Xander has kittens by Spurglie

Author's notes: set around... oh, um, season four I guess? Maybe five. There's a Xander, a Buffy, a Spike, a Dawn, a Joyce, a Willow and a Tara, and Willy's is still open for business. Spike has the chip and has only recently moved out of Xander's basement, like within the last two weeks. There's no Riley, no Angel, no Cordelia, no Faith, no Oz (or maybe there is, but they're just hiding) but all that's not important to the story, I'm just setting the scene.

Spoilers: I got one mini idea from season six (poker stuff, but again no big spoilers). Basically we're spoiler free, hurrah! Anything's out of place, that's just tough. It's my head your tramping around in, so don't eat the yellow snow. Tra la la, lack of sleep is fun! As are the mind-altering psychedelic drugs. Wheeeeee.

Rating: so far PG13. May slip into R by the time I'm finished. In fact you could pretty much count on it. Slashiness, so that means I get to make Spike say 'whelp' again. Yay!

Disclaimer: I own nothing. I have no money. I am not Joss. Spike is *not* a real person. (And that's just not fair.)

Pairing: Spike/Xander

~~~

Chapter 1

Pussy cat, pussy cat
Where have you been?
I've been up to London
To visit the queen.
~ Children’s nursery rhyme

Xander looked around the table nervously. He felt way, way out of his depth here. How exactly had he got himself into this situation again?

Oh yeah. He lived on the Hellmouth. Hung out with the Slayer. He always got himself into these situations, except by this stage, someone had usually come crashing though the door/window/wall/ceiling or sometimes even floor to save him from himself.

This time, however, the gods were not smiling on Xander Harris. That, or they had just decided that being forced into playing poker with a bunch of varied scaly demons in Willy’s didn’t warrant his being rescued.

Those selectively omnipotent bastards.

Xander immediately apologised to the combined heavenly deities for calling them names, as he knew that with his luck, they would chose that precise moment to start listening to him and put him in an even stickier situation than he was already in.

He was drinking underage.

His friends wouldn’t know to come looking for him tonight as he had unwisely not told anyone he was coming here to look for that extra titbit of information about the latest big bad. Therefore, he would probably be dead by sun up, and would have no one to blame but himself.

He was playing demon poker on a weeknight.

And he was winning.

Squirming in his seat he reshuffled his hand for the tenth time, and took another sip of the dubious looking fiery liquid from the glass in front of him. How many glasses was that now? Eight? Ten? He decided on nine. Nine suspicious glasses of uncertain origin. He knew that standing up would probably be a problem now, and running away from any and all attackers would be virtually out of the question. Ever since he had been grabbed around the throat in mid-conversation with Willy and told in no uncertain terms that a fourth was needed for a decent game of poker... Xander has assumed that he was going to die.

So, if he was going to die tonight, he was going to get good and drunk first.

He looked nervously at the pot in front of him. A basket with six wriggling kittens sat in the centre of the table, along with a not insubstantial stack of paper money of varying denominations, and a few assorted pieces of jewellery. Xander had started the game with twelve dollars and a tootsie roll. He now was the proud owner of eight kittens, one hundred and thirty four dollars, a new Rolex, a tacky looking pinky ring and a vintage copy of Playboy.

He also had a case of nervous sweats and three very angry looking demons growling at him intermittently. Xander knew this could all end very badly for him. No matter what he had done, he kept getting dealt incredible hand after amazing hand after downright unbelievable hand. It was just his bad luck to suddenly receive his lifetime’s supply of good luck on a night when it would probably get him killed.

‘O-Okay,’ he said in an unsteady voice, ‘I raise you twenny bucks, an’... two kiddens.’

He had initially felt bad at gambling with the kittens, not knowing what the demons could possibly want with them and, truth be told, not really wanting to know. The potential ick-factor in acquiring that knowledge was just too high. However, he had decided about three hands ago that it was him or them. Survival of the fittest, and since the kittens couldn’t hold cards to play, Xander swallowed his urge to set the them free, along with another burning shot of 5000% proof liquor and, much to his distress, kept right on winning.

