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babygirlgiles · 2 years

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Buffy Summers and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Cable Bill

Summary: Someone has been paying Buffy’s cable bill— and don’t get her wrong, it’s not a problem that someone else wants to fork over the cash, especially considering how broke she is at the moment. The problem is that according to the cable company, she’s the one who’s been paying the cable bill all summer while she was busy being very, very dead. But it’s nothing she can’t solve! Because she’s going to be Miss On Top Of It, whether she likes it or not. Or she would be, if these demons would stop tearing up the Claire’s at the mall.

Join our heroine, Buffy, as she and her friends battle forces of darkness like extremely annoying hold music, the creeping sense of emptiness that only late night TV can fill, and the totally confusing mess of figuring out how to be an adult.

23k, 1 chapter, complete. Also on ao3.

So here’s the thing: there’s been a lot going on lately. Between the not-so-dead thing and the “surprise! You’re broke!” thing and the whole… well, she’s not even sure what the Spike thing is but it’s certainly A Thing. There’s just been a lot of capital-t Things that she’s got to figure out and now Giles has left for England. Which is fine. It is so fine and not a problem at all because she is an adult. Who can take care of herself. And everyone else too, because that’s what she does. Ms. Buffy Summers the Take Care-r. Not super catchy, but it’ll have to do because that’s what she’s up to right now— taking care of things, on the phone, specifically, with the cable company. Which, like, okay, she wasn’t even aware that she had a cable company until four-ish weeks ago but that’s also fine because now she does know! And she has known ever since her and Giles had sat down gone through all the bills that had been multiplying like evil little… multiplying-thingies while she was very busy decaying.

“And who’s taking care of the cable bill?” he’d asked her, as if it was a question she would obviously know the answer to like, ‘who ate the last of my Gogurts?’ (Willow) or ‘who put my stakes in the dishwasher again?’ (Dawn. It’s always Dawn.)

“We have a cable bill?” she’d asked and he’d handed it to her. It didn’t have big red PAST DUE on it like all the other bills so that was encouraging. “I thought it came with the house.”

(read the whole fic, "Buffy Summers and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Cable Bill" on ao3, or under the cut)

“Typically, no,” Giles had replied, making some notes in his very spiky cursive handwriting that Buffy can never read.

“Maybe things work differently in England,” Buffy had replied. (This was before he’d told her what he was planning on doing— or, really, where he was planning on going— so it wasn’t as much of a sore spot yet).

“Well, no,” he’d replied, clearing his throat. “And unless things work very differently on the other side of Sunnydale, I would have been paying a shell company every month for years.”

So apparently not only does she have a cable bill, but someone must have been paying it because Buffy has certainly been watching a lot of late night TV when she can’t sleep. (She is now of the opinion that you really don’t start to notice the true depth and beauty of the Oxiclean infomercials until you’ve watched the full set a few times).

Giles had told her that she should find out who is paying the bill and that, according to him, shouldn’t be that hard to do. And it is, in fact, super easy to call the cable company! Which is exactly why she put it off until she got another “Amount Due: $0” notice in the mail for this month’s billing cycle and she realized she really couldn’t put it off anymore.

And so this is Buffy now: on hold with Valley Telecom on her one day off from the Double Meat Palace. The hold music has basically engrained itself into her psyche by now, which isn’t a musical masterpiece but her CDs keep going missing (she’s convinced it’s Dawn, but she won’t fess up) so at least it’s better than the oppressive midday silence. It makes a good staticy soundtrack to her scrubbing the toilet which has, of course, also fallen to her. Willow hasn’t been around much lately and she can barely get Dawn to clean her own room, let alone a shared bathroom, and Tara doesn’t even live technically here anymore but even if she did, she always did so much cleaning and grocery shopping and cooking that Buffy would never ask her. Which means it’s fallen to Buffy. She’s just starting to think about the fact that she’s already too tired to even get more tired because she’s maxed out on the tiredness when the hold music finally clicks off.

“Valley Telecom, thank you for holding. This is Matthew speaking, how can I help you?”

Buffy fumbles with the phone and nearly sends it tumbling into the toilet bowl. “No no no no,” she hisses, catching it just barely above the soapy, mucky water.

“Hello?” Matthew asks as she finally manages to cradle the phone between her ear and her shoulder, wincing a bit at the dampness her cleaning gloves transferred to the receiver. Yuck.

“Yes! Hi! I’m here! Please, please, please don’t put me on hold again.”

“... not a problem, ma’am. How can I help you today?”

“Yeah, hi, I had a question about my bill?”

The interaction goes pretty normally (and bonus points for that: dying wasn’t exactly great for her social life and she’s felt like a total spaz around strangers lately, not that she was a glittering example of a normal girl beforehand) and she’s just beginning to think maybe Giles was right and this won’t be so bad after all when she gives the employee her name.

“Oh wow,” Matthew replies, awed. “Are you the Buffy Summers?”

“The one and only?” A thick, fat drop of some yuckiness drips from the toilet brush and onto the tile. “Unless there’s another one I don’t know about, but ‘Buffy’ wasn’t exactly topping lists of hottest baby names in 1981.”

“Wow— I, um— sorry. You’re something of a local celebrity around here,” the man chuckles. Which is never really a good thing— she doesn’t tend to be a celebrity among the most savory of crowds— but, hey, if a cable company run by demons can supply her with the 3am Bowflex commercials she needs to fall asleep nowadays then she can turn the blindest of eyes.

“Thanks, I think? Not to rain on your cotton candy or anything, but I just need to know who’s paying my bill.”

“You are,” Matthew replies immediately. Don’t they usually have to look these kinds of things up?

Buffy says, “No, I’m not.”

Matthew says, “Yes, you are,” sounding very confused. She’s keeps imagining Matthew has a kind of energy like he could be one of the Backstreet Boys, but not one of them specifically because he’d be in a different band that’s equally hot— he has a really nice voice, okay? “It’s why you’re so well known around here. Basically no one else pays in cash. I’m not even sure if it’s technically allowed and I’ve been working here for eighteen years now.”

(And that shatters her mental image of hot, young, sensitive Matthew).

There must be a really long period of silence where her brain is desperately trying to piece together this new information because Matthew elaborates: “You’ve been mailing us cash every month.”

“No, I really have not. I’ve been dea— deathly afraid of postage stamps ever since a tragic incident involving a mailbox and a severed arm.”

“Oh, well… I’m sorry for your loss?”

“Thank you,” Buffy replies mindlessly, scrubbing at a particularly tough stain. Okay, whatever, that’s as clean as it's gonna get anyway; she flushes.

“It’s definitely your name on the return address. 1613 Revello Drive, correct?”

But she’s a bit preoccupied by the now overflowing toilet to respond to that weirdness and she hangs up to mop up the spilling water without the phone becoming the newest tragic casualty of Buffy Summers’s Disaster of a Life.

She doesn’t think about it again until that evening because an overflowing toilet is pretty all-consuming apparently. By the time every towel in the house was soaked through, she’d gotten Xander on the phone, who’d snuck off to a (hopefully structurally sound) corner of his worksite to talk her through diagnosing the problem and fixing it. Mom even had a spare part to fix it in the basement (Buffy couldn’t help but wonder if this was a recurring problem she’d just never noticed before because Mom had always taken care of it in the background) but the wrench she’d needed to fix it was nowhere to be found. Not in the garage, not in the basement, not in the little toolbox under the sink. Xander had eventually coached her through turning off the water to the whole bathroom until he got off work and came over with his own toolbox. The broken gasket was not only very messy but also something that costs money to replace— as does the water damage it caused to the ceiling. So the whole ordeal with the cable company had slipped her mind until Willow got home later that evening.

“Hey,” Buffy calls from the living room when she hears the front door open. It’s well past time for primetime TV but not quite time for her Oxiclean infomercials (Hi! Billy Mays here! She wonders how well it works for getting blood stains out of leather but Billy doesn’t talk about it in the commercial and Buffy doesn’t want to waste her money in case it doesn’t work).

“Hi. Shower,” Willow drones in reply. There’s a Full House rerun on which means it’s way late for Willow to be coming home; Buffy can never quite decide if watching the antics of a family that’s only dysfunctional to a G-rated degree makes her angry or sad or jealous. And oh, yeah— cable bill.

“Hey, Willow,” she calls when she hears the first stair creak (and is it bad when a stair creaks? Is she about to have a full staircase-collapse on her hands?). The stair creaks again and then Willow appears in the living room.

Buffy says, “Oh,” when she sees her.

“Yeah,” Willow replies, shifting stiffly on her feet.

“Is that…?”

“Demon guts? Yup.”

She’s covered in grey-ish green slime, sticking to her hair and in the folds of her skirt in gnarly chunks. A dollop of something splats onto the hardwood floor— probably brain matter or mucus and nope, she’s definitely done thinking about that.

“Eww.”

“Major eww.”

“But ‘you should see the other guy’?” Buffy asks.

“Oh yeah, his head went all kablooey,” Willow replies, making a big explosion gesture with hands. A blob of stringy slop flings off her fingertips; Buffy grimaces in sympathy. “I’m gonna shower—.”

“What happened ?” Buffy interrupts before Willow can turn away. It’s a commercial break now and it’s one of those Betty Crocker Cake Decorating Kit commercials that she always hates because it makes her think about how there’s no way those cakes taste as good as they look and then she gets sad— so she might as well hear what happened while she waits for Michelle and Jesse to get back to their hijinks.

But Willow just rolls her eyes in exasperation. “I did a spell that made its head go kablooey.”

“Oh. Okay. I should probably go patrolling, huh? See if it has any friends around.” Buffy says, knowing there’s no way she’s getting out of her pajamas. Or off this couch. Maybe she can slay from the couch?

Thankfully Willow shakes her head. “It was all alone. Kind of weird, sad looking little thing, like someone had already beaten it up a bit. I was just walking back from” she pushes some slime covered hair from her eyes. “Uh, from the mall. I was walking back from the mall and he shouted something about glory and honor? But I’m not really sure where it was going with that because—” she interrupts herself with an exaggerated explosion noise, gesturing the same way as before.

“I’m sure it’s fine,” Buffy replies, nestling further into the couch cushions.

“I’m gonna shower now.”

The Betty Crocker commercial is over now, so Buffy says, “M‘kay.”

She pulls the bowl of popcorn from the coffee table onto her slouched chest. Looks like a rerun of Sabrina the Teenage Witch is on next; Willow never says they can’t watch Sabrina but she gets all quiet and disappointed because apparently they promote negative stereotypes about witchcraft and young practicing witches specifically so it’s probably for the best that Willow goes now anyway because Buffy doesn’t want to change the channel but also doesn’t want to endure silent glares the entire time either. The first stair creaks again (really, that isn’t a problem, right?) and Buffy remembers—

“Oh, hey, Willow?”

Willow stomps back into the living room, looking absolutely miserable in her goop-covered state.

“What is it, Buffy? I really want to shower.”

“It’s nothing, I— do you know who’s paying the cable bill?”

Willow crosses her arms over her chest, dry muck flaking off her. “Why would I know that? Why don’t you ask Spike? He’s always over here using the TV to watch Passions with Dawn anyway.”

Sabrina’s laugh track rings out into the tense space between them.

“Okay, sorry. Have a nice shower.”

“ ‘ Night.”

When she finally goes upstairs after the second round of Bowflex commercials starts, she steps into the shower sheself. She’s too tired to keep her eyes open but too itchy from cleaning, then lying around in her post-cleaning sweatiness, to go to sleep. She pulls down her bottle of coconut scented shampoo (she switched from her old strawberry one after Spike said her hair smelled good) only to find Willow must have used the last of it. And didn’t even bother to throw the bottle away. She’d already added water to it like three times too, trying to stretch it out as much as possible. She tosses the bottle out of the shower in the general direction of the trash can and listens to it skid across the tile floor. She sighs and sits on the bottom of the bathtub until the shower runs cold.

*****

Besides the fact that Willow’s suggestion was, at best, passive aggressive, the absolute last thing Buffy wants to do is ask Spike about her cable bill because 1) if she asks him, he might get the wrong idea that they’re, like, friends or something or the kind of people who talk about home-y things like bills or groceries and if she gives him an inch, he’ll take the whole enchilada and cling to it with a death grip. And 2) what if he does know? Because then that would mean Spike was more involved with her life than she is, which honestly wouldn’t be too surprising at this point, but after spending the night crying in the shower because now she has to go couch-fishing for quarters to afford more shampoo, she doesn’t need any more hits to her ego before dawn, thank you very much.

So instead of miserably crawling to Spike’s crypt— which she is really trying to do less often lately— she waits until it’s an acceptable hour for regular humans to be awake and calls Xander.

“Xand-man speaking.”

“Really, Xander?”

“Buffy! To what do I owe the pleasure on this fine Thursday morning?”

Oh, yeah. It’s a weekday, huh? Food service has her schedule all kinds of messed up.

“Shouldn’t you be at work?” she asks.

“Caught me just in time. New job starting today so we don’t have to be in ‘til later. I’m about to head out but I’ve always got a minute for my favorite Slayer.”

“I’ll make it quick then,” she says. She’s rooting around in the kitchen looking for breakfast and coming up empty handed. “I have kind of a weird question: do you know who’s paying my cable bill?”

“Wait. I thought that comes with the house.”

“That’s what I said! I guess someone was paying in cash under my name when I was dead, because apparently cable is something you have to pay for.”

“Huh. Do you know who’s paying my cable bill?”

She hears Anya shout from the background, “I pay the cable bill!”

“Anya says she pays the cable bill.”

“Well that’s one mystery solved at least.”

“Is that Buffy?” Anya shouts from the background. “Can you tell her I say hi and also that her axe sharpener came in?”

“Anya says hi and that your axe sharpener came in.”

