike: soulful. In the past, it has always meant the voice of Barry White and the pouty lip of Elvis. Big cry-baby Johnny Depp eyes. Pastel Jesus paintings.

For Spike, soulful means a faint shadow across his expression, as if everything in him is drawing into focus, knots tightening and darkening in the complicated points of his face, where cheekbones meet eye sockets, where mouth meets cheek, where jaw meets ear. More often sadness than grimness, Xander thinks. It's really only a flicker, now and then. It makes Spike look his age. Look adult. Which he's already been for a hundred odd years, not jailbait by a long shot, so Xander confuses himself with what he thinks he sees.

After Spike gets off the phone with Buffy, Xander tries to think of things to say, and his thoughts flash by, something like: Buffy, college--how's she--so do you miss--did you two--and a while back I saw Angel--no, duh, he knows that--what to say--fuck it, I'm a guy.

So he just gives Spike a drink. His stock of beer has doubled.

In those first few days, they shop at the supermarket, they walk on the beach at night and say very little, they drive around and reminisce and look at cemeteries, they kill one vamp. Working the kinks out, is how Spike describes it.

The rest of Spike's clothes arrive. The empty boxes are already folded and stacked near the back door by the time Xander gets home one day, but he knows what was in them more or less, having glanced through Spike's New York closet. Spike is now wearing a black sweater, and Xander makes a study of it, deciding that expensive means shapeless and too big, sleeves that mostly cover the hands. Except it's not too big, really, because the way it fits makes Xander want to unpeel him.

Spike has decided that this sweater is best worn over faded jeans, which is definitely a look.

He's lost the gold chain. Xander isn't sure why and doesn't ask. Maybe it was someone else's gift, with special meaning. Like: whore. Except of course he still kind of is.

Xander, in bed: "It gets me hot, paying you. Is that wrong?"

Spike: "Yeah, you moral cretin. 'Course it's wrong. Illegal, too."

Xander, unmoving, one arm above his head: "Thanks. Thanks for enabling my panic. We now enter full crisis mode."

Spike, after making one of those dry sounds that are never quite laughs: "Too early for a mid-life crisis, 'less you plan to die young."

Xander: "In Sunnydale? Nahhhh."

Later, Xander tries for coherency:

Xander: "It's like this whole thing where...I can finally have everything I've ever wanted, if I just pay for it. Not that you're everything I've ever wanted. I'm just saying."

Spike: "Yeah. I get it." But then: "Money isn't everything, you know." Spike--always trite, always right.

Xander: "I don't get vamps and money."

Spike: "Not much to tell. Some steal, some stash it away. Knew one lucky sod who bought Microsoft early."

Xander, feeling the envy: "Sweet."

Later:

Xander: "I don't want it to be weird, though." Spike stares at him. Xander stares back. "Okay, that was dumb."

Spike: "What you mean to say is, don't tell the others."

Xander: "Well, yeah."

Spike: "They'll figure it out. Red's not stupid."

And later still:

Xander: "You like it, right?" He's gasping and fucking Spike hard into the mattress, twisting his hips and trying not to come. Not yet. Not yet. Not yet.

Spike is stretched out under him on his back, taut as a bow, fisting his own dick: "Oh fuck, yeah." Low, husky, in complete agreement.

Xander, hips snapping erratically: "I'm going to give you...a bonus." He gasps the words. "Nice car. Nice...nice car."

Spike, in rhythm with his hand: "Porsche. Boxster. Black."

Xander, startled enough to jerk to a stop: "What! No! Jesus!" But then Spike tightens his body in a way that severs all connectivity between Xander's brain and dick. "Oh man," he groans, on the verge of promising away fifty grand for a fuck.

Afterwards they are like puzzle pieces broken and rearranged and he tastes the back of Spike's neck and slides his hand between his legs, up behind his balls, the seam of his body still slicked up from the thrusts of Xander's dick when he was getting started a while ago. Xander rubs his thumb there, easy and then hard, and Spike grunts rather breathily, maybe grumpily, except there's no way a guy can be grumpy about that, so it's all a put on and Xander kind of likes that, in an indulgent way.

Xander: "So...you're okay with it then."

Spike, without much heat: "Christ, you're worse than a woman. Said I am, haven't I?" Sighing, he reaches around for Xander's hand and guides it forward to his dick, which is hard. Vampires. Ever ready. "I like your money. Like to fuck. You getting that?"

Xander: "Uh huh." But he's doubtful, and Spike turns and glares at him. And he's doubtful while Spike looks into his eyes and sees him, sees Xander Harris, all grown up and fucked up, more fucked up than he was this time last week, because all it took was this vampire coming back to lick away the years and lies of his boring life and reveal the dark chewy center, a freakish taste for perversion that he's held hidden since Anya--or else why would they be here now? "It's creepy," he says, as Spike stares at him. "I feel like one of those guys who makes a big show of taking out his wallet to pay for dinner." So very much like his dad.

Spike, darkness around the edges of his eyes, says to him slowly and clearly: "I like getting paid. No misunderstandings. No coy games. Someone beats you, you know why you're getting beaten. It's right there, no uncertain terms. Just money and fucking."

It hurts like paper tearing. Bills of big denominations, maybe. Xander's ears burn and he swallows and nods, feeling as if the past is too much with them, and that he and Spike are magnetized, closing in toward disaster together by way of bad, bad awkwardness. But then Spike relents, smiles. One of those different smiles, as if he's someone else now, and it's an even more dizzying turn, a kind of affectionate slap at Xander. Spike smiling as if these are things that don't matter, as if he's past them. This isn't the eternal whirlwind of fury and chaos Xander used to know, and Xander's nerves tingle, hypervision kicks in, because it really is a whorish and sad kind of thing, how readily Spike turns himself off. Not desire, but emotion.

He sees Spike, and Spike is absent.

And it makes it easier. Much, much easier. Because there's a distance between them, wider than a continent--that's very clear now to Xander. And as long as he can hold that thought, it's less scary to reach up and stroke Spike's hair, and to kiss his lips, and to mouth down his body and suck him off, even knowing that there's money behind all of it.

Fearlessness comes and goes in waves. He wants to take care of Spike, he wants to end this. Wants Spike here, wants to send him packing. It's just what he needs, it's the biggest mistake he's ever made.

He's not a very good vampire any more, the vampire in Xander's bed. He's almost too human. It's a deep sticky confusion, it's a submerged bubble waiting to surface and pop. It's unnerving.

There are waves crashing on the beach, audible through the open balcony doors over Spike's groans. It's night and Xander has invited a vampire in. The first fuck-up of the rest of his life. An expensive one, an adult one. Maybe a good one.

Too soon to tell.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Nine Inch Nails. James Brown. Black Flag. Sex Pistols. Blondie. The Clash. Chuck Berry. Aretha Franklin. Dusty Springfield. Billie Holiday. Bruce Springsteen. Nirvana.

Schizophrenic vampire with headphones and an AmEx card, thinks Xander, passing through the living room where the other man is jamming imperceptibly to musical static, painting his toenails a violent red, watching Howard Stern with the volume turned off, messaging Dawn on the iMac, drinking Jim Beam, and tracking Xander without lifting his gaze.

So much for the soul of adulthood.

Clearly, Spike doesn't know what to do with himself, yet within a week he's managed to find a hundred ways to waste time during Xander's daily absence. And I'm paying for all this, Xander thinks. Often.

But he decides he may like the red toenails, which are the latest Hollywood fashion for men, or so Dawn has told them both. The polish was her welcome-home present to Spike, and so he is dutifully applying her gift so that the next time she sees him, she'll beam in that luminous, toothy way. At least that's Xander's guess for Spike's motives.

Hours later, and Spike is staring at his red toenails with a displeased or maybe uncertain frown as he sits on the rail of the deck. Waves crash just out of sight, and they talk about something or other. When a vampire hurtles over the rail to attack, Spike is amazed, laughs, then sits there cracking jokes and watching while Xander bats the intruder around and finally stakes him with a piece of driftwood.

After which they have great sex, Xander nailing Spike over the edge of a crude, wooden patio table workshopped sometime last year, Spike's jeans shoved down around cool pale thighs, his ass slick, ready to be used even though they've been apart all day. Disturbing on a certain level, also crazy-making, driving Xander to fuck him harder, rock the table, unable to get deep enough. Change jingles in his pockets, belt ends swing loose, and he goes bareback, which he's never done with anyone else. If this were a movie, firecrackers would be going off. And as Xander's fucking he's thinking of his exertions, the vampire he just dusted, and how tight Spike's ass is, how beautiful his shirt-stripped back is, and those arms, posed like a swimmer's above his head, and his own back is sweaty but he gets sudden chills at how Spike is folded across the table, unmoving, untouched, ass flush to Xander's hips, letting himself be used. Hair on his neck lifting, excited, it's all Xander can do not to come as he figures out how perfectly Spike has read his own unspoken fantasy. It's scary. It's too much. He comes with forceful thrusts up that tight ass, taking exactly what he wants with the pretense of power: a rich human, calling the shots, totally in control of his dependent, obedient toy.

But when he's done, he kisses Spike's neck and gets him off with the laziest possible touch, with the palm and rolling heel of his hand, fingers stroking wood, lifting and squeezing Spike's balls. Spike is always startlingly easy to please. Xander thinks that someone so old and tired of existence as he often seems to be would find it hard to come, but he's got a knack for sex, a well of orgasms on tap, and he seems to like Xander's touch, leaning back against him the way a woman slides into a coat as you help her.

Years ago, post-soul, Spike had been looking pretty ragged. Now he looks twentysomething and fine, smooth and immortal. He looks like exactly what he is: a body kept hanging on the last breath of life, a piece of art preserved by lack of sun.

Days go by, and he takes Spike out at night, burning the candle at both ends. Sometimes to kill things, sometimes to shop, sometimes for nachos and flicks. In malls and on certain streets, Spike draws eyes like a movie star and doesn't notice. Sunnydale has attracted a Hollywood element during the last few years, which in a world of bizarre improbabilities still manages to make the short list, but there are now chic weekend bungalows cropping up like mushrooms along the shore, and the town feels the occasional ripple of an industry party that isn't publicized but somehow leaks to the locals. Spike comes across as one of those visiting exotics. He's a creature, but his breed is confused with a more ordinary one. His accent makes waiters straighten up and clerks shift into deferential mode the way Xander's money never has. It's pretty funny.

They go to Willow's for dinner, visit Dawn at school, drive by Revello to look at the old house, break into the rebuilt Hellmouth High School and wander the halls. Fuck in odd places around town that Xander always wanted to fuck in. He thinks of Buffy sometimes, and what she'd say if she knew about this. It's bizarre.

At one point he gets some bills in the mail and stares at the figures and thinks: no way. No fucking way. Then when he intends to confront Spike, he sees that depthless lack of joy, that need for distraction, and he pays them and says nothing. It has nothing to do with being used or manipulated, or with love--not yet anyway, because they're not on any kind of wavelength for that. It's just that, why fight? He can afford it. It's extravagant, keeping a pet vampire, but after all--

"How'd you get so rich, anyway?" Spike asks early on, as they're shopping.

Xander: "I try not to think about that." Off Spike's look: "It's nothing...it's, okay, I had this conversation once with Will, and then months later I win the lottery, eight point seven million, and ever since then I just, I can't stop making money."

Spike, brows lifting: "She worked the mojo for you?"

Xander: "She says she didn't."

Spike, clearly shrugging the whole issue off as he fingers a shirt: "Yeah. Gotten good at lying, hasn't she."

Lottery, business investments, fortunate stocks, and here he is.

He can afford Spike, and worrying about being taken advantage of is pretty lame, when you get down to it. Despite his mercenary claims, Spike--it's clear--doesn't give a flying, shit-flinging monkey about money except as a means to buy things to pass the hours. He never looks at price, just hands over the plastic, lets Xander pay the bills on the backend. Gives his backend up for bills. No complaints.

It's a workable arrangement, strangely, and it sustains itself for more than two weeks. Xander keeps waiting for the other shoe to drop. Thinks he'll come home one day to find odd demons milling about and drinking his booze, house trashed, privacy violated, Spike with that old dark gleam in his eyes, a ferocious hatred that he's been hiding up to now, a desire to inflict wounds.

But Spike does nothing like that. He's restless at times, yeah, but he just drinks, and lets Xander lead him into the night to kill stuff. Battles he no longer goes looking for on his own. He doesn't go off alone to bars, never postures or picks fights. Is polite to the service class. Tips well if he's the one paying. Now and then Xander looks up to find Spike watching someone--a waitress, a businessman, a kid. His face blank as a photograph of a face, something you'd flip by in a men's magazine. And Xander has no idea what's going in his head. Not the tiniest fragment of a sliver of a clue.

He's got a mouth on him. Matter of factly says shit that makes Xander's hair stand on end, with a kind of horrified delight. But it's a tactic, he thinks. A way for Spike to goose the mark. Is he ever himself anymore?

"You're so good," Spike murmurs in bed, when Xander's dick is buried inside him. And he sounds raw, as if he means it, but who can tell.

Xander thinks about asking: "So have you thought about what you want to do?" as if Spike is just some aimless slacker, a seventeen-year old with a future ahead of him who needs to buckle down. But what sense does it make, asking him that, when he could be around a hundred years from now, lying next to some other guy, or doing things equally uncertain--sitting and smoking in a cafe on the Left Bank in Paris, lying on a soiled mattress in a New York tenement, ghosting along the edge of a Peruvian jungle, fighting side by side with cyborg soldiers in a bombed-out version of L.A. He's Spike. He'll survive when Xander himself is ashes.

I'm just renting him, Xander thinks. And not even rent-to-own.

One Saturday at the mall they meet a co-worker of Xander's, stop for introductions and idle chat, Spike mostly listening as they shoot the shit, bitch about work. After the guy walks on, Spike says: "Don't you have _any_ friends?"

Xander, defensively, startled: "Excuse me?"

Spike: "You've practically got 'fuck off' tattooed on your forehead." He smacks the heel of his hand against Xander's brow as if he has every right to.

Xander: "I have friends."

Spike: "Who? Red? Dawn? Buffy? Bunch of chits who don't even know what flavor of porn you like."

Xander, heartfelt: "Ewww."

Spike: "You've got no mates, no one to drink with."

Xander: "I drink with you."

Spike, rolling his eyes: "Yeah. Real healthy. A man ought to be able to round up a poker game. You've got a social deficit, Harris."

Xander: "You should talk."

Spike: "I'm not the one breathing here."

And he's right of course. But he's annoying about it, as if he lifts all his insights from _Maxim_ or _The Man Show_, and Xander finds it hard to take seriously the advice of someone so deeply lost.

Late one night he wakes up and walks to the kitchen and finds Spike leaning against the counter, staring down at the floor tiles, just as naked and alone. He thinks the vampire might be heating up a cup of blood, but he isn't. The lights are on but he isn't doing anything that requires him to be in the kitchen at three a.m. Xander is tired but it gives him shivers.

"Hey," he says. And there's a forgettable exchange of words, and some kissing, before Spike comes back to earth and relaxes against him. On call again. But Xander isn't interested in taking what he's paid for. Not exactly. He holds Spike's hips loosely and tastes the shape of his mouth and the kitchen lights are disorienting and dreamlike and then they go back to bed, leaving the bedside lamp on, and Xander bites lightly across Spike's chest and shoulders, making him smile in a rather amused way, some private joke or wry old knowledge, and they are up far later than they should be, or later than Xander should be. But he's a rich guy. He's an owner. He can go in late. He can indulge his vampire.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

It had been surprising when Buffy finally left. Xander had suspected she might back out at the last minute, unwillingly to part from her sister. It had only been four months ago, when Dawn started college, that she'd made the move, and she'd been planning it for over a year, selling off the house at last to score enough for double tuition. Even so. Freaky. A Buffyless Hellmouth.

Willow ruled the school now, powerful enough to keep a spider web of magical protection across the town, every shiver of a strand alerting her to invaders who would fast become prey, sometimes with goofy expressions of surprise as they died. But webs had holes. Webs were in fact mostly holes, and she stressed herself out trying to cover them all, even with Becca at her side, serving as another soothing sidekick, not unlike Tara in many ways. It was a little scary watching that play out again, especially after the whole Kennedy meltdown, clash of the lesbian Titans, an entire freaking year of stormy weather, sometimes literal. But they'd never taken it to that edge Xander had feared, and in retrospect he saw how much more in control Willow had been. With every repetition of a pattern, things seemed to get smoother, and this time around she might just have it down.

Once more, with less feeling.

Oh, she felt real affection for Becca, he could see that. But not the passion she'd worn for Tara, or even the tension--ego fighting ego--that she'd built up with Kennedy. And maybe it was for the best. She needed some serenity. Stable was good.

She corresponded all over the world, and beyond: with witches, warlocks, and the new crop of watchers who were rebuilding in London. The world felt safer and smaller with that network in place, and the threat of an apocalypse would now bring people scurrying to help--planes delivering visitors with their crisp accents and shabby suitcases, cars winding up from L.A., portals dislodging oddballs at them from dimensions adjacent to their own.

Buffy, calling him at work, making a few minutes of conversation, then: "So how's he doing?"

Xander: "Spike? He's hanging in there."

Buffy: "You know, we didn't mean for you to adopt him." Dry.

Xander: "Yeah, I know. But it's cool, having someone around." Like a pet, he almost said. But the word stuck on his tongue.

Buffy: "Uh huh. I called him the other day, and got a big wave of def jammed in my eardrum. And what's he doing, just mooching around your house all day? He was watching _Days of Our Lives."

Xander, getting annoyed: "So what?"

Buffy: "_So, you need to kick his ass into gear. Find him something to do."

Xander: "Why? I thought the point was getting him here. He was already doing something."

Buffy: "Kishoi, Xander." Disgust. "Sucking off suits to pay his Elvis-sized bar tabs? Yeah, that's a real savvy career choice." Her voice is sharp. Her most dangerous edged weapon. It's hard to tell how much she still cares for him and how much she simply feels responsible for all the lost causes and head cases she's collected over the years.

Xander, wandering to the window to gaze out at his little slice of view: "He wasn't trolling the streets or noshing rats." Nearly as sharp.

Buffy, dismissively: "One step up." Still judgmental as hell.

Xander: "More like thirty stories."

Buffy, amazement dawning: "Oh my god! You're sleeping with him!"

Busted, he tries to figure out if he can summon plausible deniability, and the hesitation nails the coffin shut.

Buffy: "Don't even think of denying it, Xander Lavelle Harris."

Xander: "I didn't--I'm not!" Deep breath. "Denying it."

Buffy: "I could hear the denial fairies massing to attack."

Xander: "I _really hope you're not going to claim prior attachment." The words are weirdly formal, but they come out of some drawer in his mind like a loaded pistol he's kept ready.

Buffy: "What does that mean?" She sounds thrown off.

Xander: "I...don't know. Just, don't try to claim he's got fuck-exempt status." He doesn't often talk that way to her, but it doesn't even slow her down.

She has her own train of thought: "I've been down this road more than once, and I'm telling you," urgent tones of friendship rising, "no good can come of it."

Xander: "Did you just say 'no good can come of it'?"

Buffy, deflating: "Okay, that's a bit more Victorian-melodrama than it sounded in my head--but, Xander, he's damaged. He'll bring you down. He may not even try to, but he will."

Yadda, yadda. They talk some more and she keeps worrying at him, chewing at his thoughts like a tiny Buffy rat. Gives him the benefit of her experience with total earnestness, and it's really laughable, but he's not that mean, so he takes it with a smile she can't see and lets her lecture him as he goes to his desk. There's an e-mail from Spike with pasted spam asking: "DOES THE SIZE OF YOUR PENIS REALLY MATTER? Yes... More than you can imagine." And a photo of a horse and a jockey he's found somewhere online. Xander stares at it for a minute with stoned fascination until he realizes Buffy's still talking and he's _on the phone with Buffy staring at horse porn, and he ends the call quickly and puts his head in his hands and sighs and thinks about the Spike problem, like, is there one?

How weird is it that--almost without noticing--he's slipped into white knight mode for the vamp he once wanted to dust? Is that some proof of adulthood? You get up each day, squeeze some orange juice, go to work, move on with your life. It's not what you'd call easy.

He goes home, they say dirty horse-porn things as foreplay, they lick each other.

The cat comes to visit them mid-fuck, which is startling--it's done nothing but lurk in closets and under furniture since Xander bought it a year ago. Poor pet-shopping logic: picking the one that shies away from your hand because you feel sorry for its geeky social awkwardness.

Some things change, though.

The cat is removed but after sex it comes back and settles on Spike's chest, folding itself up, paws tucked in. Furry collapsible luggage. Spike stares at it like a feline mirror, eyes to slitted eyes in some meaningful silent dialogue.

Later, Xander pets Spike's head with an owner's touch, and is aware of doing it. He likes the sway of Spike's naked torso, his unbuttoned jeans, his bare painted toes. He's been waiting for things to go wrong, sex and money, but it's still okay. It's still an unbearable turn-on sometimes, too. Spike lying across the couch, head resting on Xander's thigh, turned to watch the TV. So post-coital and cozy.

Yesterday Xander came home and found that Spike had ordered a carton of cigarettes with the delivery groceries for the first time since his arrival. He was standing in the open door, blowing smoke out toward the deck as the sun died. "I don't want you to smoke," Xander said and took the cigarette from his mouth, threw away the pack and the carton. As if he had a right to. Didn't ask, didn't second-guess himself. And it made him hard. He came back hard and kissed Spike's smoky mouth until Spike yielded and grabbed his waist and rubbed against him. Spike was very accommodating. He liked being handled. There was no hitch of uncertainty there when Xander pushed Spike's shoulders down, unzipped himself, guided himself in with a hand on the back of Spike's neck.

He gave gaspy cries as Spike blew him, as they did this unbalanced, dangerous dance.

Tonight he is disturbingly contented and feels good. The constant sex is beginning to soften him, abrade away the shell he's grown around himself over the last few years.

A breeze from the open window teases the back of his neck and the TV's laugh-track roars softly and he enters a deep place of calm as he strokes Spike's hair. Regular strokes, petting. He hopes that it isn't just money that makes Spike lie there so quietly and accept his touch, and when he looks down he sees Spike's eyes have closed, which he takes as a good sign. The sigh of waves around them all the time may be working their mojo on Spike, even if he's trying to drown their lull out with loud, obnoxious music.

Kick his ass into gear, Xander thinks in Buffy's voice. Find him something to do.

But he has no ideas. He's not so much the idea man these days. He's the getting-by-on-luck man. He surfs the wave.

Spike turns fully onto his back and opens his eyes upward. Xander writes on his forehead with his fingertips, invisible letters. H-O-R-S-E.

Spike: "We going out tonight?"

Xander: "Feel like killing things, Pinky?"

Spike: "Don't mind."

Xander: "We'd have to move."

Spike: "Terrible thing, moving."

Xander: "Bad."

Spike: "Tragic."

Xander: "You have a very hard head."

Spike: "I'm often told."

Xander: "Move your head back like--oh yeah." He shifts his hips up and nearly groans.

Spike: "You have a very hard...horse." And he's rolling his neck, shoving his head around in Xander's lap as if he can't get comfortable, the perfect picture of frowny restlessness, but the lines of his jaw and neck are like paintbrush strokes in motion and Xander wants to take his dick out and rub off in Spike's hair. In a minute maybe he will.

Xander, talking to delay gratification: "Do you need anything?"

Spike: "Need?"

Longing tugs at Xander then as he realizes he has nothing to offer. "I want to buy you things," he says. "Expensive, stupid things." If Spike were Anya, she'd be having orgasms already.

Spike: "Mmm." A thoughtful, shut-eyed pause. "Don't have a watch." Frown. "Then again, don't really need a watch."

Xander strokes Spike's jaw and neck, handles him, moves his head to different angles. Every angle is photogenic and every one feels so damn good it stuns and slows down his entire central nervous system. "I like what you do for me," he hears himself say.

Spike opens his eyes, smiles like a flirt, and says in that low voice with vibrations fast and light as hummingbird wings: "And what shall I do for you now?"

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Another week and Spike's secrets are leaking out. That first ridiculous credit card statement was, Xander learns now, a finagled funds transfer to pay gambling debts. Not even his own, which is the real shocker, but a friend's--a human friend's--from back in New York. Spike has apparently been waiting for Xander to bring it up, but winds up volunteering it himself as part of a longer, rambling story about the things he's been doing for the past few years, the people he's known. Musicians, whores of all genders and species, boxers and bookies, demons and fixers, poets, shady dealers, and suits. A whole underworld Spike wandered the edges of until Xander spirited him away in Cinderella fashion.

Xander broods a few times, wondering if any of that world will follow Spike here. Don't buy trouble, he tells himself.

Xander: "You were pretty generous with my money."

Spike: "Pocket change to you now."

Xander: "Yeah, but..." But nothing. His two-week old outrage is as stale as duck bread, and Spike is curled up against him, the knobs of his spine almost like peas pressing up from within their pod as Xander traces them.

Spike says to Xander's chest: "I know. Ask next time."

Xander: "No, screw it. You're right. I have the money. But if you go over six figures I'm going to have to spank you."

He feels Spike's smile. It's probably a smirk, but he'll think of it as a smile. "And here I thought you were vanilla all through."

Xander: "That's a terrible and...annoyingly accurate thing to say. I have sprinkles. Though, no cherry."

Spike: "I'd like to have seen your cherry. Could've popped it for you, real sweet." He's licking Xander.

Xander: "Sorry. If I'd known." He waves a hand that Spike can't see, then lets it slide down the other man's back.

Spike: "Hope he took care."

Xander: "Yeah, it was all right." Different things are on his mind. "So, what...you think I need some new tricks. Handcuffs, sex toys..." He's trying to come up with other stuff for a list, but he's already running out of ideas. Vanilla. Back in the day he'd worked hard to keep up with Anya, but now he remembers that time as a blur of bad plans and worse execution whenever they strayed past the basics. He does consider himself good at the basics, though.

Spike: "Whatever turns your crank, love." Within seconds he's straddling Xander and very seriously looking down at him. "Rates you're paying, it's the full-service menu." Leans in with his arms propped on either side of Xander's head, all fluid muscle and floppy hair. He's got that smile, the one that says he really has no inhibitions, four syllables unnatural to his body. Xander knows that even a vampire must have a _few but they'd be things he'd never want to do himself, so...so.

And when the subject is picked up again after a half hour's fun and sweaty interruption, Spike lists all the things he's done, and all the places he's done them, and all the people--and things--he's done them with. It's a numbing inventory. Some of it requires other languages to describe. He says he liked most of it, and Xander is wavering on the edge of feeling intimidated, dick-shy, but Spike shrugs into the crook of Xander's left side. "It's all body parts," he says with no real enthusiasm, and Xander senses that comparisons won't be made and some animal angst begins to unknot again.

He thinks about the list, and makes mental checks by certain items.

Xander doesn't sit and watch Spike like some perv at a peep-show, like a stalker in his own home. But over time moments and impressions collect. Spike is like one of those guys you see in bands. Devon comes to mind. Devon used to write musical notes on his arms, hum to himself, lie on the bleachers and commune with the sky during classes, and was permanently stoned just above baseline, just below adult radar, for five straight years until, to everyone's startlement, he graduated. And then went to be Devon elsewhere.

Actually, Spike is nothing like Devon. But Xander is trying to pin down what it is that makes Spike Spike, and it has something to do with his wrists and hands, his frowns, his attunement with whatever it is he's doing, even when there is no sound to the universe except its dial tone, its static, a background hiss of massive boredom that makes Spike's eyes go blank. He is so far from zen, he's like the anti-zen, but he's got some trick of being in the moment that fascinates Xander. And he's hard to define. Is he smart? Xander doesn't consider himself that smart, so he finds it hard to tell about others. Willow--easy call. Buffy--a different kind of smart. But people who bottle up their thoughts and always match their level of conversation to yours, what's that about--is it disguise?