The demon to his left glared at Xander with the one red eye it possessed and screeched loudly in a language Xander knew he could never hope to recognise. Although, he reconsidered, at this point the demon could have been speaking the Queen’s own English and Xander was just too far gone to understand it.

With a final bellow of indignation, the demon threw its cards to the table, and folded. It then shoved its chair back from the table, and stormed out of the bar, yelling over its ample shoulder at Willy as it left.

‘Yeah Znarch’ta,’ Willy called out after him, ‘I know, I'm sorry, but he’s a friend of the Slayer’s. I can’t just let you rip him a new one. You know what she’s like. She’d only come after us all to return the favour.’

Willy made his way to the back of the bar where the poker game was taking place and collected some of the many empty glasses scattered around Xander on the table.

‘You better watch yourself, kid. Demons don’t like being beaten by humans.’

‘Yeah?’ Xander looked up at him blearily. ‘Well, iss not like I asst t’play.’ He pointed an accusing finger at the remaining two demons.

‘They made me. ’Snot my fault if they’re pussies (hic!)’

Willy looked in horror at the two furious demons sitting opposite the boy. Unaware of the barman’s alarm, Xander continued unabashed ‘ ...if their pussies all belong to me now.’

Willy’s eyes flickered closed for a moment as he breathed a sight of relief. He prayed that the Slayer would never find out just how close her friend had come to being savagely ripped to pieces tonight in his bar. If he was lucky, Willy figured he could get the kid out the door in one piece and hopefully he would manage to stagger a couple of blocks away from here before being savagely ripped to pieces, thus rendering Willy completely unaccountable. Quickly gathering up the rest of the glasses scattered around Xander, Willy left the trio to what would be the last hand of their game.

‘Huuumannn,’ the larger of the two remaining demons was said to Xander. ‘Huuuumannnn!’ it had to repeat three more times before finally getting Xander’s attention back out of the Playboy he had been flicking through during the lull in the game. One last look at all the beautiful women he would never get to have because he would be dead soon.

‘Huh? What? Yes deeeeemonnn. What’s the haps?’

Opening growling with annoyance, the demon snapped its outer row of teeth at the drunken youth. Xander blinked. Then tried to focus. Then blinked again.

‘I raised you thirty American dollars and four kittens, huuumannn.’

Xander’s too heavy head flopped forward to see the now overflowing kitten basket and the impressive pile of money with his tootsie roll precariously balanced on top. He looked again at his hand.

‘Right. I raise... I raise fiddy bucks and...’ he peeked under the table where eight tiny pairs of unblinking eyes looked up at him expectantly. Pulling himself upright, he again stifled the pang of guilt at gambling with the little bundles of fluff, and stated as firmly as he could, ‘... and six kiddens.’

The second demon hissed, and tossed his cards to the table in disgust, unable to match Xander’s bet. The first demon remained calmer. The final two players eyed each other warily.

‘A hefty wager, huuumannn,’ it said thoughtfully, thumbing through its depleted pile of money. Some urgent whispering then took place between the two demons, and eventually a bargain was struck. Xander watched as the second demon gave the first its remaining few dollars and pulled two kittens from the deep pockets in its oversize trench coat.

The demon still in play placed the money, the two kittens and an antique looking silver lighter in the centre of the table.

Pausing dramatically for effect, it told him in an authoritative voice, ‘I call.’

It laid its cards on the table, and Xander could see that it held three queens.

‘Huh.’ Xander said, looking down at his own hand with chagrin. The demon eyed him sharply.

‘What is your hand?’ it asked impatiently when Xander made no move.

Xander cleared his throat nervously. It still felt a little raw from being manhandled earlier, although the pain was numbed by the copious amounts of alcohol he had consumed. It was due mostly to this selfsame alcohol that Xander made the decision to lay his cards on the table instead of simply lying and doing the cowardly, sensible thing and folding.

