Bewitched, Chapter 18

[thismaz]

Title: Bewitched, Chapter 18
Pairing: S/X. I promise it will get back there... eventually.
Rating: This chapter PG-13
Summary: Valentine's Day arrived and Dru dipped her finger in the brew, giving it a stir.
Word Count: 1,975
Betaed by sparrow2000 and DJ, for which, many thanks. Thanks also to Sparrow for her help, conflabbing on plot twists and forms.
Comments: Are greatly appreciated, loved and cherished.
Disclaimer: here.
Prologue here, with a link to the other chapters, or you can find the whole thing, in reverse order, in tags, or in the correct order, in memories. There's a menu of links on the right hand side of my main journal page.


Many thanks to mwrgana for the beautiful banner.



Chapter 18

Spike selected his vantage point to favour him in the late evening breeze. He sat back against the stone legs of an angel (with a snort for his inappropriate complacence with the image) and lit a fag. The Slayer's voice carried clearly to him, just as the smoke was carried away, although he had to strain to hear her little friend.

"You need to pick your classes, Buffy," the redhead said. What was her name again? He cast his mind back a few months, to his last visit to Sunnydale and his stupid plan to kidnap the witch and win Dru back. It was all a bit of a blur, what with the alcohol, but... Oh yeah, Willow; that was it.

"Ah!" she said. "An Introduction to the Modern Novel." She was using a torch to read from a brochure she'd picked out from a litter of others that were scattered around her on the grass. "An introductory course on the twentieth century novel. Open to freshmen. You might like that."

The Slayer was doing some sort of calisthenics between the gravestones. "Yeah, I guess," she replied. "But there's no rush, is there?"

"Well..." Willow looked up from her reading with an exasperated frown, but she obviously decided that the subject was a lost cause, because she lapsed into silence.

The Slayer ignored her, continuing with her useless display of agility - useless because she might as well put up a flashing neon sign saying, 'Experienced fighter here'. Any opponent would be forewarned. Not that Spike cared about that. If something turned up and wanted to take her on, it might make the fight more entertaining.

The little girl (he needed to find a name for her; thinking of her by her given name seemed too much like pandering to the conventions of human society) sighed. "I wonder where Xander is," she said. "I'm getting worried." Ah, to hell with it, she could be 'Willow'; this was what he'd been waiting for. This was why he'd been tracking them for the last week. He strained to catch every shift of tone and emotion in her voice. Worried didn't sound good. "One card from Oxnard, two months ago and nothing since," she continued. "Do you really think he's okay?"

Pausing in her jumping and punching at nothing, the Slayer rested her hands on her hips and turned to face her friend. Spike had a good view of her profile and could still hear her clearly when she replied, "I think he's a boy, Will."

With another despondent sigh, the red witch (Spike considered her with his head on one side, yes, that worked) began gathering her papers together. "Yeah, stupid boys," she groused, "with their stupid inability to communicate." Stuffing the brochures into a large satchel, she sat back against a tombstone and fiddled with the pencil in her hand. "Imagine it, though," she added, "forty-nine states to visit. I bet he's seen some wonderful places."

The Slayer turned away and started kicking her legs high and forwards, alternately, while reaching out with her opposite hand to touch her toes at the top of each kick. "Don't worry," she grunted between moves. "He'll be back. He said he would."

Spike snorted in disgust. So his boy was off having an adventure. That was depressing. But with no idea of where he'd gone, there was no point in haring off, looking for him. Eventually he'd tell his friends where he was. All Spike had to do was discover when and ferret out where.

With the well of news run dry, he decided that there was no point in hanging around. The slayer was making too much noise not to scare away any potential opponents. Glancing up at the stars, he estimated that it was gone midnight, but still early. Plenty of time for a pint or two at Willy's. He got to his feet and crossed the roof of the mausoleum he'd been using as his look-out, jumped to the ground and made his way to the gates nearest to the lower end of town.

It was while he was sitting at the bar, intimidating Willy into standing him free drinks, that a snippet of conversation from the booth behind him caught his ear. He twisted slightly on his stool, resting his elbow on the bar in a seemingly careless sprawl and studied the speakers out of the corner of his eye. They were a couple of minions with hardly a decade between them, if Spike was any judge, which he was, and they seemed to be mostly concerned with complaints about their boss. That was as interesting, in its own way, as the idea that this boss had actually found the hiding place of the Gem of Amara, because it meant he had no control over his followers. Such a weak minded leader had no business winning a prize like that.

Spike returned to his pint, while keeping most of his attention on the continuing conversation behind him, hoping for a clue as to where they were doing all the digging they were complaining about. No such luck, but they both proved very amenable to singing at the end of the night, when he followed them into the alley and questioned them.

Three weeks later he was drilling under the base of a crypt with a jackhammer and half a dozen loser vampires who had thought they were in for a cut of the proceeds from their treasure hunt.

