Bare Bones by Sabrina |
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Spoilers/Summary: Post-Him. Xander comes home from the site to find Spike moping about the apartment. PG |
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Xander juggled the keys on his key ring and inserted the silver apartment key into his door lock before he remembered that the door would not be locked. He sighed, took the key back out and turned the handle. The door pushed open and Xander stepped into the darkened apartment. Surprised in spite of himself, by the lack of light in the room, he closed the door behind him and reached for the switch, flipping it up. Spike's bedroom, the closet, door was slightly ajar. Xander frowned and looked around the room. ‘Spike?’ No response, so Xander dropped the briefcase with construction plans and his hard hat onto the plaid recliner and went searching. ‘Spike?’ There was no sign of the peroxide blonde vampire in the kitchen. There was only a stack of three plates and a couple of glasses stacked up beside the sink, waiting for the day that Xander would run out of dishes and finally take the dish sponge over them half-heartedly and put them back into the cupboard. In fact, the kitchen didn’t look as if it had been disturbed at all since Xander had left for the site that morning. He frowned, opened the refrigerator and grimaced at the three small bags of crimson liquid visible through the clear plastic of the crisper. I know it’s supposed to be a good thing to see the grossness within one’s crisper, he thought. But here’s one case where I wouldn’t mind having back the ivory opaque plastic crispers of my very young years. Buffy must have been by he knew, because there had been no pigs blood there this morning. Perhaps she'd taken Spike out patrolling with her tonight. Xander didn't like the idea. He shut the fridge door and turned around to a dark shadow lurking in the doorway. Xander jumped and then turned irritated. ‘Spike! For god’s sake man! Don’t sneak up on people like that. In this group it’s liable to get you a stake in your chest.’ Spike looked away, his eyes shifting away from Xander’s gaze uneasily. ‘I just…’ He stopped and turned away, moving out of the doorway as quietly as he’d come. Xander watched him go. The once cocky vampire had given no witting comeback: No witty self-depreciating remark: Just a quiet half thought. Xander clinched his jaw and turned his back towards the door Spike had just walked through. Leaning forward he placed both of his hands on the counter in front of him, appreciating the smooth, solid feeling of the burgundy laminate under his palms. It was a relief to have something solid and steady. He didn't feel as if he'd really relaxed since Spike had moved into the closet, instead half-sleeping every night with a stake under his pillow. As if his life hadn’t been difficult enough before Buffy had come to him to ask if Spike could stay. 'He needs to be out of the school basement, Xander. You said yourself it was as if the walls moved. It's crazy down there and it's making Spike crazy.' 'Buffy, Spike's a vampire. I'm not inviting him into my apartment.' 'It's different now.' 'Because you've slept with him? Buffy, I don't think I need to mention how well that didn't go!' 'No.' She'd paused and looked down at her hands, staring at her palms the way he'd seen Willow and Tara do before when they were reading lines, reading their futures, but Buffy didn't have that ability and she'd finally looked at him straight. 'He has a soul, Xander. He left to go find his soul.' That had silenced him for a while and he'd agreed, reluctantly, to allowing Spike to stay. At one time his life had seemed very straightforward. Vampires were evil things and couldn’t be trusted. Even a vampire with a soul, like Angel was circumspect because there was always the possibility that he’d lose it. You just didn’t trust vampires or any evil thing regardless of whether they were chipped, souled, or just full-fledged demon. Good or evil. Hard or soft. Hot or cold. Black or white. Once upon a time he’d known who his enemies were. Sometime before his childhood best friend since kindergarten had tried to kill them all: before his ex-fiancée had chosen to take up her old demon ways: before his high school crush had admitted to sleeping with a demon: before the big bad evil, had somehow found his soul. I knew who I could trust. Upside down, inside out. He pushed the thoughts out of his mind. He opened a cupboard, pulled a mug out of it, and opened the refrigerator again. This time he pulled a soda off of the six packs in the corner and popped the tab with a satisfying click, listening for the reassuring fizz that told him at least some things didn’t change. He filled one of the mugs with the soda. He took a sip and stood, still facing the cabinets, his back to the door that Spike had exited back through. With a sigh of resignation and a remembrance of his promise to Buffy, he opened the cupboard again. Setting the deep blue mug on the counter he opened the refrigerator and opened the crisper. He curled his lip up slightly as he poured about one third of one of the bags into the empty mug and then closed up and put away the rest of the red liquid. He closed the door on the refrigerator and went into the living room. ‘Hey, I poured you some…’ he held up the glass. ‘If you want it.’ Spike looked up for a second, glancing away from Xander and focusing on the mug with blood. He shook his head quietly. ‘Well, fine, if you don’t want it.’ Xander allowed the irritation to creep into his voice. ‘Next time I won’t bother.’ Spike didn’t look up at all and Xander stared at him. ‘Look, I don’t know what your deal is. I know you’ve supposedly got this soul thing going for you now. And granted, it made that other souled guy pretty broody too. But in case it wasn’t obvious, I’m doing you a favour letting you stay here. I don’t particularly want you here. So one wrong move; towards me or any of my friends and you’re out.’ Xander walked across the room, set the mug of blood down on the coffee table in front of Spike and then turned to walk over to the sofa, sit down, and take a sip of his own non-blood drink. Spike murmured something so low that Xander nearly didn’t hear it. Xander set the mug down on his knees and turned around to look at Spike more closely. ‘What was that?’ ‘Sorry,’ Spike repeated again reaching for the mug of blood and beginning to turn it slowly in a circle with his fingertips. I think he just said ‘sorry’, but I might have misheard him. ‘I know I can’t apologize for what I’ve done,’ Spike spoke low, never raising his eyes to meet Xander. ‘I don’t want,’ he took a deep breath before continuing. ‘Your pity.’ He took his index finger and touched the surface of the blood with his finger, bringing it up, and examining it carefully. ‘I know that I’m dirty,’ Spike rubbed the index finger against his thumb staining both with the deep red color. ‘I know that I’m a bad man.’ ‘No? Really?’ the jibe escaped Xander’s lips before he had time to consider it. ‘You’re a vampire and you’re a bad man? An animal more like.’ Spike flinched as if Xander had hit him and continued rubbing his finger and thumb together. 'I didn’t want to hurt her,’ he said finally. ‘You’ll never,’ he sighed. ‘You’ll never believe me. I guess I can’t expect differently. But I never wanted to hurt her. It was…’ his voice wavered. ‘I just… I didn’t want to hurt her.’ ‘But you did,’ Xander stated. ‘You did. And you can’t erase that. You can’t just pretend you didn’t. And you sticking around here, doing this best buds thing with me isn’t going to help you gain her back.’ ‘I don’t want,’ Spike started and then his voice cracked and he stopped as quickly as he had begun. Turning his hands up he looked at them, his eyes mentally stripping away the blood, the skin, the muscle: down to the bare bones. Xander’s jaw clinched and he purposefully unclenched it, bringing the mug up to his lips and taking a drink. Spike turned his hand out in front of him. Bare bones. Down to the bare bones. The skeleton. Made him who he was. ‘I just,’ Spike hesitated for a second and then continued, his voice wavering slightly. ‘I want to be good. I want,’ he swallowed and his voice cracked. ‘I want to be loved.’ Xander’s eyebrows came together as he starred at the vampire. ‘Cause you really—’ Xander stopped mid sentence, his eyes focused on the figure in front of him. Tall, lean, dressed in black pants and the blue shirt he’d worn so often recently, the figure in front of him looked nothing like the Spike Xander knew and hated so fiercely. That Spike was cool and confident, with an attitude about him that said he cared what nobody thought. This Spike was broken, quiet, with a vulnerability—vulnerability?—that screamed he cared. Xander licked his lips to moisten them, suddenly rendered speechless. Never before had he found himself without a quick put down. Never before had he found himself feeling guilty—guilty?—over hurting a vampire’s feelings—feelings? A vampire’s feelings? And suddenly he had no words. No quick wit, no degrading comment, nothing. Spike stood suddenly and downed the blood in one gulp, wincing as he put the glass down and swallowed the blood. He wiped his lips off and looked Xander straight in the eye. ‘I don’t ‘spect to get back with the Slayer,’ he said quietly. ‘I know better than that. She’ll never want me. And even if she did. I’m no good for her. I’ll help when I can, if I can. I’ve got to do something. And helping her with…’ his eyes clouded and he shook his head. ‘Beneath her.’ ‘Beneath her?’ Xander stood up suddenly, taking a step towards Spike, thoroughly disgusted. ‘Beneath her? That’s a visual I really didn’t—’ ‘Beneath us,’ Spike interrupted firmly, his tone a reproach. ‘All of us. If I can help Buffy, I will. It won’t make me clean again. But at least it keeps me from thinking how I dirty I really am.’ With a quiet look reminiscent of the snarky looks he’d had been famous for giving, Spike crossed the room, opened the door and walked out of the apartment, pulling the wooden door shut behind him. The sound echoed in the apartment, fading away into quiet stillness that wrapped around Xander like a blanket. Xander sat down again and lifted his mug to nothing in particular, toasting the silence and the confusion—and discovering the core of what they were. |
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