If you’re going down, he rationalised, you might as well go down in style.

He laid his cards one by one on the table, lining them up as evenly as he was able with his second pair of hands, which were just as hard to control as the first pair. When his five cards were set side by side on the table, Xander looked up with a watery grin.

‘Um, full house?’

For a long moment there was silence in the room, broken only by the rasping sounds of two demons seething with anger and paper crinkling as Xander clumsily stuffed his monetary winnings into his pockets and picked up his lighter, the basket of kittens and the few miscellaneous items on the table.

'You know the bes’way to describe this sit (hic!) uation?' he asked, balancing the kitten basket precariously on one hip.

The two demons looked narrowly at him.

'Adjectives.'

With that, he wobbled drunkenly out of the bar, pausing only to throw two twenty dollar bills at Willy at telling him to give the two defeated demons a drink on him. Willy watched him leave, and was impressed to see that the boy only managed to walk into one table on his way towards the exit. Shaking his head, Willy poured out two tankards of Yak’s Bile, and bringing them to the back table.

‘Here ya go boys. These are from the kid.’ He set the two drinks down in front of the demons. ‘You know,’ he said hesitantly, and against his better judgement, ‘you shouldn’t take it to heart, fellas. The kid had a lucky night, and everybody has to lose sometimes, right? So maybe, and this is just a suggestion, maybe you shouldn’t track this one down and kill him just for...’

He paused, looking closely at the two demons. ‘Heeeey, why are you guys smiling?’

The smaller demon looked up at Willy as innocently as was possible for a Krazcanash demon to look. ‘No reason,’ it said in a suspiciously calm voice.

Willy eyed them, meeting their suspiciously and raising them a dubious.

‘Nah, come on, I know when something’s rotten in Denmark.’

The two demons raised what passed for their eyebrows at him.

‘Don’t look at me like that... I read.’ He grabbed a nearby stool and sat down at the table. ‘Now come on, spill. Why the not so long faces?’

The larger demon leaned forward conspiratorially. ‘The firestarter,’ it said.

‘The lighter? Yeah, I saw it. Nice looking piece of hardware. Expensive, too. What about it?’

‘It is cursed,’ the demon confided. ‘It can only be passed on to another if they take it from you voluntarily, and without the current owner mentioning it beforehand to the next... victim.’ It rolled its eyes. ‘Do you really think that huuumannn boychild could have beaten us? We let him win to get rid of that damn-ed thing. It has brought me nothing but trouble.’

‘Ooh, I get it,’ Willy grinned. ‘You guys are good. You had me totally fooled. I thought you were really pissed at losing.’

‘We were,’ admitted the smaller demon. ‘The curse was broken when he accepted the firestarter.’ It shrugged. ‘We would probably still have killed him for beating us if you had not stepped in.’

‘Oh. Well. Right, sorry about that fellas, but I do try to keep the bloodshed to a minimum in here.’

‘We understand,’ replied the demon magnanimously, waving the trespass away with its claw, ‘consider it forgotten.’

Willy nodded his thanks. ‘So, uh, this curse... tell me about it. Does it bring bad luck? Suffering to the owner? Turns him into a demon magnet? Makes him a target for possession by dark spirits? Stuff like that?’

‘Nothing so mundane. I will freely admit that the curse is a trivial one, but it can bring about deep shame and hardship to the owner.’

‘I see,’ Willy said, his interest piqued. ‘Wanna spell it out for me?’

‘It brings your deepest, darkest desire to the surface. Whatever you most desire, you will not rest until you possess it. No matter what that should be.’

‘Uh huh, uh huh.’ Willy nodded. ‘Does it kick in straight away?’

‘No. It relies on initial visual stimulation.’

Willy looked at them blankly for a moment. ‘Huh?’

The demon sighed.

‘When you set eyes on that which you desire most, you cannot rest, cannot sleep, cannot eat until you possess it. No matter what you have to do, no matter how long it takes.’

‘Oh, I get it. That could be very nasty, depending, of course on what your deepest, darkest desire is.’ Willy stroked his chin thoughtfully as he regarded the larger demon, the one whom he had had seen place the lighter onto the table. ‘Um, hope you don’t mind me asking, but, ah, what did it make you go after?’