Buffy’s been having some trouble with one of the battle axes going dull after lobbing the head off a particularly spiny scaled lizard demon thing that took up residence in the local record store a couple months ago. It just couldn’t get it sharp again no matter how many times she runs a stone along the blade, but Giles looked it up and the scales’ secretions interact with that specific metal in a way that needs a mystical axe grinder to fix. She’s gotten a lot of mileage out of various “I’ve got an axe to grind” jokes in the meantime but she’ll be glad to have it all sorted— that’s, like her second favorite battle ax and she hasn’t been able to use it for months now.

“Tell Anya thanks and that I say hi too.”

She pulls away the phone just in time to prevent her eardrum from being shattered by Xander relaying her message to the other room. There’s some indistinct shouting in reply (Xander yells, “huh? Heh?!” back a couple times and Anya repeats herself again and again) until Xander finally says,

“Anya also says you should ask Tara about your cable bill because she took care of all that stuff before, you know, you got back.”

“Oh. Okay. Thank you.”

“Yeah, yeah I’m going.”

“Huh?”

“No, not you. Anya is telling me I need to finish my breakfast or I’m gonna be late.”

Oh, yeah. She was looking for food too. She stands up from where she was slouching on the counter and starts to dig through the cabinets again. They’ve got, like, dried beans, some mushroom risotto flavored instant rice, a barely used thing of almond flour that she’s pretty sure is older than Dawn, and a mostly empty box of Raisin Bran that’s been pushed progressively further and further back in the cabinet as it’s gone uneaten. It looks like they’re out of all the other cereals. She doesn’t want to make pancakes or anything like that because Willow never stops to eat in the mornings when she has class and Dawn spent the night at Katie’s for a slumber party (right? Or was that the night before last?) and, by herself, Buffy will be left with a million pancakes and a whole lot of wasted effort. Plus, she’s not even sure if they have any eggs. What she’s really craving is these little omelet things Mom used to make— those were so good, with these little bits of sausage and just enough pepper to be a little spicy but not too spicy. But Mom always said you couldn’t write down really good recipes because they never taste the same again (a superstition from Grandma Shirley, who Buffy never met) and Buffy always said Mom should show her next time because she was always too tired before having breakfast. So now they’ll never taste the same anyway because Buffy doesn’t know how to make them. Raisin Bran it is, then. Where did this even come from?

“Buffy?” Xander asks.

“Huh?”

“I was saying I’ve gotta go. New job at the mall I’m surveying today. Guess the Claire’s got torn up by a pack of wild dogs. And we all know what that’s code for.”

Buffy groans, shuffling the contents of the cabinet despondently, hoping anything besides Raisin Bran will suddenly appear. She turns over a jar of peanut butter (they have bread and peanut butter on toast is a meal, right?) to see yuck, it expired three years ago? How is this still in here? She was literally in high school when this went bad.

“For real?” Buffy laments to both Xander and the kitchen at large. “Demons in the mall?”

“I know. Is nowhere sacred anymore? I guess it’s been happening pretty regularly too, like every couple of weeks. They called us in to reinforce some window frames, see about getting them some new steel shelving.”

“Love the crossover with the industrial chic shelving, barred store windows, and the pretty pink ear piercing station. Do you think they’ll start doing prison tattoos?” Buffy jokes but, honestly, the absolute last thing she needs is some kind of coordinated demon attack on local tween shopping establishments. And on top of figuring out this stupid cable bill. Ugh.

“If they do, do you think they’d give me a mermaid with huge— and I mean just absolutely honkin’— ow! Yeah, okay, eating! I’m eating.”

“Hey, let me know if there’s any mention of, I dunno, ‘honor and glory’ there?”

“What-y and who-y? It’s a Claire’s, Buffy. The only honors there are the respects we pay to all those souls lost in that liliac chaos.”

“I dunno, it’s just something Willow said a demon shouted. She ran into one on her way back from the mall last night.”

“Why was Willow—?” There’s a sound that seems suspiciously like Xander being thwapped over the head with a morning newspaper (and yes, Buffy knows this because she has seen Anya read the morning paper like she’s Giles or something and also seen Anya— justifiably, usually— whack Xander with said newspaper). “I know! I know, okay! Listen, I really gotta go but we’re still on for poker night tonight, yeah?”

“Yeah, of course. Wouldn’t miss it for the world!” (Buffy had no idea there was poker night tonight).

“And Dawn won’t be playing again, right? Because Anya will kill me if she clears me out like last time.”

Oh yeah, that was when they agreed to do poker night again. Buffy had tried to make Dawn give back the money she’d won from Xander and Willow but she’s pretty sure they didn’t let her; a couple days ago, she saw Dawn wearing a new pink charm bracelet with little spiky balls and a little unicorn that, inexplicably, reminded her of mom, around the same time that a red nail polish had appeared on Buffy’s dresser. It had been Buffy’s favorite shade capital-b Before; now it reminds her of her bloodied fingertips. She wore it anyway and Dawn’s smile when she’d noticed it, Buffy handing her a sack lunch the next day, had been worth it.

“Dawn will be in a strictly spectating capacity tonight,” she replies. “It’ll be great, I promise.” But Xander has already hung up the phone.

*****

Poker night is not, in fact, great. At least Xander hadn’t heard her promise that. Dawn cajoled her way into the game before they’re even done with the Papa Murphy’s Xander brought (an extra special treat because it’s not Double Meat Palace) and by 8pm, Tara is already having to de-escalate an argument between Anya and Xander about whether betting two Oreos is equivalent to three mini Chips Ahoy because Xander has been cleaned out of everything except Fig Newtons (eww) by a very, very smug looking Dawn and now has some Chips Ahoy out on loan from “the bank” (i.e., Buffy’s secret cookie stash that apparently isn’t so much of a secret from Dawn, who’s lording them over everyone’s head like some mobster money shark). Buffy went into the kitchen for another slice of pizza, which quickly turned into stepping onto the back porch from some fresh air and a second of quiet. She nibbled at the limp cheesy blandness with the sound of (hopefully playful?) shouting in the background until she realized no one had missed her or was coming to look. So she walked out the back gate, pizza crust in hand and was at Spike’s crypt before she even realized she’d left her block. The pizza crust had been cast aside at some point until now: Spike plucks it up from the night stand (and since when does Spike have a night stand?) and eats almost all of it in one bite. She must have made some kind of face because he says, around a mouthful of crust.

“What? You know how to make a man work up an appetite.”

“You’re not a man,” she says before she can stop herself. It’s mostly on instinct, if she’s being honest, some kind of pre-programmed reaction like when they tap your knee at the doctor’s office and you nearly kick the doctor through the back wall because, hello, Slayer powers. A look of hurt flashes across Spike’s face before he can hide it, swinging his legs over the side of the bed so his back is to her. Her stomach does some weird floppy thing at the sight of his slumped shoulders; she probably shouldn’t have had that last slice of pizza, is all. It must not be settling right with her.

She adds, as a peace offering of sorts, “You don’t know where that’s been.”

“My mouth has been worse places.” He looks over his shoulder at her and licks his lips. Something inside her squirms; she pulls the sheet over her shoulders and cinches them tight around her neck, even as she feels her breath grow heavier, like it's being pulled down by the weight of how much she wants him. It’s not as bad when he looks at her like this, like she’s butcher’s scraps, tossed out the back door, and he’s an alley cat. It makes it easier to pretend his desire for her is as dirty as she feels about it— instead of when his eyes go all soft and tender and aching, like it hurts to look at her the way it hurts her to look at the sun for too long.

“You’re disgusting,” she replies, closing her eyes. She wishes she was at home in her pj’s, eating Dawn’s Poptarts, and watching Cheers reruns on her (probably ill-gotten) mystery cable, but she’s here, so maybe the next best thing is sleeping.

“Yeah, I am. And you love it.”

She can hear the smirk in his voice even with her eyes closed. She pushes him off the bed for that one. But he comes crawling back up, because of course he does, slinking under the sheets near her feet. (He always comes crawling back to her; she’s not really sure what to do with that.)

“I’m done, Spike. Quit it,” she snaps, kicking out her foot. She thinks it connects with his forehead, but his head pops out from under the sheets with a spot of red high on his cheekbone where she kicked him; he must have eaten right before she’d gotten there.

“Relax, Slayer,” he cooes, picking up the foot that had kicked him, fingers wrapped around the little bone in her ankle, the one that’s surprisingly dainty. She thinks about Faith telling her that men used to go nuts for ankles, how it was “practically tits out” to wear sandals back in the olden days or something, when Buffy teased her for wearing combat boots to the Bronze; she thinks about Cordelia telling her that she was so jealous of how thin her ankles were and how much she was wasting it with all those pants and boots, as if Buffy didn’t have to tromp around fighting evil on a daily basis; she thinks about Spike kissing that little bone so gently, with such reverence that she has to close her eyes against a wave of oncoming nausea. That had been a bad night: he’d grabbed at her feet while she was trying to leave, bringing her tumbling down to the floor with him. She’d thrashed against his hold and kicked him so hard she’d broken his nose, and still he’d looked at her like he’d grovel at her feet for the rest of eternity if it meant she would kick him again because at least that would mean she was touching him. The next day he’d told Dawn all about a pesky little demon from patrol that had supposedly gotten in a lucky punch and given him that black eye.

But tonight he just pulls his foot into her lap. He’s still naked and the casual intimacy of it makes her feel even more naked despite the fact that she’s the one fully covered by the sheets. He digs his thumbs into the arch of her foot, into that tendon that’s always drawn so tight no matter how many times she goes through all the stretches Giles taught her after she’d gotten a really bad charley horse fighting a priest-turned-vampire that one time.

“Stop it,” she giggles. It tickles and her toes curl with it.

“What’s got you so tense, pet?” he asks.

“Stop it,” she repeats, more firmly this time, pulling her foot away. She’s scared she’ll actually tell him everything that’s got her so stressed out. And what would that mean, if they were the kinds of people who unloaded their stresses on each other with something other than fists?”

“Hey, hey,” he soothes, pets a hand along her calf like she’s a skittish animal. Maybe she is one. That’s how she feels lately; everything is too bright or too loud or too hard, but even though there’s just too much it’s like there’s this hollow, empty hunger and she can’t fill it, can’t even want to fill it because that would mean—

She realizes belatedly, as Spike strokes her calf, that she really needs to shave.

“Relax, Slayer,” he repeats.

“Can’t. Not with you around,” she replies, even as she stretches her leg back out and lets him scoop up her foot again. That stubborn tendon loosens under his careful ministrations and she’s only a little bit resentful for it.

Sometimes, when she touches him, it’s like sticking her hand into a pile of glass shards, like that time Dawn smashed half the nice plates from the China cabinet right onto the dining room floor after mom died— bright and sparkling and sharp. Sometimes he touches her and she imagines the little glass biting from under her skin, buried just beneath the surface but unnoticed until he runs his fingers along the prickling nubs. It reminds her that she’s real and in her body and not a lot of things feel real these days. It’s like she’s there and she hasn’t really been much for the there lately. Most of the time she feels like she’s three feet away from herself, drifting somewhere close by, like she’s carrying herself along like a balloon on a very slack string or maybe one untied entirely, bobbing alongside herself in the breeze, just one wrong wind away from drifting away entirely. But it’s never like that with him; he makes her feel like she’s living inside herself again— sometimes for better, but usually for worse. It’s like coming home from a long vacation and being really grossed out by how filthy you left your room before you went away. But even if you come back to sheets that smell weird and disgusting, at least they’re your sheets; at least they’re familiar.

This, though— these little massages and the tiny kisses and the casual brushes through her hair— this is something else entirely and she’s not totally sure how she feels about this feeling: thick as pancake batter and even sweeter. It’s a little bit like heaven again, which just makes it worse. It’s so much worse.

“Willow got attacked by a demon on her way home the other day,” she hears herself say after a long silence.

“Little Red can handle herself.”

“I know,” she sighs, rolling her eyes. “But the one way ticket to Big Problem-Ville is that the demon, before she made his head explode— literally— was shouting something about honor and glory or whatever.”

Spike pauses. She wriggles her toes until he gets the message and starts kneading at the ball of her foot again.

“And then Xander says,” she continues, “that there’s been some demons tearing up the Claire’s at the mall on like a semi-weekly basis and knowing my luck that’s got something to do with Sir Braveheart.”

“Could be a coincidence,” he offers and she raises herself up on her elbows to look at him. He meets her eye for a second before he ducks his head to kiss her on the kneecap. She’ll have to get him back for that later but for now even sitting up feels like too much effort. She flops back onto the bed.

“Yeah, right,” she scoffs. “A coincidence? In Sunnydale? Not likely.”

“Other foot, my sweet,” he says. She’s told him not to call her that so she bops him on the nose with her toes for good measure before she lets him take her other foot into his lap.

He adds, once they’re settled again: “That’s just a normal day at the factory for you, though, innit? So what’s got you wound tighter than a virgin’s— oww! What was that for?”

“You know exactly what that was for.” She hopes he can hear her eye roll. She flinches when he digs deep into a tight spot on her ankle (and he probably did that in retaliation. Asshole.) but the muscles give way a second later and wow, she really is on her feet a lot, huh? God, she sounds like Mom. Does that mean she’s getting old? Never thought she’d see the day— wasn’t supposed to. Not really.

“I can’t figure out my cable bill,” she finally admits quietly.

“What was that, pet?”

“I said, I can’t figure out my cable bill,” she repeats, a bit louder now. “It’s getting paid every month but no one will fess up to it and I can’t figure out who’s sending in loose cash under my name every month and that’s what’s got me wound tighter than a— you know.”

“A virgin’s asshole?”

“Yeah. That.”