That's kind of what Spike does, and it makes Xander flounder, because he realizes after a few stray hits that if he talks books or music or history, Spike is right there with him riding shotgun, quoting unexpected poetry and spinning yarns about the jazz age that Xander only half believes, but wants to. He's got more in his head than he's bothered to unpack, and Xander thinks that maybe if Spike finally makes himself at home somewhere, settles, he'll start to leave bits of himself lying around.

One day they play pool and before long they're playing almost every night, and it strikes Xander that--though Spike might well be playing alone during the day--he's never the one to suggest a game. He loves pool, it's obvious in how he handles the cue and works the angles, eyes busy, but he always waits on Xander. And never said the first word on arrival--let weeks pass, most nights walking with Xander by the room where the table is kept as they went upstairs.

Was Spike always like this before? Is it soul trauma, new and wrong, or was he deferential to Crazy Dru without her even noticing--did he try to match Buffy's needs at her every whim? Did he hide a small self under a big, bad coat of brashness?

Maybe. But honestly, Xander isn't sure.

Spike makes a cup of tea now and then, and some of his gestures are precise and some of them are sloppy. Dunking the little strainer, stirring in milk: precise. Tossing the leaves and missing the trash can: sloppy.

"Gives the maids something to do," Spike says of the flung tea, a splat drying on the wall, clump on the tiles.

Xander: "Do they bother you?"

Spike: "What, Patsy and Edina?" Xander is confused, because their names are Marta and Trish. "They let me be."

Most of Spike's blood supply is in a special storage room, in a locked fridge.

Looking for small gestures of his own, Xander buys Spike jewelry. First, he gets it wrong. He gets it embarrassingly wrong. He buys Spike stuff grossly expensive and Spike murmurs thank-yous with raised brows and wears it politely. Desperate, he tries to find out what Spike really likes. He fears he knows--death metal rings and dog collars, god help him. But Spike digs in, claws to carpet, like Supercat when he's poised to fight or run, and makes Xander do the heavy lifting, tells him to pick out whatever the hell he wants. It's a wrangle, and funny--Xander suddenly wonders if he has any taste of his own. Why did he buy Spike stupid gold bracelets? He doesn't like them either.

On the way to the movies one night he sidelines Spike to one of those leather kiosks and buys him a choker and a bracelet, both cheap, both so perfect he wants to take Spike into the mall bathroom and lick him all over.

They don't do that, but they grope during the movies, and in darted glances at Spike's profile he can see that the other man's lips keep up a steady series of smiles--twisty, kind of goofball, as if he's trying not to laugh--right up to the credits.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

"Buffy told me."

Of course she did. He can hear Willow's grin through the phone.

"And your objection is...?"

"None. I think it's cool."

He tells Spike that: cool.

Spike accepts this with a mildly amused mouth twitch and a quizzical downturn of his eyes, as if he's thinking of something that's funny or doesn't add up. No way to know what except to ask, and Xander doesn't.

There's that mildness again and--not then, but later, apropos of nothing, some TV debate--Xander says: "You were so feisty in New York. Now I can't work up a fight." It's a dumb, off-the-tongue word, feisty, but Spike is staring at him for other reasons, frowning.

Spike: "You want me to fight?"

Xander: "No. Of course not. I'm just saying, you've changed."

Spike, pointedly: "Not me that's changed." And when Xander doesn't get it: "You're a proper client now, aren't you?" It's like a punch in his gut, and then almost at once Spike is climbing astride Xander and winding his arms around him with an affable but reproving expression. "Now, now. Don't look like that. Nothing to get upset about." It's a seduction of voice that lifts and lowers the words.

Xander: "I thought there was. I thought this was wrong."

"Well, yeah." Spike blinks. "But a good wrong."

The next night they're in a graveyard killing vamps and Xander is still picking at the subject in a roundabout way. "So, you didn't kill anything all the time you were in New York?"

Spike: "Not after the first few months. Couldn't."

It's the first time he's said that word and it snags Xander's attention: "What do you mean couldn't?"

Spike, dusting a vamp: "They wouldn't let me."

It's like pulling teeth. Fangs.

Xander: "Who?"

Spike: "Local bosses. Demons." He's spinning, kicking, not out of breath at all, except in the permanent way. "Called me on the carpet not long after I got there--threw me on the carpet, more like, after playing piata with my innards." He frowns. "Dripped a lot, but it was a red carpet. Which is sort of odd, now that I--"

"Spike!"

"Anyway. Said if I killed any more of 'my own kind', quote, I'd be made an example of. 'S why I had to look for other work."

Xander is flummoxed, upset about things that happened two years ago or more: "You could have left."

Spike, as the last fledge explodes, looks at him and says simply: "Could've. Didn't."

After pushing at the subject all the way home, Xander senses Spike getting tense, tight-lipped, and testy, and that is reason enough to keep at it, because that's his agenda--wind Spike up, get him kicking. Except when he figures that out, staring across the kitchen at Spike's set shoulders and stiff back, Xander lets it go. It wasn't fun five years ago, and it's less fun now.

They don't talk about New York for a long while.

In the immediate while of their lives, Xander is figuring out how to make love to Spike. If they've been hot and heavy already, it's now becoming humid. Tropical. As the novelty of paid sex wears off, Xander wants more. Can't get enough, wants more, gives more. He's all about making Spike lie back and take it now, learning his buttons, making him clench his fists on the sheets and turn his head aside and force back snarls. Dick bobbing up heavily, arching until it rests on his belly, swollen and dark and getting all wet at the head. That's before Xander even touches it, some nights.

He's gotten handcuffs, and it's a no-brainer that Spike likes them. But it's interesting to find out how much. Answer: way more than Xander expected. Frantic, gasping, hip-thrashingly more as Xander works him over and sucks him off and teases his ass. Sort of French Vanilla there, and if Spike gets so wild-eyed over this stuff, which has to be tame, what does real kink do to him? Scary thought.

Harsh sobs into Xander's pillows. Game face sometimes. Cursing, begging, strangled yelling. And the Night of Eleven Orgasms, which will awe Xander for years after that, since none of them were his. He kept his own tab, a modest number, but stayed home from work the next day, sore and exhausted and hormonally hungover from his efforts.

Now it's Spike who is beginning to look blissed out from all the sex. He looks the way certain surfers do, guys Xander sees on the nearby beach sometimes, thoroughly baked on sun, weed, and waves, with eyes that look as if they've seen god.

Now it's Spike who sometimes comes up behind Xander and dares to manhandle him, hungrily sliding himself up under Xander's shirt, rubbing against his backside, mauling his neck with soft noises. Palm skating smoothly into the front of his jeans, reaching for Xander's cock, drawing it upright as if he's trying to tug a carrot from the earth.

They goof off and around, and have taken up a new hobby of grinning at each other, and when they have dinner with the girls, their audience is full of knowing glances and teases.

Wes comes up from L.A. on an errand--they're in the Magic Box for the confab--and he gives the two of them funny looks.

A week later, Angel shows up with little warning and visits them for an evening, disappearing to walk along the beach with Spike for an hour, returning with the same expressionless face he left with and delivering a few bland words of goodbye to Xander accompanied by a dark, direct, warning gaze, but after the other vampire leaves, Spike tells Xander his old sire has a lot of things on his mind, and Xander isn't sure but he thinks Spike may have gotten a little boost from Angel's willingness to take time out and check on him.

This makes him feel a strange thing. Happiness. Anything that associates happiness and Angel doesn't seem natural to Xander, but if Angel makes Spike feel good in any way, however small, he'll go along.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

"I think I should have a lesbian phase," Dawn says. "Don't you?" She's asking Spike more than him, twirling her hair around one finger and wiggling her toes as a conscientious vampire tries to paint the little piggies. "It's probably emotionally healthy to explore my options."

Xander isn't going to get sucked into this one, no matter how many times Spike looks his way. He's working on his taxes. Ha ha ha ha ha.

He is strangely moved by the friendship Dawn has renewed with Spike, and relieved to know he has company once in a while. She visits during the day a few times a week, and is often still there when Xander gets home. She stays for dinner, is trying to be a vegetarian but moans and moos in worship of the Great God Cow when Xander drags out the grill. She writes essays for the university rag, wears strangely sloganed tee-shirts, takes back the night--irony there, since it's more a vamp than rape issue the campus needs to worry about--lectures them both about global oppression and textile employment practices, wrests the labels from their jeans and shirts up to view so she can judge their political correctness.

They adore her.

Spike is a big brother of a vampire to her, or would be, except they're bonding over weird shit these days. Music, fingernail polish (gold is the new red), classics of European literature, and the latest _American Idol competition, which they both try to pretend is pass but watch avidly.

It's a suspicion Xander has, that Spike enjoys being a girl.

When he makes this joke to Spike, he gets A Look. Dry deadpan expression, slightly lowered head--Spike's big cat look--the better with which to contemplate Xander askance, as if assessing him for a head-butt or a smack, which he'd never try these days, but it still raises a whiff of punk sensibility. It's like the smell of your old favorite clothes unearthed from a drawer.

So very much _not a girl, his look says, and he holds up one painted fingernail at Xander. The middle one. It's a startling victory of some kind, but then Spike is full of contradictions.

For an arbitrary birthday--giftday, she calls it--Willow enchants their bathroom mirror so that it holds Spike's reflection, and also the long mirror that hangs on the back of the bedroom closet door. The vampire of vanity immediately orders six hundred dollars' worth of hair care products from the net--_six fucking hundred--and glares darkly at Xander for not saying anything about the state of his golden locks before now. Loon, thinks Xander. But he's smitten, loves looking at Spike's face in the glass, and often stands behind him and does the obligatory naughty stuff.

"Xander gives Spike money," Dawn says to Willow.

It's easy to reconstruct the conversation that occurred, and Xander does so many times in his imagination.

"Xander gives Spike money. Don't you think that's kinda weird? I mean, because he was, you know," a hesitancy, "selling his groove thing, and now he and Xander are in the groove, and it's groove, money, groove, money. How does that work?"

Her half-innocent puzzlement, her worry as she tries to work it out.

It blows up into a whole big thing: Spike and Dawn go shopping, Spike passes his card across the counter one too many times, Dawn is envious, Spike says too much, Dawn talks to Willow with a girlish frown, Willow listens, Willow confronts Xander in a dark, ferocious huff.

He tells her to fuck off.

Not in so many words, not at first. But then, when she won't back down and she's scaring the living shit out of him, he does say that. And they stare at each other for a long moment. And he's nearly shaking because, fuck, he can sometimes be scared of his _best friend. She's powerful and too ready to jump on what she sees as wrong.

She doesn't talk to him for two weeks. He waits for a spell, and has nightmares wondering if she's already cast one and he doesn't even know it. Wakes up each day checking for the status quo: is Spike still living with him? Does he sleep with Spike? Do they smile and canoodle and kiss?

He and Willow communicate through Dawn, and after a while Willow comes to the office, and he takes off for a few hours and they drive downtown for coffee. She doesn't apologize, upset that he doesn't fully trust her--that's the "trust issue" which they apparently have to talk to death. He can tell she wants to yield ground but can't quite, so they sit and spat in their awkward way and she assures him she's not the Willow of yesteryear, but she has such wounded eyes.

And all this is over Spike, which is a little odd if you back off for a moment and think about it, as once upon a time she had no use for him, and Xander didn't either. But now they're fighting over the vampire's peace of mind and the ethics of informal prostitution and similarly weird shit that they don't put into quite those words.

Who the hell are we, Xander wonders. It's like _Hotel California is droning on some eternal replay as the soundtrack to their lives.

Xander, his cappuccino cooling and ignored: "It's my business and his, not yours."

Willow: "You'd never have even gone to get him if we hadn't pushed you."

Xander: "You don't even--so I give him money, so what? He buys stuff. It's what people _do. Good, old-fashioned American consumerism. And so _help me," his hand arresting like a slash in the air, "if you're going to claim a vested interest in where that money came from--"

Willow, getting het up: "I _told you--"

Xander: "Uh huh. And I _so believe you, because hey, any Harris can win the California State Lottery. On the _Hellmouth."

Willow, bitterly: "Believe what you like."

Xander: "I will."

Willow: "Fine."

Xander: "Fine."

But they get over it. Time passes and Willow--as far as Xander can tell--allows the details of what she suspects to blur until she no longer seems to be holding a grudge. She starts coming to visit again and smiles warmly at Spike, hugs him on arrival and departure. He, like Xander, is cautious of her: "Witches are the scariest women you'll ever meet, mate."

Xander: "No fucking kidding. It's like the GynoPower 5000, with crispy frying action."

It's terrible, fearing that everything you've gotten used to might be taken away with the snap of someone's fingers, your memory burned clean and rewritten like the hard drive of a computer.

Fuck, Xander thinks, staring in tiredness at Spike's sleeping face as morning chirps into life. He is stressed and seriously thinking of leaving Sunnydale for a few weeks, months--however long it takes to shake this anxiety. See Europe is a thought that's been looping in his brain. Why not? Something to think about. He wants to spoil someone. It's what life is about, if you can afford it, and the idea of taking Spike away and fucking him on crisp hotel sheets in strange countries has a definite appeal.

It's unhappy for him to think that Willow can't see this, can't see that for fuck's sake he's not going to hurt Spike. What the hell does she think is going on behind closed doors? He knows that really, her concerns are more or less subtle ones about dependency and self-actualization and emotional vulnerability, but Xander manages to whip his dark thoughts into a latte-like froth, and rewrites the argument they had so that he can say things in his head like: "What do you think I'm doing--using him for a punching bag? A sex bot?" Because those things he can deny.

He's picking at his own anxieties.

Spike smiles when he wakes up. It's a smile that has taken Xander time to recognize--weeks--a movement of lips so small you might think it was your eyes playing tricks on you. He considers Xander alertly and says nothing for a minute, while Xander knuckles his collarbone gently. The day begins.

There've been several orgies of shopping both online and off, some of which Xander has participated in. Spike is pretty, ambling to the bathroom in striped silk pajama bottoms to stare at himself in the mirror, study his hair. Then out to the kitchen with careless gestures that still catch Xander's eye: lazy skritch of fingers across abs, vigorous hair scrub, thoughtful backhand check of jawline to see if a shave is needed--he shaves once a week, no more, the Lex Luthor of vampires.

He drinks coffee, and breakfast blood, collects the paper, and is usually sitting at the table when Xander comes in. Though they've never really made contract negotiations, waiting on Xander is by no stretch of interpretation part of his duties, and Spike remains charmingly thoughtless about many things humans need--bacon, cereal, fruit pulp. Even so, Xander has now and then caught Spike observing what he does in the mornings, and he thinks that if he could establish a regular breakfast habit, that he might come out one morning to find food prepared. Sadly, he is a male, and random, and his breakfasts go something like this: Monday - cold pizza Tuesday - oatmeal, toast, chopped apple Wednesday - muffin Thursday - cereal Friday - peanut butter and jelly sandwich Saturday - eggs, bacon, toast Sunday - leftover Chinese food

There is no way to predict the whims of his body, and Spike has not yet tried.

Sometimes when he comes home at night Spike is still wearing the pajama bottoms and nothing else. It should annoy Xander, but it so _completely doesn't. Also, though Spike loves showers and the jacuzzi, he sometimes hasn't bothered to wash. And the great thing about a vampire is, Xander decides, the low ick factor. Vampires, unlike the guys at his construction company, are not prone to interrupt their conversation with you to hawk up a gob of phlegm and spit it a yard from where you stand. They don't catch colds or develop unsightly rashes or have weird toilet practices you need to get used to if you're going to maintain roommate sanity.

Other evidence that Spike is in fact not quite what you'd call a guy. Except in the thousand other ways he very much is, like the drinking, swearing, grumbling, and casual tit-ogling he indulges in, not to mention his emphatic positions on music, his dislike of certain types of shoes, the panthery way he plays pool, and of course his dick, which is a handful of goodness Xander hasn't tired of and never will.

There's the strange New York sweater collection, though--high fashion, not femme, but Xander can't entirely accept that Spike's clothes nature has changed from dusters and Docs to silk and cashmere. It seems one of the most telling pieces of evidence that Spike is having some kind of mid-death crisis. He wears jeans when they go on their killing sprees, and shirts that he can toss afterwards if necessary. But the old Spike skin gets stripped off so quickly when they get home and Xander is often struck by how arbitrary and even false that skin has turned out to be. A lot of Spike's swagger was in the old duster which is god knows where, and he loses a few inches when he removes his boots, and then he's barefoot and cat-sleek again, groomed for indoors.

So it's a relief that he's cracking wise more often these days, and seems to be honing an edge again. Maybe it's the mirror.

Xander is waiting for Spike to nag him, to assert himself, to use his strength, maybe call Xander a few rude names. Give him the finger again.

I'm not a client, Xander thinks. He can be himself.

Whoever the hell that is.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

He never tells Spike the exact comments of Willow's that were responsible for tipping his freak-o-meter into the red. "He needs fixing," she said with a determined look. And also: "Maybe we shouldn't have brought him here."

Words to chill a man who knows a witch. But the horizon is now sunny again.

The day is sunny too, and it's totally out of the blue when he turns around on site and finds himself face to face with Riley Finn. Immediate grin from Riley at his astonished expression, and then they're laughing and hugging in a manly way, clapping each other on the back. Riley doesn't get into town often--three or four times a year, following up on special ops business. This time around it's nothing urgent, and they go to lunch and shoot the shit. Xander learns:

1. Riley and Sam are going through choppy relationship waters. 2. The Australian outback is crawling with dragons. ("But that's hush hush," Riley says.) 3. The government is thinking of reestablishing a monitoring presence on the Hellmouth.

Xander: "Yeah?"

Riley: "Yeah. That's why I'm here."

Xander: "Huh. They didn't learn their lesson the first time?"

Riley, tipping his head to acknowledge the hit: "They _want to learn from it. They're thinking of assigning a smaller unit here, more in a liaison capacity."

He has big hands, Xander notices as Riley toys with a breadstick. He's more likely to notice stuff like that now, even when he's not attracted to a guy.

They talk about Buffy and Willow and Dawn, and then things reach a point where Xander has to make room in the conversation to say: "Spike's back...he's living with me." Existing with me, his mind corrects, but as Giles would say, that's pedantic and not especially humorous.

Riley: "Wow. That's...living with, or living _with?"

Xander: "Emphasis on the with."

He sees wheels turning in Riley's head as the other man thinks about how this development clears one more ex-lover off of Buffy's greatest hits list, and what this might mean for a guy who is probably going to divorce his wife.

That's purely speculation. It's just that Riley seems a bit sad and lonely, and the way he was talking about Buffy earlier made it clear that he still has a thing for her even if he's tried to move on.

Riley's business is with Willow and with Bennett, their locally assigned watcher. He's in town for three days and they do the obligatory dinner on the second night. It's pure comedy gold: Spike, Riley, Xander, Willow, Bennett, Dawn, and Becca all gathered at a table over spaghetti and a carafe of blood, everyone but Dawn taking great care about what they say and how they say it.

Riley making small talk with Spike: Mister Iowa, well raised by his mother, puts a lot of effort into getting over the hump of the past, while Spike gazes across the table as if studying a not-very-interesting form of talking plant life. He's the least polite he's been since his arrival, very Old Spikish, and it would be heartening to Xander if it weren't so awkward.

At one point Riley gets some sauce on his shirt and Spike, who is wearing off-white silk and drinking blood, pauses with his wine glass halfway to his lips and stares for one long, obvious moment at the stain as if it's evidence of a character flaw or social gaucherie--this from a man who once cleaned mud from his boots on Xander's mother's coffee table with the broken rib of a Vargal demon he'd wrested earlier from its corpse as a trophy.

Riley clears his throat, dabs at his shirt, and excuses himself to the bathroom.

Xander kicks Spike under the table.

Two days later Riley is gone again and Spike sulks less, and time rolls forward again at a comfortable pace.

They go out for coffee in the evening on their way to a poetry reading, of all things--a university event that Dawn winningly begged them to attend--and end up waiting in line at the open-air cafe down the street from the Magic Box. They're debating the rankings of pricey sports cars, and gradually a man behind them adopts a listening attitude. When Xander drags his gaze from Spike for a brief moment, he realizes it's a famous movie star. The guy hit it big in a classic flick with Tom Cruise that still makes the cable circuit now and then, and several other films Xander can't immediately name. This close he looks both older than expected and larger than life.

When he catches the man's eye he nods to show he's cool, and the man nods back, casual and with complete politeness.

Spike's back is mostly turned to the star, so he doesn't notice a thing; he's yattering on about automatic versus manual transmissions, torque and cooling systems and cornering.

They reach the counter and Xander turns to order and it's as if his movement turnstiles Spike's head in the opposite direction--as he's focusing on the menu board he can see from the corner of his eye Spike nodding back vaguely toward the man, then he hears that matinee voice say, "How've you been?"

Spike: "Sorry?"

Famous Star: "Diane's last week, wasn't it? Rita introduced us."

Spike, slowly: "Oh. Right."

Famous Star: "Did you sign that deal with Miramax?"

Spike: "Nah. Didn't like their offer."

Famous Star: "I have a script you might be interested in. I'm producing it myself. You're with Kim at ICM, right?"

Spike: "Yeah."

It goes on like that, freaking out Xander, who fears at any moment the Famous Star will realize Spike is just fucking with him, but by the time they break away, he's given Spike a card with his cell number and invited them both down to his cottage for drinks the following night, letting them know that "Kevin and Phoebe" will be there.

Xander, admiringly, as they reach the sidewalk: "You're such a dick."

Time passes and it's hard to figure out how exactly it all happens or when, but it slowly dawns on Xander that Buffy and Spike have been talking on the phone a lot. He is not aware of this at first because she almost always calls him. First there's a conversation he walks in on, no big, Spike is lounging on the couch and keeps talking, Xander figures out it's Buffy, he talks to Buffy for a few minutes himself. All fine. Then Spike makes some comment a week later and it's some piece of news about Buffy, or not even news, but some tiny indication that he's up to date on her likes and dislikes. And that is a bit odd. Then Xander gets the phone bill and sees three long-distance calls to her number in the past month, each lasting about an hour.

It's embarrassing the way you behave when you're paranoid, and what follows after this is a painful period of several days, two weeks at most, where he chips away at Spike, a little bit here, a little bit there, trying through dozens of indirect questions to figure out just how much they're talking to each other, and what about, and why, and the ripple effect of his tension is palpable and laps into other talks, other things they do together.

One night it comes to a head, he doesn't even remember how. It's like crash, bang, and all of a sudden they're standing in the living room, mid-fight, and Supercat has flung himself at a gallop down the hall to escape the angry giants.

Xander: "Just tell me, okay--are you still in love with her?" Classic clich interrogation, but the pain is uniquely his.

Spike: "Of course I'm not." The words are enunciated very deliberately, and his tone and eyes say: you stupid sod, but Xander thinks he may be reading them wrong.

Xander: "Then why the hell are you talking to her all the time?"

Spike: "I told you. She's just lonely."

Xander: "So tell her to call Willow. Or the sister she left when she decided to go off and see the world." Man, he's harsh. He hears it in himself but he can't keep it down.

Spike: "She does. I'm just one of the many, Xander."

A patient tone, and it's jarring, because he only ever uses Xander's name in bed, head hanging face-down over the pillow, hips working frantically back, voice desperate: "Christ, Xander, ah fuck, love, yes, _fuck, need it harder--"

Hearing it now makes Xander ache, his temples throb. "You're mine. I've fucking _paid for you." And he gasps instead of laughing, chest tight enough to burst, and turns and punches the wall. Hasn't done that in years, and fuck. It really, stupidly hurts.

Spike comes to him and doesn't do anything for his hand, just yanks him gently back by his belt and forces him to turn, and then shimmies against him as if to say _yes, you have and he's kissing Xander's neck and baring his own, and then he's not quite moving anymore, but just waiting for Xander to do whatever he'll do.

The sex is so intense, it's nearly a walking, fucking black-out, a haze filling his brain, a cyclone. He throws Spike against the wall and kisses him and bites hard enough to split Spike's lip and he grabs Spike's head and pulls it forward then slams it back against the wall, hand full of curls at the nape, which makes Spike arch all over, mouth falling open and eyes falling shut, as if he's sky-rocketing into delirium. Xander rips Spike's shirt open, buttons flying, grabs his shoulders and his neck and his head again, wanting something he can't quite get his hands on.

He might have run out of steam then, become aware of his own violence and turned away from it. But Spike is a pro at this, more than in the strict sense of the word--he's got over a hundred years of passion behind him and he knows how to take the lead. He goads Xander by touching himself lazily, licking the blood from his lower lip, and then it's nearly impossible to wait as Xander fists his own dick out, makes Spike get down on the floor and suck him off, right up to the edge of reason, and then fucks him with madness over a chairback--some tumbled furniture before they find the right piece--and Spike's not slick for him, not easy to enter, but Xander does anyway and feels Spike thrash beneath him, hears him make noises that signal when he's about to come.

It's over quick for both of them, actually, Xander following several thrusts behind Spike, dick sharpening--that's how it feels--getting that edge that says _now, now, now, finer and keener and faster, until he's spilling over. Bang.

He can't keep anger past that moment. He's immediately flush with the joy of aftermath.

He'd be giddy if he didn't ache so much, wanting forgiveness between them both, wanting it all to be good and not a literal fucking mistake.

Spike's lust-whacked face says it is. Not a mistake, but all good.

Xander is shaky the rest of the night, his entire body one big cocktail he can't unmix, but in the morning he wakes up and looks over at the vampire in his bed--dead, undead, bedhead--and Spike is already awake and watching him and smiling. And it's a real smile, sized just right, with nothing at all to hide.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

They go to The Rambler, the better of Sunnydale's two gay clubs.

As a reason for going, Xander says: "I don't want to lose touch with my roots."

Spike's gaze cuts up to his hairline. He's clearly puzzled, because Xander doesn't actually dye his hair.

Xander: "My _other roots." A pause. "My roots in the gay community." Spike is staring at him and the words _silly sod nearly appear in a thought bubble next to his head, kinda like when a cat stares at you and you know he's thinking: _Give me fish, stupid human. "Okay," Xander has to admit. "I have no roots in the gay community. But why don't I? I should. It doesn't seem right to just _be gay. You gotta shake your gay thing sometimes. Not _that thing," he clarifies, as Spike's gaze turns downward this time.

They go to The Rambler. Spike dances. Men's heads turn to watch Spike dance--men's heads turn _away from the go-go dancer on the bar to watch him dance, even when sometimes he's barely moving, but he also manages to make Xander look and feel less than completely lame.

Outside the club, as they're leaving, an earnest young man tries to hand them a pamphlet, asking, "Have you accepted Jesus Christ into your heart?"

Spike: "No, but I've accepted dick into my ass. No more room at the inn, wouldn't you say?"

The kid, amazingly, manages to come back from this: "He has room for _you. We are all loved by our Lord and Savior."

Spike gently takes the pamphlet from his hopeful, outstretched hand, nods, and lets Xander escort him away.

"Jesus," Xander says with feeling when they're out of range.

Spike: "Just a messenger, I think."

Later, Xander finds the pamphlet on the counter, reads it: "He bled and died for our sins." He throws it away, then gets up at three a.m. and fishes it from the trash and puts it into a kitchen drawer below the delivery menus. Whatever. Spike might want it, and it's not his to toss.

They debate about installing a flatscreen TV in the bedroom on the wall opposite the bed, so that they can lie like beached fish after sex and watch cooking shows and Xander's _Babylon 5 CDs. It seems both very right and very wrong to Xander, the first flagstone on a path to hell and the kind of tacky, all-out immersion in a gadgeted lifestyle that he's tried to avoid despite having loads of money. Tried to avoid...now and then. Once or twice at the very least.

