InsaneJournal

Fic: WAITING AROUND (pt 11 of ?)

"I'm the vampire you fuck? Boy Spike, you get more and more sentimental with age."

"Wondered when you'd bring that up again."

It was night, their visit over for now, and they were driving, Spike at the wheel, going just a little too fast, in the direction of the Pacific.

"I don't want to fight about it. I just ... it makes me a little sad. I didn't want to let it go unremarked."

"Couldn't be you gettin' sentimental, could it?"

What do you do with a depressed vampire? He hadn't seemed so low after Xander's funeral; partly she suspected it was because she'd been distracted herself to tune in to him, partly that the effect came on gradually. Which made sense; her own depressions tended to occur after the fact, sometimes long after. And Spike had a lot to mourn and miss—Xander's death broke up not just a relationship but a home, and Spike's whole settled existence. Caring for him in his long illness had been involving; Spike had turned out to be—not a surprise, really—a tender nurse.

Bereft of that, he'd given himself to what he called 'the watchering trade', and what turned out to be a succession of slayers, none of whom lasted very long. The horror of that frangibility occurred to Buffy now as something that would be particularly keen for Spike, who knew first hand about the vulnerability and demise of young girls, and of slayers. That his charges kept falling must be, she realized, something he felt as a personal fault, though no one on the Council spoke of him as anything less than a valuable asset, or asserted that anyone could've done better. She knew it herself: the slayer's job was to die. Even she, who was supposedly the best of the best, had died more than once.

"I have lots of sentiment." She turned to him. Spike always looked handsome and keen behind the wheel of a car, the way some other men might look on horseback, or when wielding a gun. "Is there something about what we do in bed that isn't working for you?"

He gave her a side-glance, half-leer, half-sneer.

"No, I'm serious. Back in London you were angry with me. I thought you were over it, but maybe you just sank it. I don't want anything from you that you're not giving freely."

He didn't answer.

"Spike, we can spend time together without sex. If you don't want to sleep with me at all—"

He shook his head. "That Joe doesn't know when he'd well off. He's got a good wife there, an' she's given him two lovely kiddies, an' he ought to be more ... more. She'll come round to openin' her legs faster, anyhow, if he was."

"How do you know about that?" She really hadn't thought Spike could overhear their conversation in the garden, not all the way inside the house.

But he tapped his nose. Oh, of course. That omniscient smeller of his.

Way to change the subject.

Except, as she thought about it, Buffy started to suspect it wasn't a change of subject at all.

Spike held the silence for twenty miles.


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