“Doesn’t sound like much of a problem to me. Someone wants to pay your bills for you, no questions asked, and not take credit for it? Sounds like the opposite of a problem, actually, if you ask me.”

“I just— I want—” she’s not really sure how to explain it when he puts it like that. It’s not like she’d be falling all over herself to pay it if she did know (and the little accountant, who sounds unsurprisingly like Giles, that’s taken up residence in her head lately starts tallying on the numbers on the chalkboard in her mind). But it’s her life and so little of it makes sense to her anymore but she’s trying to live it, even if she doesn’t always want to. Or scratch that— even though she usually doesn’t want to. But she’s trying because she doesn’t have a choice and if she could just understand this one thing—

“I just want to know, okay?” she finally settles on saying.

“Well, I can’t help you with that, love. But I can help with your little demon problem,” he replies and as a thank you she doesn’t even tell him off for calling her ‘love’ this time.

*****

As usual, Spike’s version of “helping” is totally unhelpful. He gave her a time and a place, but wouldn’t tell her anything else and she wasn’t about to beg. Like, come on, she has, like, at least a tiny bit of self respect hiding somewhere. Probably. Either way, a girl has gotta set some limits. At least, he lets her stay until she’s confident that the dust from Poker Night fallout has probably settled— even offers to walk her home which makes her chest do this little fluttering thing because it would be super sweet and romantic if it was literally anyone besides Spike offering. It’s also made slightly less sweet and romantic (as if the fact that it was Spike didn’t already lower the bar to the bottom of the ocean) if the offer didn’t have the caveat attached that she’d have to leave before the sun comes up “because otherwise we’ll be taking the scenic route through the sewers”. It ends up being a moot point anyway because Buffy does stay ‘til after dawn. Can never be too careful when avoiding poker-related fiascos. Plus, Spike really does know how to massage out stubborn knots.

When she gets home it is very solidly ‘morning’, so she’s surprised to see Dawn on the couch, eating cereal that is definitely not Raisin Bran (and where does she keep getting this stuff?) and watching Pinky and the Brain. Dawn, at least, looks just as surprised to see Buffy walking in through the front door wearing last night’s clothes which, yikes, that’s not a good look.

“You don’t like Pinky and the Brain,” is all Buffy can think to say.

Dawn rolls her eyes. “Good morning to you too.”

“Uh. Aren’t you supposed to be at school?”

“It’s Saturday,” Dawn replies flatly, eyes fixed on watching the little cartoon mice assemble some wacky contraption.

“Oh.”

“Yup.”

Dawn picks up a bowl of cereal off the coffee table. Somebody must have bought more but she’s not sure who. Buffy thinks about going and sitting down next to her, stealing a bite of her cereal— they could pretend that everything was good and normal, the same as before. But then she remembers what she’s wearing and what she’s been doing and why she’s coming home at 10am after being away all night and she realizes maybe Dawn wouldn’t want that with her. So just ends up hovering in the entryway, torn between sitting next to Dawn and running off upstairs.

“Have you called Giles back yet?” Dawn asks over the slide whistle sound of Pinky falling.

Oh. She’d forgotten.

“Yeah, yeah,” she lies. “He’s doing good. England is rainy and cold, just how he likes it. He says hi.”

Dawn narrows her eyes, squinting at the TV as the mice get squished under a falling book. “That’s weird. Because he called again last night, told me to pass along a message to you.”

“Well if he calls again, tell him he should get tested for early onset dementia. It’s a very tricky disease, hard to spot the early warning signs.”

“Mhm,” Dawn hums skeptically, not bothering to look away from the TV. “Sure. Can you just call him back so he stops hogging up the line? He’s interrupted me and Tracy watching Dawson’s Creek like twice now.”

“Can’t Tracy just come over?”

“You’re literally the one who grounded me!” Dawn snaps.

In all honesty, Buffy really can’t remember what Dawn is grounded for (this time) but if she admits that, she’s going to lose the tiny modicum of authority she’s managed to build up like a house of cards (and that’s a win! Dawn actually followed the rules of being grounded and didn’t go to Tracy’s! High fives for Buffy!).

“A decision I stand by,” she settles on saying instead.

“God, you’re such a bitch,” Dawn huffs, slamming down her cereal bowl. It splashes a streak of milk on the table that lazily rolls to the edge of the coffee table and onto the carpet.

“Ugh,” Buffy sighs, grabbing some Kleenexes off the side table to mop up the sticky milk before it can stain the carpet. “Go get a towel from the kitchen. Go!”

But Dawn just huffs in that whiny teenager-y screech thing Buffy really, really hopes she never did, and storms off upstairs instead. The whole outburst seems a little uncalled for, so Buffy calls after her,

“That’s another week added to your grounding, young lady!” (The ‘young lady’ thing kind of just slipped out and seems, like, absolutely ridiculous, but she’s not gonna back down now).

“I hate you!” Dawn yells back before her bedroom door slams hard enough to rattle the walls.

Buffy sighs.

There’s a new stack of mail on the hall table, so she toes off her shoes and brings it to the couch with her. She picks up the remote and clicks mute because that ZooPals commercial always gets stuck in her head, letting the little animal plates dance around on the screen in bright, cheery colors. There’s hardly anything besides fliers in the mail— she remembers being ten years old and getting a pen pal from Uruguay through some program Mom signed her up for at the library, how excited she’d get to flip through the mail every day waiting for a response, paging through all the coupon mailers and offers for pre-approved credit cards to see if it had gotten stuck between the pages of something else. Today it’s just the weekly Safeway coupons, an advertisement for a local exterminator, something urging her to vote to re-elect (or maybe un-elect? It's unclear.) the current school board representative for her district. There’s also the formal invite to Anya and Xander’s wedding— she sets that aside so she can hang it on the fridge.

(“Can’t you just hand it to me?” Buffy had asked Xander when her and Willow were helping them address and stamp all the invitations last weekend. “I’m right here.”

“That defeats all the fun of it! Look how adult this is!”

“Plus, we should use up all these stamps we bought,” Anya adds. “Waste not, want anyway.”

“I think you mean ‘waste not, want not,’” Willow had chimed in.

“I meant what I said,” Anya had replied.)

She takes a bite of Dawn’s cereal. It’s one of her monstrous concoctions (Fruity Pebbles with…Reese’s Puffs?) but Buffy keeps mindlessly eating it anyway.

She wishes it was exciting to get Xander and Anya’s invitation. It’s not that she— it’s just that sometimes Buffy feels like that hole that she and Willow burnt into the living room carpet with a candle. This was sometime during her junior year of high school, and as much as Buffy would be less embarrassed if it had been seance or some kind of demon fighting magic, the truth is that they’d been having a girl’s night when Willow’s karaoke rendition of “My Heart Will Go On” (seeing Titanic in theaters like 3 times that winter Buffy moved to Sunnydale had been a cornerstone of their early friendship) had gotten a little out of hand and she’d knocked a candle over. They’d dragged a rug over it, but the burn is still there, a big ugly mark ruining the carpet.

Thinking about Giles makes her feel like there's a giant hole in her chest, like there’s a burn mark ruining her, one that’s poorly hidden by something that’s kind of like the thing that was destroyed but not quite, the same way the rug is not exactly the carpet it’s covering. Even with the rug dragged over, this thing that’s wrong with her, everyone can still see it. He could see it.

She wants nothing more than to call him; she doesn’t want to call him at all. She doesn’t want to imagine what his life in England must look like, and she knows she will if they talk on the phone. Did he bring that green glass lamp back with him? Or did he give it away? Sell it, maybe? She always liked that lamp; it was pretty like an old-timey antique and so perfectly Giles. Did he still have that same frumpy armchair? She doesn’t know. He’d already cleared out his old apartment for his first foray by the time she got back.

God she really hates this. Hates feeling like a little kid begging. She feels the same kind of pity and embarrassment and anger at herself that she had felt watching Dawn tug on her dad’s sleeves and cry when he came to grab the last of his boxes. She’d never felt that way for her sister before.

She gets up and opens the drawer of the hall table and sifts through its contents— takeout menus, a pair of broken sunglasses, a pair of shoelaces, a baggy of guitar picks, other junk— and pulls out the notepad that’s been buried under it all. Giles had tried to give it to her before he’d left but she’d just told him to just throw it on the table and ignored the little wounded look that flashed on his face before he said, “right, of course”. There’s a note in there that she flips past because it always makes the hole in her chest feel even bigger (“I have the utmost confidence—” her eyes skitter over because she doesn’t turn the page fast enough) and finds where he wrote his new address, the email address Anya set up for him, and his new phone number.

She dials the number, waits for it to connect, and listens to the ringing.

He hasn’t set up a personalized message on his new answering machine yet. In her mind, she can still hear the one he had on his old machine (“you’ve reached the personal number of Rupert Giles…” said in that crisp clear accent that Spike called posh once, the one he always used when he was trying to be authority-man) even though she can’t really remember listening to it all that often.

The machine beeps.

“Hey Giles, it’s me. Buffy. From Sunnydale. Not that you probably know many other Buffy’s so wow, that was probably unnecessary wasn’t it? I probably didn’t even need to say who it is, I mean, I left you a million voicemails at your old apartment back when you still lived there so you probably know it’s me. Does your phone have caller ID? But anyway, it’s me, Buffy, the one and only. Or maybe not, the jury’s still out on that one, on account of there maybe being a different Buffy Summers who likes to mail cash in for strangers’ bills. Uh, yeah, anyway, sorry for missing all your calls and sorry if Dawn was a jerk about it. Um, we’re all doing great here, if that’s what you called to ask. Or if that’s now why, and there’s an apocalypse or some other kind of impending doom, maybe mention that to her so she won’t hang up on you for interrupting her shows again. We’ve been pretty apocalypse-free here for the most part, but if you know of any demons that hate earrings or necklaces or other assorted accessories meant for teen girls, that would be super helpful, because there’s been this whole thing at the mall with—. But yeah, I’ve got it totally under control.”

She’s rambling, she knows, but it’s like she’s tugged the rug off the burn hole and now she can’t cover it back up again. And even if she could put it all back, it’s not like she could unsee it, un-know it’s there. It just all comes tumbling out before she can stop herself.

“All of us here are peachy with a side of keen. I’ve got a job now and mostly got this whole cable bill thing figured out, Dawn is actually going to school when she says she is, Xander and Anya have gotten to the sending-out-invites phase of wedding planning and— and you should come, if you can. No pressure but, we’d— we’d all really love to see you there. And you don’t have to worry about us. We’re all doing good or— well, better. And it would be nice to see you because we all miss you. I—”

She runs a hand through her hair. It’s kind of knotted where the ponytail holder tugged on it and feels greasy in the way that it always does after a double shift; her new coconut shampoo doesn’t make it feel as clean as the strawberry one did.

“Gosh, I must be taking up all the space on your machine with my babbling. Just talk, talk, talk, same ol’ Buffy, right? You must be looking at how long this message is and thinking ‘oh dear lord, what is it now?’ so. Anyway. You know where to find me. Sorry I missed your call. L— ”

She almost says it on instinct, and then hesitates and then thinks about saying it anyway, the same words she used to say to her mom before she said goodbye on the phone.

“Bye, Giles,” she says instead.

She hangs up the phone.

*****

There’s a whole lot waiting, is what it comes down to; she doesn’t remember slaying involving this much sitting around and watching Malcolm in the Middle before, but patrols have been pretty uneventful the past few nights, and as far as the issue with the Claire’s, there wasn’t not much she could do until Thursday. That’s what Spike had told her, at least, that she wouldn’t have any luck figuring that one out until then, and now it’s “then”.

Now she’s waiting for Xander to come pick her up because Spike said to be at the mall at 11pm on Thursday and the mall is just about the most annoying place to get to in Sunnydale because there’s just no way to not take the highway. And the last time she’d jogged along the shoulder of the freeway, the police had stopped her to ask if she was “alright” and “if there was an emergency” and “hey aren’t you that Summers girl that’s always running around town”. Because apparently the shoulder of a freeway is “a dangerous place for a young girl”. As if she couldn’t take care of herself. Whatever. She doesn’t have time for that tonight.

Xander is late, though, so Buffy is waiting in the kitchen, trying to keep herself from eating Dawn’s portion of spaghetti out of boredom. She’d switch shifts with Karina to go investigate whatever it is at the mall that Spike thinks will lead her to the answer of her most recent Claire’s destroying demons and since she was going to be home anyway, she’d cooked for Dawn. But Dawn hasn’t been back tonight, yet, (study group, according to the note she’d left on the counter) so it’s just her and Tara. Tara’s been over a lot even though she’s technically moved back to the dorms— hanging out with Dawn, helping her with homework, watching her while Buffy is on patrol— at least when Willow isn’t around, which is most of the time lately.

Oh, wait. Didn’t Xander say Tara usually does the bills?

“Hey, Tara?” she calls into the empty quiet of the house.

“Down here!” Tara calls back from the basement.

Buffy heads down, her socks making little pat-pat noises on the rough wooden stairs. When they were little, her and Dawn weren’t allowed in the basement without Mom or Dad for seemingly no reason but probably, in hindsight, because there were power tools down there and boxes twice their height stuffed full of Santa Claus inflatables and Christmas lights. It was a different basement, a different house— the one in LA, the same one that’s probably empty now that her dad has run off again— but the same kind of stairs, the same kind of un-finished, un-sanded wood that’s snagging on her socks now. Buffy tried to sneak down to the basement this one time when she was a little kid; she’s not even sure anymore what she wanted from down there so desperately and it makes her heart ache because she knows Mom would remember. Mom wasn’t always great with keeping track of what she was up to or who her friends were or which team she was trying out for, but she always remembered that sort of thing. Dawn had tried to sneak down behind her, got a splinter from the banister, and then, in her tearful surprise, stumbled and slid down half the stairs on her butt. Buffy had carried her back up the stairs, shushing her the whole way so Mom wouldn’t find out, telling her the crying was gonna get them both in trouble. Of course Mom had heard anyway and Buffy had been put in time-out even though Dawn just got to go back to toddling around the house. Dawn was just learning how to walk then. The last moment Buffy knew true peace, she thinks half-jokingly, was when Dawn was still confined to her Fisher Price baby swing.