"The bedroom is for sex," Xander slurs after one marathon session leaves him steamrollered. Flattened. Barely verbal.

No TV.

Looking back, it's clear that this was not the first flagstone on the path to domesticity, which is turning out to be nothing like hell. All of Spike's clothes have been moved into Xander's room now, his own side of the closet. His CDs outnumber Xander's. And he's stopped nesting in the living room quite so much. He's allowing himself to take up more space in the bedroom. Finally, one day: a paperback appears on his side of the bed, and what was Xander's personal space is suddenly theirs, shared.

He has his own side of things.

Right about then is when Spike starts to get antsy. The broodiness is like a third person in the house. One night Spike says, "I'm taking the car for a drive." His own car, but it's the first time he's ever expressed such a whim. He vanishes for three hours, comes back with blood on his shirt from a slice along his chest. It was a good shirt, not a throwaway. Xander isn't sure how many questions he should ask, or not ask. He has the inevitable thought: how would I know if he started eating people again? Not that he believes that. It's just the inevitable thought, a blip on his mental radar, and then gone again.

Totally, utterly unchipped vampire. And people with souls do bad things all the time.

The next week, Xander comes down with a hellacious cold and, after bringing him a mug of tea and some toast, Spike climbs back into bed with him among the littered, snotty tissues and stays there for three days. Reads books and lets him sleep. Fetches and carries. Cleans up his tissues and makes soup and orders ineffectual homeopathic medicines off the net by overnight express, based on a recommendation of Becca's. Shares a hot bath, sitting behind Xander and washing his body with soothing palm strokes. He's mellow, stretchy as taffy, folding himself to Xander's body whenever Xander gives him a sign that it's welcome. Spooning him, playing pussycat.

When Xander is well again--ye, having passed through the Valley of the Death Wish--he feels a profound sense of gratitude and can't keep his languid, molesting hands off Spike. Touches him all the time.

When Xander is well again, Spike gets hincky and quiet and half-withdraws. Back to brooding. He's killing things grimly when they patrol, sometimes with an angry ghost of the old Spike vim. Kick, smash, snarl.

He's been the new-and-different Spike for so long that it nearly rips Xander to pieces when the vampire picks a fight with him. Bypassing any number of several smaller fights, he bears straight for the championship match, and it's a big rude bloodbath of shouts and angst. Never goes for the jugular, but it's still terrifying. Emotionally. Not physically. Meltdown, some of which Xander had guessed at, some of which he hadn't. Spike paces almost the way a lion does, but trying to hold back from attack instead of working himself up, Xander feels.

Spike, drunk, eyes angry with tears: "It's all so bloody pointless!"

Xander, teetering on the edge of heartbreak and afraid to touch him: "What is?"

Spike: "Why don't you just put a collar 'round my neck--chain me up in the garage with the car--not as if this is going anywhere--"

Xander: "Is this about the money--is it--"

Spike: "Of course it's about the fucking money!" A storm-eye of cold calm: "The _fucking money, Xander."

Xander: "Take it, you can have all of it." He means it, and what he's trying to say is, it doesn't matter.

Spike's mouth twists. "Oh, right. Guess you've got me pegged, then. After your fortune, is all. Big wads of cash up my bum, thanks." Words dripping with contempt.

Xander: "No, that's not--that's _not what I--"

And then, whiplash: "It's not about money."

Xander: "You just _said--"

Spike: "Sod your magic money. You think I _give a fuck--"

Xander: "No--"

Spike: "You're so bloody thick--it's a wonder you don't topple like a buffalo with that massive, self-absorbed head on your shoulders."

It's grossly unfair, it's incoherent, it's frustrating as hell, and it goes nowhere, at least not until Xander braves himself to walk to Spike and take the sides of his face in both hands. Spike, his head tilted down and to the right, resists looking up for a moment in a stubborn, bullish way that makes Xander feel strangely generous and tender and willing to play the big dumb man in this equation, to another man who keeps giving it up for him: "Tell me what to do--I'll do it. Please, baby." And he's only ever said that during sex. Baby. It's wrong, but he says it anyway. "Just tell me." He's reduced to babbled endearments and begging, as desperate about this as he's ever been about the sex.

And when Spike meets his eyes, he's so close to spilling over--anger, tears, pain, a miserable twist of death and time and soul--that it's hard not to flinch.

Spike sags against him finally, his head on Xander's shoulder, and Xander swallows down all pride as meekly as any man ever has in a fight like this--as he never in a million years would've done with Spike before he brought him back from New York, as he really never did with Anya, if you want to get honest about it.

In the morning, Spike is actually rather embarrassed, but things remain strained and there's the difficulty of being men and not wanting to talk about things in plain terms while sober. And just when Xander is afraid it's all going to cycle and spin out of control again, Spike stretches next to him on the couch one night and draws his eye and asks, "You ever put your mark on anyone?"

Xander's mouth goes dry and he shakes his head and the next night they come home and Spike has a tattoo on his lower back and Xander nearly breaks himself when he thrusts along the clasp of Spike's ass--outside, not in--and his dick is pushing toward the tattoo like a clock hand, pointing to his own stylized initial, almost reaching it and then suddenly rubbing across its bright surface. And he comes instantly, gasping, tremors, a slippery cry pulled from his balls, it feels like. Has to relearn how to hold his spunk after that, whenever he's taking Spike from behind. How to make it last.

It's really not about money. It's moving past that, and the money sometimes doesn't even feel like his own, so the idea that it could matter is starting to seem...off. There should be boring red tape, Xander realizes, paperwork, bank meetings, and it should be Spike's as much as his, in every formal, legal way. Something to solve. Spike doesn't even have a social security number. He'll need to call Willow, of course. These things usually end up in her lap, and Xander resents that if he thinks about it too much--a good sign that he needs to let something go, because she's his best friend and if he's feeling resentful, this is in fact a bad sign.

It's all about roots. Xander wants them, Spike might be afraid of them, Willow makes them. But really, it takes more than one person to make roots.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

It's funny, the things you can ignore, avoid talking about, take for granted. They're in bed and Xander has several slick fingers buried in Spike, who is gripping the rails of the heavy iron headboard hard enough to pull them out of true again, and it's like he always has a camera trained on him instead of just Xander's focus, framing every look and move--chosen to walk the earth in eternal night because his face caught a vampire's eye, his survival odds aren't hurt by being pretty. No need for fancy vamp thralls to keep Xander fixated. Watching the twist of his arms and the tossing of his head and his agonized-ecstasied face working is like seeing a religion getting born.

The handcuffs--manacles, really--rattle against iron as Spike tries to find a grip to keep him anchored, as if he might lift off the bed otherwise. His hips are weightless, muscles tensed, pushing him up from the pillow beneath his ass, and he's gasping and then chokes as if he he's cutting off the word _god. It snaps into a sob and Xander feels a hot spurt of pre-come slide from his own dick at the sound. Parts of him start to tremble and vibrate with the strain of waiting, making himself wait.

"Fuck yourself on me," he says in a husky strangled voice. Spike is. Then Xander can't wait, he drags his fingers out--Spike gasping _no with a wild shudder--and shoves his cock in their place, demand flushing through his balls all the way up to the sticky head, and sex, the need to satisfy the ache under his skin, is like that time he had a cast on his arm, stifled, sweaty flesh and knitting bone, twinges of pain and that maddening itch that made him want to rip things off and use his teeth on himself. He wraps his hand around Spike's cock as he fucks him, jerks it and feels Spike clench around him and there's no doubt at this moment that Spike is desperate for Xander's cock, working himself on it, going offline whenever Xander hits him inside at a certain angle--his wild thrash freezing suddenly, his body an arc, even as his muscles tighten to keep Xander right there, _oh fuck, right there, love. And Xander is big, and Spike likes that, has told him so with amazing expressions on his face, in every position, hands free to clench on his shoulders, or chained and punishing the headboard.

Xander likes to feel big, and does when he's inside Spike, thrusting, sliding toward home, because it's always so tight, and he's a master at dicking, it's just something he does well, no bullshit false modesty, he can bring Spike off without even touching him, even if he takes his hand away, can make him shout when he comes, cock tight against his belly, spattering himself with little white stripes as Xander finishes inside him.

What they don't talk about is how Spike is always the one getting dicked. They've had a total of two short conversations on the subject, one in New York that ended with Xander saying, "I don't really like it," and the one about losing his cherry, which was Spike's way of dropping a hint, offering--or more accurately letting him know in an indirect way that he wouldn't mind a reversal of fortune now and then. Xander had ignored it.

He's felt remarkably little guilt. He's fucked Spike in the kitchen against the counter, in the shower, bent over the bathroom sink, shoved across tables and armchairs and deck rails. Spike on his knees facing the headboard, on his hands and knees, on his belly with his ass lifted up, upright and slouching back, straddling Xander while he sits or lies back. Every way they could figure out, and it's always good. After the first few weeks Xander confessed that he never much liked "the whole ass thing" before Spike, and he meant giving it as much as receiving. He kept the conversation from diverting to questions of reciprocity by adding, "I want you all the fucking time, twenty-four seven, I just want to live with my dick in your ass...maybe I can get one of those headsets to take conference calls from bed, what do you think?" Spike had looked amused.

But now he's beginning to feel something else, which is...Spike's dick. He feels it against his thigh, or rubbing against his own, heated by friction, or filling his hand or his mouth, or nudging him from behind whenever Spike spoons him, and it's melting his brain. He's got to have more, he's got to have it _do something to him. It's not enough when Spike thrusts between his thighs--almost enough, insane-making, but now he wants it to prod up and in. He thinks he does. Except he honestly hasn't liked being on the ass-end of things up to now. There's a grossness factor and there's discomfort and he's never come that way, nothing like the way Spike does, where if you just touch him inside he's gasping and ready to pop.

It's not hard to figure out that Spike would like to do him. It's the whole guy _thing--you stick your dick in stuff and drain your brain cells off. That's what guys _do even if he himself had never been fully sold on it. So no question, he's been depriving Spike in a bad way.

I'm a bastard, Xander thinks.

Spike is spooned close behind him, slick and working between his thighs with amazing little twists and thrusts that drag his cockhead up behind Xander's nuts--tease and stroke and push and a wet little kiss of the head to his throbbing flesh. "Oh fuck," Xander says, gripping himself to keep from coming. Spike is tonguing his ear too. It's a circuit of moist, horny vampire.

Xander: "Why don't you...oh fuck." He spreads his thighs a bit and drives himself back, trying to direct and intensify that brushing heaviness. Tying to manipulate someone else's dick like that is like trying to work a paint brush with your teeth, or master chopsticks, but once in a while the pay-off is amazing.

Spike: "Hmmm?"

Xander takes a deep breath: "Why don't you do me?"

It's an absolute pause, as if time stops ticking forward and the universe ceases spinning, and then--

Spike: "You sure?"

The rigidity of his body and his dick and the strain in his voice--not a growl, but some subharmonic note of tension that suggests the moment before game face--makes Xander realize how long he's made Spike wait, how badly the other man wants it. Probably wants to plunge inside him and howl and fuck him with rough, raging strokes.

Xander: "If you...you know I've never really liked it. But that's okay." He's not trying to be a martyr, but it's unnerving. Ass. Dick.

Spike: "You going to let me drive?"

Xander just manages to nod, and Spike slides his arm around him and thrusts again, three or four times, quickly, gasps and spills in the inseam of Xander's body. Just taking the edge off; Spike can raise wood on a dime.

The first time with Spike is like the first time. He's been almost apelike in his stupidity, he realizes--an epiphany that hits hard about seven minutes after Spike positions him face down on the bed, props a pillow under him, and begins tongue-fucking him, which is when Xander begins to shake all over and beg. He's actively discouraged this act before, though he's done it plenty often for Spike, licking his tidy vanilla-bean ass inside and out with no hesitation.

I am so dumb, he thinks dizzily, trying to climb out of his skin when Spike's tongue stabs him open--repetitively, obsessively--thick and long and clever and wet. He uses his tongue until Xander can't take it anymore, then two lubed fingers as he croons reassurances, and then his dick, which makes Xander sob. One slicked-up hand stays busy, keeping Xander stiff, driving him to the edge of climax and holding him there, and he's strong--vampire strong, duh--and lifts Xander up to his knees, sinks human teeth into his shoulder to pin him upright until Xander is driven to a good, new place that makes him snarl almost like Spike does, and his orgasm just about jumps out of him.

They lie together side by side on their backs, both of them nearly unconscious and unable to speak above a sedated murmur.

Spike: "So that was all right, then?"

Xander: "Shut up."

Spike: "Because they say it's not every bloke's cuppa tea."

Xander yawns, and then: "Bite. Me."

Spike: "Guess you'll not be wanting to do that again."

Xander smiles dopily at the ceiling, his eyes deeply closed. It's what they call a lazy smile: mostly on the inside because he's fucked himself to immobility, too wiped out even to widen his mouth.

Xander: "Mmm."

His head sings to itself.

I will buy you a new life. Perfect, shiny and new.

Two days later he and Spike are at Willow's house, standing on the back porch as dinner preparations are being finished in the kitchen--women bustling, men hiding, traditional gender roles triumphing--and Xander stands behind Spike, arms wound around his, their hands clasped, and he butts his chin on Spike's shoulder as Spike slouches in that melting, accommodating way he has which seems to make him three inches shorter.

I didn't kill him, Xander thinks. He can hear Willow talking and laughing in the kitchen, and there's this momentary braid of then and now, everything looping together like a big bow around the present, and he's startled to realize how little he could have predicted if he'd put his mind to it years ago. It's not just the earth-shattering things, but the people and what they do to you. If he'd been any one of his more ordinary classmates, he could have pegged some tacks into the map of his life: graduation, college, job, marriage, maybe a move across country or a sudden career change throwing him a minor curve, but no major shockers, not like saving the world or setting up house with a more or less dead ex-killer whose hair smells of the same shampoo he uses. The same pillow.

Spike: "I can hear the little cogwheels grinding."

Xander, pretending to misunderstand: "Sorry. I'm kind of hungry."

Spike gives one of those grunted laughs that doesn't quite leave the throat. A few moments later says: "You move that hand any lower and I'm going to give the ladies a show."

Xander: "You won't believe who I heard from today." Spike hums an inquiry. "Anya. She's coming to visit. I mentioned the us thing. The you-and-I-same-bed thing."

Spike: "And what'd she say?" Slightest possible emphasis on the _she.

Xander, raising the pitch of his voice just enough to mark the quote: "'My god, Xander. If I'd known you were going to have sex with him too, I'd never have felt so guilty. All that wasted energy!'" Spike snorts, and Xander goes on in a normal voice: "I'm not sure I want you two in the same room. I think she might try for a threesome."

Spike, sultry: "And that'd be bad how?"

Xander: "Trust me. You _so don't want to go there."

Spike: "I think it's you, doesn't want to go there."

Xander, copping to it easily: "You've got me."

Spike's seductiveness is like a thin, silk veil across naked uncertainty: the practice of distraction and undertones. "Have I?"

Xander lets his mouth warm Spike's ear: "My wallet, my dick, my hands, my..." Heart. "...green and utter jealousy."

Lashes lowering, Spike curls out a smile for him. "Your orgasms."

"Yes. You're a good orgasm friend." A surge goes through him, a river rush of feeling like he's only ever felt for Willow, a strange but wonderful thing. His lips move to add with gentle redundancy: "My friend."

Then they're called to dinner, and they go.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Xander dealt with the attempted rape things years ago. It was ordinary alchemy. A while after the First Evil had been handled, Buffy was working Xander's nerves--he can't even remember the reason now--and at the same time Spike had done something equally forgettable that earned him a temporary spot in Xander's good graces. They'd all been at Buffy's: post-traumatic social gathering number nine hundred and whatever. He'd walked into the kitchen to get something, a drink maybe. The two of them had been in there talking--Spike and Buffy--and Buffy had briefly smiled his way, distracted, the conversation nothing so intimate that she clammed up or shooed him off.

The smile wouldn't normally have irked him, but it did, a feather across a sore, and he tried to pointedly ignore her, but she didn't even notice. She chattered on as Xander got his drink, and he was half-listening, casting the two of them casual and blameless "I happen to be in the same space as you people" glances, and something about Spike's slump-shouldered, helpless attitude of befuddlement struck a chord, because for crying out _loud Buffy was so _Buffy she drove them all crazy, and that didn't excuse Spike for one motherloving minute, but clearly Buffy had moved on, Buffy could deal with what had happened--whatever _had happened, because the details were never shared. She'd dealt with Spike the same way she had with Willow and Faith and Angel and Andrew and too many others to count, and here she was, dressing down Spike in the mildest possible tones for who knows what, delivering sugar and tart verbal slaps, talking to him the way a know-it-all girl talks to a friend or some kind of social improvement victim, and there was still a lot of hatred on Xander's part, but it suddenly struck him as bloodless and lukewarm, like leftovers from some meal you can't recall eating; the kind of hatred you feel for some punk-ass stupid ex-flame of your sister's, and not a neck-crawling vampire.

The sister who never pressed charges and gave as good as she got.

Time can create small stitches of affinity as much as it can create distance, mend as much as rip. When you're young you don't get that. Aging helps. You don't get perspective so much as you just get tired.

So one night there's some movie on Showtime, enacting a terrible, disturbingly graphic rape. They watch in silence, as if someone had clicked the mute button on their normal idle commentary ("What the bloody hell's she wearing--looks like someone killed an ostrich on her head"), and then Spike gets up and leaves. Later they talk around the subject, briefly and with a crosshatch of aborted assurances to each other. They reach a mute understanding. Xander thinks they do, anyway. As much of an understanding as you _can reach when you aren't verbalizing a goddamn thing. They could be acting out their issues with hand-puppet therapy, if they were oh, say, two other people.

The next morning, Xander wakes from a dream that Spike is raping Buffy. It's creepy, but it's a dream, and the extent of his angst is to slink from bed, shower, and navigate his way through the rest of the day via a series of grunts and hand gestures.

That evening he does the wacky and unthinkable and brings Spike flowers. Which makes no sense, and on so many levels. Spike stares at the handful of truncated dead things in surprise and then smiles. It's an amazing smile. It's the only blossom worth looking at in the room. His eyes soften and he gazes at Xander as if he's never seen him before. The whole exchange stuns Xander, makes him Spike's bitch for the rest of the night, dumbfounded and clumsy and short-circuited by weird impulses, schemes to make Spike do that neat trick again with his lips. Cruises, chocolates, fancy dinners--okay, his impulses are not so much weird as trite, not to mention so totally inappropriate for both a vampire and a red-blooded male.

Xander's entire romantic history is Anya and that's just fucking scary.

Well, reconsider: his entire romantic history consists of Cordelia, Faith, Anya, and Tim--a guy who thought sharing _Chiclets was a sign of commitment and started talking about moving in with Xander right after his own dishwasher broke.

Still fucking scary.

Anya comes to visit and it's just as freakish as expected. Her chain of magical shops--modeled after the Magic Box but given a New Age face lift--have been successful, and in consequence she's flashy and upbeat. She condescends to Becca and Dawn, trades snippy repartee with Willow (who, when Anya turns her back at one point, raises clawed hands in parodic witchiness and pulls the most comically terrifying face that Xander has seen in years), and shows way too much interest in the nuts and bolts of his relationship with Spike. Sexual innuendo fully applicable there.

Spike, strangely, takes some of her harsh edge off. He liquors her up over dinner and calms her down to a soft hum until her hair is a bit awry and she's pressing a tumbler against her cheek to cool it. Her old insecurities and uncertainties, still present, start to reveal themselves, drawn out by his mild questions. By the end of the evening everyone is feeling sympathetic toward her and the gathering closes with a series of hugs.

On the dark winding drive home, it strikes Xander that her visit was completely gratuitous, not at all business related, and--a bit tipsy--he almost starts to cry. They're all freaks, damaged and alone, and it's wonderful, like being part of a secret club--the ones who've saved the world--but it's also terrible sometimes.

He says nothing to Spike of what he's feeling, but maybe Spike senses it. They don't make love that night; they walk down the beach with their bare ankles in the waves. No demons attack.

I have a demon, Xander thinks. It's walking next to him, made colorless by night, just a figure in shadows. He is unutterably happy. The universe is huge and strange. Unkind but strange. And it's the strangeness that makes it bearable. He's only getting that now.

The season turns and it begins to rain all the time, warm rains. His nerves are a perfectly tuned piano and the weather plays scales on him, sends his moods up and down--it's really work that is setting him off, but the rain seems timed to accompany. He leaves work early more often and comes home to find Spike in the living room, lamps on, the rain busy outside, the cat making a lump of itself on the couch arm and staring at the TV. Spike will almost always be on the computer, shoeless feet propped on the coffee table. And when he looks up and sees Xander, he's never not happy. He's so fucking easy to please. This is his life.

Xander, erratic, sometimes drops down to the carpet and gives Spike a blow job that makes him writhe and card Xander's hair. Or they'll just sit, Xander's mind turning off for a while.

It feels as if stormclouds are massing, as if the dark is rising. Evil might be making dire plans at any moment in some crack or corner of town, or motoring on its way to the Hellmouth for a fling.

"I don't want to die," Xander says one day, when the sun is so overcast that Spike can stand with him at three o'clock in the afternoon on the deck and see the distant, restless waves hitting the beach, through a gap in the bushes.

Spike: "Don't knock mortality."

Xander, still watching the waves, feels a flash of anger: "You say all the wrong things."

Spike, quiet. Sad maybe, though it's hard to tell: "Yeah?"

Xander, after a long pause: "No."

Spike has a particular sweater, wool and cable-knit and authentically Irish, in a complex shade of blue-green that Xander's eye keeps trying to puzzle out. It's one of many articles of clothing that are very unlike him. That is, the old him. He has dyed his hair again, though, and it sticks up in whitish-blond tufts that draw Xander's hand upward whenever they're close.

He loves Spike's face, the way it molds to his head, the way his head rests on his neck, the way his neck stems up from the downcurled edge of his sweater. Spike often smiles at him. He's so pale, and so perfect, and when Xander sees him at three o'clock in the pearly twilight of the sky he can't tear his eyes away.

It's time for something different, and he takes Spike to L.A. for no good reason. "Let's get out of here," he says. "Let's go somewhere." There's a concert Spike wants to see and they attend in ridiculous outfits, leather and ripped shirts, both of them laughing and stoned off some sweet pot that a friend of Dawn's scored for Spike, a thing Xander will never tell Buffy.

They visit Angel and company. Stay for a few days and help kick some local demon ass. It's a hell of a good time, and at one point Angel lifts his chin and laughs with genuine pleasure and Xander quite likes him. Just for a moment.

Then they take the car and drive east in random paths, heading toward Buffy. She's expecting them and when they get there, she's radiant, white teeth and wispy hair and big eyes. Such a skinny, pretty woman. No longer a girl, not at all. There are hugs exchanged--Xander lifts her off the ground and she squeals. It's hard not to look at her, impossible not to love her. Spike is more jazzed than Xander has seen him in a long time, ebullient and attentive to his slayer. They walk around the college, then town; have dinners, see the sights. Buffy introduces them to her boyfriend, her friends. She's found a place for herself.

Buffy: "I still get in a good slay now and then. The commute is nothing--New York, Boston, Philly. The vamps in Philly? _So easy to spot. It's like a Michael Jackson video. I swear time stopped in the mid-eighties."

They're both terribly, manfully indulgent and protective of her, though she clearly doesn't need them to be.

Her friends are a mix of flighty and intellectual, goofy and aloof.

Spike, speaking softly as the first streaks of pink are appearing in the sky, as they're all sitting around in Buffy's apartment after a night of talk and beer: "Dawn misses you."

Buffy, looking down: "I know."

Xander: "Come home more often. If it's money--"

Buffy: "No. It's...not. I just," shrug, "I lose track of time. I _mean to visit, and then there's a test or paper due, or I end up in Hartford tracking down some vamp with a kiddie kink. And Dawn is...she's doing so great. Best thing that ever happened, big sister leaving the nest."

The drive back to California is mellow, slow. They seek out the kitschiest hotels, the ones that still have unsold stock of color-tinted postcards from the fifties, agate keychains and rock candy and locally jarred honey, pine cabins and mountain views. They ignore interstates for the back highways and discover restaurants with proud pedigrees, selling huge, dripping burgers that stun Xander's cerebral cortex, touristy places that Spike visited with Dru once upon a time, though his stories require careful editing.

Xander's Jag has well-tinted windows, and he takes great care with his passenger. They don't fight over the radio. Much.

There's one motel where the walls are glossy knotted pine, hung with flying-duck paintings, and the lamps have small orange shades. The ice machine is broken. Xander has been chewing gum and his breath smells of wintergreen and Spike smells of the shower's tiny, floral soap. They are on rough sheets and the room's heater has an annoying buzz.

"I want you to stay with me," Xander says.

Spike, blinking up at him: "Don't I now?"

Xander: "Just stay."

Spike: "People clamor for my presence."

Xander: "I know."

Spike: "It's hard, bein' in such demand."

Xander: "You can't go, though. Tell them you're booked up."

Spike: "Well, I don't want to disappoint..."

That could be taken a few different ways, but he's looking into Xander's eyes, and his voice is a quiet thing, and his meaning seems clear.

Xander: "Good."

It's a moment of good. It's like a postcard.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Some of his best Spike-induced orgasms:

Evening, in a well-lit chain store parking lot, isolated from nearby cars but in view of shoppers coming and going. Classic car-parked blow job, Spike disappearing below the horizon of the dash like a street hooker and sucking him off. After a few hair-raising minutes, Xander flings his head back and becomes so loud and encouraging he wouldn't have noticed if small children or cops had been knocking on his window. He's the one knocking on the glass when he comes, hard enough to crack it.

A creature they nickname the Acid-Wash Demon destroys Spike's boots and does some nasty damage to his feet. Spike is laid up healing for three days. When he's done, the two of them bookend the smaller couch and Xander massages Spike's feet with oil, a gift of Becca's. One of Spike's feet keeps wandering between Xander's legs with wicked intentions, and god, every part of him is clever, Xander thinks. Every part of him is sex. Spike has elegant feet, like a statue's, as if someone put artistry into making them, getting the twist of ankle just right, the veins and bones. And Xander lets himself be talked into taking his dick out, letting Spike work him over--ball and heel and arch of his foot--until Xander is shuddering like that time he stuck the screwdriver in the electrical socket.

Spankings, which Spike does dirty and good. He knows just how to give them without making Xander feel like a fool, which is something Anya failed at spectacularly the one time they tried it. Spike has done this before, and that takes Xander's mind places it does _not want to go, because...Dru? _Angel? Gyahhh. Vampire hands warm themselves on his ass; Spike has a few different methods of angling his blows--kind of sideways, or flat on--and Xander discovers he has a preference for the first. His dick drools and aches against Spike's thigh until he comes, rubbing himself off with hitches of breath and then throaty cries, his burning face smashed into the blankets. Sometimes Spike adds dirty, whispered words to their little tableau and Xander goes to a psychological place he never entirely gets used to. But it's deep, like a pain surfacing from his chest to become lighter; and it makes him realize how much he trusts Spike, so he asks for it. Sometimes.

The full-body dick rub, playful and a bit nasty: Xander straddling Spike and rubbing himself across Spike's face, neck, chest, painting him wherever it feels good to thrust. The way Spike lies there almost peacefully, the way he shifts, flexes, turns his head and jaw, murmurs approval with his eyes closed, makes Xander swell all over, inside and out.