Willy suddenly found himself hauled across the table by his lapels, eye to eye with a furious demon.

‘I do mind,’ it snarled at him, snapping both sets of sharp teeth in anger ‘and if I did not require you to pour me liquid refreshments, I would rip your throat out for even daring to ask!’

‘Ok, ok, there’s n-no need to get all steamed up about it, I was just asking.’ Willy stuttered, breathing a sigh of relief when the demon set him back on his feet. With a final growl, it turned and walked away from the table towards the restrooms, leaving Willy slightly out of breath and straightening his ruined shirt.

‘What’s his problem? What was so bad about the dumb lighter, anyway?’

‘Nothing,’ the remaining demon shook its head. ‘Just whatever you do... whatever you do, do not mention the huuumannn girlchild Britney Spears in his presence if you value all your functioning body parts.’

‘Britney?’ Willy asked, confused.

‘Trust me,’ the demon said sternly, ‘you would not believe me if I told you.’

Chapter 2

Xander awoke the next day with a kitten sleeping on his chest and a dead sock in his mouth.

He closed his eyes, counted to ten, and opened them again.

There was still a kitten sleeping on his chest, but on closer inspection the dead sock turned out to simply be his tongue.

Carefully manipulating the dead sock, he let out an impressive groan.

‘What on earth did I do last night?'

He was answered by a tiny mewling sound as a second kitten made its presence known by scampering across his bed and colliding headfirst with his hip. It shook its head to clear it, spun suddenly in midair and pounced on a poor, defenceless loose thread on his blanket.

‘Why are there two kittens on my bed?’

The chocolate brown kitten on his chest opened its eyes sleepily as Xander’s voice intruded on peaceful kitten dreams. It got to its feet and systematically stretched out each of its legs and let out a body-stretching yawn, before sitting and looking at Xander quizzically, as if to say ‘If you don’t remember how we got here, I’m certainly not going to tell you.’

It then gracefully leapt off his chest and went to lie beside the snow white kitten at Xander’s hip, promptly curling up into a tiny ball beside it and going back to sleep, the movement of the snowy kitten batting the stray thread with its paws not seeming to bother it in the slightest.

Xander flopped back onto his pillows, racking his brains as to what he had done the previous evening. There had been a demon scare, then some Scooby research. He could remember that much. Then he had gone to Willy’s to find out the “word on the street”, and apparently had many, many beverages of an alcoholic nature. But how? And with who?

And also... kittens? What the hell was he going to do with two kittens?

What he was sure of was that the late afternoon sun streaming in through the tiny window of his basement was entirely too bright, even behind his closed eyes. He flung an arm over his eyes to block out the light and managed to smack himself on the head with something cold, metallic and heavy around his wrist. Cracking open his eyes and squinting in the offending light, he saw a vaguely familiar watch around his wrist.

‘Holy mother of pearl! That’s a Rolex! Unidentifiable bruises and a killer headache I can put down as a standard sacrifice to the party gods, but two kittens and a Rolex? What the hell did I do last night?’

Suddenly the blanket under Xander’s elbow gave a twitch. Then another. Xander swallowed, hoping that he hadn’t brought any miniature demons home with him last night, and slowly peered over the side of his bed. What he saw there made him rub his eyes, cartoon style, just to make sure that he wasn’t seeing things.

Kittens. Lots of kittens. Lots and lots of kittens. Scattered all over his floor. One was pulling at his blanket with its sharp little claws. One was skidding madly about, careening across his room to collide with various piles of dirty laundry, only to leap over them and continue on its mad chase of dust particles. Another was dutifully giving itself a wash, a little pink tongue lapping over fluffy kitten fur. Yet another was doing something that Xander really didn’t want to have to deal with right now in the corner of his room. Others were sleeping, taking kitten naps in the shafts of warming sunlight.

But mostly, they were watching the newly awakened huuumannn in their midst with wide eyes, wondering if he would be getting out of his oversize basket now, and what exactly he would be providing for them with for breakfast.

