Part One
Spike rolled over and stared at the sleeping human beside him. Xander lay on his stomach, his hair mussed and still slightly sweaty, one arm around his head and the other tossed over the vampire's naked waist. The sheet obscured any view of the muscled ass and thighs, but Spike knew they were there. He had just spent two hours getting reacquainted with those particular parts of the boy's anatomy.
It had been awhile since the last time they were together. The last time had been in outside April, with an infrequent spring rain beating down around them. Usually, the teenager met up with Spike once or twice a month at the crypt or the bronze, where they more than once had shared a quick fuck in a cramped stall of the men's room. It had been two months since their last encounter, however, and the blond had begun to think it would never happen again. Not that he blamed Xander for that - Spike had seen for himself Anya's voracious appetite for sex. Even though he was still a young man, Xander couldn't satisfy her and have a little something going on the side, too. Plus, the blond had Harmony to take the edge off, although truth be told he often closed his eyes and imagined he was with Xander when he was inside Harm.
But now, of course, that he had the real thing...he let his eyes travel over the sleeping features one last time before he deftly extracted himself from the youth's embrace and stood up. He dressed quickly and silently before making his way out of the brunette's new apartment and down the stairs of the building. It was right at the door leading to the street that he ran into her.
"Spike! What are you doing here?" she even managed to act a little surprised.
He sighed boredly. "Hello Harmony. Why are you following me?"
The blonde girl looked him up and down. "You smell like..." Suddenly, her eyes widened as her brain slowly made the connection. "EEEEEWW! Xander Harris? Spikey, that is so GROSS. I can't believe you're cheating on me with him."
Spike's temper began to flare at her words. How *dare* she demean Xander. "Harmony, you stupid bint, it's not possible for me to cheat on you if I'm only using you for a good lay now and again." He began to turn away, disgusted suddenly with both the creature in front of him and himself for having allowed her to come so close to the man asleep upstairs.
Harmony went still, the blond's antipathy clear even to her. "What? You don't love me?" she whispered.
"Love you? Love you? No one could love you! If you were the last fuck on the planet I'd never love you." Spike used her shock to push past her with ease, laughing at the pain in her eyes.
Finally the demon reared up in Harmony, breaking through her shock and replacing it with anger. "You'll pay for this, Spike! No one uses me and gets away with it! You'll see!" she yelled at his retreating back.
Still laughing, Spike kept walking toward his crypt, hearing her voice get fainter and fainter as he left her behind.
Part Two
Four nights later, Spike was struggling with his lighter as he stalked across the cemetery toward the crypt. It was an old lighter - an antique, really - and had come to mean a lot to him in all the time he had had it. It apparently had chosen that very evening to stop working for good, which meant that until he got another one, or hunted up some matches, he was without a nicotine fix. Therefore, he was already *very* cranky when he realized the crypt door was ajar and that someone was inside.
He readied the axe he habitually carried around Sunnydale at night, then lashed out and with one powerful kick had the door the rest of the way open while he scanned the interior.
At last, his eyes picked the familiar blonde figure out of the dimness of the room.
He didn't even bother trying to disguise the annoyance in his voice. "Harmony, what do you want?"
"It's not what I want, Spikey. It's what I've got that you want."
"Now why do I doubt that? Harm, I don't need you anymore. Get out."
"But you haven't even seen my childe yet!"
This time, it was Spike who went very still. "Your what?" He hoped she was joking, or that he had misheard her. There was no way in hell Harmony could be a competent Sire.
"My childe." She said simply, indicating a figure buried under the blankets of Spike's bed. "He hasn't woken up yet, though. I thought you might like to see him when he does. You know, now that he's mine."
Spike suddenly had a very, very bad feeling about this. Striding forward, he yanked the blanket down and stared into the cold, dead face of Xander Harris.
"Xander." he whispered, disbelief making him have to touch the lifeless flesh in front of him to confirm what he already knew. "Oh, Xan...."
Before Harmony had a chance to move or even blink, she found herself on the floor with a vamped out, pissed off Spike holding a stake directly over her heart.
"What did you fucking do to him?" he yelled, even though the answer was obvious.
Harmony started to laugh. "You can't kill me. I'm his Sire. If you ever want to see him again, you'd better be nice to me, Spike. Because now I'm in control - "
Her words were cut off abruptly as the peroxide blond slammed the stake home, watching her crumble to dust beneath him. "Can't kill you my arse," he muttered, standing up and brushing himself off. He sat down on the edge of the bed and gazed down on the man who he had, slowly and almost without realizing it, come to care about more than any other being on the planet. He knew there was only one thing left to do now.