Everything they do is good and hot and fun, never really awkward. Or when it does get a little awkward, it solves itself without fights or trauma. They don't often have bad sex. Spike doesn't make him feel lame. When someone gets called "easy" in a sex way, it's usually about sluttishness, but with Spike it's a different kind of true. He's apparently had enough sex in a hundred years that everything has run together, like tigers melting into butter, and he can be savage or unhurried or amused or taunting in _just the right way, and maybe he's tailoring himself to match Xander's needs, so skillfully that Xander can't pin him on it, or maybe it's chemistry, synchronicity, that makes them want the same things at the same time.

Xander: "Were you always a good lover?"

Spike looks pleased to be complimented and says: "What--you think it comes without practice?"

Xander: "Isn't that the difference between a skill and a talent? It could be a natural talent, right? ...sucking someone off." He smiles, half kidding.

Spike's face is odd and intent and serious as he considers Xander. A small frown has etched itself between his brows: "Suppose so. Wouldn't know." Dry turn to his voice. "I was well trained."

They've touched on this before, and Xander has always been interested in hearing more details, harboring an illicit, naughty-boy thrill at the implications of this. Training. Even though the figure behind this mystery is Angel, their history fascinates him with a low-down dirty tickle.

But whether or not it's Spike bringing up the subject himself, he always answers Xander's questions with the assurance: _you don't want to know. When he says that, Xander lets it drop. He can tell when Spike isn't interested in talking about something: his face closes down. Shades dropping in the windows, shop sign turned to closed.

Now, though, Xander feels that Spike has mentioned it one too many times. Maybe he _does want to talk, and just needs to be pressed.

Xander: "So how exactly do you train someone to do...that."

Spike gazes at him, and says predictably: "Told you before. You don't want to know."

Xander looks at Spike's face and thinks of how Angelus probably hurt him; but then again--here and now--Spike seems completely untraumatized, matter of fact about it, as if he really is just thinking of Xander, like maybe Xander's too human or too young to hear such adult, vampire secrets.

"I do," Xander says. "What makes you think I'll freak out? Does my Hellmouth cred count for nothing? I've walked on the dark side, my friend--" And now he's playing it up for effect, a topping of extra cheese. "--I've seen the evil that lurks in the hearts of men." He wants Spike to share his secrets. They're lying in bed on their sides, facing each other, close enough to touch, far away enough to talk. They're primed for secret sharing.

Spike is still serious, and his face has started to smooth itself out, leak away expression. "Xander--"

His name: a bad sign, and annoying. He says in exasperation, "Oh come _on."

Spike, calmly: "Fine. You want to know how vampires train their kind? I was a bashful, tight-arsed little sod 'fore I was turned. Closest thing I'd had to sex was back-alley hand jobs and I prayed God's forgiveness after, for letting low women tempt me. Dru was my first, made sinning easy. Then she took me home to Daddy." He pauses. "I was all puffed with myself--worryin' his ankles, always a laugh to see if I could trip him up. But I was a pup, hardly worth his attention. Slapping me down now and then was as much trouble as he took, till I pissed him off enough to make it interesting for him. Spent a good year on me then." His tone is musing. "Darla's doing, really. Think it was a bet." His eyes flick to Xander. "Sex was just part of it." And then: "To keep a man from biting, you have to pull all his teeth out. Takes about a week for a vamp's to grow back if you feed him well. Longer if you starve him."

Xander's throat is tight and dry.

"'Course, the point was to break me in so well I could keep my teeth. Till he was sure I'd do anything he said 'fore he even said it." A smile without any pleasure, cold eyes above. "Once he got started, he wasn't in a hurry to stop. I was his workshop project. He broke me long before he lost interest, kept on to try out new things. I heeled like a good dog for him. He had this thing for dogs, trained them as well. Amazing what you can teach a dog to do if you--" Spike pauses. "You want I should stop?"

Xander nods, and it stops and he feels shaky and small--not small as a man, but small the way a human feels small when he realizes there's more in the darkness than just him. He wants to crouch down and hide away from things.

Later though, he gets angry in a way he hasn't gotten angry in years. Not since he first clashed with Angelus over Buffy. It's a smoldering, killing anger, it's as if he's operating some heavy power tool, the vibrations working deep into his bones. He battles it in his own workshop, cutting and sanding things, blasting noisily through wood, smashing and hammering and ripping until sometimes he's hard, a rageful hardness that he doesn't bring to Spike, but eases with his hand, rough jerks as he imagines killing Angel in different ways. Climaxing always on unspeakable violence.

It's not as if Spike hadn't been evil too. Make that a capital E: Evil. Obnoxious, sleazy, ruthless: a stalker, a manipulator, a guy who'd kidnap kids to serve his purposes, who'd killed slayers and thousands of people, cutting a bloody swathe across continents, his vampire face hard and ugly and empty of life. Xander had enjoyed Spike's humiliations and been indifferent to his feelings, the angst and bitterness of a monster.

Nothing makes sense. Xander can't make it scale out to justice. He's starting to see things differently--he's somehow been stuck with an idea of good and evil as an equation on the level of basic math, but it's not, it's beyond that, beyond even algebra, where you can fill in x's and y's as almost anything--it's like those equations in _Good Will Hunting those squiggles and shapes up there in the stratosphere of meaningless complexity. Down here on Xander's level, nothing is ever going to add up or factor out. He can't kill Angel. He'd once wanted to kill Spike. Now he feels about Spike the way he once did about Buffy, at the time he'd hated Spike.

It's enough to make a man cry. In private.

He builds Spike a desk. An elaborate, detailed, roll-top, pigeonholed desk, with a hand-rubbed varnish, styled like an antique but designed to take a computer.

For a while Xander has trouble getting it up in bed, now and then, but the problem passes off with time, and sex acquires another layer, a deeper patina. This complicates things that used to be purely fun, because it's a kind of intensity inside him that isn't going to go away. It's harsh and full of longing, trapped inside him, and he tries to get it out--through his mouth, with kisses all over Spike's twisting body, through his dick when he comes, through the planing movements of his hands over all that unmarked skin.

Xander hopes it's getting out of him and through to Spike. He doesn't have a lot of good words for it, but it's something he can do with his hands.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Willow: "Are you in love with him?"

Xander: "That's the big, heart-shaped question, isn't it?"

Willow, smiling, eyebrows lifting gently in a very cute way: "You act kind of hearty, you know."

Xander: "Do I?"

Willow: "You touch his hair," she lifts her hand up behind her head to the nape, "right in the sweet spot." Her lips twitch, a tiny but firm not-quite-a-smile motion, pretty much a gavel banging down to say: case closed.

Xander goes for the smaller, safer admission: "I like that spot. That's the best spot." He smiles and looks off to the side, his thoughts taking an alone moment. Traffic goes by.

Willow: "It'd be okay to love him, you know."

Xander cuts her a glance, and some of what he's thinking reaches his face: a dryness at her permission but also an acknowledgment that vampire boyfriends come packaged with issues. "Yeah." A pause as they continue ambling toward the Magic Box, coffees in hand. "Timing is everything, isn't it."

Willow's face knits up into a quizzical, self-directed little frown. She's got a navy pea-coat on, and a fuzzy striped scarf, and her hair is doing the Chloe. "We have the weirdest lives," she notes, more or less to herself, as if this hasn't occurred to her lately. "By the most objective standard, I mean? We're right up there."

It's nothing they haven't joked about before, and it's not even a joke really, but Xander nods as they re-establish the common bond of weirdness.

When Xander next sees Spike, he thinks about love. Big word. Four whole letters. He's trying it on for size as he studies the curve of Spike's bowed head, nape to neck to shoulders. Spike is on the couch, typing, absorbed in something, eyes fastened to his monitor screen. Xander thinks that love isn't a useful word for what you can feel for someone. It is and it isn't.

Most of the time he thinks of himself as: Xander Harris, ordinary guy. It's his shoe size. If the shoe fits, and all that. And ordinary guys have ordinary-sized loves. At least, this seems the usual rule. He's not the kind of guy who gets the slayer, for instance. He found that out early. And when he was with Anya--and wow, honesty isn't the nice place in your soul, is it--when he was with Anya, he loved her, he did. But he'd also settled. Settled for settling down with her, because he's always been the kind of guy to try hard and work at things he isn't a natural at. His love was ordinary-sized and not enough. Which was why the whole big botched marriage thing, if you rooted down to the underbelly of fear.

Spike is not at all ordinary. He's slayer-sized. It doesn't matter if he's communing with Xander's couch, or that these days he's more often cursing his keyboard than cursing some demon with the nerve to bleed on him as he guts it. He's an established element--like a rock star with those seven solid albums to his name that ensure his place in history. Not a one-hit wonder, by any means, and he can afford to coast for a while, bring it down a notch. The concept of retirement is meaningless when it comes to vampires; you've got to take the long view. Spike could seclude himself away from society for a hundred years and then turn around and write a whole new chapter for himself in the world's book.

After all, it's been done before.

But okay, here's the funny thing: up until New York, Xander had mostly been acquainted with the Big Bad Spike. It was like knowing Superman--or, well, Bizarro. A guy who duked it out with hellgods, grabbed swords bare-handed, flew up tall towers to save damsels in distress. No matter what Xander felt about Spike back then, he'd gotten to know him as a big, loud, comic-book persona with icy white hair and sinister eyes, duster flaring behind him wherever he strode. And no matter how low Spike sank, diminished by circumstance--no matter how many debates you had with him about the best Doctor Who or the right way to eat french fries--he always had a cloak of darkness around him that kept him upright. He'd looked taller than he was.

Now Xander is getting to know Clark Kent, a guy apt to lounge in low-slung sweatpants, who's trying out different brands of yogurt with his blood, who fumbles when he types.

With all that in mind, what's more likely--that you'll pull a Lois and fall for the Ubermensch? Or that you'll yen for the nebbish who's starting to reveal his cunning at crossword puzzles?

Spike, plunking down across from him at the kitchen table: "What's up?"

Xander, angling his notepad: "I've been meaning to--there's this thing." Spike, looking suddenly warier, waits for him to spill. "You know how you have to use my credit card to pay for stuff," Xander asks, "and it's doable, except there's that whole forgery element?"

Spike: "Yeahhhhh..."

Xander: "I just thought it would be cool if you...had a name." He's put this off for weeks, maybe even a few months--he's lost track of time deliberately, to avoid raising money issues again, and this isn't the way he'd intended to go about things. He's saying it wrong. Spike is staring at him, forcing him to continue. "A last name," he clarifies. "And a social security number. To be official."

Spike's brows crease in surprise as if he hasn't ever thought of the idea before, which seems unlikely, but maybe it's been a while. "And why would I want that?"

Xander takes a breath, leaps: "So I can put you on the checking account. And the deed. And my insurance policy."

Spike: "I see." His voice is so soft and strange it makes Xander hincky. He can't tell if it's good or bad, Spike's tone, and Spike is leaning back now, picking at a spot on his jeans, eyes down as if this is where all his focus has gathered, this one tiny crease of denim. "Never been fond of assigned numbers. Tends to attract the wrong sort of attention."

Xander: "The government's not going to know you're anyone worth caring about. Willow can fix it up, get you a clean identity."

Spike, glancing up: "Can she. Planned this out, have you?" He's curious.

Xander: "Yeah. I mean. No. I've just been thinking about it." A pause. "If something happens to me--" It hurts to say it. "--I know you'll fall on your feet. But I want to put a cushion there."

Spike: "You should leave your money to the Bit."

Xander: "She'll get some." He feels they're moving off the point. "But it's not just the future. It's the now. I've got," he reaches for something plausible, "too much. I need to share the wealth."

Spike: "Plenty of charities, if you want to--"

Xander, sharply: "Spike." A breath. "Fuck charity. You're not a charity. I want your name next to mine on little pieces of paper, okay? Is that...it's just a thing. We humans do. We like paper." His lips manage a quirk, and he fixes his gaze on Spike, holding him steady. "We line our nests with it."

Spike says he has to think about it, and that's as far as it goes for a few weeks. It would be easy to resent Spike for keeping him on hold, but Xander finds a reserve of quiet patience, and puts his notepad and his paperwork away in a drawer. When Spike finally agrees, he brings it up out of the blue. Blue wide sky. "Been thinking about what you said."

And Xander smiles inside.

Willow: "Okay, so we need a last name."

Spike stares at her, casually shutting her out with his eyes. "Pick one then." A sly, dry glance at Xander. "Harris."

Xander holds up a finger to point out: "Trendy but disturbing." It's just his personal hang-up, it's where he draws the line in the sand, where on one side you're gay but average, and on the other side you're _gay, gay, gay and hosting dinner parties served by naked waiters. Spike doesn't seem crushed or anything, though.

Willow steps in: "Yeah, I think you should have your own name." She tries to sound offhand as she hunches closer to her computer, but ends up high-pitched and obvious: "So what about your old name...before you died?"

Spike's eyes narrow, and it's almost a showdown, but Willow keeps an innocent, inquisitive face on. Xander wisely says nothing. Spike, tight of lip, finally lets out: "Atwood." It's a perfectly ordinary last name and Willow and Xander exchange a puzzled glance.

Willow, determinedly upbeat: "Okay, great! William Atwood."

Spike looks disgusted and gloomy, as if he's revealed some great secret about himself. Xander is helpless to find this anything but endearing, and gazes fondly at Spike, making the other man scowl even harder.

Soon there is a paper trail, and a virtual one, along with a folder of very real documents: birth certificate, social security card, California driver's license, Permanent Resident Card, affidavits, tax returns.

"Hello, William Atwood," Xander says one night, sliding his arms around Spike from behind.

Spike: "Sod off."

But his growl is worse than his...no, strike that.

Xander is pleased, though. And Spike, after inflicting a stubborn trial of grumbling on everyone, seems to get a kick out of his legitimacy. Dawn takes him around town and forces businesses to card him so that he can flash his new, flawlessly substantiated ID in place of his old one. And as time goes by, Sunnydale logic prevails, the origins of his false identity fade, and everyone starts to take for granted that even a vampire deserves a green card. What they did seems a small and necessary massage of the citizenship process, instead of the highly illegal mix of magic, computer hackwork, and graft that it is.

Armed with his own name, and a share of funds, Spike starts to buy Xander things. Shirts, a book, a watch. Xander, smiling in delight: "Hey, I needed a new watch!"

They're in an odd place, all told.

At night, Xander always logs onto his own computer for a little while. He has e-mail, sites he keeps up with, a few geeks he chats with. And he keeps a diary. It's just a simple program for journaling, stored on his hard drive. He isn't sure why, but he wants to try and record this part of his life, in case something happens. It's hard, though. The typical entry goes something like: Thursday -- More rain today, colder. Eggs for breakfast. Jack tried to get me to go with Tucker Co. and derailed the entire meeting with Hammond. Asshole. Came home early with headache & talked with Spike about buying new tires. Killed Masostic (?) demon, Restfield south--tusks, very smelly--thing took three swords.

Whenever he goes back and reads these entries, he's confused by how totally he keeps missing the point. He doesn't remember conversations from even a week ago--tires? Jesus. Big fucking deal. In his mind, when he wrote that, there must have been some reason it was important. He isn't sure what, though. He knows when things are important, but it's nothing you can put easily into words. It would take so long, and he's impatient about writing. Not his thing. So he doesn't try to get down the long conversations he has with Spike about everything and nothing, the way Spike rambles on about India and curry, or how women wore their hair when he was a boy. It would be more than he's capable of to express how he feels when Spike looks sideways, holds his head a certain way. Or how he comes over when Xander's on the computer, brings a plate of Fig Newtons. The shape of his eyebrows. The creases of his tee-shirt when he's sitting up in bed with a book. Not that this is so important, but it's what Xander notices. Behind that fan of creases is Spike's chest, and his heart doesn't beat, but he's reading a book, and it continues to be strange. Something to wonder about. A big tangled fascination of little details.

How the hell do you put that into words? This is what he asks himself as he stares at his stupid journal program and its blinking cursor, and meanwhile Spike comes up behind him and strokes his shoulder, and Xander wants to shut the computer _off because shit, he's got a life going on right behind him, trying to get him into bed. And if Spike gets dusted tomorrow by some son-of-a-bitching demon, a program full of words isn't going to bring him back.

Spike: "You coming to bed?"

Xander: "In a minute."

And Spike goes, and Xander shuts down window by window, until it's all darkness, and then he follows.

Spike is in bed, chest bare, silk pajama-clad legs loosely apart as he rests on top of the sheets, one arm folded across his stomach. His lamp is on, his side of the bed. He's closed his eyes. Might be asleep. He looks serious and still, as if he is. And he killed three vampires earlier that night, so it wouldn't be a huge surprise if he's conked out.

But he opens his eyes when Xander comes in. He's a vampire, not a human. He doesn't get the same kind of tired. He's always so ready.

It's like getting a present, over and over again, one that never gets dull.

Xander never turns the lamp off. He wants to see everything.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

It's that time of year.

Xander: "Okay. _So over this."

Willow tries to comfort him: "It's not that bad." Adds in a bright-side tone of voice: "At least you're warm."

Xander glares at her with baleful red eyes from out behind a shaggy curtain of fur that extends to cover his entire body like the coat of a yeti. "You know," he seethes, "time was, your resident evil had _no sense of humor. It came, it bitch-slapped you, it tried to dominate the world. You knew where you stood then."

Willow begins reminiscently: "Well, the mayor actually--" Then catches his look. "Shutting up now."

Xander: "This warlock of yours plays pranks like a brain-damaged five-year old."

Willow: "He's not _my warlock. But don't worry. We'll get this fixed." She pats his thickly furred shoulder and smiles, way too fucking cheerful for Xander's liking. "Hang in there!"

A week later, she rages and fumes, pacing the magic shop in a scary, manic, pissed-off-witch way: "Okay, this is _so not funny any more."

Xander, eyes glazed with twisted fascination, has to agree. Dawn has not yet stopped gaping.

Spike, sharply: "Be careful." Willow is holding the Churakkan orb tightly and using it to gesture with. "You don't know your own--" There's a cracking sound and a brilliant flare of light, and then the orb is crumbling from her hand. "--strength," Spike finishes, while the dusty, fragmented remains sift and trickle to the floor.

Willow: "Ohhhhh." She stares at the orb, and then her startling blue eyes--eyes of Spike--lift in horror at them all.

Spike, in Willow's pissy tones: "Oh, well done. Could you _try to remember you're a vampire, please?"

So the body-switching--the switching _back--is obviously not going to happen that night. Xander, having been returned to his normal non-yeti self, is sympathetic but unsettled. No one can quite figure out how to handle the practical side of things, so all of them end up at Xander's house, retreating from the world into its bunker. Becca in particular seems shell-shocked, and her gaze ping-pongs back and forth between the Willowy Spike and the Spikey Willow as if she isn't quite sure which one she's supposed to focus on. Xander, after the initial disorientation, focuses on Spike--who, Willow bod or not, is his personal priority.

Xander: "You okay?" They've slipped outside to the deck. Inside, the three women--one of them a male vampire--are having an increasingly anxious conversation about blood. As in the consumption of.

Spike, bemused: "Guess so. Haven't been alive in a while. Lost my baseline." His edgy, clipped style of talking is weird in Willow's voice, and the British is bleeding in too. "I think..." Willow's face frowns, but looks like Spike to him.

Xander: "What?"

Spike sighs. "Think I'm hungry."

When Spike raids the fridge, Xander can tell it's as if he's seeing its contents for the first time. He makes a huge, dripping sandwich with just about everything in there. Willow looks on with an almost comical mix of horror and resentment, her mug of blood sitting untouched on the table by her hand.

"You can't eat all that!" she exclaims, when Spike sits down with the Dagwood.

Spike, smirky: "Watch me."

Vampy Willow is disgusted--and, weirdly, manages to look even more like herself, which is subtly different from how Spike looks when he's disgusted. They both seem to be sapping their hosts from the inside. Xander starts to feel disoriented again.

They pair up for bed with a great deal of discomfort all around.

Willow to Xander: "If you have sex with my body, I will turn you into something warty and small." Eyes narrowing. "Or maybe just parts of you."

To Spike, in terse warning: "Don't look down."

In bed, Xander's wig reaches beehive proportions. Here's a Willow-shaped person going through the nightly rituals, then sitting next to him, wearing a faded tee and sweats. He has a momentary sense of what it might have been like if he and Willow had hooked up way back when, become sweethearts, gotten married. And yet he can't sustain this alternate reality in his mind for more than a moment or two, because Spike's gaze locks with his, and Xander sees him, looking out from the inside, from behind the face of his oldest friend.

Then, as if irresistibly magnetized, Xander's eyes descend to the tee-shirt and those high little breasts outlined underneath.

"You checking out my rack?" Willow asks in a low, amused voice.

_Spike! Xander catches himself as his eyes jerk up in shock. Just Spike. He groans and flops back on the bed. "This is so fucked."

The switcheroo lasts two days, just enough time for Xander to become reacquainted with his old heterosexuality, at least in name. When he and Spike sneak a Willowy cuddle each morning, it's a weird kind of nice, friendly and soft, and he doesn't feel the urgent need for sex. Which is a _good thing, he tells himself. Right? Because, Willow. They're years past that.

On the other hand: Spike. What if he gets stuck like this? Or what if someday he gets tricked out in another womanly form, with all the usual working parts? Would Xander still want him? ...her?

He tries to divert his mind away from such complicated questions, but there's a moment, when Spike comes shower-fresh from the bathroom in one of his own robes, hair sticking up all over in wet licks, and they pause next to each other--and Xander has to kiss him. Just has to. And it's Willow, lips of Willow, but Spike burns through. The kiss feeds Xander an unholy surge of lust that wants to bury itself in bad places, good places. He draws his mouth off gently, breathless, then jumps back with his hands raised as if to say: _not touching!

The Willow eyes are huge and amazed. And then Spike looks down, running a hand south over his robe, as if he's suddenly gotten a lot more curious about his borrowed body.

Xander: "Oh...god. You'd really better not."

Spike blinks, gives him a slow, wicked smile.

Later Xander hears soft little cries coming from the bathroom and runs away. He says nothing to Willow. Ever.

When he's got Spike back, vampire and very male, Xander's relief is staggering. He hasn't realized how freaked he's been until the moment he slides his arms around Spike and they stand there in loose, latched intimacy, heads held close, their bodies saying hello without words. This is the body he wants. That's just how it is.

He can't stop touching Spike: strokes his chest and belly through his tee-shirt, palming the hard muscles and then mouthing them, dragging his teeth across Spike's shoulder. Takes him to bed and sucks wet spots at Spike's black-cotton-clad nipples until the vampire is gasping. Naked, it's Spike's dick Xander wants everywhere. He can't get enough of it rubbing across his entire body, sliding into his mouth, forcing its way into him from behind while he holds himself trembling and taut and steady. He cries out as Spike fucks him with hard, relentless strokes and when Xander comes it's a sweet one, the kind you get after you've held off for a few days.

You might _think this would be enough bizarrity and psychological trauma to tide a man over for a month or two, but the next week it's a whole new kind of fucked, when a warlock's minion hits Spike with a spell that leaves him vamped out and unable to change back.

It's that time of year again, Xander thinks. It'll be a ten-car pile-up by the time it's all over.

Turns out Willow can't undo the warlocked mojo, but after some research she believes it will just wear off in time. Three, four days.

Spike is keeping his distance, upset, and Xander wants to comfort him, but senses that there's more going on here than he can understand. Spike took his turn as Willow more or less in stride. This, on the other hand, appears to be fucking him up. He's been through the pacing, roaring, kicking stage a few times now, but he can't seem to unwind and prowls through the house like a caged lion, snarly, almost afraid.

He is afraid, Xander suddenly sees, as Spike begins abusing the Soloflex, doing rep after rep, his body vibrating with dissatisfied tension.

After an hour, Spike is in the kitchen, where Xander seeks him out. The work-out doesn't seem to have helped much. If he'd been trying to exhaust himself, it hasn't worked--Spike's shoulders are still bunched and rigid. Xander isn't sure, but he thinks the exercise may actually have honed Spike's edge instead of taking it off.

Spike is heating up blood, his movements sharp and angry. _Bang goes the microwave door, and Xander briefly thinks that Spike might punch his finger right through the buttons as he sets the timer.

Xander: "Hey."

Spike's voice is startling--he hasn't spoken in hours, and his flat, normal tone suggests nothing of the furious storm he's been inflicting on his surroundings: "Xander, leave me alone."

Xander has too much to say, though, about how Spike doesn't need to cut himself off and go through this alone. It's the boyfriend speech, the supportive friend speech, and he's almost glad of an opportunity to offer it, because for months Spike has needed so little--facade of financial dependency aside, and despite their relationship roller coaster, the other man has been without any real demands.

Xander begins: "I just want to--"

Spike whirls and grabs him by the shirt collar and there's his warped, demonic face inches from Xander's own, familiar but terrifying on some instinctive level. Fangs and fury.

Spike, shouting: "Fuck off!" His shove sends Xander skimming a few yards--illusion of a skater flying across ice--into the kitchen counter, which smacks his lower back hard, a sudden flare of pain. "Stay the hell away from me," he follows up with a snarl, and leaves without his blood. He leaves the house, doesn't take the car, vanishes into the night.

And Xander has to follow, because what if his vampiness isn't just stuck--what if Spike's being hyped up by darker magics? Xander can't let Spike hurt someone. He's had this nightmare and he won't accept it. He goes searching unsuccessfully, calls Willow on his cell as he tries to track Spike. She's got a spell, and they run him down, find him huddled in a rock crevice on the bluffs. He doesn't want to see them, but it'll be morning eventually, and they're not just going to let him crawl into that tiny crack and hide. ("Like some kind of vampire crab," scolds Willow.)

He goes home with Xander, silent and locked up. Locked up inside, not outside. But he suggests chains, and Xander is beginning to feel that this might not be a bad idea. Willow, as if _trying to complicate things, tells them that Spike isn't suffering from anything but normal vamp "hormones." Her word. "You've always managed to control it," she reminds him. Post-soul she means.

She goes, leaving the decisions up to them.

Spike, back turned: "I'm not going through it again."

Xander: "What?"

Spike, low: "You hating me."

It's shocking, the idea of that hurt, and by some weird, inversed proportion it makes Xander that much more calm when he says: "That's not going to happen."

Spike: "I could hurt you."

Xander: "_That's not going to happen."

Spike, turning angrily: "And you _know this." It's a question, a challenge. He's close now, nose to nose again, his own curling away into serpentine brows. "You know this--" He jabs a finger into Xander's gut to make a point. "--or you _think you know this," and with _think his finger is like a gun to Xander's temple. At issue is the difference between gut and head, faith and mere optimism. Xander gets it, and answers--

"I _know."

Faith.

And he's got his arms around Spike, one hand tight at his neck, forcing him to accept the fact that he's going to stay right up in Spike's face, no matter what face it is.

Over the next twenty-four hours Spike throttles down to something approaching calm, and it seems obvious to Xander that most of that sound and fury was baseless--fear of what Xander would think, of whether or not he could control himself. He gets used to seeing Spike's demonic face far more quickly that Spike gets used to wearing it.

Xander's never had the opportunity to study those other, stranger features for this long. Usually, it's dark and Spike's a swirl of punches and kicks somewhere off to Xander's side. Now and then in bed--only ever in handcuffs--he loses it, that wild snarl of features blossoming up from inside with a crunching sound as he writhes. It always shoots a bolt of triumph through Xander's dick, because it means he's pushed Spike right to the edge. But Spike's usually twisting his head as he shudders out his orgasm, and shakes his face off as soon as he's done. Once or twice, Xander has tried to hold that mask on, stroking it with his fingers, trying to persuade Spike that he doesn't have to dress himself in human skin again so quickly. But Spike always turns his face to the side and gets all avoidy, as Willow would say.