This basement is a little bit smaller than that one was, with un-finished concrete walls, while the other one had been painted a kind of eerily green-ish beige. It still smells kind of weird down here since the pipe burst (and fixing that ate through the gift from Giles pretty quickly, didn’t it?) but, hey, at least it’s not underwater anymore.

“Hi, Buffy,” Tara greets her in that way she was, where she looks genuinely happy to see you even though you’ve both been in the house this whole time. It’s easy and light on the expectations which is refreshing. Everyone seems to expect something from her; she suspects it’s been that way for a while now but it’s almost like she can’t remember anymore. She doesn’t remember everyone’s expecting being so hard before.

“Everything all right?” Tara asks and Buffy blinks. Oh, yeah. Cable bill. Right.

“Uh, Xander told me that you were taking care of the bills. When I was, you know…”

“Oh, yeah,” Tara interjects when Buffy trails off, saving her from having to put it into words. Sometimes it’s easier to say it than other times. “Just— while you were away. I know it’s overstepping, but I didn’t know if— I’m just a guest here, after all—”

“You’re not just a guest here, Tara.”

And Tara beams at her even though any more words get caught in Buffy’s throat so she can’t add anything else.

Instead, Buffy says, “I’m glad you took care of it. No one else was— are you folding laundry?”

Tara hides a pair of Buffy’s socks behind her back— it looks like the green ones with little shamrocks that Xander gave her senior year of high school to spare her from getting pinched on St. Patrick’s Day. They stuck a few inches above her white Keds and she’d ruined those shoes, hadn’t she? Got blood all over them sometime in college? The socks languished in the back of her drawer for years until she’d worn through enough other pairs that she was scraping the bottom of the barrel by the time laundry day rolled around. Now even these ones have a hold in one of the toes but she keeps wearing them because the thought of replacing them makes her feel really tired. And the whenever she thinks about getting new socks, the little accountant in her head starts tallying away on the chalkboard, because even if it wouldn’t cost that much, she gets so nervous these days, like something bad is going to happen and she won’t be able to—

“Sorry,” Tara says sheepishly. Buffy has asked her not to fold the laundry before, even when she still lived here, but she always does it anyway. She still keeps finding little chores done after Tara comes over, ones she’s pretty sure Dawn didn’t do unless she had a personality transplant and ones Willow wouldn’t think to do— surfaces dusted, carpets vacuumed, little bags of produce in the fridge that Buffy definitely didn’t buy because her and vegetables aren’t the best of friends in the first place but also these look like nice vegetables, the kind with names she doesn’t know, from the Farmer’s Market in town that Tara loves. It’s so helpful and so kind; Buffy isn’t entirely sure if she deserves it, but Dawn does and it’s not like Buffy has been able to keep Tara from helping anyway.

“It’s okay.” Buffy says with what she hopes is a reassuring smile. She plucks a shirt out of the laundry basket. “Hey, can I ask you kind of a weird question?”

“If being soulless is what makes vampires evil, then why do people do cruel things even when they do have a soul?”

“Uh, no? But that sure is a weird question. Why’s that been on your mind?”

“No reason! Anyway, what did you want to ask?”

Buffy’s never been all that good at folding clothes. Mom used to tease her that she just didn’t have the patience for it, but she’s gotten a bit better at it lately. The shirt is only a little bit rumpled when she puts it on the pile of Dawn’s clothes and picks up another.

“Oh, uh, I know I should probably know this already, and it’s been like way too long since I should’ve figured this out, but better late than never I guess, so I was wondering if you know who’s paying the cable bill?”

“Oh,” is all Tara replies.

“Oh?”

“Well, I thought you knew?”

“... knew what?”

Tara is paying an awful lot of attention to making very tidy folds along a pair of Buffy’s shorts. “Dawn said Joyce said it was okay. So I kind of assumed you knew?”

Outside, a car horn beeps once, sharply. Xander is here, finally. Great timing.

“Knew what? What did Dawn do? Tara, I’m not mad or anything,” Buffy lies. She is mad, just definitely not at Tara. Dawn on the other hand… “I just want to know.”

“Dawn pays it. The cable bill. She's the one who pays it.”

Buffy’s mouth opens in a kind of dull shock before she can stop herself. She’s not even totally surprised, if she’s being honest— she really was running out of options of who could be doing this— mostly just resigned to the way insanity seems to flock to her like geese at a golf course pond.

“Dawn pays it,” she echoes. “And no one thought to ask where Dawn was getting enough money to pay a cable bill every month.”

“She said— she said she sells friendship bracelets at school?” Tara replies like she’s just hearing how flimsy of an excuse that is. “Okay, yeah. I— I messed up. I’m so sorry, Buffy.”

The car horn bleats again, long and then short in quick succession, then a few sharp staccato beeps to round it off. Xander is going to wake up the whole neighborhood at this rate. She literally does not have time for this.

“Xander’s here, gotta go, Dawn is so dead but it’s not your fault, also don’t fold the laundry, bye!” she shouts as she rushes up the stairs and out of the house, the front door closing before she can hear Tara’s reply.

*****

“Sorry I’m late,” Xander says, merging onto the freeway. It’s basically empty at this hour in Sunnydale. The only thing that’s open after 10pm around here is the McDonald’s and, god, she has seen her fair share of post-patrol McDonald’s drive-thru runs since Xander got a car a couple years ago. She really loves the M&M McFlurries and how the little candies get all cold and crunchy, but Xander is a heathen and thinks they’re an abomination and says the Oreo McFlurry is the only way to go; some people just have no taste.

Xander continues, explaining, “I fell asleep watching Next Gen with Anya. It was this episode where Deanna’s mom is really horny and she’s gonna die if she doesn’t have sex so she keeps trying to sleep with Captain Picard.”

“That sounds boring?” Buffy tries to agree but she knows it’s not the most convincing thing she’s ever said. If Deanna is the one that Buffy thinks she is (she does always get all the characters mixed up, though) then Deanna is, like, really pretty and if her mom is equally pretty then— eww, no, never mind. Not thinking about that. Anyway!

“That’s what I said!” Xander agrees, thankfully oblivious to the… everything that’s going on in Buffy’s head right now, an everything she’d love to scrub away with brain bleach. “Anya loves that episode, though, and wouldn’t let us skip it on the rewatch. Count yourself spared, Buffy.”

Xander and Anya have been bringing their Star Trek re-watch to her house after Xander got the full series on VHS as a joint birthday present from her and Willow and Anya and Dawn (only nominally from Dawn, although maybe Buffy should’ve made her chip in some cash now that Buffy knows she’s got cable-bill-paying money). If Buffy had known she would’ve been subjected to watching the show, she maybe would’ve suggested they get, she doesn’t know, maybe the first season of Gilmore Girls or something? She liked that one enough to rewatch it. But Xander really loves the VHS’s so she lets him bring them over, making it her first time watching Star Trek, much to his excitement. It’s not her favorite show ever; she thinks it's kind of boring and even when there are fight scenes, none of the girls get to fight, but the others let her tell them all the ways the punches and kicks are inaccurate and even pretend like they’re listening. And it's fun to look at all the different aliens because she’s pretty convinced there must be someone like Giles making the show because there are so many times she’s thought “huh, I fought something that looked like that last week” that the costumes and makeup must be inspired by demons. She thinks the doctor is cool too, even though Anya thinks she should do something about her crush on the captain already or step aside and let someone else have their chance with him, but Buffy gets it. Sometimes it's hard to take what you want after you've lost so much, even when it's right there.

So even if she falls asleep during the episodes, it’s nice, snuggled up on the couch, tucked into Xander’s side with his arm around her like they’re kids again, knowing Anya is on his other side. The characters talk an awful lot for a show that Xander said was about fighting bad guys in space, but he always fills her in on what’s happening when she nods off. Sometimes even Dawn will concede to join them even though it’s ‘totally lame’ and she’ll curl up on Buffy’s other side. It’s warm and soft and as safe as she ever feels and when she’s asleep it’s almost like she can pretend she’s back in heaven again. Maybe everything in life isn’t so bad.

“Buffy?” Xander asks.

“Huh?” She blinks.

“I asked what you need to go to the mall for anyway. Unless there’s some super secret late night hours for cool kids who don't fall asleep during Star Trek, aren’t they closed?”

Buffy snorts a laugh. “No cool kids hours and even if there was, I wouldn’t be invited anyway. Think I’ve got a lead on that ‘pack of wild dogs’ at the Claire’s, though. Might be connected to Willow’s demon ‘kablooey’ from a while ago.”

“You got a plan?”

“Well, I’m thinking a good scolding might stop it from ransacking the Claire’s again.”

Xander snorts.

“So nah, no plan, not until I know what I’m up against.”

He opens his mouth, probably to say something that will sound reasonable like, ‘wait, you don’t know what this thing is?’ or ‘what do you know then?’ but she cuts him off at the head (or whatever that phrase is) and, before he can say anything, lies in a rush,

“The prophetic Slayer dreams aren’t always rich with details but I know that I’ll find it at the mall tonight and that whatever it is, I’ll kill it.”

“The classic ‘wham, bam, thank you ma’am’.” Xander hesitates a moment, tapping on the steering wheel out of time to whatever classic rock is on the radio. “Did you ever ask Giles?”

Buffy looks out the window, shrugs. The golden arches of McDonald’s glide by outside as they pass the exit.

“Yeah,” Xander agrees, even though she hasn’t said anything. “I get it.”

“It’s just…”

“Yeah,” he repeats. “Yeah.”

She wipes her cheeks with a sniffle that Xander is kind enough to ignore because it definitely didn’t happen.

“Hey, I did get one mystery solved, though. I found out who’s paying the cable bill.”

“Oh, yeah? Adulthood win!”

“It’s Dawn.”

“Oh, yeah? Adulthood win?”

“She won’t be un-grounded until adulthood so if you count that as a win, then, yeah— adulthood win.”

“You know, Buffy,” Xander begins in that way he has that lets Buffy know he’s about to say something that’s going to make her want to push him out of the moving car. “It’s not all bad, right? She was just trying to help, chip in a little money.”

“That’s the problem, Xander. Where do you think she was getting the money? It doesn’t grow on trees last time I checked, and neither do wholesome, family-friendly jobs for 15 year old girls.”

“ ‘Ask me no more questions, I'll tell you no more lies,’ ” he replies in a singsong voice. “Rule numero uno in Xander’s Guide to a Happy, Healthy Life: don’t ask questions you don’t want the answers to.”

“Unfortunately, asking questions is kind of my job, at least according to Social Services. And I’m not even getting paid.”

Xander interrupts her, briefly, to tell off a driver who illegally passes him on the highway off-ramp to the mall.

“You should ask for a raise,” he jokes, when he’s done flipping off the little old lady in the other car— like, can she even see?

“I think I’m slated for a 100% pay increase soon, actually.”

“A hundred times zero is still zero.”

“And Mr. Finkbiner said you were bad at math, but what did he know?”

The front of the mall is dark, but the JC Penny’s sign is glowing brightly above them as they pull into the parking lot. Spike told her to meet him at the loading dock with the Target sign above it, but she’s sure not gonna have Xander drop her off there, in a dark alley with a leather-clad vampire he definitely does not trust.

“You want me to stay and wait?” he asks, turning down those windy fake little roads that connect all the different stores' lots to each other.

“It’s okay, you should go home and get some rest.”

“You sure? I can take my old man naps and still play getaway driver.”

“Nah, it’s alright. This might take a while.”

“Or it could be nothing,” he replies, putting the car in park. They only saw one other car on the way in here, on the other side of the lot. Its windows are suspiciously foggy and ah, yes, Buffy can remember being the kind of person who would park in empty lots for reasons other than meeting a demon to… hunt other demons. Or, she can remember vaguely, at least. She must have been that kind of person at one point, right?

Xander adds, face illuminated by the dashboard lights: “Let me help.”

She unbuckles her seatbelt.

“You can help by going home and finishing that episode with Anya so I don’t have to.”

He hesitates for a moment, giving her a look for so long that after a while of it, she can’t meet his eyes and looks out to the glass and steel atrium across the lot. It reflects the lot’s street lamps in a weird, wavering way, like by looking in she’s really looking back out at their car through a thick, murky ocean.

“Alright,” he finally concedes. “Call me when you’re back home, though?”

“It might be late.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

He seems so genuinely worried that it scratches something at the back of her throat, like little claws wearing away at the softness there. She doesn’t like sneaking behind his back but what choice does she have? This falls to her, like it always does, and she has to take care of it, even if it means keeping him in the dark about who she’s meeting and for what. The guilt fills her throat with something hot and acidic, even as she’s touched by how he still cares about her in these little ways even after all the bigger horrors they’ve seen together, even as some little part of her wonders how he can care so much about her of all people, even as some part of her hates him for it just a little bit. She swallows but the feeling stays.

“Okay,” she agrees. “Talk to you later. Thanks for the ride.”

They say goodbye and she closes the door behind her. She heads across the lot towards the front door, in all its shiny fake-palm-tree’d glory; she’ll wait until he’s gone before taking off for the back of the mall. Not that breaking into the darkened front door is any less sketchy. Now that she’s thinking about it, why didn’t he drive her around back? Did he really just think she was going to burst in through the main entrance where there’s probably security cameras at the very least, guards at worst? Maybe she should be wondering how Spike plans to get into the mall too but honestly that had never crossed her mind before. It’s just… he’s Spike. Of course he has some secret way into the Sunnydale Plaza Mall. It’s weird, but Xander must just be kind of out of it. He’d just woken up, after all. It’s not like she hasn’t also been acting weird lately, so— glass stones, throwing houses, etc.