Huuumannn.

That rang a bell in Xander’s fuddled head.

Then it rang a fire alarm.

Finally it rang an air raid siren and Xander leapt out of bed.

Then he paused, gripping the back of his chair for balance, and clutching at his head as he waited for the sting of his headache to pass at the sudden movement.

‘Okay... ow!’

Why had he done that again? Oh yeah, air raid siren. Huuumannn. Demons. Playing poker. Drinking way too much. Winning at poker. That was where the kittens had come from. Trying to get really drunk so it wouldn’t hurt as much when they killed him.

Succeeding at getting really drunk, and then categorically not being killed.

Xander patted himself down. Head, torso, all limbs and vital organs... check. No visible scarring or... he ran to the mirror... mangling of his boyish good looks. He gripped the edges of the sink with both hands and let his weight rest there for a moment.

Generally he seemed to be in one piece. Dressed in only the baggy jeans he had been wearing the night before and his spanking new watch, and the proud owner of about a dozen kittens, but generally in one piece. He winced as he took in the grey pallor of his skin, and the bloodshot eyes, but still couldn’t complain. He’d played poker with demons and lived to tell the tale. Hell, he’d beaten them and lived to tell the tale.

Xander splashed cold water on his face, rinsed out his mouth and ran his wet hands through his hair, lifting the dark curls off of his face.

Beaten them.

‘I beat them.’

He grinned to his reflection. His reflection grinned back, its interest sparked.

Yes you did. It nodded at him approvingly. But what exactly did you win?

‘A good question indeed, my identical friend. What say we find out?’

Leaving the mirror behind, Xander made his way gingerly back to his bed, trying not to step on any kittens on the way. He did manage to trip over a mangled, ancient looking copy of Playboy on the floor next to his bed, but the kittens escaped unharmed. Standing by his bed, Xander checked his pockets, and threw the items he found there onto his covers.

‘Fantastically tacky ring, squashed tootsie roll, old silver lighter, shredded beer mat, large roll of money, book of matches...’ Xander paused and slowly picked up the money again, afraid if he moved too fast that it might disappear. No, it was still there, seemed real enough. Leafing through it quickly he counted how much was there. Then he realised he had been too excited to counting the first time and had to leaf through it again.

Three hundred and sixty-five dollars.

Three hundred and sixty-five dollars.

Three hundred and sixty-five dollars.

Xander sat on his bed and only just resisted the urge to fan the money out and rub it against his naked chest. This was more money than he had seen together in a long, long time. It was all his. He hadn’t had to work for it, and he had taken it away from demons.

This was incredible. This was awesome.

This was almost worth the hangover.

The shrill ringing of his phone roused Xander out of his thoughts, and also startled the mass of snow white and chocolate brown fur still tangled together on his bed, making them leap off and disappear under the battered armchair in the corner of the room.

‘Hello?’ he croaked.

‘Xander! Is that you? Where have you been? We had a Scooby meeting this morning, did you forget? I was getting worried about you.’

‘Oh hey, Willow. I’m fine. Sorry. I slept in.’

‘Xander, is something wrong? You sound terrible.’

‘What? Me? No, fine. Everything is peachy in fact.’ He eyed the pile of money sitting innocently on his bed and adjusted his watch. ‘Couldn’t be better. What are you two crazy kids up to today anyway? We have slay plans?’

‘Uh, yeah, about that. Giles says no go. He got his dates wrong, so the badness won’t be rising ‘til next month.’

‘Score for the G-man. Well that suits me. I don’t really feel like getting beaten unconscious today.’

‘Well, no, neither do I.’ Xander could hear the smile in Willow’s voice. He liked hearing happy Willow. Happy Willow gave him a happy, except not in that special happy way, just the regular happy way. More than anyone else in his life, she had the uncanny ability to make him smile.

He sat up suddenly as he was simultaneously attacked by a brilliant idea, and a kitten who was trying to make a meal of his bare foot.

‘Wills?’ he asked, gently trying to shake the kitten off his foot. ‘Are you and Tara going to be home in about an hour?’