*****

Xander wandered into The Bronze. Once he'd had a good night's sleep, he thought, he'd go and see Giles and the girls, but at that moment, he just wanted to lose himself in the familiar noise of home, even if he wouldn't recognise any of the patrons. He couldn't spend his first night back in Sunnydale, alone in a tatty room at the Sunnydale Motor Inn. Much better to spend it alone in a crowded bar.

The fake ID he'd got in Oxnard was good enough to get him a beer. It was more for show than for drinking; with a beer in his hand, he was a man in this haunt of high school juniors.

Withdrawing from the crush of people waiting to be served, he found an empty stretch of wall to lean against and a place to put his beer down, and surveyed the room. He'd been right, although some of the faces were vaguely familiar, he could put names to none of them. They were all so young - kids who'd been sophomores or juniors, when he and his friends were scheming to defeat the Mayor, and dying in the process.

Looking around the room, his eyes were drawn to the dark corner under the stairs where Larry and he used to hide from the girls when they were being particularly fag hagish. It appeared that others had found it now, he could just make out the darker shadows of two bodies, locked in an embrace, the pale glow of the boy's bent head and the bracelets on the girl's wrist catching the light. The sight made him feel old.

It had been a long summer and he'd achieved none of the things he'd set out to achieve, but there had been compensations. He had come back to Sunnydale with new experiences under his belt and a new level of confidence in himself. With separation from Sunnydale and all he knew, some of the pain of Larry's loss had blunted. As with Jesse, it would probably always be there, as a dull ache, but he'd come to a sort of truce with his guilt, in Oxnard. At some point, between rescuing Jimmy the dancer from a vampire attack and kissing him goodbye, Xander had realised that Larry, like the others who had died that day, had been heroes to be honoured rather than victims to be pitied.

He reckoned that he had Wilber to thank for that recognition, more than anyone else. The old man visited The Fabulous Ladies Night Club every Thursday afternoon and between sets he'd talk to anyone who'd stand still long enough to listen. Mostly it was complaints about the retirement home his son had placed him in, or he'd rail against the President and his politics, but one day a diatribe on the cost of new shoes led to a comparison with the prices of his youth and somehow that became a tearful story of the war in Europe and what he'd seen in Germany at the end. He'd called it a righteous war, his voice fierce as he said it.

Listening to Wilber, Xander had realised that fighting the Mayor had been a righteous war, too. Without the battle of Sunnydale High School Graduation, the whole town would have been lost, and possibly the whole country. It didn't change the fact that the cost had been horrendous, but Wilber's phrase had given Xander a perspective that he'd needed to see.

A flash of blonde hair caught Xander's attention and he stood up straight, trying to see past the heads of a knot of boys near the dance floor. He craned his neck, spotting the blond head again and following it with his eyes, until the shift of a few bodies also gave him a view of the face that went with it. What was Buffy doing here? She should be partying with the grown-ups, at the grown-up school. She turned her back to him and sat down on the battered old sofa that they'd appropriated during their senior year.

With a private grin, Xander picked up his beer and pushed his way through the crowd. Creeping up behind her, he leant over and whispered in her ear, "The whole world in front of her, and she comes back to this dive."

Buffy twisted around, her face breaking into a huge smile. "Xander!"

They spent the next hour catching up and he bought her a light beer, some sort of boutique brew made with honey which she sipped at appreciatively. The summer had apparently been slower than usual, once all the funerals were done. (Xander felt a pang for his absence, but Buffy refused to allow him to indulge in guilt, admitting that she'd only gone, herself, to support Giles.) In the aftermath of the Mayor, she said, demonic activity had dropped off to almost nothing. She claimed to have had a restful summer. Judging by signs of strain around her eyes, the fall was not being so kind.

In turn, Xander told her the truth about his every-state-in-the-union road trip, raising more than one laugh from her, which was good to see. He even told her about Jimmy and his own one night on the stage. But once the catching up was done, he asked her about college and the reason for her appearance in The Bronze became clear. It appeared that, intimidated by UC Sunnydale, she was suffering a crisis of confidence. It was strange to hear her so despondent. She had always appeared so irrepressible to Xander. The idea that some wannabe prima donna of a vampire should make her doubt herself infuriated Xander so much that he dragged her up from her chair, out of the club and into the alley.

They spent the rest of the evening in the most therapeutic way possible for a slayer - chasing around the campus looking for vampires and then dusting their skanky asses.

By the end, it was almost like old times. Giles turned up, and with Willow and Oz, Buffy and Xander treated his late arrival in the spirit that it deserved. When Xander eventually got back to his grotty motel room, after helping to return all Buffy's possessions to their rightful place, he was more hopeful that, in spite of the loss of the library, the Scooby Gang was still in business.


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[thismaz.livejournal.com]

Thank you for reading and commenting. I'm pleased to know that you enjoyed them.
I am smiling hugely, right now, at your kind compliments.
I am fighting the next chapter into submission, at the moment, so it will hopefully be ready to post on Saturday. Thanks again.