She’s never really spent a lot of time thinking about what malls must be like after they're closed (she much prefers when they’re open and letting her buy things, thank you very much) but she’d never really thought it would be so empty. She pulls her jacket tighter around herself. It’s not that it’s cold, but more like this buh, creepy empty parking lot feeling. It gives her the heebie jeebies. She’d take a cemetery over this any day. Spike better not be messing with her because if this is just all some ploy for him to get with her in the Dick’s Sporting Goods (and, like, okay, that would be kind of funny) she’s gonna stake him for real this time. At least he’s here, though. She can tell he’s around the corner once she gets close enough, a little prickling on the back of her neck that lets her know he’s creeping in the shadows nearby. And nope, she’s definitely not comforted by that feeling, not at all. Maybe she’ll get luck and it’s some other demon who ate Spike but—

“Evening, Slayer,” he calls to her from the shadows under a flickering Anne’s Pretzels sign. He’s leaning against the dirty concrete wall next to the loading dock, his face going in and out of sight as the sign’s light wavers. Lit one moment by the flare of his cigarette tip and then dark the next.

Ugh, here she goes. Time to get this over with.

“What’s the plan?” she asks, shifting the stakes in her jacket. She’s got a backpack with a small battle axe in it (the one she finally got sharpened, courtesy of the mystical sharpener Anya ordered for her), but she’s hoping she won’t need it; that sounds like a whole lot of effort. Plus, she just got this thing sharpened, she doesn’t want to have to mess with that again. Apparently, she wasn’t supposed to use the sharpener inside because it “lets off noxious fumes” and “throws off sparks” that “lit the dining room curtains on fire” but no one bothered to tell her that beforehand.

“Right to business then, I see,” Spike replies and why is she imagining he sounds disappointed? Because she has to be imagining that.

“Well, I’m certainly not here to play pattycake.”

He stubs his cigarette out on the wall behind him and rolls off it, prowls towards her. She steps forward too, leaving the pool of last streetlamp’s light.

“I’d sure hope not,” he replies. “The kinds of games we play aren’t usually meant for Kindergartners.”

She rolls her eyes. “Do you always have to be this exhausting? Like, have you ever once thought, ‘hey, maybe today I won’t be such a douche?’ You should give it a try.”

“Right, because you’re such an easy breezy Covergirl. You’re a right piece of work yourself, you know.”

“As fun as this has been,” she snips, “I’m missing an I Love Lucy marathon and also I would rather be anywhere else than in your general vicinity so. Let’s get this show on the road.”

Spike’s face lights up. Buffy remembers learning in science class— not sophomore year bio with the praying mantis lady but junior year chemistry— about molecules getting excited, how they wiggle. Her and Willow and Xander all thought that was the funniest thing ever and for the next few months, any time one of them got excited about something— an A on a test if you were Willow, a night off patrol if you were Buffy, sloppy joe day in the cafeteria if you were Xander— they’d do this little happy dance and the other would ask “are you a happy little molecule?”, much to Giles’s confusion. Spike looks like he’s about to do the Excited Molecule dance.

“There’s an I Love Lucy marathon?” he asks eagerly.

Buffy blinks. She usually only sees him get this excited for, like, murder or when she wants to take him extra rough and, nope, not going there right now. “Yeah? But that’s your take away from what I just said? Did you miss the whole ‘show’, ‘road’ thing?”

“Right, yeah. Demons tearing up the mall, the big fight against the forces of evil, I know,” he says. He turns to the loading dock, gets as far as the base of it, before he whips back around. “What channel?”

“Uh, thirty-two I think?” she sighs, crossing her arms over her chest. “It’s Nick at Nite.”

He clicks his tongue. “Damn, don’t get that one in the crypt.”

“Spike.”

“Okay, fine, on it,” he grumbles and leverages himself on one hand to jump up the loading dock. She watches from the parking lot as he walks to the door labeled “Receiving #4” with what looks like a bunch of different stores listed underneath it and— just opens it? Whatever break-in scenario Buffy had been imagining— picking a lock or knocking the guards out— most of which, admittedly, ending in Buffy kicking down a door at some point— are swiftly dispelled when Spike steps back to hold open the door.

“You coming?” he asks

She hops up onto the loading dock after him and waits at the edge, still skeptical because it seems too easy and, knowing her luck, nothing is ever this easy.

He gestures grandly, then insists, “Ladies first.”

“Oh, of course. After you, then,” Buffy smirks.

Spike rolls his eyes but does as she says, stalking into the darkened room beyond. He lets the door swing closed behind him and Buffy has to lunge for it so it doesn’t slam shut in her face, but soon she’s falling in step beside him among the stacks of boxes lining racks of metal shelving in the storage room. He stops suddenly— she almost runs directly into his back— and plucks a pen off a clipboard that’s hanging from one of the shelves with a little noise that’s close to an “ooh” of excitement, which is never a great sign from a soulless monster.

“What is that?” Buffy asks. “Is it cursed? Does it have something to do with the Claire’s?”

“What?” Spike asks like she’s the crazy one and even in the dark she can see how confused and weirded out he looks. “No, it’s just a nice pen.”

“You decided you needed to delay my mission, when poor innocent civilians are possibly being torn apart right above our heads, to pick up a pen,” she tries to ask but it really comes out more like a statement because, yeah, that sounds like something Spike would do.

“Hard to come by nice pens when you live in a crypt,” he replies defensively, twirling the pen in his fingers, but he does start picking his way around the towering boxes. Expertly, despite the total darkness— stupid vampire reflexes. It’s not too different from the storage rooms at the Doublemeat Palace and when he pushes open the door at the other side, she sees why: they’re in the back of the Panda Express. He hops over the counter, his shoes landing on the linoleum floor of the food court with a clap that echoes through the cavernous space. The food court is on the garden level which, Buffy knows after going apartment hunting with Xander, is just a fancy way of saying “basement” but it’s open all the way up, a massive atrium. She can see all the walkways up to the third floor, the ceiling a massive glass skylight up above. It has an enormous fountain in the center— still burbling despite being closed, which surprises her— that’s surrounded by these potted fake palm trees, as if there aren’t, like, real palm trees everywhere outside.

“You know,” Spike says, weaving between the tables dotted throughout the food court. “I’m very secure in my manhood and that’s why I’m not offended by you calling me a lady.”

“Yes, of course, Spike. You’re so big and manly. We all cower before your manhood,” she replies, following him towards the escalators.

“I think you’re usually doing something else with my manhood, pet, and I wouldn’t really call it cowering— though, you usually are on your knees, I suppose.”

Buffy shoves him into a potted plant.

“Oi, watch it!” he scoffs, brushing dust off his jacket as if the whole thing isn’t made entirely of plastic.

“‘Oi?’ Really? What are you, some Oliver Twist street urchin? ‘Oi, Mister, got any coins to spare?’”

And then he’s looking over at her with this look that is so thinly veiled by annoyance, it’s kind of a lame attempt at hiding how soft and fond he looks.

“What? I went to college,” she snaps, choosing to go around the other side of a table just to put some distance between herself and… whatever it is he’s doing with his face that makes her insides feel like a crinkle-cut fry from the school cafeteria— warm and mushy and not quite right.

“Didn’t take you for the Dickens type is all. And I could make another dick joke there but I won’t because I value my ribs and their current placement in my body.”

She smirks at him with great exasperation, as if to say, ‘aren’t you so smart,” and then she decides to actually just say it aloud.

He replies, “And here I thought you were only keeping me around for me dashing good looks.”

Spike takes the escalator steps two at a time and she has the sudden mental image of Spike as the kind of jerk who would push past her shopping bags to walk up the escalator back when she was in LA, and the kind of girl who would go to the mall to get weighed down by shopping bags and not to investigate the mysterious demon ransacking the Claire’s. But then, just as quickly, the image is replaced in rapid succession by the thought of him at the mall with her, Spike holding her shopping bags, her piling on more as they stop by store after store. That idea feels more accurate even if it’s a hundred times more absurd— in her mind's eye he’s still wearing that long leather coat and full vamp face and she’s wearing this bubblegum pink miniskirt with this blue halter top that she’d always dreamed of wearing out of the house. Mom never let her back when they were in LA— always made her put on leggings or a cardigan even when it was a million degrees out— and by the time she could have, she realized she must have lost the skirt moving between houses, or maybe given it to Goodwill. She wishes she’d had the chance to wear it. She mostly opts for comfy clothes now when she’s not in her Doublemeat uniform— no point in dressing up just to get dusty. But he really would hold her bags and it’s not like she’d even need it anymore.

“Well that never bodes well for me,” he says when he catches a glimpse of her face as he steps off the first escalator and rounds the corner to the escalator up to the second floor.

“What doesn’t?” she asks.

“You smirking like that. Usually means you’re about to have a laugh at my expense or I’m about to have something lobbed at my head.”

“God, can’t a girl just smirk about nothing? Geez.”

“Right.”

She brushes past him on the steps because… well, just because and also to get a couple steps ahead of him before she says, in a rush, “Would you go to the mall with me if I asked?”

“Uh, we’re at the mall now, in case you haven’t noticed.”

“No, I meant like—” she doesn’t even know why she asked it. The question was out of her mouth before she could even catch herself. Stupid mouth. “Whatever. Never mind.”

“Would you…” he begins and she gets to the top of the escalator, and starts walking away way too confidently for someone who has no clue where she’s going, so she has to see his face when she doubles back. He gets to the top of the steps and finishes his question. “Would you like that?”

He takes a few tentative steps towards her. The sound of his footsteps ricochet off the glass panels closing off the railing of the walkway from the atrium below. And then they’re looking at each other among the shuttered kiosks, the sultry Victoria’s Secret models whose backlit posters stand larger than life in the store’s windows, their faces criss-crossed by the metal grating pulled over the storefront at night. And she feels the emptiness of the mall again suddenly, like a sharp acidic pain right beneath the tip of her sternum, when she realizes it’s just them, the two of them, even though it’s usually just Buffy lately, by herself even when she’s not by herself. She’s really lonely.

Fuck. Fuck.

“No,” she lies. Or maybe she’s not lying. She’s not really sure and, god, she can’t believe she got out of her pj’s for this. “Where are we going?”

Spike clears his throat and takes off in the opposite direction. “You’ll see.”

“Good. Nice and cryptic. Just the way I like it.” She rolls her eyes even though she knows he can’t see it.

The second floor is where all the best stores are. There’s the Yankee Candle that Mom always loved— she always liked the Christmas themed candles best and would burn them year round, even in July. There’s the Abercrombie where Dawn used to get so mad that Buffy was allowed to shop there while she wasn’t because Mom thought their styles were “too mature for young girls”. And the Hot Topic where Dawn wasted all of her allowance during her very short lived (but nonetheless intense) goth phase she had the summer Buffy ran away to LA. They pass the Lids where Xander bought a very inexplicable Yankees hat during one of his many failed attempts at being cool, and the Spencer’s where Cordelia took her and Willow when she learned that neither of them had vibrators, which Cordelia decided was very un-feminist of them (“we’re modern women. We don’t need men.”). That must have been the summer after they graduated, before Cordelia moved to LA but after she was hanging out with them again (defeating a giant lizard mayor is a good team building exercise, come to find out). Buffy had this whole story planned about how the little fake lipstick was a gag gift for a friend’s birthday but the woman checking her out didn’t even look twice when she read her the total. Buffy gets it now— someone could place their order totally naked and she probably wouldn’t bat an eye at this point, not after someone stuck his head right under the drink dispenser last week, pressed the button, and poured Pepsi directly down his throat. He’d even finished it off with a crunchy helping of ice dispensed right into his mouth.

Buffy misses how bold and unapologetic Cordelia could be— well, not all the time, because she could be a little too bold. But especially lately, because all Buffy feels like doing is apologizing. She wonders how Cordelia’s doing now, if she’s happy in LA. She just kind of misses Cordelia in general, even though they were never the best of friends. There’s a lot of things she misses about those days, things she hadn’t even liked at the time. She misses the afternoons (rare as they were between training and patrolling and school) spent bored out of her mind, sitting around with her friends in the food court. She misses when Tara used to get everyone together and cook them all dinner, even though it always felt like a drag to clear her schedule, because the food was great and she always left feeling full in all the nice ways and it always made everyone smile. She misses when she’d come home from patrol to her mom sitting on the couch glaring at her, misses the lectures about curfews and boys.

Heaven was nice, but it was indistinct, formless— she knows in some not-knowing way that she wasn’t reliving her memories there, but sometimes, when it’s really quiet and late and she’s sitting in a bubble bath by herself, she thinks that even if she couldn’t go back to heaven, maybe it would be nice to go back to before. She’s not really sure when before is but— she’s been dealing with having demons be a part of her life for a long time now and, yeah, that probably won’t go away unless destiny decides to literally rewrite itself. But at least she didn't have a lame job and bills and especially not a cable bill that her sister is apparently paying.

“End of the line,” Spike says, startling her from her thoughts. She stops in her tracks and realizes that Spike stopped a few steps ago.

“What do you mean ‘end of the line’?” she asks, turning back to face him. “You promised me a demon.”

“And a demon you’ll get, love. Right up ahead, can’t miss it,” he replies, nodding his head towards the escalator. There’s only one set of escalators up to the top floor, the third floor, on the opposite side of the mall than where they’d come in. They’d made their way across while Buffy was lost in her thoughts, and she looks out at the cavernous expanse behind him.