‘Yeah. Should be. We’re just hanging out. Tara’s thinking about redecorating again, and I was going to get in some extra study. Why?’

‘Um, no reason. I just thought I might call by in a little bit. I have something you might want.’

‘You have surprises?’ she asked excitedly.

‘Yup. You can say no if you don’t want it, but I thought you might like one.’

‘One what, Xander? Give me a clue! I can’t wait an hour for a surprise, I'll never get any study done!’

Xander wagged his finger reproachfully, even though Willow couldn’t see him.

‘Ah ah ah. You’ll just have to wait and see. I'll see you in about an hour, okay?’

‘Okay Xander, I'll see you then.’

He hung up, smiling at the image in his mind’s eye of Willow pouting at not getting her way.

Humming to himself, and looking forward to drinking about a gallon of coffee before he set out for Willow’s, Xander lifted an almost dry towel from the back of his chair and headed for the shower, leaving a mass of tumbling kittens in his wake.

Chapter 3

‘Oh my god, Xander, they’re so cute, I can’t pick one.’

Xander smiled at the two girls bent over the basket of kittens as they oohed and awwed at the little bundles of cuteness. Willow was systematically picking each of them up in turn for a cuddle, before reluctantly setting them down to pick up another.

Tara’s beaming face turned up to look at Xander.

‘H-how d-did you know we w-were looking for a kitten?’

‘I didn’t,’ he admitted with a shrug. ‘I just happened upon these little fellas who were looking for a good home, and I thought of you two lovely ladies. So I take it you want one?’

‘I want all of them,’ Willow pouted as she cuddled what had to be number fourteen. Or perhaps she had worked her way through them all and was starting again at the beginning.

‘S-sweetie, we can’t take them all. It’ll be hard enough hiding just one, and besides,’ she smiled again shyly at Xander, ‘X-Xander may only want to give us one of them.’

‘Oh no, you can take as many as you want. I can’t really keep a dozen cats in the basement. Might cramp my style with all the hot chicks I bring back there. You know, so many people are allergic to cat hair these days.’

Willow rolled her eyes at him knowingly. ‘Where did you get them all, anyhow?’

‘Trust me,’ he said with certainty, ‘you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.’

Willow just grinned and went back to making her difficult decision.

‘I kind of like this one,’ she said, holding aloft the snow white kitten who had head-butted Xander’s hip earlier that day. ‘Don’t you think he looks like Spike?’

‘Like Spike?’ Tara frowned, tilting her head to one side. ‘Oh yeah, I see it now.’ She reached out and gently stroked the kitten’s head in the wrong direction with her forefinger. ‘I-if you spike up its hair like this then it totally looks like him.’

The kitten appeared not to like this treatment and reached out with a tiny paw to swipe viciously at the offending finger, only managing to look incredibly cute and making the girls smile even more.

Willow held the kitten up for Xander’s approval. Xander had to admit there was a certain resemblance. There was also a strange urge to take the kitten away from Willow and persuade her to make a different choice. That one was his own little head-butting kitten.

‘Definitely spending too much time with the evil undead, Will,’ he told her. ‘Hey, how about...’

‘This one!’ cried Tara, holding up a bright eyed tortoise shell kitten, who appeared to have been just woken up by the girls’ attentions and seemed eager to find out who these two new people were to play with.

‘Oh, yes. You’re right. She’s perfect.’

Willow carefully set the Spike-kitten back into the basket with his brothers and sisters, narrowly missing getting caught by another vengeful swipe of its paw, and moved to sit beside Tara so they could get a better look at their new pet.

‘Hey, how do you know if they’re boys or girls?’ Xander asked.

Both girls looked up at him as though he’d just asked them what colour the sky was.

‘Silly,’ Willow said. ‘You can just tell. It’s so obvious.’

‘Okaaay. So, uh, what are you going to call her?’

Willow and Tara shared a look as they considered his question.

‘W-what about Miss Catty?’

‘Miss Kitty?’ suggested Willow.

‘Miss Kitty.’ Tara repeated, testing the name out for sound. ‘Miss Kitty. I like it. M-Miss Kitty Fantastico.’

‘Perfect,’ Willow agreed, looking down at the contented kitten in Tara’s lap.