Once, Spike looked at him steadily and said, "Some clients used to pay for it special. Big kink, doing it with a demon--if you're human." And though Xander was undoubtedly paying ten times what those nameless men had and could have demanded anything, he of course bent over backwards to prove he wasn't like that. Just as Spike intended.

Once, Xander asked, "Which one's the default?" No need to clarify. Spike got it and turned away, saying dismissively, "Depends on how you look at it." And Xander wanted to shake him in frustration and force him to clarify, but didn't.

Does he shake his demon face off, remove it like a Halloween mask? Or is the demon the nakedness underneath that Spike's human face covers?

Though calmer, the demon makes Spike restless. Even when he's sitting still he's wired. He doesn't touch his computer, doesn't read. Mostly he slumps and watches TV and drinks. A lot. And Xander watches _him when he can, trying hard not to be obvious or offensive. He doesn't want Spike to feel like some freak in a freakshow. It's just that he wants to _see.

Finally, though--

Xander on the other end of the couch, magazine on his lap. Spike, sighing, eyes fixed to the TV: "Might as well get your fill."

Xander: "Huh?"

Spike shifts toward Xander, his body a lean sprawl of outstretched arm, twisted torso, legs legs legs. "Take a closer look."

Xander does. He tosses the magazine, moves close--easing to Spike's side the way you approach a wary animal, a horse or a dog you're afraid of spooking. The TV continues to talk to itself as Xander reaches up and touches Spike's face. He looks angry, even though he probably isn't. Ridges glare at Xander even when he's just sitting there motionless and resigned with a beer in one hand. His lips remain tightly sealed, hiding his fangs. His eyes glow, golden and strange. Xander does nothing but stroke him for a while, fingers moving slowly around his eyes, across his forehead, down his nose. After a few minutes, Spike's eyes close and he makes a soft groaning sound.

A thrill goes through Xander, and he realizes he's hard. Painfully hard. He shifts and tries to breathe steadily, and it's hopeless.

They end up in the bedroom, and the kissing is a little scary. Fangs scraping his tongue. But he keeps getting harder, achy.

Spike: "You should tie me down."

Xander: "Not tonight."

It takes some convincing, but in a little while he's face-down on the bed, his own hands cuffed to the rail, every hair on his body electrified as Spike, poised unseen behind him, breathes on his back. Xander can feel every movement even when he's not being touched--the turn of Spike's face, cheek hovering against his shoulder blade--and then, some time later he can't measure, his inner clock incoherent and dazed--Spike rubs his cheek down his spine and Xander cries out. His dick, stifled in the pillow underneath him, hums like a live wire every time Spike drags the ridges of his face across Xander's skin.

It takes forever to come, in the best possible way. Spike never bites him. There's one point when Xander is desperate for him to, struggling against the sheets as Spike rams into him again and again, wildness rising in his own body like the quick, fever-red shot of a thermometer, and sharp fangs are at his neck and he's crying out, doesn't even know if he's asking for it, just hears himself begging, "oh god, please--please--" and Spike growls, snaps his hips forward, and Xander sobs and comes.

"Oh yeah," Spike says afterwards, as they're heading down the twilight road to sleep. "You'd like it." He's lying behind Xander, arms around his sated, unshackled body, and one hand rises, a finger tracing Xander's neck along the bite zone. "But later, love," and his lips brush the back of Xander's neck, "when all's said and done, it's just another ugly wound."

Two days later he's perfectly composed. Spike, the male model, lashes brushing blinks across his clear eyes, lips a sedate line. He's strangely ordinary. It's hard to get used to.

But Xander switches gears again. Smiles, and kisses him.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Buffy: "Are you in love with him?"

They're sitting having coffee together. Xander is starting to think that being a grown up is all about the coffee. Not the coffee per se, but the whole social ritual of drinking coffee and having serious, life-like conversations. He wants to rewind to high school, when they all drank pop and gossiped about the horrible fashion sense of their doomed classmates.

Rewind to high school? Jesus. Let that one go. Adulthood, he thinks: I embrace you.

Xander: "Did you get script coaching from Willow? I'm hoping so, because otherwise you're Willow in Buffy's body, and I think we've played that scary movie out."

Buffy, lowering her eyes with a small half-smile: "It's natural for us to be curious, don't you think?"

Xander has a meditative look for his own coffee cup. "Because it's Spike." Who'd be a scary person to love, no matter how you sliced it.

Buffy's kind, gentle correction: "Because it's you."

Xander gazes through the open cafe wall to the street, where cars ease by, kicking up splashes in the unexpected rain. "I look at him sometimes," he says absently, "and I think of that saying--about repeating past mistakes?" He catches her eye again, and she nods just enough. "Fell for a demon, fucked that up," he notes. "It's the been-there, done-that dance. Except it's not the same. He's not Anya, and I'm...not even me. Not the me I was." He tips his head, thinking about stuff, and rather than breaking in, Buffy waits him out. It's a new restraint for her. Or an old one he's never noticed before now. "I look at him sometimes," he says again, "and it's..." He gropes for words. "...it's like my life is rewiring itself."

Buffy, reaching to try and make a connection: "Is that the," uncertainty, "the gay thing?" She asks this with the caution of the indelibly hetero. Meekness, almost.

Xander smiles. Her social efforts are usually far more endearing than her heroic ones. "It's the Spike thing." His eyes grow more intent on her, and he has to ask: "Did you love him?"

Buffy considers, head posed at a slight twist: "I don't know. I was so messed up then."

Xander doesn't force his gaze against hers, drops it. Thinks it might be best not to dredge too deeply into the past. "Do you think it's love," he asks, "if you just have the little stuff and not the big stuff?"

Buffy: "What do you mean?"

Xander: "Like the other day. I'm telling him about some stupid mix-up with a shipment of some insulation. And I'm getting my bitch on, and all of a sudden I tune in, and--he's asking me about fiberglass versus rock wool, and composite versus foam, which has _nothing to do with the issue, but god. It just about killed me." The memory makes his overfull heart squeeze against his ribs; he feels as lucky as when he won the lottery. More. "No way did I tell him that stuff." Xander shakes his head. "He must be going online, reading up. That shit's boring even to _me and he's talking shop like it actually matters."

Buffy seems strangely subdued by this. "He cares," she says, half-lost in her coffee cup again.

Happy thoughts are pressing up like dogs at a window, wagging for Xander's attention, distracting him: "I like being with him. It's the dumbest stuff he does that kills me." A faint smile. "I think he's writing a book," he confides, unaware of his diffident pride, "but he doesn't want me to know."

It's a far cry from New York City, from a flash life of clubs and tricks and contemplations of the eternal.

And later, driving home, Xander's still thinking of Spike. That thing with the insulation, and so many other conversations he hasn't paid attention to, have been slipping gently by him. Spike has been trying hard to make it all look natural.

Xander doesn't always miss the obvious. There are times when life folds together, sweet as a pie--they're deep in the cherry filling and the universe is warm--and he wants to pull Spike close and bring the universe to an abrupt end, so he can be certain that Spike will be the last thing he feels.

Xander more and more thinks love is beside the point, except when he panics and decides love is everything.

It's the most common word.

I love blueberry muffins, Xander thinks. How stupid is that?

Sometimes he trades a dry, wordless look across the Magic Box table with Spike, when Willow is complaining about the difficulty of finding decent clerks or how Anya's new web sites are sucking away their own share of online ordering. Their eyes know how to talk to each other now. Days pass, rise and fall like a tide, and Spike's still around.

So with all that, it should be easy to lay the word on Spike, to give it like a gift, a fancy bracelet--or, if not that, then a magazine you've picked up at the supermarket. Something casual, spur of the moment, stripped of its heavy significance. But Xander doesn't say the word, because he overthinks it. He has two modes: thinking too much, and thinking not at all. When he doesn't think at all, long periods of time can pass.

He says it anyway, one day. He's not forcing the issue, doesn't work it out beforehand. It just happens. Impulse purchase. No fancy bracelet.

Xander: "I love you."

Spike is dripping with demon goo, standing in the middle of a graveyard--headstones splayed out like broken teeth all around them. He stares uncomprehendingly at Xander. He's holding an axe and his face wears a confused frown: he's been slapped by surprise. Xander's gut turns over with fear. You can't take words back.

Spike, lowering his head slightly to process the words: "Love." The briefest pause. "Me." He seems to be having trouble with the basic concepts.

Xander braves it out: "Yeah."

There's a moment of frozen uncertainty, and then Spike actually turns around to look behind him, as if acting out some comical--and yet heartbreakingly terrible--imperative. He's not making a point, he's just unable to help himself. He's trying to find the audience, the laughtrack, the joke.

"You," Xander whispers, and it drowns him.

Love changes everything. But it does it slowly and you usually don't notice, and by the time you say the word, it's far too late. Saying the word is the last step. It changes nothing.

Xander doesn't expect Spike to claim love back, leap to meet him over the abyss. It's enough that Spike nods at last, smiles a little: the right signs to show he's not going to freak out, pull back. Leave.

Drugstore. Xander's shopping for the boring, necessary stuff--the supplies that get you through life, things you'd gladly do without if your existence were simpler, if you were, say, a Neolithic cave-dweller. Shaving cream. Soap. Minty mouthwash. Dental floss. And while he's there, he meets up with Susan Pilgrim for the first time since junior year of high school. Could there _be any woman more oblivious? She's Classic Sunnydale Lite, but hadn't she moved away? And how the hell did she remember his name? He'd been a non-entity then to everyone but Willow, Buffy, and Giles. Cordelia, if you wanted to get technical, but he tries to block that out. Yet here Susan is, a chick who shared only one English and one Health class with him in four years, her face a high-beam of recognition. "Xander!"

Xander: "Oh...hi." He's blank, no memory at all. At first he thinks she's the wife of an employee.

Susan: "How are you?!" She seems so absurdly delighted, and what that says about her life is terrifying. Her last name is actually Jerome now, he learns. She wants to catch up on old times, and invites him over for some kind of cocktail party or housewarming. It isn't very clear.

Xander thinks in bafflement: The hell?

Bemused, he allows her to press her number and address on him, words looped onto a piece of paper. It's pink, lined paper from a small notebook she carries in her purse. He has no plans to attend, and their meeting seems almost Twilight Zone to him, but then at work, Jack asks: "Are you going to be there Friday?" At Susan's, he means, and it turns out that she's social with a lot of people at his company, and that's maybe why she feels like she knows him better than she does. It starts to come clear, and Xander's Hellmouthy radar, ready to peg Susan for a demon, is apparently off for once.

He's not planning to go, he tells Jack, but somehow by the end of the conversation his no gets arm-twisted into a maybe. Xander can tell Jack thinks he's stand-offish, and it's kind of funny that he's now a guy people try to persuade to parties. His geeky high school past seems firmly dead and buried. Of course, in this town, that means nothing.

When he talks about the party with Spike, it's clear the vampire's interest in attending is located slightly south of the Marianas Trench. He's not horrified or anything. It's simply that Xander's remarks about the party don't seem to penetrate.

Finally, Xander has to get explicit and say: "I was thinking of going...you want to come?"

Spike looks up, his tiny distracted frown giving way to full focus on Xander. There's this pause, like a car jumping the air across a broken drawbridge, and then he says: "Yeah, all right." And turns back to his laptop.

It's a hellishly anxious hour of preparation to get ready for the party, and when he's done, Xander realizes there's still another hour before they even have to leave. Disgusted with himself, tense, he gets a beer and bides his time alone in front of the TV, trying to run his brain down to empty. He doesn't want to be in the bedroom, because he's afraid he'll drive Spike bugfuck the way he's driving himself.

With fifteen minutes left to go, Spike comes into the living room, readied for the evening's social experiment.

Spike is wearing expensively fine suede shoes, dark brown. Faded blue jeans that rest on his hips in a way God never imagined: not especially tight, but following the line of his legs. A belt that looks right, without catching the eye too closely. A dark-blue fitted shirt, cuffs rolled up, the top few buttons undone. His leather choker. His leather bracelet. His white-blond hair stiffened by hair gel to a nervous mix of curls and tufts, but looking stylish and strokable.

Xander stares, gaze lifting from feet on upward to take it all in. That's my boyfriend, he thinks with dumb wonderment.

They go and it's about what Xander expected. Pricey house in Beechwood with a lot of pastel wall art. People mingling, some known to him, most unfamiliar, all with drinks firmly in hand. A few stray children lurking and mugging on the fringes. Cheese, crackers, wine. Jack coming up to him and clapping him on the arm. Conversations about work, about rezoning, about the Oscars. Spike wanders, looking perfectly at ease. Hangs by Xander's side from time to time, goes to stare out over the landscaped backyard, studies a few bad paintings, buzzes the buffet, gets himself a drink. At one point when Xander looks, Spike's cradling a cut-glass tumbler in his palm, whiskey over ice, and talking in a laid-back way to some woman Xander doesn't recognize. One of the many women who gravitate to him during the course of the evening.

Another time, Xander searches for him and sees Spike by the stairs, looming over a few children who are sitting on the treads. They're gazing up at him, he's gazing down, chit-chat going on. Spike always enjoys being a bit scary, likes to play with an easy audience, and the kids seem transfixed by whatever he's saying. Xander isn't entirely sure he wants to know and hopes that none of the adults overhear.

Xander has been "out of the closet" for a while now. It's a catchphrase, not meaningful when you examine it. He's had few relationships with men lasting longer than a month, which means he's rarely reached that point where it's time to tell co-workers and more casual acquaintances that you're seeing a steady someone. At the office, no one asks if he's gay or straight, but also--on the spectrum of identity--he's just not the kind of guy who drops mention of his orientation into small talk.

Tonight he makes no attempt to hide, and that's a kind of turning point for his dealings with several people in the room. He calls Spike his partner when introductions are being made. It seems the right word when you share a checking account with someone. Spike gives him an odd glance on the first introduction that makes Xander realize they should probably have talked about this beforehand, but then seems to accept it.

After they've been there a few hours, they find themselves on the rear deck, half-hiding in the shadows. Light filters through the nearby trees and shrubs from a few torches. Good taste shows in the design of the backyard. Xander thinks it can't have been Susan's. There are people here and there on the grass, voices carrying to the deck only as murmurs along with the faint smell of cigarette smoke.

For a few minutes they talk, an easy space between them as they relax by the deck rail.

Xander: "Thanks for coming. I know it's boring."

Spike pauses, head tilted as if he's considering possible replies, and then: "What doesn't kill us makes us stronger." A curve of mouth. "'Sides, all the tortures I've been through, not sure I'd rank this top of the list. Somewhere above Sally Jesse, below flaying."

Xander feels a wash of small, ridiculous tenderness and can't stop staring into Spike's eyes, loving the way they speak back to him. He puts his hand out without thinking about it, cups the side of Spike's neck, plays his thumb up and down. Just because he can. And Spike lets him, which is amazing. All that cool flesh, living by magic, standing still for him. A demon with ordinary habits. His close companion with a soul.

If you set your expectations of a relationship low, every small thing is a surprise and a gift. Xander can't do that. He wants a lot. But he's getting a lot already. He thinks about how he once punched Spike's nose hard enough to make it bleed, the vicious thrill in his own knuckles, and the tight fury of humiliation in Spike's eyes as they spoke to Xander, promising that one day he would exact his revenge in the most thorough and painful possible way.

Spike: "Susan wants us to come over for dinner next week--she tell you? Already decided the menu. Told her I like chops." Dry tones. "Should be interesting."

Xander, shaking his head and feeling strangely peaceful: "Not the word I'd use."

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Xander's lying belly-flat between Spike's legs and sucking dick, a heavy, silky roll of flesh that forces his tongue down, while its head strokes and tickles the roof of his mouth like the swab of a paintbrush. Thick, moist. He can get it some of the way in and then he always begins to choke a little. He used to be embarrassed, imagining what Spike thought of him--talentless gay boy here, who sucks at sucking--until he began to associate his own half-choking sounds with more urgent upthrusts of cock and harsher noises from the vampire's own throat, and realized that Spike liked it. Likes it, maybe identifies it as a sound of helplessness. Sick puppy.

Sometimes now Xander is even clumsy on purpose, slurpy and eager, scraping his teeth along the side--and Spike _really likes this, rewarding Xander with anxious snarls, bursts of pre-come, thrashing and groans. It took Xander a while to trust Spike's encouragement, because--teeth--_so not his own thing, at least not down there, like that. No, sir. But now he knows that teeth make Spike go off into his private head space. That after a while, wrists latched above him, Spike will sink into himself, sightless, no longer making words, only sounds, unless Xander stops what he's doing, drags his teeth off, and then Spike will beg over and over, rough-voiced and as mindlessly repetitive as a doll. When he's like this, Xander can tease him, say things, but whatever he says flies off target, because Spike is deaf to him, locked tight in his own need.

Spike's like that tonight, halfway there. Xander scrapes upwards with his teeth until he's tugging on the foreskin. Sucks hard enough to draw the skin over the crown and works his tongue in one spot for several moments--heavy, focused shoves. Spike shudders. "More." His voice is hoarse. Xander keeps sucking, then pushes his mouth on deeply, then draws it off again and begins chewing everywhere. He always starts off lightly but Spike takes anything he can give, up to heavy mauling. It's almost scary. Xander doesn't draw blood, but the dark skin reddens even more wherever he nips.

When Xander is working his teeth harder than usual, forcing a roll of skin up and down over the wet head, he has a sudden certain thought, a bad thought. A dark part of his mind imagines how you might torture someone--say, Angel--and thinks, you could rip the foreskin right off and it would be a fucking brutal kind of pain, like a scalping, but worse. And he knows then, without needing to ask, that this is something Angelus did to Spike, maybe more than once. Because if Xander Harris, ordinary human, can think this up, then there's no question it would be among a psychotic vampire's repertoire of tortures. He will never ask Spike. He's learned that Spike is right and there are things he doesn't want to know.

Spike isn't going to get hurt again except in the good way, for as long as Xander is around.

That's one night, one type of blow job, and Spike is a beautiful sprawl of pale dead man when Xander is done with him.

Other nights, he just lets Spike drive. Lets all that heavy flesh bump and grind its way around his mouth until Xander's whiting out in a back room of his mind and drooling, while down below his hips work on their own: small, rhythmic thrusts as he frustrates his dick against the sheets, ass clenching, thighs trembling to drive the head into a punishing groove, making it sore and wet and raw, all of him swollen with that frictiony, never-gonna-come feeling that could go on for hours--and he wants it to, wants Spike to keep him like this, hand resting on Xander's head without force but letting him know he's helpless and wouldn't be allowed to stop even if he tried--and then Xander's hips hitch, drag him painfully against the sheets--he's desperate to get off, it's too good, he's shoving harder and faster, quick and sharp and frantic, and finally comes with a relief that makes him want to cry.

Cocksucking leaves him so breathless that his face grows red and hot, and when he collapses afterwards, Spike will usually stroke his curls with gentle, lazy fingers until Xander returns to life, and massage his jaw back into working order when asked.

The longer they're together, the safer Xander feels. Barriers slide away one by one, and it seems dumb not to take full advantage of a lover this fucking sexy and perversely inventive. One night Xander hands a blank check over to Spike--a metaphorical one this time. He says he wants to do something for Spike, whatever they haven't done yet that Spike's been wanting, that turns him on. He's talking kink now, without saying the word. He can tell he's got Spike's interest.

Spike: "You know, there're some things you just can't dish out till you've learned how to take it." He gazes at Xander from under his lashes with lewd, sly fondness and his mouth is a smile.

Xander works this out. "Oh," he finally says. "Like...what?"

They don't jump right into the heavy stuff then and there. Days pass. Xander wants to uphold his offer but he has to process, and Spike doesn't push, so that accounts for some time. When Xander says he's ready, he leaves it up to Spike, and they have to arrange a night, so there's a little bit of formality which hangs Xander up somewhere between anticipation and nervousness. Because: formal sex night. He's done this with Anya, and it never went well. And it's about this time that Xander, slow to admit it to himself, realizes that he and Anya had really amazingly bad sex. At least for him. A man doesn't like to think that. And a man also doesn't want to share his suspicions with anyone else, so it can remain uncertain, unprobed. The tooth can't be bad if you don't go to the dentist. Besides, all sex is good sex, right? So he's told himself for a long time.

In the bedroom, Spike, demonstrating his always surprising practical side, has bolted a sturdy and well-made set of manacles to the wall.

Now there's some wall art you don't see every day, Xander thinks, staring at them and wondering what they'll do with them afterwards. Leave them up for guests to see? Cover the bolt-plates with artfully hung pictures? Make them into plant-holders, maybe? Something to decide later.

He trusts Spike. He's known this for a while, but it comes even clearer when he's shackled and facing the wall, naked and nervous. This is the big time. This is stuff that million-dollar industries specialize in. And he waits to feel foolish, a mental stage he always has to pass through when they're pushing the envelope: the suspicion that doom must be just around the corner. But the other shoe never drops, and eventually he relaxes. Spike strokes his shoulders, back, and neck, thumbs their lines in a way that starts the current humming through Xander's body. Stands close behind Xander and skims his hands everywhere, says reassuring things, lets them escalate into smoother, nastier things as his touch wanders down. Nips Xander's neck and nudges a hand sidelong between his legs, knuckles brushing the crease of his body, thumb flickering across his asshole, a word Xander considers not at all sexy, for an area that sure as hell shouldn't be, and yet he's thrusting back for more of the good touch. Spike spends a few minutes slicking Xander up, fingers rude. By the time he draws away Xander is hard, flushed all over with sweat. They turned the heat up before they started, and it feels good. He's beginning to get it. Get into it.

He's seen the cane, or rod, or whatever it's called. Asked questions about it to try and appear nonchalant. Spike ordered it over the net, of course. Rattan, nylon. Xander can't remember the fine points of Spike's description. It's straight and it has a handle. And Spike is teasing its length across Xander's back, getting him used to it. He's so slow and good about it, and Xander can't see him except in his mind's eye, standing behind him with his shirt off, jeans on, barefoot. He's going to be good at this, Xander tells himself. It'll be okay.

That's not an especially good word for what it is. Xander doesn't intend to tell anyone about this, so he's never going to need to describe it, and that's fine, because there'd be no way. He stands braced when Spike begins to kiss his skin with the cane, across his ass, thighs, back. It's so light at first he almost thinks Spike is mocking him--or, not mocking, but maybe as a vampire Spike's out of touch, doesn't have a sense of how much a human can take. But it's just warming him up, and Xander learns this because Spike tells him so in a low voice, steady as the strikes across his back. Sometimes he talks and sometimes he doesn't, and the braid of his tones with the blows begins to make Xander buzz everywhere. The force increases, but it's achingly slow, a tease, a cruelty, and it makes him tremble as the white wall in front of him blurs at the edges of his vision. He can hear his own breathing getting louder, ragged. The blows sting like horseflies against his slick back. He wants more force, and asks for it with a gasp.

The pain never jumps to a sudden, new level he can't take--every level is better and better, and he can see nothing but whiteness now as his body sways under the blows. His skin feels raw, a tongue licking up pain and pleasure. He wants to rub off, but can't.

Sometimes Spike stops and comes over to him, cups his ass or strokes his dick. The sudden touches make Xander cry out in shocked ecstasy. It's only then that he feels how close he is to coming and how much he needs to. But Spike pulls away with murmurs and a few kisses to his shoulders, and then he's flicking that torment across Xander again. There comes a point when Xander thinks he can't stand for it to stop. It's wave after wave of heat spreading into his bones and muscles and blood. He's making sounds he's never heard from himself before. His hair is clinging in slick tendrils around his face and his throat is rough and his dick is pressed against his belly, a single strand of pre-come ribboning its length like melted wax. He might be speaking in tongues for all he knows, and when the blows stop he breaks open and begins to cry. Spike is behind him at once, thumbing open his slick hole, thrusting inside with his own ragged sounds of need. When he's buried to his balls, the rasp of zipper and denim against Xander's ass makes him start to come in hot wet jerks, and then Spike is gripping him, helping him finish, drawing him into a dark wash of surrender.

Twenty-four hours later, Xander is still boneless. He never entirely got that word before--except in relation to a few species of demon that he tries never to remember--but he understands it now in relation to his own body, because he feels like a handful of chicken meat before you toss it on the grill. Says this to Spike, decides it sounds gross, doesn't care. He's lying on the couch with his head in Spike's lap, his entire body so relaxed he's nearly past speech. His entire day has been quieter than usual, with stretches of time where nothing needed saying, nothing needed to get out. He brought a book down to the beach around three in the afternoon and just sat with it open in his lap as he stared into the waves.

Pain lingers in his body somewhere, the softest possible pain, a sponge soaked through by a sea of endorphins.

He loves how his neck feels draped across the bulk of Spike's thighs, his head resting in that sweet groove. Spike's hands: one resting on Xander's chest, the other twined through his hair. It's enough to make him want to have sex again, but his body--the big chicken--is not boning for him any time soon.

There's something on the TV, but turning his head would be a crying shame and, besides, he thinks he'd have trouble seeing anything beyond a flicker of colorful lights, hearing anything but noise.

Xander: "I'd let you do anything to me."

Spike, quietly: "Don't say that." He's very serious.

Xander, eyes closed: "Hmmm."

When he goes to work on Monday, he's still in the zone of mellow. His entire body hums with the awareness of having had the best sex in the universe. He's a tuning fork: struck three days ago, still vibrating with gently diminishing returns. Work doesn't hold much interest. For the first time he wonders why he keeps coming back when he could take an early retirement tomorrow. He holds down a job, that's what a man does. So he's always thought. But this job?

He pauses in the middle of a hallway to stare out its window at the park across the street, and thinks: I could do anything, go anywhere. Right now. I could be one of those guys. Those boat guys. He's picturing the nifty yachts moored down at the marina, and the type of men who own them. Rich men, like him, but wearing white caps. Some are just weekend sailors; others have crossed the Pacific, sailed around the world and back.

Him, yachting? And more to the point: Spike? Well, no. That won't work.

They're researching warlocks that week, tabled together in the Magic Box most nights. It's like a book club, this after-work routine. A book club of people shaping the history of the world in secrecy, with occasional bloodshed. Once, Xander finds himself staring from under his lashes at Willow, idly wondering whether she's ever done anything sexually adventurous. Lesbians, he thinks, and his imagination conjures up the sex toys, the...actually, his imagination exits there, because he's still looking at Willow, and it's hard to believe she'd go very far. He doesn't see Becca and Willow heading off to some dykey orgy with a bag of strap-ons.

His entire life, he's been obsessing about sex. Ever since he was three minutes old. Maybe earlier. He's owned dirty magazines and porno tapes, watched a lot of late-night cable, gotten it on with women and men and demons. He's always thought that hard-core kink is for sad bastards: a whole lifestyle of custom-made leathers and leashes, carried out in clubs and back rooms where you wanted to be careful where you stepped. Years ago there'd been a sex shop out on Pismo Avenue, Kelly's, that Xander stopped by once in while. It used to creep him out though, how he'd see the same dozen guys every time, bellied up to the video shelves, working over the skin mags, disappearing into the curtained hallway with old sandwich bags of quarters for the pussy peep-shows. When he was with Anya, he felt superior to all that.

Okay, he kind of still does.

What he gets now is that you can do serious stuff, deep and amazing and wild, that has nothing to do with some uncomfortable subculture of middle-aged swingers and lonely people and men who size you up with fixed, empty eyes as if they've got a van around the back, with mattress, knife, and rope waiting.

And oh yeah, there's this demented warlock gearing up for the big showdown. Buffy is already home from school, ready to stand with them, and planning to stay the summer at Willow's after the ass-kicking. But the epic battle of good versus evil hasn't got Xander's full attention. Things are on his mind. Sex. But also life, and Spike, and the future. It's a dangerously distracted state of mind to be in, and there comes a point when he has to snap out of it and focus.