She has this very brief moment where she wonders what could be bad enough to have Spike scared of it, but then she remembers that, whatever it is, she’ll take care of it anyway. She always does. So whatever. If he wants to be like that, then fine.

“Don’t wait up,” Buffy calls over her shoulder as she starts up the stairs.

He leans his hip against one of the massive terra cotta pots holding a fake fern and lights yet another cigarette. With his free hand, he pulls the pen he’d found earlier back out of his pocket and twirls it in his fingers, its little green cap dancing across his knuckles it whirls around. The half-light from the emergency signs and always-on displays (Whiter Teeth in 10 Days Or Less!) makes him all sharp angles and deep lines. The little end of his cigarette flares and she reminds herself of all the reasons she hates him.

“Be seeing you, Slayer,” he calls after her with a little mock salute.

She flips her hair over her shoulder because that is a supremely mature and well-adjusted way to blow him off.

The third floor is smaller than all the others, only half the length of the building. Her footsteps echo off the tile of the mezzanine, the opening to the fountain three floors below almost like a pit waiting to swallow her. The leaves of those big, fake palms only come up to the second floor, their leaves swaying in the artificial breeze. She remembers this time in high school when they were up here and she’d dropped a lipgloss she’d just bought. They’d all watched over the railing as it sailed down and splashed into the fountain three stories below. Oz had said “wait here,” and then completely disappeared, only to reappear a few minutes later, wading into the fountain in search of the lipgloss. Her and Willow had watched from above, stunned, until he’d waded out and joined them back upstairs. He’d been wet up to his knees, leaving little puddles with every step, but he had the lipgloss in his hand. He’d returned it to her wordlessly. “It’s not a problem,” he’d said simply when she’d tried to thank him.

There’s not anything up here tonight, though. Not as far as she can tell. It’s just as empty and quiet as the rest of the mall as she makes her way across it. She’s almost at the entrance to the Sears that marks the end of the floor, mentally building elaborate Looney-Tunes-esque contraptions to stake Spike indirectly— and then it hits her, the wall of sound and the lights of what must be a store teeming with demons.

“What the—?”

A step back, and it’s quiet again, the storefronts dark and empty. A step forward and there’s the sounds of some heavy crashing, and a crowd cheers uproariously before… Britney Spears starts playing? There’s some demons milling around outside of the tight throng that’s gathered at the storefront— the kinds she’s used to, vampire, orcs, other typical garden variety hellspawn, but also kinds she’s never seen before with tentacles and eyes where eyes definitely should not be. No one looks up when she crosses whatever threshold this must be, but as two relatively humanoid demons— pointy little horns, purple skin, holding hands (or, she’s assuming those appendages are hands)— pass by her on their way out, they look at her up and down with confusion. The weird looks they’re giving her melt away in a wavering shimmer as they cross the invisible line she’s just crossed and they disappear. Must be some kind of magic then. And whoever is responsible for it must also be responsible for the crowd pushing in on— yup, that’s definitely the Claire’s all those demons are gathering in. The gate is flung up, the fluorescent lights turned on. It looks like wall to wall demons inside but at least there’s no visible carnage at the moment.

She straightens up her shoulders and heads towards the crowd— whatever this is, she’s taking care of it tonight.

Out front of the store, there’s a demon standing behind what looks like a repurposed ear piercing cart that’s been pushed into the hallway, accepting handfuls of cash from demons with four of his hands, while the other four are all busy writing up and handing out little white slips.

“Kraven the Demolisher vs. Magic Jack! Three to one for Sunnydale’s very own Magic Jack, three to one!” one of the demon’s heads calls out into the crowd. The other two heads are busy talking to… she’s kind of unwilling to call them customers because whatever they’re doing, it’s not purchasing earrings or friendship necklaces. There’s so many people jostling to fork over cash and get the white slips in return that she has to shoulder her way to the actual entrance.

“My money’s on Kraven, she kicked the Maker’s ass into the seventh dimension last month,” one demon says to another as she pushes towards the entrance of whatever the hell is happening.

“Watch it!” someone shouts when she accidentally steps directly on something’s tail.

“Hey, get in line, lady!” a monotone robotic voice shouts (or well, it’s at a very high volume but it’s more the context clues than the actual tone of voice that tell her the demon is angry). She turns around the see a very, very tall woman— or that’s what she’s assuming, but there’s way too many horns and teeth to be human, plus the whole grey skin thing— with a little metal box attached to her throat like a choker necklace, connected to what must be some kind of translator?

“Sorry, Slayer duties, gotta run! Love the dress, though!”

That sends up a wave of chittering in a bunch of demon languages— god, she really wishes Giles were here, he would be having a field day with this— and yeah, maybe she shouldn’t have mentioned she was the Slayer but no one seems keen on doing anything about it and at least people are getting out of her way now.

“Last call for bets! Last call!” she hears the many-headed demon shout from back in the hallway.

She keeps edging her way towards the center of the store, through tentacles and furs and fangs, to whatever everyone is crowding around. She keeps expecting someone to recognize her or at least be like, “hey, what is that small blonde woman doing in a crowd of big nasty demons?” but everyone is too engrossed in the center of the store or chatting with each other. It probably helps that there are a handful of other creatures that look human even if they’re probably not. She stands on her tiptoes but still can’t see over everyone’s heads.

A bell rings out in the space and a hush falls over the crowd. She takes advantage of the relative quiet and stillness to push forward without the commotion (lots of “sorry” and “excuse me” whispered as she slips around). A new song starts just as she’s pushing her way to the front— it’s Destiny’s Child, which reminds her that her CD went missing recently. She’s finally come up to the front row of the crowd and can’t go any further because she’s up against what she’s just starting to realize is… a giant metal cage? Everyone is crowded around a giant metal cage. And that’s just, wow, okay, not what she was expecting, and she’s just starting to wrap her head around that when a voice she recognizes calls out:

“Are you ready to rumble!”

Buffy says, “Oh my god.”

Dawn says, “I said: demons of Sunnydale Plaza Mall, are you ready to… rumble?!”

The crowd is going wild, screaming and jostling Buffy around as she tries to get around the cage.

Dawn, up on the checkout counter, yells into a megaphone, “And now, tonight’s main event, the fight you’ve all been waiting for! In this corner, we have the destroyer of civilizations, the breaker of hearts and bones! Sunnydale’s pride and joy, you might know her as ‘the one that got away’ but we call her… Buffy?”

The cheering dies down and a wave of chatter passes through the crowd.

“You are so grounded,” Buffy shouts at Dawn from inside the cage. She couldn’t think of another way to get Dawn’s attention given all the commotion. Once she’d finally pushed her way to the cage’s gate, no one had stopped her from going inside— ‘the breaker of hearts and bones’ was busy getting a pep talk from a thin little waif of a demon that Buffy assumes is her equivalent of a Watcher-slash-coach.

“What are you doing here?” Dawn yells indignantly, hand on her hip.

“Like, you are going to redefine grounded. They’re going to have to make a new word for what you’re going to be because grounded won’t cover it.”

The chattering picks up all through the crowd, changing tone from plain old confused to a mix of recognition and irritation.

“Isn’t that—?”

“Let’s get out of—”

“No way, is she—?”

“The Slayer is going to cage fight!” a deep throaty voice roars over the din. Probably a Grombling, Buffy thinks, remembering the time Giles had thought one of those was terrorizing the ceramics classroom was (it was actually just a very lost and confused hell-troll). Ecstatic whooping rips through the air, feet (and hooves and paws) stomping in excitement. Someone has started a cheer (“kill the girl! Kill the girl!”) accompanied by clapping. Buffy rolls her eyes. As if.

Dawn is practically beaming up on top of the counter, clapping along with the chant (which, seriously?). Buffy holds out a hand to her and Dawn obviously gets the memo because she tucks the megaphone closer to her chest with a frown. She glares in response and wiggles her fingers and Dawn caves, tossing the megaphone over the top of the cage and down to Buffy. It makes a horrible screech as it soars through the air and into her hands. Buffy fumbles for a moment to get it in her grip then, for good measure, looks up at Dawn again and mimics cutting a finger across her throat because she is so dead.

“Enough!” Buffy screams into the megaphone. “Enough! Everyone out, there will be no more fighting tonight!”

No one listens. Great.

She levers herself over the top of the cage and onto the cash register next to Dawn. She probably couldn’t slay all of them but she could probably make a sizable dent in the crowd if she needed to; that sounds like a whole lot of effort, though, and she’s got more important things to kill (like Dawn’s social life).

“Everyone out!” she repeats. “Or things are going to get real messy!”

There’s some discontented grumbling (“man, what a rip off,” she hears a few somethings by the wall of headbands chorus) but the demons do start to disperse, scattering out the door and, she can tell from how much quieter it's getting, beyond the magical veil that’s separating this area from the rest of the mall.

“What did you do that for?” Dawn whines. “A Slayer match would’ve been great for business.”

“That is enough out of you for right now.”

Dawn crosses her arms and pouts, which is absolutely not going to work on Buffy at all, not this time.

“What about our bets?” a straggler yells, stepping out of a little cluster of demons still lingering at the back. There’s only them and a couple other pockets of demons milling about, looking disgruntled and muttering amongst themselves.

“Yeah,” someone else chimes in. “We bet on a fight and there was no fight. Give us our bets back!”

“Give us our money back!” someone echoes.

Well, maybe she’ll get some slaying in after all. Foolhardy, moronic demons are like chicken noodle soup for the soul as far as Buffy is concerned. Plus, if she doesn’t pummel something, she’s going to start screaming at Dawn which sounds very, very appealing but won’t be doing any of them any favors.

“You have bigger problems than some money right now. Like me decapitating you, for example,” she replies.

“I’d love to see you try,” says one of the first demon’s friends, stepping forward. He’s got full vamp face on and this kind of heavy metal rocker look that makes Spike look like a Kindergarten teacher by comparison— long black hair, all chains and piercings and blood-stained black leather. She’s glad that out of the handful of demons that were too stupid to leave that it’s a vampire who’s chosen to be a brave idiot; she doesn’t even need to get her axe out of her backpack.

“You must be new here,” Buffy says. She hops down from the checkout counter and ambles around to the other side of the cage. The vampire is rolling his shoulders and snarling like a bull about to attack the matador. “Welcome to Sunnydale, I’m Buffy and I’ll be killing you tonight. Where are you visiting from?”

The metalhead charges forward with a roar, fists clenched as he bares his teeth at her. The scattered friendship bracelets and headbands littered across the floor crunch under his heavy combat boots. The chains and other bits of metal dangling from his piercings— and hey, she’s never seen that on a vampire face before, she wonders if they, like, pinch when he shifts— jangle like little sleigh bells.

It’s all brute force and blunt-trauma-inducing levels of rage, nothing to really worry about, so she lets him have his little diva moment in front of all his friends, waiting until he gets close enough. At the last second, she drops the stake from her sleeve into her hand and side steps his advance, sticking out her arm. The tourist vampire either doesn’t get it or just can’t stop himself because he just keeps coming and then— poof. He impales himself on the stake.

“Someone must really hate small talk,” she mutters to the room at large.

She dusts her hands off on her pants and is about to make some quip like, “anyone else wanna ask about their money?” but everyone else has decided to make like a tree and leave. Which is a bummer, she had a few other jewelry-related puns it would’ve been fun to get in, besides leaving her generally unsatisfied. Watching the few slower runners clear out, disappearing into the dim glow of the exit signs, she doesn’t feel any better than she did before the slaying. If anything, she feels worse, because now all that’s left in here is her and Dawn and her massive responsibility to correct this massive transgression.

“No takers?” Buffy calls out, but the last demon is dematerializing beyond the barrier. “Huh, oh well. Guess that means me and you can have a little chat.”

She turns around to Dawn, who’s climbed off the counter and has been edging her way towards the back door that must lead to the storage area. Where she’s planning on going after that, Buffy can’t even begin to guess since they, you know, live in the same house and everything. Dawn realizes she’s been caught and stops near a rack of purses that’s still standing and surprisingly unscathed by all the commotion. She gives a sheepish little wave with a smile that’s more of a grimace.

“Is this yours?” she asks, pointing towards the cage.

“No, it comes with the store,” Dawn sasses her with an eye roll.

“This is serious. I’m not kidding around.”

It feels a bit weird to know she’s really not messing around. She’s said things like that a lot lately, especially to Dawn, but she hadn’t realized until now that ever since she came back from the dead, she hasn’t really meant it— or, she has, but only in the half-sense that she ever means anything lately, only with the part of her that doesn’t have one foot out the door, the small part of her that is here and present and not mentally camped out in front of the TV, waiting for the next rerun of old Simpons episodes to start. She is certainly present now— the burning sensation of pure, unfiltered rage will do that to a girl— and it doesn’t feel great but… but it’s something, that’s for sure.

“Come on, let’s take it down,” she says and Dawn, tears in her eyes (good, she’s probably realizing how much trouble she’s in) goes and pulls a toolbox out from under the checkout counter.

“Did you take that from the garage? Is that where the wrench went?” Buffy asks.

“... maybe?” Dawn winces, pulling the wrench from the box.

“Oh my god. You know the whole bathroom flooded because I couldn’t find that, right? Gimme.”

Now that there’s not a gaggle of demons pushing and shoving around it, the cage isn’t actually as imposing as it looked at first glance. It’s not much more than a chain link fence, a couple feet taller than her, with some sturdy looking wooden beams holding it up and braces shaped like giant triangles supporting the beams. She puts the wrench to the first screw she sees— seems as good a place to start as any— but Dawn stops her with a series of “eh eh eh” noises.

“You don’t want to do that. Unless you want a five star concussion from bringing this whole thing down your head,” Dawn explains, trying to take the wrench from Buffy.