~~~

Xander rang the doorbell and stepped back the politely appropriate two steps as he waited for the door to be answered. A moment later Joyce Summers opened the door and smiled broadly when she saw Xander standing there.

‘Hello Xander.’

‘Hi Mrs. S. How’re you this fine day?’

‘Just fine, Xander. Come on in. Are you looking for Buffy? She’s up in her room, I'll just call her.’

‘Actually, I need to have a word with you first.’

‘Oh?’ she asked, folding her arms. ‘Is something wrong?’

‘No, no, nothing like that,’ he grinned at her, trying desperately not to think about love spells or zombie masks or any other of the million and one things that had previously gone wrong in this very house. ‘I just need your permission first.’

‘My permission? What for?’

‘For one of these.’

Xander opened the lid of the basket and held it out. Joyce raised an eyebrow at him before looking down into the basket. When she looked up again, she was smiling.

‘Permission granted. I think that one of them would be just fine.’

~~~

‘Hey Buff, you naked in there?’

‘As the day I was born, ‘ came the muffled reply.

‘Cool,’ Xander answered, pushing open the door.

Buffy sat cross-legged on the bed, braiding her younger sister’s hair.

‘Wow,’ Xander said. ‘You were born wearing jeans and a tank top? That must have been hard on your mom.’

‘Xannn-der.’ Buffy grinned, making an ‘ewww’ face at him.

‘Hi Xander,’ Dawn said, bouncing on the bed and knocking her half-braided hair out of Buffy’s hands.

‘Hey Dawnie. How’s my favourite surrogate little sister doing?’

Dawn shrugged. ‘Okay. ‘Spose. Buffy won’t take me to see that new werewolf movie that’s out.’

Buffy rolled her eyes, and lightly smacked the back of her sister’s head. ‘Yeah, dream on, it’s rated R. Mom would go postal if she knew I'd taken you to see that. And plus... we can just wait ‘til Oz is in town and you’ve got the real thing. Besides, monster movies are so dull, and they never get the details right. I mean, look at Blade. Imagine if I had to make stakes out of silver. Do you have any idea how many of those things I go through in a week?’

She trailed off as the saw the “nyah nyah, let’s make fun of Buffy” looks passing between Xander and her sister and decided that a subject change was in order.

‘So, Xander. What’s in the basket? You going to visit your old grandmother who lives in the woods?’

‘Why Buffy, what big eyes you have.’ Xander grinned, batting his lashes at her playfully. ‘Actually, I brought you a surprise.’

He set the basket on the bed beside the two girls and flipped open the lid.

‘What is it? I can’t... KITTENS!’

In a heartbeat, Buffy’s bed was swarming with kittens as the two girls giggled and squeaked at the ‘oodles of fluffy cuteness’ that Xander had so graciously bestowed upon them.

‘Xander! This is so nice of you, but we can’t, I mean mom would never go for it.’

‘Well that’s where you’d be wrong, Buff. I have already faced the mom monster, and she has given her unholy permission for you two to have a kitten. So long as, and I quote, “she doesn’t get stuck looking after it, and it doesn’t come back from the dead”.’ Xander scratched his head, a little confused. ‘That second part I didn’t quite understand, but I totally get the thinking behind it.’

‘Yeah,’ Buffy agreed, ‘long story.’

‘But she said we could keep one, right?’ Dawn asked hopefully.

‘Uh huh. You’re responsible now, right? You’re, what, twelve already?’

‘Xan-der, I'm fifteen. Which you knew already.’

‘Yeah,’ he grinned, wiping a pretend tear from his eye, ‘you all just grow up so darn fast. Before we know it there’ll be boys and motorcycles and makeup and short skirts, and... and parking!’

‘Parking?’ Dawn asked confused. ‘Why would I want to park anything?’

‘Xander!’ Buffy yelped. ‘Don’t give her any ideas! These are all things that will happen over my dead body.’

‘Sorry Buffy,’ he apologised, with a sly wink at Dawn. ‘You two made a choice yet?’

‘I don’t know. You think mom would let us keep them all?’ Buffy asked, already knowing that the answer to that question would be a resounding ‘no’. She picked up the snowy white kitten and examined him critically.

Xander watched this with alarm. That was his white kitten. He realised with a start that he was going to come out of this keeping at least one of them. Like he needed a pet to look after. The kitten was struggling in Buffy’s hand and looking at him beseechingly.

‘I don’t think this one likes me, Xan.’ Buffy told him. ‘Here ya go, little fella, go to poppa.’