Bad shit goes down when the face-off finally comes. It's one of those big tornado blurs of a battle, magic raging everywhere until that ozone smell hangs heavily around them. When it's all over, the warlock is banished into some hell portal, and Willow is shocky and bloodlessly pale, looking to Xander as if she shouldn't be moving, though she's keeping herself on her feet. Becca's left arm beginning just above the elbow now descends abruptly into a stump of twisted flesh, hand entirely gone. Blasted by magical blowback. Buffy doesn't have any wounds except for the look in her eyes. The warlock toyed with her: put her through hoops, danced her like a puppet. She looks as if she's seen her own helplessness against magic and hates it. This time it was Willow who got to save the world.

Xander just feels lucky, as usual, that he's not toast, so that he can help pick up the pieces. And this time some of the pieces are Spike's. Flung high into a tree by a casual sweep of hand, and that witchy bastard had obviously hoped the vampire would be dusted with a heart-blow on one of the branches. But Spike also has more than his share of luck. If you can call it that. Tornado forces can embed a straw deep into a telephone pole like it was a nail. Spike is pinned and gutted on branches, one through his shoulder, the other through his belly. By the time the fight is over, he's managed to break the limbs, drag himself off, and tumble himself like a wet sack of bones to the ground below. Blood mats the grass around him, less than there'd be if he were humanly alive, but enough to send a wave of dizzy horror through Xander.

I hate this shit, he thinks fleetingly amid the chaos, his internal tone a kind of hysteria. Year after year--there's no way their luck can hold out forever.

Call it luck. But Spike is a mess. Shredded, fucked up, filled with splinters and twigs. Some of his inside stuff on the outside. You shouldn't have to push your lover's guts back in, but Xander does, bloodying his hands in gore as Spike lies white-lipped and shut-eyed, braced against the pain. The lower branch must have missed his spine by millimeters.

Spike, weakly, confirming mobility of his legs: "Good thing. Not sure I'd be up for Roller Derby again."

It's incredible to Xander that a body can heal from that, but it does. He takes Spike home and puts him to bed, pours liters of blood down his throat for days, tries to think of ways to coddle and spoil him.

When Angel comes up to visit his convalescent offspring, Xander is one big mass of conflicting impulses that cancel out and leave him strangely passive. He stands motionless off to the side as Angel sits on the edge of the bed and talks with Spike. A few times Angel glances his way as if he's hoping Xander will take the hint and leave, but Xander just stares at him with eyes like stone.

Angel to Xander in the front hallway, with inexpressive face but uncertain voice: "Are you mad at me?"

Xander: "Why would I be mad at you?" He's visualizing plunging a stake through Angel's black sweater, a collapse of dust pattering to the carpet. "Well," he allows, "centuries of torture and death, trying to end the world, killing Giles's one true love, and that time you punched me in the face that I've never really thanked you for. But that's all behind us." His mouth moves in the cold mockery of a smile. "Right?"

Angel: "You tell me."

Xander burns a gaze into Angel's, finally says: "We're family. And as a member of my family, I'm sure you won't be surprised when I tell you to get the fuck out and keep your distance for a while. When he wants to see you again, he'll call. When I want to see you, I'll call--except, oh wait. I won't."

Angel's posture changes very slightly--not straighter, not slumping further, more a twitch of his shoulders: "I guess you've been talking about the past. It's not--"

Xander: "Okay, here's a thing it'll help to understand: when I say get the fuck out of my house, I mean now. Or at this point," he glances at his watch, "twenty seconds ago. Which in unwanted guest time is about twenty years too long. It's kind of like dog years." He has no smile now, but his face feels frozen in a facade of psychotically pleasant calm. "You like dogs, don't you?"

Angel leaves.

Xander returns to the bedroom, suppressed adrenaline making him nauseous, and curls up next to Spike on the bed, piling up pillows so that he can look into his face without Spike having to turn. He's flat on his back like a big vampire pancake.

Spike: "Had a nice chat, did you?"

Xander, a conversational tone: "Any time, say the word. You want him dead, I'll do it."

Spike gives him an unreadable look, then says: "Don't go blaming Soul Boy. You off him, might as well take me out too. I've done more than my share of ills that men endure."

It sounds like a quote to Xander, but he doesn't know it. Doesn't care so much. He isn't up for this conversation now. "So I have a double standard," he says, trying to keep it light so that he is not swallowed up by utter darkness from the inside.

Spike's face changes to something gentle, dry, and indulgent, but he's still serious when he says: "Long as you understand that I've made my peace there."

Xander: "Sure." There's not much else he can say.

Spike: "'Sides. Heard you say he was family." He pauses, frowns skeptically. "Bit much, isn't it?"

Xander's mouth twitches. "Well, I figured, sire-in-law. Thanksgiving dinner is out, though. I'm just telling you now. But in return, you _do get to shun a member of my own family." He skims a hand across Spike's chest, adds mildly: "Or, like me, you can just shun them all."

Spike: "Hmmmm." The humming sound seems amplified by his entire body, almost a purr. His eyelids are heavier as Xander strokes him with feather-light fingers in the places he's not hurt, but then there's a moment where he seems to be staring right into Xander, blue eyes and one of those smiles that make Xander's heart flip over, both overspilling more warmth than a vampire should contain. "Don't know if I've mentioned...I'm glad you're on my side."

Whatever Spike's meaning is hinges on one word, "my," and it's hard to tell if he's saying that Xander would make someone a dangerous enemy, or if he's just saying thank-you. In the good-versus-evil show that's been running in Sunnydale for the past ten years, Xander knows that his own role is small. He doesn't strike fear into the hearts of men or vampires or warlocks. He's a supporting character, the clown that distracts the bull from the real matadors.

He can't help but think briefly of all this before he lets the thought pass on. It's not important, and it doesn't matter exactly what Spike means. It all comes down to the same thing. It's a no-brainer. As if answering a child's questions before sleep, Xander runs a hand along Spike's face and says:

"You're my guy."

It's the kind of thing you just know at the end of the day.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Xander's having doubts. He's had a dream with all kinds of symbolism in it, and he doesn't know whether it's Freudian or not, but it's right there, symbolism tall and erect as sequoias. Obvious as wood. In the dream, he's on one of those moving sidewalks, carried along in an airport: slow, steady, heading to his final destination at a level pace. All of a sudden Spike is next to him and he's been talking for a while, and Xander looks up to find they're riding on an escalator. "Stairway to Heaven" is playing on the airport speakers.

As Xander lies on his side of the bed piecing together his dream, he's amazed that his brain came up with this: is he very brilliant, he wonders, or common minded?

The thing is, the escalator isn't taking them anywhere. It just keeps going and going and somewhere up there is the next floor, but it will take hours to reach it--he knows this in the dream--and after a while he glances to the side and sees they've started to move down. Backwards.

He associates this dream with certain feelings he's been having lately. There's no question he's had his ups and downs in the last few years, but on the whole it's been a steady ride, a ride of money, friends, independence. Security and the ability to make choices. And then along came Spike, and Xander looked up: here was this whole new level of happiness, a possibility coming into view above him. And he rose, with Spike next to him. Being with Spike gets him high.

But where the fuck is this going, Xander wonders. He looks over at the white curve of Spike's shoulder and the muscles that braid his arm. The other man--so beautiful, like a demon prince from a tawdry fantasy novel--lies facing Xander, still asleep. Sheet draped over his hip, hair sleep-licked, face calm in death. His right hand rests between their bodies, a bony fan with a slight curl to the fingers. Xander's eye is drawn to the leather choker at Spike's neck, its brown twist and simple beads. He never takes it off.

Shouldn't that be enough?

It's a killing thing, how Spike wakes up: lashes lifting, head shifting on the pillow as his gaze finds Xander. And it's always an open question whether he'll smile or not, which is why Xander often slips out of bed early, so that he won't be around when Spike opens his blue, blue eyes.

Vampires are moody bitches, and Spike is no exception. He can be amazingly calm for long periods of time, lull Xander into a sense that all is right with the world. If they fall asleep blissed on sex and pillow talk, Xander expects to wake up to a contented bedmate. It isn't always the case. Sometimes Spike opens his eyes and meets Xander's and he doesn't smile; looks tired instead, disturbed by his own dreams, by existence. It tears away Xander's heart, piece by small piece. It's in his own nature to smile good morning--that's what he wants to believe of himself. He wants to be steady, a rock. And when Spike's insides are showing on the outside, through his eyes, Xander wants to be strong enough to reach out and stroke the curve of his head: the shell that holds all those dark, unhappy thoughts. But he's not perfect by any means. He's only human, and not immune to the infection of other people's moods. So sometimes they wake up and don't say much to each other, and Xander goes to work a bit pissy and on edge.

Grunts keep them stitched together: animal sounds of greeting, acknowledgment. It helps to reassure Xander that there's a subcurrent of being-togetherness that never entirely goes away. Communication below the surface.

When Spike's eyes meet his this morning, Xander wants to see a sunflower opening and turning to face its source. Despite himself, he measures Spike's actual smile against his hope and tries to decide if it's full enough and if it's for him, or whether it's a shade too brief, the exercise of habit unconnected to anything deeper. A smile without any roots.

This morning, the smile is sexy, and Spike's hand works south on his own body, waking himself up with a few lazy pulls. Xander smiles back.

Every morning should be like this.

Not every morning is. Not every day is easy. And there are the doubts. He doesn't know where they came from, because last time he looked everything was good and right in his world. Maybe it still is good. If nothing has changed, though, where are his doubts coming from?

Okay, he thinks. Here's the problem: he needs to get over this whole stupid escalator thing. Life isn't going up. It's going steady. And that's what he's got.

On the other hand...what if _he's not enough for _Spike?

Moodiness. The Harrises also breed it into their spawn. In the middle of the afternoon, Xander is at work and someone ticks him off and he raises his voice, then retreats to his office like a grizzly to its cave, guilty and testy. As he broods he feels it all come together for a moment: it's not just Spike. It's work and Becca's arm and Willow's misery and Buffy's distracting presence and his own insecure fears. And he catches himself wondering if, while he's sitting here, Buffy is visiting his house and hanging out with Spike, talking and...talking.

I am a dumb man-thing, he thinks as he stares at a photo on his desk: Spike posed in an armchair almost as if someone gave him a shove and sent him sprawling--limbs loose, sexual akimbo, head tipped as he gives the camera a look, white shirt unbuttoned and showing a hint of chest, jeans showing everything. A picture that makes female employees sneak into his office in tiny herds to show new hires the Mysterious Boyfriend.

Xander doesn't want to admit that he's jealous, that his own tightly-wound bitchfest is all about that, but self-awareness is trying to surface, pounding at the underside of consciousness like a drowning child trapped beneath a sheet of ice.

When he goes home that night, he's tired and grumpy despite himself, and there's his house: a comfortable but elegant stucco gem almost completely hidden behind layers of trees and shrubs, up a short but winding drive. The realtor hadn't needed a hard sell; the house is a marriage of perfect bone structure and taste, architecture and design, and oh man, he is so very gay about it. It's a manly kind of gay, he often assures himself. He loves his home. Tonight it soothes him, and as he turns in the drive, he waves to the gardener, who is working late. Parks, pauses a moment to absorb the ambiance: flagstones and rich green frondy bushes and the wind chimes that were a housewarming gift from Becca and Willow. He lets himself relax into the evening breeze and goes inside, tosses his keys on the hall table, steps out of his shoes.

Inside, Spike and Buffy are hanging out in the living room, and it makes him immediately tense. They're laughing and drinking beers and there's music on and they look just too, too cozy. He gives them a brief smile and goes to take a shower--makes it last a while, lets it beat down on his nape as he stands bent and propped against the tiles. When he comes out again Buffy is gone.

Nothing else special about that night, and life goes on, and there are a few more incidents--are they incidents? Hardly. A few more chance social overlaps like this, of him and Spike and Buffy and sometimes Dawn. He feels older than all of them and has no idea why. Maybe because he has a job, pulls the usual nine-to-five while the girls take the summer off and Spike just...does his thing. Whatever that is.

A month or so into summer, he's feeling sore and out of sorts. He's not doing much to change things. It just seems like a thing, a thing you let happen that will eventually pass. Moods, shifts in relationships, a randomness of wind chimes. They go to a carnival one night, everyone--even Becca, blouse discreetly pinned. It's fun, it's a wild, warm, starry night and he and Spike ride all the rides and Xander smiles at the right moments and feels a kind of contentment, and if there's a strain of melancholy underneath it all, that probably just has to do with the nature of summer. A fleeting season, even in California. Time, not weather.

But it's around this time that little things start to change. He comes home one night and Spike is in the kitchen. He's got that whole barefoot, blue-jeaned, tee-shirted thing going on; a greyish-blue tee that drapes over his muscles, a teasing sight which still makes Xander's mouth go dry, makes him want to sink his teeth deep and not let go. He looks so fucking good even from the back--Jesus, especially from the back--and he's--

--making stir fry.

Xander blinks and comes over. He's been trailing the smell since he hit the front hall, figuring Buffy is getting domestic on their behalf, but he doesn't see her. He comes up behind Spike and wraps his arms around him and lays a bemused kiss on the side of his face. Spike, relaxed, lets himself be cuddled and continues shoving his wooden thing--to Xander, kitchenware is just a collection of nameless things--around in the pan. In the onions and chicken and other fine stuff.

Xander: "What's this?"

Spike: "Thought it'd be obvious. Food meets skillet, does that sizzly thing. 'S called dinner." He turns a little to find Xander's eyes and says, "All the cool kids are doing it." His voice is a blend you could never bottle: rich and low and teasing and warm.

Xander, surfing on a wave of dazed pleasure, a trigger of goofiness: "Since when do you cook? Did I miss a memo? Because I checked the fridge--" Where they keep their post-its, he means. "--and I saw no memo. There was no memo." It's his Bill Murray impression, which is wasted on Spike.

Spike: "Yeah, well. I'm not totally helpless, you know."

The seductive smell of friend onions is making Xander downright romantic, and he squeezes his arms tighter around Spike and reminds: "Yes, but those of our patients on liquid diets are _not required to serve kitchen shifts."

Spike, mildly: "Thought it might be nice, having dinner ready."

Xander steps back several feet and does the classic finger-pointing screech, straight out of _Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the 1978 version. Spike looks confused and alarmed. Of course, it's only hours later as he's falling asleep that Xander realizes he had it backwards and that, in his impromptu performance, _he's the pod person, but thankfully it's yet another pop culture reference that flies right over Spike's bleached head. His own geek cred remains intact.

Xander, dropping his arm: "Who are you and what have you done with Spike?"

Spike pauses a moment, then shrugs a shoulder as if he's copping to a failed conspiracy: "He's in the bedroom closet. You'll find a couple of bags there."

It's wonderful, Spike's stir-fry, and Xander eats it on the couch cuddled next to his vampire as they watch _Hellbender, the latest Colin Farrell movie to hit cable.

Spike, as Farrell stumbles backwards from the bloody shower in a panic: "Christ. I'd eat that sweet ass like an apple."

Xander, forking up rice on autopilot, eyes fixed to the screen: "I'd help."

Things keep happening. Spike starts making dinner three or four nights a week, greets Xander when he comes home instead of clamming up with his laptop, stares deep into Xander's eyes at the most unexpected moments--his own wide, clear eyes saying things. Deep, deep things.

Xander is freaking out. Not necessarily in a bad way.

There's definitely a moment when he gets it, when he connects a dozen tiny dots like fireflies and figures out that Buffy has been talking to Spike. Coaching him or something. It's strangely girlish and he doesn't know what to think. Except, thinking: not so big on the thinking, not when Spike is gazing at him with luminous eyes and sliding his shirt off like a stripper. Sliding arms around Xander's waist, cheeking their faces together gently. Dropping to his knees, hands latched gently to Xander's hips.

Not when he's bringing Xander beers and doing dishes and trying to find out if he wants to try a new brand of toothpaste.

Xander: "Okay, stop." He has to wrench the toothpaste from Spike's hand, chuck it aside. It whacks into the sink. "What's going on with you?"

Spike, wide-eyed and startled, just dips his head a little and stares at Xander as if he's not sure he wants to engage the scary, crazy man.

Xander: "The cooking, the foot rubs, the toothpaste--if you're reading _Cosmo I may have to deprogram you."

Spike looks self-absorbed, as if he's adding up the details of his own behavior for the first time, or maybe just trying to figure out what to say. "Just trying to contribute," he says at last.

Xander, lost: "Contribute?"

Spike, eyebrows drawn together, face uncertain but very serious: "To our relationship."

Xander is floored, can't really find a response. He knows Spike intimately on every level, but he is still turning to tapioca, so helplessly lost and in love he can't even form words. Had he ever in his life looked at Spike differently? In disgust and loathing? It's like he's broken free of the most foul fever. His life is marked by this moment: past and present and future. There's nothing in him now that could hate Spike again. He wishes a soul was something he could hold in his hands, a thick sweet body of flesh he could fuck into heaven.

But he's so stupid. It is.

He ends up with his arms around Spike, murmuring soft things into his ear, and Spike pushes like a storm's wind against him, something exotic and tropical and dark and endless.

It's around this time his tide turns, comes in. Luck and joy and laughter, things that only mean something when they're strung together in the gazes of someone else's eyes. Xander feels lost and helpless, and when they make love he can't focus on skill, can't do anything but kiss Spike wildly all over and force himself deep inside. His entire body is a cry.

I love you, I love you, I love you, his hands say.

Spike comes for him, eyes so wide they're seeing past Xander, right up through the atmosphere to the stars.

Spike figures out how to make the perfect sandwich for him, with ham and pickles and mayo.

Spike slides close to Xander's side of the couch and leans his head on Xander's shoulder and takes up residence in the cradle of his body as they watch the world go by on television.

One night at Willow's, Xander and Buffy are talking and he throws his arms around her and has to stop himself from crying, he's so grateful. She hugs back, head on his shoulder, a tiny shrimp of a girl with a terribly large heart.

Aware that it is absurd in countless ways, Xander takes Spike to a lesser known island in the Bahamas, rents a private villa in a place so secluded and exotic, it's like a hush has fallen over the world. They have their own bay, a huge overhang of cliffs, trees massing and whispering all around them. Spike loves the way it all feels by moonlight, wears nothing but white--or, if you want to get technical, fashionably expensive colors like oyster and eggshell.

It's the first time Xander has been anywhere this exotic, this amazing. He decides seventeen times during their trip that he wants to move there, dig his feet into the white sands and never leave. He eats fruit, he eats Spike in the lazy afternoon when the blinds are drawn.

When they return to Sunnydale, it seems smaller. Kind of tacky, dull, and doomed. But their home is familiar and it smells right.

Xander: "I'm going to go pick up Supercat."

Spike, flipping absently through the accumulated mail: "Poor little beast. Hope he doesn't crawl up your neck again, like that one time..." He leaves off absently, reading something or other.

Xander: "I won't be long." He steps forward and turns Spike toward him. Letters drop to the table from Spike's hand, some falling to scatter at their feet. Spike doesn't care. He's an armful for Xander, a pliant gift. His coolness is like home, no matter where they go.

The Hellmouth is no place to grow old, but if they can, this is where they'll be.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Xander has to admit that having Buffy around perks Spike up. The inner vampire is coming out in ways that have nothing to do with face time. They're working out together, sparring two or three days a week, and Xander has noticed a return of flash and force to Spike's fighting style, especially when Buffy's around. He's no longer just going through the motions, but showing off.

Like you would for a sister, Xander tells himself.

At least he isn't wearing the duster. He's still got it, hanging in the back of the closet, an enduring item of his wardrobe, but now more of a relic, saved like one of Elvis's jackets. Or that's been Xander's impression; after Buffy came, he thought the duster might be brought out of retirement. He isn't sure if it would be important, if it was. He doesn't want to get hung up on a coat.

Riley comes back to Sunnydale to set up his station, trailing a squad of soldiers like ducklings to his mother duck. Just three of them, no one Xander recognizes, though Riley mentions that two of the men had been posted here previously. Back in the day. Xander hopes they were chosen on sound psychological principles for their flexibility and stability. The Hellmouth can deliver a lot of wear and tear on a person over time.

Riley, in his mildest voice, irony hidden in a cornfield: "Don't worry. We watch for signs they're going postal."

Like you did, Xander thinks, remembering that whole vamp-junkie phase he ended up hearing about secondhand. But he says nothing. They've all been there in one form or another. That's the point. You want people who can come out the other side of their personal shitstorms more or less intact, and keep fighting the good fight. Screwed away your boyfriend's soul? Tried to destroy the world? Deal. Move on.

On the other hand, Xander doesn't extend the same line of credit to strangers as he does to friends, so he intends to keep an eye on the goon squad himself, especially when it comes to Spike.

It's nice though, having another guy around again, someone he's not sleeping with who exists purely in the friend category. He hangs with Riley the way Spike hangs with Buffy. Sort of. Helps him move into his apartment. Shoots a few games of hoops with him. They don't have a lot of common ground, interest-wise, but they're both making efforts. More of a barrier, even more than the whole gay-straight thing, is the couple-single thing. Because if they were both single guys, they could at least go out for beers and pool once in a while, or to the movies. But doing those things without Spike feels wrong, and doing them _with Spike in tow is a recipe for disaster.

At least, Xander believes that at first. But with both Riley and Buffy around, new social mixes come into play and actually go pretty well. The four of them make a night of it once in a while, and the Buffy buffer keeps Spike and Riley in line. After a few weeks, time and familiarity and changed circumstances combine to bring the two men into grudging ease with each other. A few ferocious patrols help the whole male bonding thing along to the point where they'll even play nice when left alone together, though neither man ever looks thrilled with the other's company.

Things are okay. Spike becomes obsessed with making the perfect omelet for several days, despite Xander's assurances that all of them taste fine, from omelet one all the way through omelet seventeen, and dear god, he gets sick of omelets, but he doesn't tell Spike, because it's too much fun watching him whip eggs and chop things--his beautiful hands wielding the knife in an expert style picked up from _Iron Chef--and try to intimidate the puffy contents of his pans into submission. Expensive omelet equipment is bought, many eggs broken.

He's not especially housewifely, despite his barefoot charms. More masculine than ever, Xander sometimes feels, given the way he and Buffy riff off each other. He's almost flirty with her. But I am a strong man, Xander thinks. And it's his bed that Spike shares, his body that gets Spike off.

Buffy likes to take Spike with her when she shops, and Spike lets himself be dragged around local malls, wherever sunlight is indirect or forbidden. But Spike also has to yield some ground to Riley. It doesn't seem likely that Buffy wants to pick things up where they left off--she still has a boyfriend back east--but she's making time for him. Riley's the one who seems to be holding out a sad hope. It's hard to watch.

One night, just one of many, Spike massages Xander's shoulders--him on the couch, Xander resting on the floor between Spike's legs. Spike's hands feel like love. But how likely is that? Spike has always been devoted to women, men just sidenotes, a way to pass the time or make easy money--and maybe even a way to punish himself, though he'd denied that possibility with scoffing laughs when Xander asked him once about New York.

What would Spike do if Buffy decided right now that she wanted him back? Wanted him and would treat him right?

Ordinary guys, guys like Alexander Lavelle Harris, do not inspire great and obsessive love: this Xander knows. Spike seems comfortable staying with him, but it's obvious that he's settled. Not in the nesting sense, but in the sense of accepting what's offered instead of yearning after what's not available. And there's nothing truly wrong with that, Xander thinks now and then, because a vampire is someone you can have a long-term relationship with only if you're a vampire too.

He's just one short chapter in what will be a very long book for Spike.

If he thinks about it with this perspective, it shouldn't hurt so much when he comes home one day and finds Spike and Buffy in his bed, having sex. And perspective should help make sense of the surprised looks on their faces when they see him standing there, should give him a hint, a small one, just enough to keep him tethered to earth for as long as it takes to get to the truth of something so wrong.

Of course, perspective is a fucking joke. He has none. When they say time stands still, it means that your life ends on a certain moment and hangs there, like a ship on the edge of a black hole, tearing apart. Buffy says, "Xander," in a small voice, and Xander feels a flush of blood descend through his body from head to feet, a tingling wave he's felt before when facing down the worst. Terror. He should stay, but his feet carry him back out, and he ignores the sound of their voices behind him as he leaves the house. It's his house. Spike is on the deed, but it's his house, and if he were the same man he'd been four or five years ago he'd have told the vampire to get the hell out, told Buffy off, cut them both out of his life with a self-justification so deep it became a cold comfort. There's nothing stopping him.

Instead he goes to a hotel with a bottle of Jack Daniels--shades of his failed wedding--hides there and watches the nothingness of television, sleeps for hours. After he wakes and pulls himself together, he thinks of Willow. If anyone is going to find him, it'll be her. A snap of her fingers, eyes closed, she could find him. But he doesn't want to see her. Or anyone. He sits on the edge of the bed with head in hands, not wanting to move or deal; but knowing he has to, he finally calls her. She's heard about what happened and tries to talk to him, but he interrupts. "I want to see you," he tells her. "And them. At your place. Neutral ground."

He hangs up. It's night, and he drives to his empty house, collects his passport and a bag of clothes, and leaves town. The drive south is mindless, the drive east a blur. Will they find him? Track him? He goes liquid in L.A., withdraws cash, and uses this to travel across the desert and into the heartland, drives aimlessly until he hits New Orleans. Then jets out of the country.

At every moment he expects them to catch up, for Willow's locator spells to find him. He isn't sure how far her powers range. Locator spells work best the smaller your search area, but she's amazingly strong.

He goes to Japan. He's always wanted to see Japan. He takes a room in Tokyo, drinks a lot, goes to insane clubs with go-go girls and crazy cheerful businessmen. Doesn't try to learn the language. Just makes an ass of himself with savage thoroughness. Once he wakes up in an alley, dazed and dehydrated, burrowed into the most repulsive blanket on the planet, quilted with garbage. A rat pauses near his head to look at him. This is the bender to end all benders, and the end is...going to be a doozy.

In a booth, crying, with a bar girl trying to soothe him in chirruping tones and with little patting hands. That's where he is when Spike finds him. He's so drunk he doesn't tune in at first to the voice saying, "Xander," somewhere at the table's edge.

There's a trip back to his place, a taxi ride, Spike digging the key from his pocket and finding the hotel. His body a slump against the vampire's, lights smearing by the taxi windows, a sense of nausea and tiredness and soul weariness. He can't entirely focus, but Spike is wrapped close and his cheek is resting against Xander's hair, and his hands keep touching Xander in the good way. Stroking with a tenderness that matches the sound of his words, which are hard to make out and probably unimportant.

Morning comes: another room in a strange country with the blinds drawn. It could have been a dream, but Spike is in fact there, sitting in a chair, closed eyes immediately opening as Xander sits up. Spike looks haggard and strange, as if he's been packed in a box and shipped around the world, express delivery. He finds a rough voice and says,

"Love--"

Xander turns his face away and staggers to the bathroom, bangs the door shot, sinks to the toilet and is violently ill. It's a miserable thing when Spike comes in and puts a washcloth on the back of his neck. He has no right to do that, but he's there anyway, stroking Xander's hair, his touch so familiar it hurts.

During the next half hour there's a strained silence broken only by tiny words as Xander brushes his teeth and drinks water and showers and gets dressed in what clothes he has available, which suddenly seem unfit for public or company.

Spike: "Xander, it was a spell."

Something in Xander leaps with sick hope at the word, but it's so beside the point. "You don't say."

Spike: "You know I'd never--"

Xander: "Sleep with Buffy? Please." He stares at Spike, his brain a flat-line. He can't get his life or his heart started again. "She crooked her little finger, you fell into bed. Enough said."

