Chapter Twelve

Dawn blew on her newly lilac-colored fingernails, ignoring Spike and Andrew. Not that it was easy. When Spike was around, Andrew talked more than ever. Dawn wouldn’t have thought it possible, but apparently it was. She would have liked to think that Spike might cool Andrew up, but that one was definitely impossible. Besides, she was actually kind of fond of the guy. Everybody else in the gang had someone special they were close to, but the two of them were just kind of these satellites around the main group. Sure, Buffy loved her, yeah, and so did Xander and Willow and probably Giles, but that didn’t change anything. When all was said and done, she was Buffy’s sister, period. They’d been a happy little group before she arrived, and if she weren’t there, it wouldn’t make much of a difference.

And Andrew, despite the fact that he’d paid for the house and was supporting all of them, was still the last and least of the trio of nerds. Tucker’s brother, an afterthought. Occasionally Dawn thought she saw Buffy jump a little when she looked at Andrew, like she was surprised he was there.

The two of them were on the fringes, even if Andrew didn’t realize it.

She thought of what Andrew had said once when they were watching a DVD of the original Star Trek series. Dawn had mentioned that a crewman was cute, even if he was drooling all over a blue-skinned alien babe in a feathered plastic bikini. Andrew had rolled his eyes and said, “Forget it, chica! He’s a red shirt.”

Crewmen who wore red shirts ended up dead, he told her. They were expendable. Not important enough to make the main cast.

She hadn’t thought much of it at the time, but now it seemed so clear. She and Andrew were red shirts.

Dammit, she didn’t want to be expendable! There had to be some way to become a blue shirt, or a green shirt, or whatever shirt was worn by people who didn’t have “kill me” stamped on their forehead.

Hey, Xander had done it, hadn’t he? He’d been the third wheel to the Buffy/Willow friendship, and had “demon bait” written all over him—look at how many he’d dated. But here he was, alive, and he’d ended up saving the world, when even Buffy couldn’t. He’d overcome his red shirt destiny.

If he could do it, so could she. She was magical, right? A super-special key. She could save herself. And she’d better start right away; look at how things had gone for the last few years—well, her entire actual existence. Who had the thaumogenesis demon attacked? Her! Who had Glory gone after? Her! Who had Willow tried to kill? H—

Okay, all of them. But her first!

It was a pattern: go for Dawn. It was sheer luck that she wasn’t already dead. And that … well, it just sucked.

Maybe she and Andrew could go in it together—watch each other’s backs. She felt reasonably sure he didn’t want to die anymore than she did. It was probably on his mind as much as hers, disturbing him. Haunting him.

“—well, I don’t know about an elevator,” Andrew was saying. “But escalators are fun….”

What? “Escalators? Where?” asked Dawn.

“Over there,” said Spike, waving at the wall. “Escalators are okay, but the good thing about an elevator is that it doesn’t work unless you push a button. What would happen if you were sleepy or pissed and accidentally stepped on an escalator?”

Andrew’s eyes grew large. “You could plummet to your death,” he realized in a whisper, shuddering. He tended to sleepwalk, and the last thing he wanted to do was wake up dead because they’d installed an escalator. But it was so tempting—they had the money, and why not use it? If not on an escalator, then wha—“Oh!” he exclaimed. The others looked at him inquiringly. “We could put in a fireman’s pole,” he said dreamily.

Spike scowled. That did nothing to help with the dangers of taking the stairs while hung over. “Yeah, I don’t really think that’s—”

“Like in Bridget Jones’s Diary?” asked Dawn, sounding more enthusiastic.

“Yeah! We could take turns—”

“We are not installing a pole,” said Giles flatly, entering the room, a book dangling from his hand. Andrew heaved a sigh. It was nice, having a dad—dad-like figure, he corrected himself—who was so involved, but Mr. Giles was so strict sometimes. He was just like he had been in the library at school, only now he glared more often.

“Kennedy. Where is she?” Buffy asked curtly, standing in the doorway. Willow stood beside her, her face anxious.

“She left,” answered Giles, his voice tired. It hadn’t been a pleasant afternoon, and he thought he might require aspirin. Or possibly something in the Vicodin family.

“Left? She usually stays a lot later,” Buffy protested.

“Yeah, but that was when she and Willow were all relationshippy, and not let’s-just-be-friendshippy,” pointed out Andrew helpfully. Willow colored at the remark, and Buffy fought against grinding her teeth. There was no reason to be impatient with Willow, of course, just because she felt bad about breaking up with her girlfriend who was, oh yeah, gunning for Spike.

“What’s so urgent?” asked Spike, raising his eyebrows.

“She, uh … borrowed my good axe,” lied Buffy shamelessly. As far as she was concerned, lying for a good cause was completely acceptable. Unfortunately, however, she wasn’t great at it. And Spike usually saw through her lies—he was a very perceptive guy. Unless, of course, she was telling him she loved him, at which point he displayed all the perceptivity of a block of wood. A block of wood that didn’t believe his girlfriend when she said she loved him.