She tightens her grip on the wrench. “How did you even build this?”

“Well, usually my staff does it but you scared them all off,” Dawn replies, pointing Buffy towards the thing she really should be un-wrenching.

“You staff—?” Buffy splutters. “I don’t even know where to begin.”

“Well then why don’t we begin with my talent for entrepreneurship!” Dawn supplies gesturing cheerfully with the hand that isn’t holding a piece of wood in place so Buffy can take the bolts out. “Isn’t that why the Girl Scouts sell cookies? I learned how to successfully start and manage a business in a tough market. There’s lots of choices for demon entertainment and nightlife in Sunnydale— such as maiming, and killing— but in just a few short months I’ve created the most profitable—”

“You can save the elevator pitch for potential investors, Dawn. Why don’t we start with: what the hell is going on here? Are you the reason the Claire’s keeps getting demolished?”

And demolished is kind of putting it lightly.

“I wouldn’t say I’m the reason, per se,” Dawn says, trotting off and pulling a very large red wagon out from some display racks that have been piled in the corner— likely to make way for the cage they’re deconstructing— leaving Buffy to prop up the beam they’ve just detached so it doesn’t go crashing to the ground. “Some collateral damage is to be expected with any growing business endeavor…” she trails off, noticing Buffy’s absolutely withering glare. “Okay, fine, yes, I’m the reason. I host a demon fight club here every other week. There are cage matches, fights to the death, blah blah blah, and we collect bets. The winner gets bragging rights because apparently ‘honor and glory’ go a long way in the demon community. Plus, they’re bloodthirsty anyway, so it was never hard to find competitors— I’m booked out until next November. So that’s what’s going on here.” She's loading the wagon with all the screws and metal brackets and little pieces of wood that were holding up the beam, but now she looks up with a glare of her own. “And now you’re ruined it. Happy?”

Buffy blinks and very seriously considers just dropping the beam and walking away. She’s not sure if she even wants to know any more or if she’d rather just lock Dawn in a closet for the rest of her life and be done with it. A very small, very dark closet. The latter option is sounding pretty appealing, but she’s gotta ask:

“And this is how you’ve been paying the cable bill every month? With demon fighting cash, under my name.”

“You know about that?”

“Yup.”

Dawn dashes off again and pulls out a flatbed cart that definitely looks like it was stolen from Home Depot for Buffy to lower the beam down into and so she does, then they get started on the next one.

“I mean, yes,” Dawn admits and oh. That feels kind of anticlimactic. After weeks of being haunted by this stupid phantom cable bill (metaphorically speaking, because Buffy wouldn’t put it above her awful luck to be literally haunted by the actual phantom of a bill). After asking everyone and floundering around trying to figure it out, the whole time it was Dawn, mailing in blood money she gets from her illegal fight club. Awesome.

Dawn continues, “But let’s get back to my entrepreneurial spirit because I really only had enough profits to pay the bill because of my innovative and forward thinking market mentality, that’s—”

“And why the Claire’s? How do you get in here?”

Because she might have to find an even darker, smaller closet to lock away whoever was dumb enough to help her sister break into the mall on a biweekly basis.

“Jimmy C.’s older sister works here.”

“Doesn’t really answer my question.”

Dawn rolls her eyes like it should be oh so obvious why some classmate’s older sister working at the Claire’s explains her little Houdini tricks. (Buffy can practically hear the little Willow-voice that lives in her head saying that Houdini wasn’t actually using magic, he was a matter-morphing demon and that’s why he was able to— but that’s beside the point).

“Jimmy C. has a crush on me.”

“Wait, is Jimmy C. the redhead with the skateboard?” She remembers him, Dawn talked about him all the time before she’d died but it seems like he’s old news now.

“No, that’s Jimmy P., and he’s actually total crush material but Jimmy C. always looks like he needs a shower and this one time he made Becky cry because he— .”

“Are we nearing a point any time soon?”

“Anyway, I told Jimmy C. that I’d go on a date with him if he got his sister to make me a set of spare keys. And then once things really took off, I started bribing the head of security to turn off the cameras and not schedule anyone.”

They’ve gotten the next support beam all disassembled. Dawn arranges the little pieces in the wagon while Buffy puts the beam itself and the segment of fence they’ve freed onto the flatbed cart— then it’s on to the next one. This is maybe the worst possible time to realize she actually really misses doing things with Dawn— it’s been a while since they’ve done anything besides watch TV together and they don’t talk while they’re doing that— because she’s supposed to be furious at Dawn, not all mushy wistful, and Dawn isn’t going to be allowed to do anything, with or without Buffy, for a very long time. Because she’ll be living in a teeny tiny dark little closet like the horrible gremlin child she is.

“Do I even want to know what you bribed the security guard with?”

“Oh! Just cake.”

“Cake?” she asks, skeptically. And then repeats, because it sounds absolutely ridiculous, even to her. “Cake.”

“Well, Tara got one of those Betty Crocker Bake ‘n’ Fill things as a birthday present last summer—”

“Like the one from the commercial?”

“Yeah, Willow gave it to her for her birthday and she makes these chocolate lava cakes that are to die for— like way better than the Applebee’s ones—”

“But those are so good,” Buffy chimes in before she can remind herself that they are absolutely not gossiping, they are having a very adult discussion about her sister’s life-threatening missteps while doing some light carpentry— and yeah, okay, they are gossiping but Buffy can multitask. She can also be enraged at the same time.

“No, they are so good, but Tara’s are even better so I asked her to make me one and I thought I’d, you know, use it to sweeten up ol’ Jerry before we had our little chat but turns out that, like, all he wanted was the cake. I think he kind of wants to lose his job, he really hates it. So, yeah, I got Tara to show me how to make them and I bring him one every couple weeks.” Dawn pauses, contemplating for a second, then adds, “I think Jerry is kind of lonely. We hang out sometimes.”

Buffy pushes aside the little part of her brain that goes “aww, why has Tara never made me her famous lava cake,” because she’s had Tara’s baking before and yeah, her cakes are so worth losing your job over. But that's definitely not the point.

Buffy yanks at a particularly stuck bracket that Dawn can’t get unwedged and says,

“I know humans are easily persuaded by cake but demons— they could have killed you, Dawn. They might have seemed like they were on your side, that they’re playing nice with you, but you were only ever a second away from getting your guts ripped out. You saw what happened earlier with that vamp—”

“Marcus was one of my best customers until you came in and ruined everything. He even gave me some disco cassettes to play between fights. Maybe you’re the problem. Have you ever thought about that? Ever wondered what about you makes everyone turn all crazy and mean?”

Buffy drops the wrench. It hits one of the boards and cracks it with a snap that seems to echo off all the torn up keychains and wrecked accessories, before sliding to the ground with a dull clang of metal on linoleum. There’s a little dent in the metal where she’d been gripping it.

“Buffy, I didn’t mean—.”

But she raises a hand to stop her, and Dawn does.

All she can think to say is, “You could have died.”

A look flashes across Dawn’s face and Buffy knows— maybe even better than she knows her own face these days— that Dawn is about to say something that will devastate them both. But then she closes her mouth and the moment passes. She scoops up the wrench instead and gets back to work on the bracket that was stuck— it comes free with a dull pop.

“Risk is an inherent part of any business endeavor,” Dawn says eventually. “Take the Girl Scout example again. You never know when you’re going to knock on the door of a serial killer.”

“Yes, but Girl Scouts also don’t invite the serial killers to—”

“And I may have also implied that I have some godlike powers because of the whole Key thing,” Dawn interrupts in a rush. “And I may have used some pyrotechnics to prove it.”

If this was anyone else— or, really, anyone she wasn’t directly responsible for— it would be kind of funny. It’s smart, actually; everyone was too scared of Glory and her minions to mess with her so it makes sense that everyone would be too scared to go after Glory’s key. But the problem is that she is the one directly responsible for Dawn.

“Why?” Buffy asks finally. “Why did you do this? Why go through all this?”

“Because the cable went out,” Dawn explains with a shrug, tossing the next set of newly dismantled support beam pieces into the wagon. “And no one else was paying the bill.”

“I get that, but I’m struggling to see how you jumped from ‘overdue cable bill’ to ‘demon betting ring’. Why didn’t you tell an adult?”

“But I did!” Dawn insists, throwing a handful of screws into the wagon with an awful lot of vigor. “I told all of them over and over but they all told me to go tell one of the others or that they’d get to it as soon as they could or that there were bigger problems to deal with. They were all so caught up in—,” Dawn cuts herself off but even though she doesn’t say it Buffy knows she means their grief, the burden of her duty. “None of them did anything until I made them chip in. Tara taught me how to make the cakes; Willow let me use her laptop to do research and order ingredients for the glamors that hide this place and dampen the noise; Xander gave me advice on how to construct the ring and gave me the name of one of his carpenter buddies; Giles showed me how to research demon fighting abilities so I could set the odds,” she lists on and on until she’s running out steam. She takes a deep breath then finishes, “I had to take matters into my own hands because I did tell them about the bill so many times and they did nothing.”

Okay, she is so going to have a stern talking to with all of them about what is and isn’t appropriate activities for a fifteen year old because wow. Did they really not get it? In their defense, she’s been back for probably three of these fight nights now and she didn’t notice either. But it’s not exactly like she was aiding and abetting.

“And did you tell any of them what they were helping you with?”

“They didn’t ask.”

Buffy sets the most newly freed beam down. “But you didn’t tell.”

“I guess,” Dawn huffs. Buffy hands her the wrench. They’ve gotten most of the beams and fencing down now so the few that are left are getting wobbly; she’ll support it while Dawn undoes the last of the screws. She just wants to go home now. Maybe finding a closet to lock Dawn inside can wait until tomorrow.

Buffy sighs, watching the top of Dawn’s head as she undoes a bracket. “I just— what were you thinking?”

“I was thinking,” Dawn says, prying away one bracket and starting on the next, “‘my sister just died and everyone is too busy for me but even though I’m sad all the time and so lonely, I— at least I don’t have to be bored, because I have TV, even if I don’t have anything else. And then I didn’t even have that.”

And Buffy isn’t really sure what to say to that. Because she knows the feeling. She’s also so sad all the time since she got back and pretty constantly lonely and has been lonely for a even longer than that when she lets herself think about it, so she doesn’t— think about it, that is— and instead of looking at all of— all of this too closely, she can look at pretty people living pretty lives and companies trying to sell her things and fight scenes that look nothing like the real thing and it’s not good, but it’s better. It’s something and Buffy has been feeling a whole lot of nothing lately— has been feeling like she is a whole lot of nothing lately— so something is better. And to know her sister has felt the same way—

“Oh, Dawn,” she sighs, voice thick. Dawn looks up at her, eyes wet. She tries to let the last pieces of the wood and fence come down gently, but it ends up crashing anyway because she needs to hug Dawn right now. And so she does, picks her way across the remnants of the dismantled ring and the cheap jewelry and pulls Dawn to her chest. Dawn tucks her head onto Buffy’s shoulder, wraps her arms around her tight and squeezes and squeezes until Buffy is pretty sure any non-Slayer would be suffocating right about now.

“I get it,” Buffy says, running her fingers through Dawn’s hair.

“No, you don’t,” Dawn replies, voice wobbling. She’s muffled by the fabric of Buffy’s puffy jacket but Buffy can feel the tears soaking through to her tee shirt.

“You’re right. I don’t. Not really. But I feel that way sometimes too.”

“You do?” Dawn asks, turning her face to look up at Buffy, head still on her shoulder. And then Buffy is looking down at her kid sister who’s looking up at her with such wide, hopeful eyes— the same look she’d had when she’d asked if Buffy could do her makeup for the first time, when she’d asked Buffy if she could come along to Ice Capades the year Buffy turned 13. And maybe Buffy can remember what it feels like to be not alone; maybe not, but at least she can remember what it feels like to be hopeful that she’s not alone.

It’s just a stupid cable bill. She’s still going to make Dawn regret the day she was born over the whole “being the founder and CEO of a demon fight club” but still. Dawn messed up and Buffy still loves her anyway. Maybe she can let herself hold that love again, touch it even though it feels the way grabbing a curling iron before it’s totally cooled feels. She’s not sure if she can but she wants to.

How is it even possible to love someone this much? How could she have possibly forgotten this feeling? It makes it easier to admit, “Yeah. I do.”

“Maybe we could try being lonely together then?”

Buffy is about to agree when she feels it; it’s always next to impossible to explain what ‘it’ is, what it feels like to know there’s a demon shifting nearby without really knowing, but it’s there. Something around the corner, headed away from them. The awareness of that demon must have been there the whole time, blurred into the background during their conversation, her attention only brought to it now that it’s on the move. Well, background hum or else it’s just a demon she’s very familiar with, which could only mean—

“You might as well come out now, I know you’re there,” Buffy calls over her shoulder.

“That’s so creepy,” Dawn mutters.

The sensation stills.

“I know it’s you, Spike.”

And the vampire in question pokes out from around the corner through the empty space of the, now shattered, display window. He steps over the empty frame and swaggers over to them with a walk Buffy knows means “this confidence is all bluster”. Which doesn’t make a ton of sense because, really, this is just typical annoying Spike behavior, until Dawn pushes Buffy away and screams,

“You bitch!”

“Dawn!” Buffy exclaims. “Language!”

“You bastard!”

“That’s an improvement, but still not great.”

“You lying, scheming traitor! You betrayed me!”

“What are you talking about?” Buffy asks. “How did he betray you?”

“After everything I did, you went and ratted me out to Buffy? How could you!”

“Hey, come on now—,” Spike placates.