Spike swallows once, and then repeats: "Xander. It was a _spell--"

Xander: "So? What the fuck does it matter? Do you love me? No." The rejection is his to give this time and it should be easy and free of humiliation. But it isn't. "And I don't love you. I was wrong. I've done this before. Anya, now you. It's obvious, isn't it? I'll sleep with anything that gives me a second look. Doesn't even have to be human."

Spike's head turns aside and down as he averts his gaze. It's too deliberate to be a flinch but there's hurt there. It just doesn't matter. It's the wrong kind of hurt.

"Someone boring," Xander goes on, "that's who I need to be looking for. Someone who thinks magic is a card trick. It'll be hard to find a guy who doesn't want me for my money, but hey, as long as he sticks around and doesn't sleep with my friends...."

Spike: "I love you." His voice is low and sore and raw, and he looks up at Xander again, blue gaze cutting into his own like a laser. Pain.

Xander, cold: "Please. Don't even try." His hands are shaking. "I've got nothing you need. You've said it yourself--you don't care about money. And I'm no slayer. Slayer, vampire. Good, evil. Me, I'm just middle of the road."

Spike, soft as a kiss, his gaze not wavering: "I love you."

Xander: "Stop," one hand raises, flattened in warning, "saying that."

Spike, his voice a husky, finely-tuned instrument: "You make me hard." The statement throws Xander off, bewildered. His heart wants to shout: that has _nothing to do with love. But he's unable to knee-jerk a response Spike's way, and Spike is taking a step closer, pinning Xander with his eyes. "The way you touch me...makes me feel alive."

Stupid, stupid words, Xander thinks. Spike's pathetic, like bad verse on a Hallmark card. No man can say stuff like that and mean it.

Spike: "Nearly killed me when Red undid the spell, when you'd gone. I thought you'd offed yourself, I--" And his voice locks up, and Xander can feel it in his own throat. Spike is closer now, his shirt stale and wrinkled and his hair awry, the shell of a tired man except that his eyes are glowing, as if the magical fire that keeps his body upright is starting to burn wild. "I would never hurt you." Spacing his words out with care, giving each one a weight of almost religious intensity: "You are the best man I have ever known."

Xander: "And that's," his throat tightens, "that's it. Big dick, nice guy--"

Spike takes a final step forward and sinks to his knees in front of Xander with one smooth, eloquent slump. His head bows. "I love you," he says, as if he intends never to stop saying it. He says it to the carpet, then looks up into Xander's eyes. "I need you." Xander can't find anything to say, but his entire body is one big question mark asking why, and Spike says: "No one's ever taken care of me the way you have. Not money." A deliberate correction of what Xander hasn't said. "Love." A faint, miserable smile, as if it's almost too much to bear: "You've got me on the ropes. Addict for it." Another deep breath of admission, and an earnest humility. "Need you bad, pet." And he bows his head again and leans forward just a little to rest it against Xander's leg, and a charged bolt of love and desire and longing goes through Xander's body, nearly toppling him.

"Oh god," he says, close to losing it. "Oh god."

His hands are in Spike's hair and he can't think. He'd thought it would all go differently, Spike harder, impatient with him, bringing him back for Buffy's sake, or just never bothering to find him at all. Xander isn't ready for love, to be loved. He needs time to prepare, to set up some defenses and excuses so that it won't sweep him away.

And he wants more, he wants Spike to give him a thousand reasons for his love so that Xander can be sure that it's not a joke or a fluke, something that will pass. He feels so needy. It can't be healthy.

There's no call for wanting more, just false expectations set by a thousand Hollywood movies. Cue rising music, passionate kiss, certainty. But there's no music and this is it. This is what he's getting. Oh Jesus, Xander thinks, as he realizes Spike has started to cry.

Xander drops to his knees and desperately mouths Spike into a kiss, hands locked to the sides of his face. The carpet is hard under his knees, even through his trousers, and Spike tastes off, as if he hasn't had the chance to brush his teeth in a while, and Xander grows sharp and hungry anyway. He can't find anything wrong to break them apart. They fuck desperately on the floor, pants unzipped, cocks rubbing against each other, mouths kissing and then gasping, their bodies and voices a rush of wild love. Love, promises, need. Spike's hips thrust frantically against his, and need swells and bursts, they're coming with laughs, and Xander cries out, "Oh god, I can't--oh Jesus, oh Christ--" as he holds tight what he'd lost, and Spike whispers with shock, eyes falling shut: "Xander."

Japan is a place Xander intends to visit again.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Xander has no lingering resentment of Anya, but she holds a certain position in his mind as the person he had his first, serious, long-term relationship with, and because of this she's his basis for comparison with Spike. With Anya, he'd almost always been at fault. If they fought, he had to bring apologies to her like flowers--sometimes _with flowers ("Are these the most expensive ones?")--if he wanted to speak to her again. Even when clearly in the wrong, she'd apologize grudgingly with her small, pouty lips of resentment, then somehow twist it around and exact one from him. Anya was the kind of woman who could turn you into a toad during some hormonal whim and then say, "It's your own fault for looking at me like that." Once upon a time, she'd done that sort of thing literally, and she retained the skills of vengeance and self-justification even after she was humanized.

Most of the time, she'd managed to stay charming even when driving him crazy, her irritating quirks softened by a deep and appealing insecurity that outmatched Xander's own: being with her made him felt deeply solid and sane by comparison. He'd usually been able to take comfort in the moral high ground, even when he was in the doghouse.

With Spike, he's got a patch of high ground right now--spell or no spell--but he doesn't care. He might as well be flinging himself downhill toward Spike's outstretched arms, buoyed by song and dance like Julie Andrews, as happy as a kid tumbling in tall grass. "I'm sorry," he tells Spike more than once, wishing he'd given just one moment's thought to magic. "I should have known." Spike isn't having any of that; shakes his head and corrects him in the nicest possible way, says in his rough, low voice that Xander has no call to be apologizing and if he doesn't stop Spike's going to do something about it, like punish him with his mouth until he comes.

Xander gets a lot of blow jobs over the next several days. And it's as if he's never felt Spike's mouth before, Spike's tongue lapping hungrily at his balls while he sits stoned and helpless in whatever chair he's been pushed into, or propped against the headboard. Spike makes love to his dick as if he's worshipping it, and sometimes comes with a harsh groan when he's sucking, both hands wedged under Xander's thighs to make it clear he needs nothing except this to satisfy him.

It goes to Xander's head, the big slap-happy one on his shoulders that he can barely hold upright when he's this well taken care of. "I love you," Spike assures him over and over again whenever his mouth isn't full of Xander's dick, and his voice is always husky and unforced. And sometimes it seems like those words are enough to make him come--he'll gasp, face tightening with anguish and Xander will feel him shudder as he spills. Sometimes he'll arch his neck, eyes closed, and his cry will become trapped in his throat like a visible thing, right before he lets his mouth fall back on Xander's aching, ready flesh.

Xander's own orgasms are different now, shaking him to pieces, like when you lift a puzzle in your hands and it unlaces itself and falls apart everywhere you touch it. Love makes their sex feel amateurish and broken at times. They're coming to pieces and mingling together. There's an element in Spike almost like shame, unworthiness, that makes him turn his head aside as Xander kisses his face and neck. He longs to be touched but his entire body says he doesn't deserve it, and he trembles and cries out Xander's name when he's being loved. When Xander fucks him with long, deep strokes, Spike can be nearly silent and motionless with pleasure, head bowed to the pillow, hands wrenched in the sheets, and sometimes when Xander does it just right he's crying afterwards.

It's just a stage of forgiveness and renovation. Xander doesn't want it to always be this way, because it makes him anxious on Spike's behalf. But there's no denying that it's his entire joy: Spike's helpless love, the stunned look on his face when he's astride Xander's hips, riding him in a slow roll and trying to make it last. Love is in their bodies, passed back and forth like a drug between two junkies. They're easing off the hard stuff though, back to normal levels that will let them get through a day clothed instead of naked.

Don't sabotage yourself, Xander tells his mirror: don't sabotage this relationship. These are phrases that your average guy on the underside of twentysomething doesn't usually exercise much. But he knows them, even knows _where he knows them from. Tony Harris, 1992: "'We like to get away for the weekend'--that's just brilliant. I don't expect sabotage from my wife--now Brennan thinks I've got one foot out the door. He's not going to look my way twice. But then I guess you'd be pretty happy if I never got another promotion."

Jessica Harris, 1993: "I'm not the one sabotaging this relationship!"

Tony Harris, 1994: "You sabotage yourself, you sabotage everyone around you, you're like a goddamn Nazi!"

Xander fears himself, and he's ready to blame himself for something. When he stands in his Tokyo hotel bathroom and looks back over the past several weeks, he thinks about how happily he'd basked in Spike's attentions, and the Bahamas trip, and then returning home. Home. That was the first mistake. They should have stayed in all that warm air and white sand. Because home could be dangerously ordinary, and here's proof: one time soon after their return when Spike came up behind him, head settling affectionately against Xander's shoulder, arms sliding around his waist, Xander was thinking of how he had to fire one of his managers for incompetence, and it was _all he could think about, making him tense and almost impatient at Spike's distraction.

Turn that around, and Xander would sometimes see Spike laughing or talking with Buffy and judge it to be a not-Xander thing. Every Xander-friendly thing was overlooked and every not-Xander thing seemed more evidence that he didn't have Spike's real attention. His heart.

But fuck, he'd wanted to _hear it. The words. He'd needed Spike to say it. Why hadn't he? If he had, maybe Xander would have looked at his lover and his good friend rolling naked together in bed and thought the obvious: magic. Because the mouth of hell is always laughing, always yakking. It never shuts up, and you want to stop listening, but you'll be a dead fool if you do. You meet a strange woman, and it's better safe than sorry to think: demon. Or, possibly, killer robot. Overly cheerful men: minions of Satan. Or again, killer robots. A little girl skipping by herself at night? Vampire, ghost child, evil fiend of darkness with a sticky lollipop. The most ridiculous interpretation is always the right one. He should have known.

He manages to see-saw the blame within the space of a single minute sometimes. It's like having his own personal Anya, right in his head.

You will always have this special part of me, Xander tells Mental Anya via the powerful reflective properties of his hotel bathroom mirror. One of his more lunatic moments, in a lifetime of same.

Fast forward, home again.

Willow, her eyes understanding and sad: "It was a ring they found when they were searching the caves for that Vlarlick demon."

Xander: "Yeah. It's always a ring in a cave."

He'd wanted to stay in Japan, maybe tour the world and avoid Buffy for, oh, say, forever. But Spike said in a soft voice that she was very upset, and so after three days vigorously doing the kind of thing cheap hotels are made for, they'd headed home by boat.

But first--at one point in their Japanese bed with the scratchy sheets, Xander says: "Tell me at least that it was very, very bad sex." Terrible, no-good, very bad sex.

Spike is grim and doesn't hesitate: "It was wretched, love. Felt sick afterwards, when I knew--" He cuts short the thought, lets it stand half-legged. When he knew what he'd done.

Xander: "But during?"

Spike gives him a serious look, heavy with sex: "Wasn't you. She didn't touch me the way you do. Didn't make me feel like you do." Spike has taken Xander's hand and is kissing it, finger by finger, as he stares into Xander's eyes. Lips grazing the knuckles and mouth pressed to his palm. Xander gets hard and uses the results to show Spike just what he thinks of that.

Another time, hating the sound of his voice and his weakness, Xander asks: "You never said you loved me." It doesn't sound like a question, but it is.

Spike: "I know." Low voice, full of endless sadness. "Didn't want to think about it." What the fuck, Xander thinks for one moment, just before Spike goes on. "I can't keep what I love." His mouth tight, eyes hard and taking on a glisten: "I'm a failure as a man."

Xander tells him no, fuck that, and shows him how it isn't true.

Once cracked open, Spike is an egg that can't be put back in its shell, sort of shattered and yolky and wet. Humpty Dumpty after the fall. Xander sometimes catches Spike staring at him with love-stunned eyes as if he's stuck, unable to think of a word he wants, and Xander thinks: I've created a monster. Which is kind of funny-strange, funny-sweet. He's turned Spike. Now he's got a monster of love.

They get home after a few weeks crossing the Pacific, and Buffy is still there, on the cusp of heading back to school, obviously overwhelmed with relief to see both of them, but with eyes only for Xander: guilty, miserable, pain-filled eyes. He has to forgive her. He's pretty sure it's in the friends manual.

Good timing though, on the leaving. The more distance the better.

Becca has taken care of Supercat, and the animal gives Xander a disgusted look when he tries to touch base. Ass plonked on the hall carpet, the cat lifts both ears for his master's greeting--"Hey, Supercat, how goes the holy mission against the mice of evil?"--then gets up and walks away, profoundly bored.

When they're home again, Spike is walking on the eggshells of himself and trying too hard to please, uneasy in places where they'd once been comfortable. For a week, Xander never sees him on the computer, and he's always cooking when Xander comes home, and that's about all Xander can take before he has to say:

"Please relax, okay?" He interrupts Spike's tense cooking ritual and turns him away from the stove, hands gentling either side of his neck. "You're making me crazy."

Spike stiffens for a moment, then drops his head a little and sighs, and weeks of tension seem to slide out of his shoulders. Looks up again, eyes blue and sharp, still holding a deep well of that impossible seriousness as he says: "I don't want to lose you."

Xander: "You won't."

This is needy, hungry, insecure Spike: an explosion of love and neuroses. Xander has seen this at a spectator's distance, watching him years ago with Buffy, but now--up close and personally directed at him--it's like a tsunami has crashed over Xander. He's surrounded by Spike Love, the obsession and passion and devotion of Spike. It's a little bit darker than expected under all that saltwater, but Xander isn't kicking for the surface. This is what he wanted. He doesn't need to breathe. Breathing is highly overrated.

Good thing you own your own company, Xander thinks when he returns to work. The looks people give him seem to say: Flake. Big flake.

His private section of beach isn't the Bahamas, but at night the waves roll endlessly, making up the seabed and turning it down. Turn down, make up. Down the beach he can see scattered lights, windows to the half dozen expensive houses hidden along the curve of bluff, on the same stretch of sea road. He walks with Spike, holding hands, waves swirling around their ankles. They talk. They kill a sea monster. They're home.

Spike gets submissive as hell in bed, as if some switch has been thrown. Not that he wasn't oh so willing before, but that seemed physical, and now it's more--now he's desperate to roll over for Xander, spread himself for fucking. Wants light torture, begs for small cruelties. Even more fucked-up than Xander suspected, the vampire comes to bed with a new hunger in his eyes, and things he's ordered online. He's dark, edgy, hopeful, his generosity and selfishness impossible to separate as he asks to be tormented, offering himself up for Xander's pleasures.

At first Xander has trouble delivering, getting his groove on. Their bed is suddenly a toy-box of kink and it seems like it's coming between them in the most literal way--clamps taking the place of his hands, leather straps instead of his mouth, dildos instead of his dick. But making Spike tremble is never not fun, and the sense of power Xander feels slides under his skin and makes a home there. He sucks Spike off while driving home eight inches of polished granite and Spike comes with harsh, grateful sounds. He twists clamps on Spike's nipples, gags him, laces up his dick in tight leather bondage gear that denies him release. Whips, plugs, wands that deliver tiny electrical jolts--and some not so tiny. Spike seems eager to show just how far he'll go to stay Xander Harris's bitch.

If Xander hadn't started making his own demands he probably could have kept Spike on this frenzied string forever. But being forced to give instead of receive puts responsibility on Spike, makes him sane, clear-eyed, gentle. It's about this time Xander rediscovers who's the master in the master bedroom, and it's not Spike. He gets used to the sound of Spike's resigned sigh as Xander puts yet another toy away, forces Spike to make do with just Xander's dick and mouth and hands.

Spike still comes. "You'll come the way I tell you to come," Xander reassures him, working against Spike gently.

Spike, face down, gasps, "Yes."

And "No," Xander says one night, when Spike suggests they head early into the bedroom. He's not unkind, just firm, and pulls Spike into his arms, arranges and drapes him the way you might hold a suit against yourself to see if it fits. Spike gets a dreamy, contented expression.

Xander: "I just want to take it easy tonight. Fulfill my destiny as an American, degrade my brain with bad television and beer."

Spike, shifting his head lazily on Xander's shoulder to focus on the screen: "What're we watching then?"

Xander, surfing with the remote: "I'm thinking sex, violence, gratuitous stupidity. Maybe something in the Tom Green oeuvre--"

Spike: "Hold up, stop there, yeah--"

Xander, stomach sinking, can't quite believe he's serious. "Haven't you, uh, seen that before?" It's just a guess. Everyone's seen it before.

Spike: "Yeah, but it's a classic."

Xander stares at the screen for several silent moments: "I will suck your dick in the Baskin-Robbins if you let me change this channel."

Spike: "Bet I could make you do that anyway."

Xander: "Okay, I'm willing to get in touch with my roots. But this is toy-poodle gay. This is drag-queen, Ethel Merman impersonation gay. I need time to work up to this." Like a million _never years, he thinks.

Spike--like the leather, safety-pinned punk at the next table who's going to get up and drive a fork through your hand if you don't keep it down during Celine's big number--says in keen offense: "What the hell are you on about? This is _family entertainment."

Xander: "For a special kind of family, yes." But he senses he's pushing the line, and slides his hand down Spike's belly, rubbing it the way you'd rub a cat's. Spike's bristling fur settles again. But Xander has to make one more try: "If you loved me, you'd let me change this channel."

Spike twists briefly to look up at him, with something like astonished respect: "God, you're a manipulative twat. Would do Dru proud. Now shut it and watch the bloody film or I'm going to kneecap you with this fucking bottle. That's me loving you, right?"

No question. The settled weight of Spike against him is like a blanket of love, and Xander tightens his arms and kisses Spike's temple. "I guess it's not that bad," he allows a minute later, watching the screen. He is so totally lying.

Spike, firm: "Man's got a heart of stone that can't appreciate this film."

This will have to be where they differ. But Xander decides that his heart isn't stone, and that gratuitous stupidity comes in many forms he will learn to appreciate, and that this is still--right now--better than sex. The hills are alive with the sound of music. His vampire is complicated and loves him.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Some days their relationship cruises the edge of the Romulan Neutral Zone, dangerously close to the line of cheesiness and high camp, but never quite crossing over.

Though then again, Xander has always though that in deep space, it would be hard to know precisely when you were on one side or the other of a designated line to within a few meters because you might as well toss out the cosmic distance ladder, and it's not as if you could get parallax off any fixed orbital point, plus the ship's computers would have to constantly recalculate recessional velocity, and everyone knows how hard it is to pin down the so-called Hubble Constant--

But anyway.

Spike is a thrilling thing to own. He's bought a collar for himself and presented it to Xander, not unlike how a dog will carry its leash to its master to go walkies. Not in his mouth, though, thank god. The collar's not leather, not studded, not dog. It's stylish and attractive, with stainless steel bands, "reminiscent of a Native American choker," to quote its accompanying marketing copy. And okay, there's a little leather on the back as it turns out, with locking buckles you can attach padlocks to. A ring in front is where you clip a chain, Xander guesses. Or a leash. Or a trailer hitch.

Jesus Christ.

"Too much?" Spike asks, low and rueful. He's looking at the collar in Xander's hands and his face suggests he may be starting to have his own doubts, but maybe he's just afraid of having freaked Xander.

There comes a point in all of life's little pageantries when you just have to say whoa. Nuh-uh. Hello, Mister Sanity Man. This is the point when you realize you need to put down the Klingon costume, back away from the Hummer salesman, grab the tattoo artist's hand as the needle is lowering.

This, apparently, is not one of those times.

Xander: "This is just around-the-housewear, right?"

Spike gives him a slow, thrilling smile and a look from under his lashes that would melt glaciers. "'Course, pet. Just for us."

He slides down to the floor to sit between Xander's legs, face turned away and neck bowed. Xander takes Spike's choker off, puts the collar on. His bare neck, the moment between the exchange, is pale and perfect, with lines of golden hair that shade into the thick bleached mass above. When the collar is locked, Xander slips a hand around, slides his fingers between skin and steel to test the fit. It's close but not too close, though even if it were, it's not as if Spike needs to breathe.

Spike's soft groan goes all the way through Xander's body.

He turns and rests his cheek on Xander's thigh the way a dog would, shows off the line of his neck, collar to collar bones. It occurs to Xander that there's this whole dog _theme sometimes with Spike's behavior, and it saddens him on a deep level. But he doesn't know how to fix it, or if it can be fixed. Spike has been well trained.

Still hating you, he thinks to Angel.

The man at his feet is beautiful, and Xander's hands stroke him. "You like that?" Xander asks, meaning the collar, his touch, everything.

Spike cheeks his thigh with sensual approval, wordless.

"What are you going to do for me?" Xander asks, running his hand in a casual, proprietary way up the side of Spike's neck, palm fitted to cup the underside of jaw and chin. Spike turns at once to kneel between Xander's legs, and mouths his rising erection. Head bent, hands under Xander's thighs, he nuzzles and laps and sucks Xander right through the denim as if this is all he can do on his own. After a few minutes, Xander unzips himself with a shaking hand, and his flushed cock thrusts out. Without any interruption, Spike takes it in his mouth--oh so fucking good, wet, slippery--and gives him head with the mindless compliancy of a slave. Xander wants to stop it, for about half a second where rationality and fear and love threaten to capsize him in panic, but then grabs the back of Spike's head and holds him in place and fucks him urgently, grinding with his own rough, mindless need until he comes. It takes less than a minute.

Spike licks the inside of his mouth afterwards, dips his head and rubs his face against Xander, picking up faint trails of stickiness on his cheeks. Xander's head falls back on the couch and he exhales. Add a scoop of ice cream and his day could get no better.

"For special occasions, okay?" Xander says about the collar before they turn in that night. Which in his mind translates to: put it in a drawer, please, and let's pretend we're a normal couple.

Spike: "You make every day special, pet." He says things like this now that he's formally declared his love, soft talk that from any other man would make Xander cringe. But there's a list of reasons why Xander doesn't cringe: ... his voice is smooth and low and Xander can tell he means this, ... and the sugar-coating on those words is pure, dark, honeyed sex, which in its undiluted form might as well be crack, ... and in fact when Spike talks it's like that Far Side cartoon, "What Dogs Hear," and all Xander hears is, blah blah blah SEX blah blah SEX blah blah blah SEX, ... plus he's a vampire, so the predatory look in his eyes can make anything seem faintly menacing, can make "Want to have tea?" seem menacing, ... and in the end he's really just teasing.

And he takes the collar off.

He looks strangely naked without it, more naked than naked. Like a statue some southern senator would demand to be clothed. He's bad and he's drawn that way.

Later that week, Xander says: "This is it, then?" He's sitting at the kitchen table holding a printed manuscript, and Spike is standing a few feet away, arms hanging loosely at his sides, hands working in finger-crunching little spasms that suggest a vast nervousness.

Spike: "Yeah." His entire face is a frown, a scowl, a dubious twist of second thoughts. "'S just scribbling. Would be if I'd used a pen, anyway. Dunno what that is on a computer." A pause while Xander continues to scan the first page in silence. "Doesn't matter." Spike's tone tries for dismissiveness. "Probably crap."

Xander looks up: "This is so great. I can't wait to--"

Spike, talking over him with a sudden anxious sharpness: "If you don't like it, you'll say so. No poncing about, just come out and tell me."

He's almost angry, and Xander smiles and soothes him and assures him it will be great, and if it isn't he'll say so, but that it'll be great, and so on, until Spike starts to look less nutso, and merely uneasy again.

Xander starts reading the novel in the living room that night, while Spike watches TV restlessly, shifting every ten seconds, eyes darting to Xander. Xander can sense his jittery attention--it's impossible to ignore at first--but he finally manages to sink into what he's reading and become absorbed, at least until Spike jumps up and mutters, "Going to the store for a bit, maybe get a drink. Be back."

Two hours later, he comes in smelling of cigarette smoke that may or may not be from a bar. He's drunk, though not enough that you can see it in his movements, and drops onto the couch looking depressed. "Shit, isn't it?" he says, sunk into motionless resignation.

Xander looks up from his page and says: "This--"

Spike stares.

"--this is incredible. You wrote this without help?" It's a rhetorical question, but Xander's still boggling. He's never written a five-page theme paper without help.

Spike brightens hopefully. "Well, yeah. 'S been a while. Kind of rusty. Tried to write a book once before, back in the seventies, but Dru got blood on it." The memory seems to annoy him. "I'll tell you--Xerox and Microsoft, greatest tricks the devil ever pulled."

Xander brings the pages to bed to finish, Spike eventually leaning close and reading over his shoulder in a way Xander should mind, but doesn't. When he finishes, the end, Spike has questions, some of which Xander doesn't have a chance to answer, because Spike gets caught up in explaining what he was trying to do, and Xander still doesn't mind, because Spike is lit like a candle and his voice is what they call melodious--a word he used in the novel so it's right there in Xander's mind--and as Spike winds down, they make love, and the eager way Spike moves in his arms makes Xander gasp, happiness given flesh.

The manuscript's round-two reader is Willow. Spike's idea, but they both agree she's very smart, and she smiles excitedly when asked. "I'd be honored." She's holding the manuscript and sitting in their living room, and Spike is sitting on the edge of the couch, an expectant look on his face. Willow's own face shows realization. "Oh, you mean now."

Xander, fulfilling his role as the sane one, says: "Well, maybe just a few pages."

Willow quirks an understanding smile and settles back to read. After about a minute, as her face turns absorbed, Spike flees again. "Can't hack it," he says. "Going to take a walk. Find something to kill."

He goes, and Xander heads to the kitchen for a while, then wanders back in. Willow is sitting with the manuscript closed in her lap, her hand bookmarking the page. Xander sits down and meets her eyes with a proud smile.

Willow looks stunned: "Wow."

Xander: "What part are you on?"

Willow flips the work open momentarily and glances down: "Um...page three. The part where John decides to start a band."

Xander, smiling: "Amazing, isn't it?"

Willow: "Amazing...is an inadequate word."

Xander: "I can't believe he wrote over three hundred pages."

Willow, eyes widening with a moment's rapport: "I know! And all of them so bad!"

Xander, caught off guard: "Bad?"

Willow, displaying a manic, whiplash cheer: "Did I say bad? 'Cause I think I said sad, or, n-no, not sad--mad, plaid, Republic of Chad--what I meant was--"

Xander: "You think it's bad?"

Willow: "I--I'm not sure my own thinking has much to do with it, objectively spea--yes. It's very, very bad."

Xander: "Okay, but is it _bad or is it _Bridges of Madison County could-be-a-bestseller-anyway bad?"

Willow: "It could make dogs howl."

Xander puts his head in his hands. "Oh, man."

Willow: "And, quite possibly, doves cry." Launching under a head of enthusiastic and very inappropriate steam: "If you dropped it in the reservoir, it'd poison the water supply. And if you read it aloud, you'd give lab rats cancer--" She breaks off abruptly with a look of regret. "Sorry."

Xander: "Yeah. It's Vogon. I get the picture."

A dubious look from Willow. "Did you really think it was good?"

Xander: "It had a lot of pages. And words. And he wrote all of them." He raises his head and fixes her with a hopeless look. "Will, I thought it was better than _Neuromancer."

Willow, a faint smile of sympathy: "Wow. You've really got it bad."

Xander: "Okay, maybe not better than _Neuromancer Better than most _Babylon 5 tie-in novels, though." A thought occurs to him: "Hey, you know--you've only read three pages. Maybe it gets--"

Willow: "Xander, if I read any more my eyes will bleed. Trust me. It's _all bad."

Xander, slumping again: "How am I going to tell him?"

Willow, heartfelt with relief: "Oh, thank god." Off Xander's look, apologetic: "Sorry. I wasn't looking forward to lying."

Xander: "You were going to lie?"