Part Three
It was an hour later when he finally came to the UC Sunnydale dorm complex. He had spent nearly ten fruitless minutes ripping the crypt apart, searching for his chains, until he finally found them at the bottom of an old, broken crate. It had taken another ten to securely shackle the still unconscious Xander to the bed frame, then firmly shut and place a large padlock on the outside of the crypt door. The last thing he wanted now was some random demon wandering in and killing the defenseless fledgling before he even woke up.
He had to break into one of the housing offices again and look up Willow's current building and room. She had moved out of the room he remembered her being in, and it took him nearly twenty minutes before he found the new room. He knew that Xander could wake at any second, and these constant delays, on top of his lack of nicotine, were making him extremely irritable.
When Tara opened the door in response to his knock, he could see Willow behind her, sitting on the bed. "Good. You're both here. I need you to - " He had started to step into the room, only to be stopped by the invisible barrier keeping him out. "Dammit, Red, let me in."
Willow got up and stood next to her girlfriend's side. "Spike? What do you want?"
He glared at her. "I need you to let me in. There's something I need to tell you that I don't want to get into when I'm standing in the bloody hallway." He noticed that his voice had gotten progressively louder with each word, but he didn't care. Time was running short, and he was wasting it standing here arguing.
Willow seemed to think about it, then shook her head. "No. Letting you in is too much of a risk."
Spike stared at her in disbelief. "I've still got this sodding chip, you know. It's not like I can hurt you."
"But what about when it stops working? I don't want to come home to find all my fish strung up on a wire...not that I have fish anymore, but I do have Miss Kitty Fantastico, and that would just be ick."
The vampire blinked at her. He simply had no idea what she was talking about. After a second, though, he snapped out of it. "Fine. Then you come out. And bring one of your spell books. I need to show you something."
"You need me to do a spell? It isn't a love spell, is it?"
He glared again. "No, it's not." He sighed. "I need you to give a vampire back his soul. You can do it, can't you? You still have the curse?"
Willow looked startled. "A vampire? Angel?"
"No." Bloody hell, this was taking forever. "Someone else. Just...hurry, okay? He'll wake up any second now."
Willow was torn. She wanted to know more about this before she went rushing off, but at the same time any soulage was to the good, right? Finally, she glanced over at Tara, who had already begun gathering the ingredients for the curse. Although Tara had never actually performed the ritual before, both she and Willow knew how to do it and kept the proper components on hand. Just in case Angel ever had a really good day.
Materials in hand, she and Tara followed Spike across town to the cemetery.
Part Four
Spike had waited until they got to the crypt to tell them the vampire in question was Xander. He didn't want to risk one of them calling Buffy or running over to the Watcher's house before they did the spell. He was not going to chance the possibility of Xander being staked by a well-intentioned Slayer who remembered all to clearly the last vampire with a soul in Sunnydale.
Thankfully, the youth was still out when they arrived. Willow and Tara stared, shocked, at the lifeless form. "Who did this?" The shy brunette finally whispered. Willow had lost the power of speech.
"Harmony. Stupid cunt. Don't worry, I already staked her." He grabbed a handful of dust and let it trickle through his fingers.
Fat tears began to trickle down the redhead's cheeks until she just collapsed into Tara's arms, sobbing. Spike allowed her to cry for her friend for a few minutes before he tapped her arm rudely.
"I hate to break up this depressing moment, but we have to do this curse now. He's gonna be plenty pissed off and hungry when he wakes up, and I think it'd be better all around if he had a soul. So let's make with the mojo already."
Willow wiped at her eyes with her sleeve, then focused on the blond. "Why do you care if he has a soul anyway? I thought you'd want to have another soulless vamp running around trying to kill us."
"Little girl, you don't know half of what you think you do." He began unpacking their supplies. "Where do these go?"
* * * * * * *
Once the ritual had been performed, all three simply sat in silence, waiting for the inevitable instant when the demon in front of them would open its eyes. Leaning against the bed, Willow still let out the occasional sob, while Tara held her close, smoothing her hair back from her face and planting small, comforting kisses on her eyelids, nose and cheeks. Spike sat in the crypt's only chair, smoking with the help of the matches the witches had brought for the ritual. None of them had said a word since the orb had let its bright pinkish light go, meaning that Xander now had a soul. The silence in the room was thick and heavy, which was why the sudden clinking of the chains seemed almost deafening. Three heads whipped around and took in the cause of the noise, as Xander's whole body began to twitch. Suddenly his eyes shot open, revealing their gold depths. He stared wildly around him, taking in everything.
"Spike?" he gasped out.
-end-