“I bought out your shares,” Dawn raves, gesturing emphatically as she counts off the list on her fingers. “I got those Megelorns off your back, I even gave you a payment plan to work off your debt and this is how you repay me. You backstabbing, lying piece of—”

“Oh, come off it!” Spike interjects, taking a menacing step forward. Dawn doesn’t budge. “You know that payment plan was a joke. A mockery of the justice system. Slaves get pay better than that.”

“Slaves don’t get paid at all. That’s kind of the whole point of slavery!”

“My point exactly!” Spike seethes, gesturing aggressively, but Dawn takes a step towards him anyway with a murderous glare and okay, that’s enough.

“As much as I’m loving this,” Buffy butts in, stepping between the two of them, “let’s just take a moment because huh? Who? What?”

“This little demon ring you ruined tonight? Spike was the co-founder.”

“Oh, so this was all your idea?” she asks, turning to Spike with a scoff. “Well, that explains everything.”

His face goes blank for a second before he rolls his shoulders, stepping back from them with a smile that reminds Buffy of talons. “What, you really thought she pulled this off by herself? Yeah, of course it was my idea. I told Dawn—”

“Oh my god, no!” Dawn all but shrieks.

“Hey, relax, kid, I can fess up to what I did,” Spike patronizes.

“No way! I am not letting you take credit for all my hard work!”

He drops the act, throwing up his hands in resignation. “Okay, fine, I was trying to take the fall for you but hell, if you’d rather face big sis’s wrath and be grounded for the rest of your life then be my guest.”

“Oh don’t worry,” Buffy scowls. “There’s plenty of wrath to go around. Just sit tight, you’re next.”

“Spike was the muscle of the operation, at best,” Dawn explains. “He just doesn’t have a mind for business. He’s too much of a bleeding heart; you have to be ruthless in the entertainment biz.”

When the hell did Dawn start saying things like “a mind for business”? Where has this girl been learning this stuff?

Dawn turns to Spike and adds, “No offense.”

“None taken,” Spike concedes with a nod.

“I’m the one who does all the marketing, all Spike does is hang the fliers,” Dawn continues, turning to Buffy, hands on her hips. “I’m the one who had to kiss Jimmy C.’s gross stubbly lips. I’m the one who does all the accounting. I’m the one who blackmailed Willy for the names of all the other ring leaders—”

“Not helping our case here, nibblet,” Spike interrupts.

“My point is,” Dawn says firmly, “I won’t let Spike take the credit for this when I did all this research—”

“Oh, bollocks,” Spike spits, pointing at Dawn. “You watched three episodes of the Sopranos and decided you were a ‘mafiosina’ or whatever it was you were calling yourself—”

“We have HBO?” Buffy interrupts.

“Not with the new plan,” Dawn replies.

“Too expensive,” Spike adds. “Not worth it for only a handful of decent programs, if you ask me.”

“I watched way more than three episodes, though, that’s a lie.”

“She was getting nightmares from it anyway,” Spike elaborates. “Kid was hardly sleeping as it was.”

“Spike,” Dawn hisses. “You said you wouldn’t tell anyone.”

Spike looks at Buffy with something that is bordering on actual panic mixed with regret and contrition, his eye contact screaming, “nope, nope, nope!” into the silent, agonizing space between them.

“Dawn,” Buffy sighs, because they’re way off-topic anyway and she’s so ready to go home. “I’m glad you put hard work and dedication and persistence into… something, even though I wish it was anything but this. And it’s great that you put so much thought into…” she gestures vaguely. “But you have to look at the bigger picture. Even if this was safe for you— and I’m not convinced it was—” she adds quickly, before either Dawn or Spike can interrupt. “Look at how much damage you’ve caused.”

Dawn’s eyes well with tears. “I’m sorry, okay?”

But Buffy knows her too well, so she asks, “Do you actually regret what you did or are you just saying you’re sorry because you hope you won’t get in as much trouble?”

And the lack of an answer is answer enough.

She pinches the bridge of her nose with a weary exhale and in a moment of pure, unadulterated horror realizes what she’s done. “Oh my god, you’re turning me into Giles,” she groans. “Just go gather up all the weapons. I know you have my good crossbow here somewhere.”

The other crossbow has never been the same since Xander tried to shoot Oz’s rubber chicken out of it senior year of high school; the other night it seized up on her at Restfield— major bummer, she tore her favorite big comfy sweater staking the guy by hand.

“Fine, whatever,” Dawn sniffles. She stalks off to dig the various weapons out from the debris across the room. She pulls out a knife from under an overturned rack of cell phone charms, then a sword, and dumps them into the wagon then plods off over to the checkout counter.

“Hey! Watch where you’re throwing those things!” Spike exclaims when Dawn throws a handful of stakes at the wagon. They land about ten million miles away from him.

“Shut up, Spike,” Buffy and Dawn say at the same time.

Buffy turns to him, considers his indignant pout for a moment, and then smacks him on the chest with the back of her hand.

“Ow! What was that for?”

She crosses her arms over her chest and glares.

He says, “Okay, yeah. Fair enough.”

“You lied to me,” Buffy says, bending over to unpry the last of the cage pieces. She holds out a hand and he gets the message, placing the wrench in her upturned palm.

The weird thing is, she wouldn’t have even been that mad about this even just last year. Hell, she would’ve expected it last year. She would’ve been shocked if Spike hadn’t lied to her about something, anything— about why he’d just so happened to be around the corner at the exact same time she was coming home or what happened to her favorite training leggings that mysteriously disappeared from the Magic Box or the color of the sky or whether gravity still works.

“I wouldn’t say I—” Spike begins. She pulls at one of the metal brackets hard enough it snaps clean in two. “Alright, well, when you put it like that—”

“You could’ve told the others about the cable bill if that’s what this was really all about.”

“Yeah, right,” he scoffs. “Like they’ll listen to me over her.”

“Fine, you could’ve told them about what she was planning. They would’ve listened to that.”

As she pulls the support off the beam and brings it over to the wagon, he replies, “And give them an excuse to stake me? You know they would’ve made it my fault that she’d even had the thought. Rupert and your boy are always looking for any reason to drive a piece of wood through my chest and I couldn’t—” he cuts off, picks up the loose beam and tosses it onto the flatbed.

She’s not sure she wants to know the answer, but she hears herself asking slowly, skeptically, “Couldn’t what?”

“Promised you I’d take care of her, didn’t I? Keep watch of her? Couldn’t give them any excuse to keep me from doing that.”

“That’s great and all, Spike, but I don’t think helping her run an illegal gambling operation counts as keeping Dawn safe.”

He laughs once, sharply. “As if I had a choice. Stubborn as a mule, that girl is. You Summers women are all the same.”

It sounds mean, but she knows it’s not meant to be. Or maybe it is— this is Spike after all— but Buffy doesn’t think it’s a bad thing. It’s one of the things she always loved about Mom, even if it drove her to literal tears sometimes; it’s one of the things she’s glad her and Dawn inherited from her, because she loves her Mom and loves Dawn and loves that they all share this stubbornness even if it means her and her sister want to murder each other sometimes. She looks over at Dawn who is very valiantly trying and failing to lift a massive sword off the ground. It’s nearly as tall as her and even Buffy sometimes thinks it’s kind of heavy when she’s tired so yeesh, good luck. She can hardly get the handle a couple feet off the ground. But she’s trying anyway.

Buffy cups a hand around her mouth. “Come on, put your back into it, Dawn!” she calls out to her. Dawn looks back momentarily to give her an exasperated glare over her shoulder, bracing herself to try again.

“Why’d you hang around?” she asks, still looking at Dawn, who’s now resorted to dragging the sword across the floor to the wagon. “Just wanted to watch the carnage unfold? Can’t pass up the opportunity to watch me fail?” She thinks neither option is entirely plausible.

Spike stuffs his hands into his pockets. “No reason. Thought I’d step in if she needed, is all— can’t have you going too hard on the kid. It’s not her fault.

“I think running an illegal betting ring out of the Claire’s definitely falls into the category of ‘her fault’, unless the nature of free will changed while I was dead.”

“Not what I meant.”

“Then what do you mean?”

“Those knuckleheads don’t listen to her. I mean, Tara tries but she’s only one girl and Dawn is…”

He trails off and she follows his gaze to where Dawn is failing to un-wedge a mace from the check-out, feet braced against the base of the counter as she throws her whole weight backwards. She grunts with the effort, tugs again, but the mace doesn’t budge.

“Yeah,” Buffy agrees, fondly. God, she loves her little sister so much, even when she’s a screw-up. “she really is.”

Spike is watching her wrestle the mace with so much… if it were anyone else, she would call it affection, call it fond amusement. It’s the same kind of way Buffy and Willow watched Xander unwrap (and promptly geek out over) the Star Trek box set they all got him, the same kind of way Tara watches Dawn do her walrus routine with the extra takeout chopsticks. She would call it love, but he doesn’t have a soul so it can’t be that. Because if it was love, what would that mean for…

What she means to say is, he was trying to help, in his own weird way, in the only way he knows how.

“Were you really gonna take the blame for her?” she asks, a piece of plywood held loosely at her side.

He’s lighting up a cigarette now, their wagon project thoroughly abandoned, and Buffy thinks about saying something about smoking in the store. But it’s by far not the worst thing this place has seen in the past 24 hours, so she lets it go.

“As much of it as you’d let me take,” he replies. “I did help, after all. Only ‘cause the girl already had her mind set— you know how she gets— but if she was gonna do it either way, least I could do was keep her from getting eaten.”

“That was, um— that’s good. That was good of you. Thank you for keeping her from getting eaten.”

“It’s nothing,” Spike says, but he’s got this wobbly little look on his face that reminds her of eating too much funnel cake at the county fair, sick on something sweet. “Figured you already hate me anyway.”

“I don’t hate you. Not like that,” she replies before she can stop herself. She’s surprised to realize she’s telling the truth.

Spike ducks his head and looks away, his gaze skittering away to watch the floor instead. He takes a deep inhale off his cigarette, but she thinks she can see his lips curved a little bit around the filter.

He says, “Liar.” And the smoke curls up around the sound.

“Hey, I think there’s a couple more hours left of the I Love Lucy marathon. You could— if you wanted to—” she offers tentatively. “As long as you promise not to get blood on the carpet again.”

“Yeah,” he breathes, all soft and awed. “Yeah, I’d—” he cuts himself off by clearing his throat, sticks his hands in the pockets of his coat. “Yeah. Okay.”

“Spike,” she says. He turns back to look at her. “Don’t make me regret this.”

He nods once. And she’s pretty sure he will, but he’s so serious and it looks like his feelings are so undeniably real that she can kind of ignore the whole… everything else. At least a little bit.

“Let’s go,” she calls out to Dawn, who looks up at her in frustration. “Just leave it, it’s okay.”

“Oh thank god,” Dawn sighs in relief, wiping her hands on her jeans. “Because that thing wasn’t going anywhere.”

She trots up beside her and Spike, the two of them picking their way through the rubble and debris. “So does this mean that I’m not in trouble?” she asks, cheerfully.

“Definitely not.”

*****

The next month, Buffy proudly mails in a personal check— ones she bought from the bank and everything, with her name and address printed in the upper left hand corner— to the cable company. She sends it in the little return envelope that came with the bill and everything. She had to cut back on her nice coconut shampoo and a few other things to make ends meet, but it was worth it to use her new checks, the first time she’s gotten any besides the ones that came with her bank account when she opened it, age thirteen, after she started her first babysitting job.

The month after that is a rough one— and isn’t it miraculous, all the ways life keeps finding new lows to surprise her with— but still, she manages to put her check in the mail on time. Well, mostly on time. Moral of the story is the cable does not get shut off and there are still plenty of old sitcoms reruns and Gatorade commercials to go around.

The next month she forgets and, okay, that’s not great, but in her defense there was a lot going on and she’s been very, very tired and things are getting weird with— well, anyway, she misses that month and the next bill shows up with a big red Past Due stamp on it. She looks at it, sighs and thinks “shit, I need to do that,” before setting the envelope on the hall table to run off towards whatever Dawn is burning on the stove. The bill promptly gets buried under a mountain of other mail, the paper bag their takeout came in last week, assorted sunglasses, the jacket Xander keeps forgetting to take home, and a new key bowl Willow found at a thrift store that may or may not be cursed.

The month after that, the cable company receives another envelope of cash. It looks different than the old ones they used to get. The cash is sent in bills that are all different denominations, like before, but this time it isn’t even close to the total of the bill, sometimes far greater than what’s owed— almost like someone just put a fistful of money in an envelope without actually having looked at the the bill. Second of all, the money has stains that would look suspiciously like dried blood if all the long-term-ers at the cable company hadn’t lived in Sunnydale long enough to get very, very good at explaining away any mysterious substances or liquids. Rust, Cathy from Accounting hypothesizes. Ketchup, Bill the Customer Service Rep suggests.

The envelopes are no longer addressed in the pink glitter gel pen, no longer with a heart dotting the ‘i’ in Revello Drive. Instead, now the envelopes are written in pen— or marker or even in crayon one time— but mostly in green ballpoint. The envelopes themselves are always a bit crumpled, a bit stained like someone pulled it out of the trash can— clearly reused, all of them originally sent to one of the cemeteries in town, the original address scribbled out. The handwriting is different as well, the kind “they just don’t teach in schools anymore,” according to the wistful sigh of Gertrude from Accounting.

But despite the differences, the envelopes still have the same return address, the same name. According to the return address, the bill is supposedly paid every month by Miss Buffy Anne Summers of 1630 Revello Drive, the name written in perfect, immaculate cursive.

#btvs #buffy the vampire slayer #buffy summers #spike btvs #spuffy #btvs fanfiction #buffy the vampire slayer fanfiction #willow rosenberg #xander harris #dawn summers #tara maclay #btvs s6 #buffy season 6 #i literally had the time of my life writing this so im so excited to share it!!

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