Willow, eyebrows raising: "People invest themselves deeply in their art, Xander--and, granted, we're using the word 'art' loosely here--but I don't want my throat ripped out."

That gives Xander something to think about. "What do I say?"

After some talk, Willow reluctantly decides that Xander shouldn't be the one to tell Spike after all, because a message like this should be delivered with constructive criticism, and so she valiantly takes the novel home with her, looking to Xander the way a soldier does when heading off to certain death. On Spike's return, Xander explains that she wanted to be able to read it "properly," and Spike accepts this.

A few days pass. Spike is difficult to live with and increasingly irritable with Willow.

"How long does it take to read a bleedin' book, anyway? Not like it's _War and Peace "

No, Xander thinks. You're very right. He feels sad, and a bit scared. He's beginning to see what Willow means about the whole throat-ripping author thing.

He's not around when Willow gives Spike her constructive criticism, but when he comes home that night, Spike is sitting cross-legged in the open doorway that leads to the back deck, just out of range of the fading sunlight. He's got a fireplace poker in his hand and is sifting the ashes of his book on the hibachi. Xander's heart sinks, and he goes to Spike's side and slides down next to him, his back to the glass door so that he can see Spike's face.

"I'm sorry."

Spike looks over dryly. "No worries. Symbolic, is all. Got it backed up on hard drive."

Xander smiles a little. "Rough?"

Spike, matter of factly: "I've had my entrails ripped out, tied up in a bow, and shoved back in, love." He pauses. "This was worse."

Xander winces inside, but keeps a straight face as he says, "You want me to kill her? Because I will. I'll kill her right now. Gut her like a fish--" He has to stop because Spike is smiling, eyes sharp and clear and looking directly into him, and it's one of those moments that makes Xander feel completely grounded even as the ground falls out from under him. He is right where he wants to be in the universe, and it's what they call bittersweet. Which is another word Spike used in his book, and Xander knows what he means. Wants to touch him, but doesn't.

"Nah," Spike says. "Thanks, though."

If it were his own hard work, Xander thinks, he would burn the damn thing, too. Except if it were him, he'd never even have finished it, and he knows this, because hey, a _Babylon 5 novel seemed like a good idea when he was fourteen. For about five days and five pages. But then he gave up, which is exactly what he'd do now too, if someone told him his stuff was crap.

Spike doesn't give up. They go to the bookstore and he picks out an entire basket of books on writing, pretty much just sweeping them off the shelf with his arm, and Xander pays for them all--makes a point of paying, even though Spike has his own credit card now.

Xander tells the bored cashier, "He's writing a book." Spike, leaning against the counter, rolls his eyes and looks vaguely embarrassed, but clearly takes it for granted that Xander will brag. And they go home and time wanders on and Spike reads some of the books, then reads more books that aren't about writing--"Guess I'd better, since it's the only bloody thing they all agree on"--and he reads and reads and reads, and kills some vampires and drinks beer and comes up with the perfect spaghetti sauce and fucks Xander, and starts writing again.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Every Tuesday and Thursday Xander drives Spike to his writing class at the university and picks him up again when it's over. Not because he has to, but because he gets a kick out of that moment a few minutes before ten when he arrives and steals a glance through the door and sees Spike sitting in one of those school-room desks: legs slightly spread and feet planted on the linoleum tiles, fluorescent lights making his hair look whiter than usual, face squinched up into a frown as he listens to someone talk.

I could be a writer, Xander thinks when he stares at Spike, and it's untrue, but his eyes write without words: black leather shoes on the dull white speckled floor, slight curl at the jeans cuffs that Spike bitches about but refuses on principle to iron flat, and the slinky shape of hips and torso and the throwback of shoulders against the undersized desk. One hand holding a classmate's story, the other resting on his thigh, leather bracelet clinging to the wrist. He is real and so very unreal--vampires? writing fiction? taking night classes?--that Xander sometimes has a brief, strange uncertainty about whether his own life is real or not, whether the things he remembers have actually happened. Sunnydale childhood, fateful meeting with Slayer, failed wedding with vengeance demon, dead boyfriend. It all coalesces in the surreal here and now.

Boy meets world. At these moments, Xander feels like he's seeing it for the first time. He loves Spike and this twice-weekly ritual, loves driving him home afterwards and talking about class, sometimes stopping for coffee at the Espresso Pump. It's like foreplay. Not just for sex, but for the rest of their life together.

Spike sometimes looks over and catches Xander watching through the classroom door, gives a faint smile. His blue jeans, his shirt, the buttery tufts of his hair: he has style, he's brilliant and alive, the most living dead man Xander has known.

Like just about every other human being on the face of the planet, Xander takes what he has for granted ninety percent of the time. And even the other ten percent of the time, there are still many things he never says to Spike. Daily life is a habit and you don't want to get too clutchy or co-dependent. If Xander walks into a room and notices how Spike's jeans fit and thinks, _sweet holy fuck, he rarely says it aloud. How many times does Spike want to hear that? Some people say that compliments never get old. But Xander feels he'd just be babbling the same boring, unimaginative thing over and over, forcing Spike to think up a reply.

Spike doesn't seem to worry about this in reverse. Xander has never been with someone who gives so many compliments. He isn't sure if Spike's just one of those natural romantics, or if Dru--the original Lady Die--needed constant reinforcement, but Spike is verbal, and will tell Xander over and over how sexy he is, how edible, how juicy and hot and good. But it's not just a sex thing.

"You're a good man," he sometimes says, tender and warm, when Xander installs a safety handrail in the girls' house for Becca, or helps Willow with business taxes, or reassures Dawn that one bad, drunken night doesn't make her a loser slut doomed to a tragic and vampiric end. Xander's family taught him to take praise with a tight and distrustful smile, but he can't do that with Spike, who will wrap himself around Xander from behind and murmur regards against his neck, so that the words sink in--or, even harder to take--will say them right to Xander's face. Spike's gaze takes no prisoners. He'll stand close and stare with passionate admiration into Xander's eyes, or sometimes with a kind of deep wonderment. He has the super-power to melt human brain cells into pudding.

Xander has a hard time saying stuff in general. Spike's influence is starting to loosen his tongue, but not everything makes it out of his mouth. You're amazing, he thinks to Spike when he watches him through the classroom door: I'm so proud of you. How do you say that aloud, though, without sounding as if you're talking to a four-year old? You probably have to add fucking: I'm so fucking proud of you. A manly, adult pride. Except then it's kind of extreme, as if Spike's not just attending night class but battling cancer or taking a shuttle trip to orbit.

A few times they've gone to coffee with some of the students from Spike's class. Most are what Xander thinks of as real adults--over forty, with kids and paunches and grey hair--a category he doesn't count himself into yet. There's also a handful of aimless thirtysomethings in need of a creative jump-start, and one young guy, a short-order cook, who's already been published. Xander can't see any common factor among them, except that they like Spike, who bonds with the EMT over the difficulty of estimating blood loss volumes, reminisces with the lesbian lawyer about the sixties Berkeley scene ("Yeah, my mum was always telling stories"), and trades trivia with the cook on the methods and hit counts of famous serial killers.

He looks comfortable among them, except that he clearly wants to smoke with the smokers, and Xander feels a twinge of guilt when he catches Spike's fingers twisting straw papers into intestinal designs. Spinning coins. Bending fork tines back and forth until they break off.

Ginnie, the EMT: "Good lord, you're strong, honey."

In the diner they frequent, Spike looks unnaturally pale--which he is--and his female classmates joke that he's a vampire. Ginnie tries to take his pulse while Xander looks on in rising alarm, but Spike is meeting Xander's eyes across the table and smiling slyly. He does flirtatious things with his hand to evade her grasp. "Now, now," he purrs. "I've got a jealous boyfriend, you know. I have to be careful." The women coo, and tease Xander with approval.

Talking to normals has apparently required some interesting fabrications on Spike's part, and Xander is always careful not to accidentally trip him up.

One night as they're heading home, Xander says, bemused: "You told them you worked for a mortuary?"

Spike: "You'd be amazed how often that cover story comes in handy."

Xander, with a slight, wry head shake: "No, I really wouldn't."

Spike glances at him across the front seat of the car then looks off to the side where the trees are rolling by outside his window: "I'm a wicked man." His tone is strange and absent.

Xander: "Good man, wicked past." He almost reaches over to caress Spike's thigh, but they're taking a curve on the beach road and he needs both hands on the wheel.

A half-hidden smile directed out the window--harbor lights flashing by between breaks in the trees--then Spike offers: "Still got a wicked fashion sense."

Xander, after a thoughtful nod: "Killer smile."

Spike: "Bloody awful temper."

Xander: "Cold feet. Warm heart."

Spike: "Unbeating, though."

Xander: "Plus, you're drop-dead gorgeous."

Spike, glancing over again: "You been holding that in reserve?"

Xander: "Nah, I'm the soul of spontaneity."

A week or so later, spontaneity nearly makes Xander suggest that Spike invite his classmates over for dinner or drinks some night, but he holds that thought, figuring if Spike wants the company, he'll figure this out on his own.

Life has its little moments. Xander, reading from the bag of Cheetos: "You know, if you call snackfood puffy and cheesy, it's a good thing. If you call people that, it's a bad thing."

Spike: "Makes you think."

Xander: "You're just saying that."

Spike: "No, really. Snackfood, people--usually lump them in the same category." Off Xander's dry, lazily-lidded look: "Used to, anyway."

The class is dredging up things. Writing exercises spark memories, Spike tells him. He shares these with the class in the guise of fiction, and impresses the others with a skill for morbid detail. In one piece, he describes a scene in a tenement in the nineteen-thirties, the smell of blood and the necessity of dismemberment. Flies, flesh, bonesaws. It's like Xander is right there, with Dru laughing in her bloodstained gown--smearing hearts across face and lips, peering dreamily into disconnected eyes, playing patty-cake with piles of severed hands--as Spike fills suitcases one by one with newspaper-wrapped body parts. An air of boredom and inconvenience rises from the page.

Xander thinks he will have nightmares after reading some of Spike's writing, but doesn't. Spike does, though. He thrashes one night, muttering into his pillow, waking Xander toward four a.m. Vampires are strong, and Spike has never had a nightmare before, so it's a toss up where Xander's instincts might land him--sit up and turn on the light first, or just wrap his arms around Spike and try to ease him awake.

Instinct says embrace him, and Xander does. Spike shudders and twists away and is suddenly standing by the side of the bed, naked and in game face. Scarier in the darkness of the room. A low growl comes from his throat--thunderstorm in the distance--and Xander shifts to snap on a lamp. "Hey," he says.

Everything above the neck is twisted and snarled and monstrous, and the familiar choker at the neck is like a borderline separating this from the normal human body below that still shows signs of sex and Xander's mouth. But it's all the same, all one thing--a continuation of Spike.

Xander would hate to be scared of Spike. He isn't now, and moves across the bed without a thought. "Hey," he says. "Easy." Runs his hands up Spike's body as he rises to his feet, and feels a twitch of awareness that's followed by the melting away of demonic features. And Xander must have it bad, like Willow says, and maybe he needs to be needed, because the way Spike lets his neck bow and head rest on Xander's shoulder--the feel of his nape, the slope of his muscles, and the tired, heavy drape of his body--folds together everything vampire and human until the difference is meaningless.

His hands rest on Xander's hips and he cracks into soft, broken sobs.

Xander wouldn't recommend it to people, loving vampires. This is the only one worth loving, in his opinion. And it was one of those wacky, unlikely things--it's not as if when your loved one dies and is born again as a creature of darkness you can say: "Stick a soul back in so I can take him home, please." It's sad, but it's random. Spike was just the one. Right place, right time. Fate and stupid moves and a perverse streak--whatever the hell went into it, he's here now.

Xander, a week of nightmares later: "So, I'm just saying, any time you want a change of scenery, let me know, okay? I can take the time. Wherever you want to go, we'll go. A day's notice." Spike, rubbing garlic sauce on chicken--cutting board, kitchen island--looks up and smiles at him, his eyes showing bluish shadows. He is wearing one of Xander's oldest tee-shirts, the one that makes him look like a twenty-year old drummer instead of a hundred-year old vampire, if you don't look at the eyes too closely.

Spike, in a low, sultry voice: "You trying to spoil me?" That voice would go right to Xander's dick like a buzz if the other man's deep tiredness weren't so obvious.

Xander: "Always."

Writing classes seem a stupid reason to Xander to stick around when they have no other real schedules anchoring their lives. Or they would, except that they're important to Spike. Xander doesn't push. He will be understanding, and he's not going to push. He lets another week pass, and the time is usefully spent.

At the end of the week he takes Spike on a ride. Thinks about making him close his eyes as they approach their destination, but it's not necessary; they're coming at it from a back access road, and Xander parks by a set of anonymous outbuildings, and Spike is still curious and poking him with questions that Xander smiles at but won't answer. They crunch across asphalt and grass, around the building, and Xander unlocks a door in the chain-link security fence and there they are.

Spike stares.

Xander: "It was such a steal, I'd have been an idiot to pass it up."

Spike stares at him, eyes slightly wide, amazed.

Xander, mildly, hands in pockets: "It gets good mileage."

Spike stares at him.

Xander: "Okay, granted, it's going to depreciate in value, and I can't write it off for business if we use it for personal trips. And of course it's probably a tool of Satan. But--"

Spike: "Have you lost _all your chips?"

They stand and look at the plane sitting fifty feet away. A balmy night wind sweeps the smell of fuel and tar lightly across the tarmac, and in the greater distance, a small commuter jet eases loose of the airport and rolls toward the runway, lights blinking.

Xander stops pretending to be casual and, focusing, takes Spike's hands in his own: "I don't want to have to worry about flight times and sunlight if we want to go somewhere. That's all."

Spike, helplessly: "Christ, pet--'s not like we're bloody rock stars."

Xander: "So? Millions of people have private jets nowadays."

Spike stares at him, eyebrows reaching new heights.

Xander: "Okay. Hundreds, at least."

It's decided that when you're a vampire, you've got plenty of time ahead of you to write, but a jet has a more limited shelf life--you don't just want to leave it sitting around unused, collecting rust. So they close the jet windows against the sun and head to Paris, a strange land filled--like everywhere else--with people far younger than the world they live in. Spike is one of a very select group, a small number of people who've seen the city before the turn of the century. He doesn't have as much to say about that as Xander expects. Has some stories, but they seem tinted with darkness, and he lives more in the now than in the past.

They wander Paris at night, and go places Xander will forget the name of, and eat things that are too rich, and see trees and gravestones and the Eiffel tower and people and dog shit and books and chic dresses and pigeons and long loaves of bread, and one night Spike breaks into a small museum he's fond of, and they wander its halls without tripping any alarms, which is just one of those perfect things you don't question too closely.

Spike, as they leave the museum: "Maybe I'll write about this."

Xander: "You should."

----------------------------------------------------------------------

He's thought more than once about why Spike's here--one of the survivors, the redeemed. It was easy to hate Spike before the soul, but now Xander sometimes has to wonder: was he always a demon with character?

The confusion sometimes breaks Xander's mind, a big stick thrust into his bicycle wheel to send him flying. Demons are demons are demons, and most of the toothier species kill and eat humans, and they're just not worth knowing when they inhabit that side of the world. The underworld.

But Spike crossed over to the other side. Xander wonders about this more now than he ever did back when Spike's soul was oven-fresh. What is Spike, a freak of nature, a guy who can turn himself inside out, and will do it just to kick back at the universe?

He's a man who still has some secrets.

Xander and Spike maintain a busy boy-slayer hobby. They're not like other couples--okay, Batman and Robin, maybe--and there's a big gap to fill in the Sunnydale Justice League these days, even with Riley back. Buffy is doing her thing across the country, Faith has her own duties that don't often bring her to the unfashionable Hellmouth, and Willow has long preferred to "patrol" from the comfort of home, cozied up on cushions while she gets her magical buzz on, though that's a tenuously upheld duty these days. Becca's ongoing depression distracts her.

They patrol and Xander wonders, which is just a thing he does now and then, about how it affects Spike--killing his own kind. Because isn't there still some kinship under the skin with other demons?

"What, like ethnic solidarity?" Spike says when Xander asks. He's dry, amused. "Thought you knew better than that by now."

Xander: "Are you kidding? What do I know? I know what Buffy knows, and that's not a hell of a lot. I mean, don't get me wrong, I respect Giles, but the guy tossed out the slayer handbook, gave her a stake and said 'kill'. Watchers, man--they tell you just enough to get by. Too much info, you might start questioning the mission, and we can't have that."

Spike: "Aren't you the cynical one these days."

Xander: "I've earned it."

Spike: "With interest."

Xander: "And now they're rebuilding watcher lore from just about nothing--stone knives and bear skins. I say that makes you an expert in the field."

Spike, dismissively: "Huh. Expert on nothing but myself, pet." They stroll along the docks, looking for the slimy thing that's been cleaning out the seagull population and menacing fishermen. After a minute: "What do you want to know?" But he goes on before Xander can answer: "Vamps come in all flavors. Not a lot of loyalty among us." Us, not them, Xander notices. "You've got family lines--sometimes that means something, other times not so much."

Xander: "But you've got a vamp code."

Spike: "Yeahhh. For what that's worth. More honored in the breach."

Xander: "So what happens before you get, you know, embodied?"

Spike: "What d'you mean?"

Xander: "Well, in hell, when you're just hanging out waiting to suit up."

Spike's face has slackened with faint amazement. "D'you mean to say all this time you've been thinking--"

Xander shakes his head: "Wondering. I almost asked you about it once, back in the day--that time you emptied my dad's liquor cabinet and got me stinking drunk."

Spike: "Don't remember needing to pour it down your throat."

Xander: "You were a bad influence."

Spike, smiling: "And look where it's got me." A pause. "Someone sold you the crooked dope there, pet. Demons are born--incarnated, like. Same as humans, if you go by some religions."

Xander: "Yeah, but--what, there's just some baby demon in the driver's seat? Okay. That actually explains a lot." He hesitates, then stops Spike as he's walking by taking his hand. They pause near a tomb in the grass of the Fisherman's Graveyard, nothing stirring to distract them. "I know I've asked before, but, I'm still trying to figure it all out--demon, not-demon--"

Spike: "Half cup of one, third of the other, toss in some currants. Right." He's wry, indulgent of Xander's curiosity, but his eyes cut away with familiar evasion. "Don't know about most vamps. I've heard a few life stories, yeah, but existential debate doesn't come up as cocktail party conversation often as you'd think. Not really our bag."

Xander thinks that moonlight is the only place you can ask: "So do I love the demon, or the man?"

Spike's eyes are hard to read. "I'm baked, love. It's all one in the mix." He's silent as if waiting, then goes on: "Dru turned me and I woke up. I knew who I was. Same life, same loves, new eyes. Reborn, is all."

Xander: "Reborn. So how do you know you're a demon?"

Spike: "Just something you know."

Xander: "Yeah, but _how? If you remember everything before you died--" A pause. "Okay, see, it's too confusing. _You died, but _you're a demon. And now you've got soul. A soul. His, yours--"

Spike: "Give it up, pet." His voice is kind, sad. "No answer's going to satisfy you."

While they were in Paris they'd met vampires Spike had known decades ago. They bred a different type of demon in Paris--or the city attracted and held them. These had been languid creatures, civil and fond of the arts, with stock portfolios and patrons. They held salons, mingled with humans, drank blood without killing. Not all the time, Xander felt sure, but enough so that he didn't feel too creepy hanging with them for a few hours.

"Bunch of effete housecats," Spike had said in derision. "Balls snipped, collared to rich buggers who show them off at parties--all of them hoping to star in the next Anne Rice novel."

And Xander, blinking, had glanced over at Spike's irritable profile and realized that he was (a) honestly contemptuous of the Parisians, and (b) utterly unaware of any irony.

Other people's blind spots can be exasperating and Xander hopes he'll never feel impatient with Spike's as he did with Anya's. As they rubbed shoulders with the Paris vamps, Spike described to Xander old grudges and slights, his inability to fit in with their "set." It was clear that the snubs rankled him even now, years later. Well, okay, there wasn't much guesswork involved, since he actually said: "Still rankles." Spike is often helpfully unsubtle.

The Paris vampires prey on Xander's mind weeks later. He tries not to think about this proof that vampires might vary, might paint pictures and attend the theater and contribute to society while sucking only the willing. It fucks with his worldview, which is clearest when the unsouled fiends are gamefaced and vicious, reeking of grave dirt.

Buffy comes home for a visit, and when Xander picks her up at the airport, she says: "You bought him a _jet?"

Xander: "Just a small one."

Buffy: "You bought him a jet."

Xander: "And it was on sale."

Buffy, arms crossed, head cocked skeptically: "All over the world, orphaned children are starving, so you thought, 'Hey, I know what I'll do! I'll spend thousands of dollars on a big flying machine shaped like a penis!'"

Two million, Xander thinks, but it's probably better not to mention that. "It gets good mileage," he says helplessly.

Buffy stares him down, then her mouth twitches and her face is suddenly like ice cream on a hot day, melting and slipping off the cone. She throws her arms around him, and he hugs back with relief. When she pulls away he sees that her eyes are brimming with tears, but she's got a smile wedged on tight, her lower lip full of indulgent pride. "And the Olympic gold for the boyfriend freestyle goes to Xander Harris."

"Thanks," Xander says, smiling gently, a bit confused and off-balance.

Buffy's head hangs. "I'm so out of touch with the teasing," she apologizes, a huge sadness pulling at her small body. "I practiced that orphan line twenty-three times in my head." And then her lip trembles and she bursts into tears.

There's a horrible few minutes where Xander thinks that he's the one making her cry, that their relationship is so shaky that she can't see him without water-works. But then she gushes like a hydrant, and he learns that she's broken up with her boyfriend and eaten a gallon of mocha ice cream and found out she's pregnant, all within the last twenty-four hours.

It's a strange and difficult visit. Buffy stays with Willow and only comes over to the beach house a few times, and only when Xander is home. She also makes all arrangements through him. ("I thought I might stop by tonight, if you guys feel like hanging.") He wants to tell her it's okay, not to fret about formalities and the past when she's got other things to worry about. But he doesn't, because her being here like this--pregnant and alone and needy--puts him on edge, and he still has an instinct to keep Spike to himself. When she does stop by, the conversations between the three of them are awkward. Some serious social drinking might have helped, but none of them indulge.

He tells Spike about the pregnancy as soon as he gets home that first night. They're getting ready for bed, and they've been talking about it on and off for hours. When Xander comes out of the bathroom, Spike's outside on the deck, gazing out toward sea. Xander comes up behind him and cups Spike's left elbow in his palm, then slides his hand down until their wrists overlap, their hands mesh on the railing.

Spike, after they've talked a bit more about Buffy: "You're not getting the urge to spawn, are you?" His tone is wary, and maybe other things, but Xander hears only the wary.

Xander: "Oh dear god, no."

Spike, relaxing: "Didn't think so."

It's Willow who drives Buffy to the doctor's office where she gets the abortion. Xander doesn't see her at all that day, though he talks to Willow on the phone for a few minutes, gets an update in soft murmurs pitched so that Buffy won't hear. She's been crying, Willow tells him, and then as she talks Willow starts crying too, wet whispery sniffs that fill Xander's body with tension and helpless rage against the guy who isn't around to deal with all the shit he's caused.

After Xander hangs up, he holds the phone for a while and works on his rage, and wonders if he personally could have done anything differently, given Buffy other options. He'd talked to her over coffee--given her the choices talk, been the supportive guy friend of old--but his help had never quite gelled. His mind doesn't want to look where the possibilities pointed. It's too late, and he's not father material, and she hadn't expected more of him than he'd given.

Buffy is old, for a slayer. As the years pass Xander is beginning to feel a chill if he thinks about this too closely.

The abortion itself doesn't seem to count for much with Spike, doesn't make him angry or sad on the unborn's behalf, but Xander can tell he feels for Buffy. He's writing again, and there's something in the line of his mouth, the lowered brood of his eyelids.

A few weeks pass. Buffy goes and Dawn visits them more often for a while as if instinctively seeking comfort. The breezes from the beach are growing cooler at night. Riley comes over for dinner one evening and the three of them end up in the living room afterwards, talking late over too many beers, music playing low. The Spike CD mix. Nirvana. Buddy Holly. Norah Jones. Riley sleeps over in the spare room--they won't let him drive--and in the morning Spike treats him more or less like a normal guest at the kitchen table. They're starting to take each other for granted.

Xander feels out of sorts for a while: everything he does, it's as if he's fumbling. He can't get a grip at the office, he's distracted during patrols, and his workshop projects are shaping up into misshapen messes. Sex is good, but there's something building inside him like a sneeze he can't quite get out. All the ordinary things he usually handles without even thinking about them feel off, clumsy in his grasp.

It's like a fever breaking with relief when one day Spike comes out to the workshop on some errand, and stays to fuck him. He's got Xander bent over the workshop table and Xander's left hand is braced on the splintery surface while his right grips the edge so hard he thinks the wood might crumble like gingerbread. Xander's jeans are around his knees, and Spike rides him from behind with rough, merciless thrusts, every upstroke driving Xander onto his toes and lifting the nearest two table legs off the ground, every downstroke letting the table thud back to the floor. Each jarring smack knocks a cry from Xander's throat, and every few thrusts Spike twists his hips and nails him somewhere deep inside, prodding a live current at the base of Xander's spine.

"Yes!" Xander shudders and grinds back, trying to take more.

Spike's hips move at a slightly off-kilter angle, a skidding heaviness of hipbone against Xander's ass. He's got an arm around Xander's waist, Xander's balls in his hand, and he's working them, tugging and rolling and massaging.

"I need you--oh fuck," Xander gasps. "Please--" Spike skims his hand up and then down again, up and down, up and down, and then suddenly fists the head of Xander's cock into a tight, slick cap--thumb, forefinger, heel--and pulls it over him again and again. A blur of pleasure rises into pain and then breaks like glass.

"That's it," Spike says thickly, his own hips starting to lose rhythm, a sweet fuck, like popcorn jumping. He comes with a shout, face pressed into Xander's hair.

Waves crash, days wheel by, fall wanders in.

Xander doesn't often surface from his life. It's hard to explain, but he's submerged in daily existence, and it's not often that he kicks up, breaks gasping into the strange upper air, and thinks: Huh, so I'm a human being--what the hell _is that? How fucking weird is it that he's this bipedal, soft-organed creature capable of abstract thought, a member of a race that builds skyscrapers and dreams up moving pictures and tosses rockets at the moon once in a while? Did the human race just invent itself, or were they created by a god--some big Brain Guy who contains multitudes and must be at least partly responsible for prime-time television? Evolution seems highly questionable given what Xander knows, but the idea that Darwin and the monkeys could be batting for the losing team is pretty fucked up, when he thinks about it. Which he rarely does, thank you very much.

Human existence is bizarre, science-fictionally bizarre, but when you add in demons and the implication of angels, the power of the holy cross, an eyewitness testimony of heaven--it's all a mystery he thinks someone should explain.

Then he sinks back into life. The beach he lives on runs along the edge of Sunnydale, and he goes back and forth between two worlds, one where he battles the insane forces of evil at the insane whim of good, and another where he grills steaks and listens to the waves crash while Spike sits on the deck rail with a beer and reads to him from his latest attempt at fiction.

Spike is his normal life now. Things cross over. Xander is going to keep Spike with him here at the edge, where some evenings it almost feels safe.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

This was a series of off-the-cuff pieces posted in my LiveJournal over the course of a few weeks, not intended to be read as a story. But they kind of took on a life of their own, so I thought I'd collect them on a page for the convenience of readers.

eliade @ drizzle.com http://www.drizzle.com/~eliade/btvs_slash.html http://www.livejournal.com/users/eliade/

Better Buffy Fiction Archive Entry

Subtleties