But he must have been absorbed in catching up with his shows, because he lost interest and returned his attention to the magazine in his hand. “Yeah, gotta get that one back,” he said absently, flipping the page to find out god knows what.

“Yeah, I think I’ll go get it now,” Buffy agreed, heading outside while the getting was good. If she lingered, he might have asked more questions, and she might not come up with anything as good as a borrowed axe next time.

“Buffy, hold on. It doesn’t necessarily mean anything,” Willow argued, hurrying after her before the front door closed.

“It means she went behind our backs.”

“It’s just that she hates being left in the dark—”

“We didn’t leave her in the dark—we told her the same thing we told everyone else, and everyone else was fine with it,” Buffy pointed out reasonably. “She’s the one who had to go digging about the thaumogenesis demon. We told her it would disappear on its own, but she didn’t like that, did she?”

Buffy’s face was set, and the look of awful determination on her face frightened Willow. “Look, don’t jump to conclusions,” Willow babbled desperately.

“I’m not jumping to anything. The demon has to kill Spike to stay around. Now Kennedy knows all she has to do is—”

“That doesn’t mean it’s her,” protested Willow. God, Buffy was so—when it was somebody someone else cared about, like Kennedy or Anya, Buffy was right there, ready to mete out pitiless Slayer justice. It was a different story when it was someone Buffy cared about. Spike or Angel, or even Willow herself. Sometimes she needed to be reeled in. Because just because someone did something Buffy didn’t understand, even something really wrong, didn’t mean she had to kill them. It wasn’t like that, wasn’t black and white.

Hardly anything was.

Buffy was silent for a moment, absorbing Willow’s words. She glanced back at the house, filled with people she loved. Her sister, her Watcher. Her friends.

Her Spike, dammit.

“You’re right,” she sighed. Before Willow could breathe a sigh of relief, Buffy’s gaze hardened. “But I’m not taking any chances.”

***

Spike eased the front door shut, closing out Willow’s pleas that Buffy calm down before confronting Kennedy. He didn’t have to hear the rest of their conversation; he’d heard enough.

He was going to die, apparently. Possibly horribly.

Good to know.

It wasn’t a surprise; he’d always known he was mortal. Even when he was newly vamped and loved to taunt Angel about his prissy, safe kills, he’d known his life had hung precariously between dust and eternal youth.

That was what gave the fight its tang. If the risk wasn’t there, neither was the thrill.

But still … wasn’t like being human. As a vampire, it was sunlight, a stake, or beheading. That was it. Well, there was also removing the heart from the body, at least according to the Master, the old pervert. But nobody remembered the tried and true methods any more, just the flashy Stoker stuff. Sad, really.

But as a human there were so many ways to die that it was miracle he was still breathing. Influenza could kill him, or a car accident, or black lung disease. Did they still have black lung disease? Or that Chinese food the other night! He’d been to China, he knew the kinds of things they ate. Or spontaneous combustion—Christ, he hadn’t even thought of that one. For a few moments he held his breath, then realized it did nothing to decrease his chances of suddenly bursting into flames.

And now, apparently, death-by-rebirth was on the list as well. Kind of appropriate, wasn’t it? The death of others used to give him life, and now his death would give life to the thaumogenesis demon. Yeah, it was poetic justice all right.

Spike leaned his head back against the door and sighed. God, he hated poetry.

***

Xander pushed his face deeper into his pillow and tried to hold onto sleep. He wasn’t dreaming anything pleasant—wasn’t dreaming anything at all—but it was a refuge. When he was asleep, he didn’t have to open his eyes and see his dead girlfriend.

The effort was futile, of course. It always had been. He’d open his eyes and she’d be there, or not—whichever left him more on edge.

Stop it, he told himself harshly. That wasn’t him, was it? He was an optimist. If he wasn’t, he would have killed himself a long time ago. His parents would have been enough to do it, but there was always staking his buddy Jesse to add to the list, or losing Cordy—god, he’d barely survived that one. Now she was in a coma, as good as dead. He’d lost an eye—good old lefty. And Anya was gone, and he’d never even had a chance to say goodbye, or see her body. Life just kept getting worse and worse, and he didn’t even want to know what form of worse was coming down the road next.

Yeah, if he weren’t such an optimist, this would be a great time to kill himself, he thought hazily, beginning to drift off again. It would sure make things a lot easier.

“Yeah, pal, it’s not like you’ve got a lot to live for,” agreed Jesse.

Xander’s eyes shot open and he leapt up, his breathing suddenly ragged.

He was alone in the room.

Xander willed his heart to stop racing. It had been nothing. A nightmare, that’s all it was. Well, a daymare. A napmare. A bad dream.

He jumped slightly as the phone beside the bed rang, then snatched up the receiver. That was reality, not whatever had drifted through his head when he was mostly asleep. “Hello?’

“Xander? It’s been so long.” The voice at the other end of the line was clear, distinct. It did not sound like a dream.

It sounded like Cordelia.