With that she deposited the struggling kitten into Xander’s hands, where it immediately seemed more content and began kneading its claws in and out of his shirt, purring as loudly as a l’il bitty kitty cat can.

‘Oh he likes you. Definitely.’

‘You think?’ Xander asked, holding the kitten awkwardly. ‘What do I do?’

‘Just be careful,’ Buffy told him in a serious tone, ‘and remember to support the head.’

‘Support the head. Gotcha.’

The two girls burst into a fit of giggles.

‘Xander, don’t worry. Cats are very self-sufficient, and they always land on their feet. Just play with him and remember to feed him. You’ll make a good mommy cat.’

The kitten in Xander’s awkward grasp seemed to agree wholeheartedly.

‘Where did they all come from, anyway?’ Buffy asked him as they watched Dawn chatting happily to a mesmerised black kitten sporting a white patch over one eye and one white paw.

‘Oh, I liberated them from a nasty demon man,’ Xander told her.

‘Yeah, right, like a demon would have a bunch of kittens,’ she said, not believing him for a second, ‘where did you really get them?’

Xander smiled at Buffy’s assumption, without taking his eyes off Dawn. ‘You’re absolutely right Buffy. I found them abandoned in a box and thought I'd give them all good homes.’

Buffy looked at him then, impressed. ‘That’s sweet Xander, you’re all heart.’

‘This one. She’s the one,’ Dawn interrupted their conversation.

‘Ooh, yeah, she’s gorgeous,’ Buffy agreed. ‘Shall we call her Salem?’

Dawn shook her head, giggling delightedly as their chosen kitten followed the movement, thereby shaking its head along with hers at the name.

‘We can’t call her that. It’s a boy’s name.’

‘Hmmm,’ Buffy considered, stroking her chin in thought. ‘You’re right. We’ll have to come up with something else.’

Xander looked at the two girls in confusion. ‘Okay, I just don’t get it. How can you tell it’s a girl?

Dawn held the kitten up to the light.

‘You can just tell. This one is so a girl. Look at her face. That’s just not a boy kitten kind of a face.’

Xander looked closely at the bewildered kitten. It just looked like a kitten face to him.

‘We’ll have to take care of her properly,’ Buffy said gravely to Dawn, ‘I don’t want another repeat performance of the goldfish incident.’

‘I will, I will, I promise.’ Dawn told her. ‘My word is my bond.’

Buffy pinned her with a cynical eye.

‘What?’ Dawn asked her innocently. ‘I will. Honest. I'll feed her, clean up after her. I'll even take her for walks if you want. Won’t I Cleopatra?’

‘Cleopatra?!’ groaned Buffy. ‘That’s terrible. We’ll have to come up with something better than that or it’s back to Salem.’

‘How about Charcoal? Or Smudge?’

‘Mmmmaybe. I think I’d go with Smudge. What do you think Xander?’

‘Don’t involve me. I wash my hands of the chosen kitten. And you know,’ he told them as he scooped up the other unwilling kittens into the basket, ‘in every litter there is a Chosen One. She alone can battle the dolphin-unfriendly tuna fish, and has the power to be petted by the Key.’

Buffy sighed good-naturedly and watched as Xander struggled to get the last kitten into the basket. The snowy kitten was point blank refusing to go back in the basket and was clinging onto Xander’s shirt for dear life. She only just managed to stifle an ‘awwww’ as Xander gave up and kept the white kitten perched in his hand, where it sat happily with its paws draped over his fingers, watching the world from its new elevated position.

‘Any last words of wisdom before you go?’

'Why yes.’ Xander looked up at her, oblivious of how she had been watching him unconsciously petting the kitten he held in his hand. ‘Dawn, listen up. You’ll need to follow these rules, too. There are only three, but they are very important.’

Buffy and Dawn listened carefully.

‘Rule 1. Never expose them to sunlight. Sunlight will kill them. Rule 2. Never get them wet. Rule 3, and this is the most important rule of all. No matter how much they beg, no matter how much they plead, never, ever feed them after midnight. Are we clear?’

‘Sure.’ Dawn told him with a confused nod. ‘Clear as mud.’

‘Dawnie? Just for future reference, if I ever tell you to listen carefully to what Xander has to say... ignore me, okay?’

‘Okay.’ Dawn agreed happily as she stroked her kitten.

~~~

‘Can’t you take just one more?’

‘Buddy, we’re only legally allowed to keep ten in a cage, and as you can see we’re all stocked up. Kittens sell like hotcakes in this town. Beats the hell outta me, but we just can’t keep up with demand.’

‘Then you should be able to get rid of them fairly easily, right?’

‘Nuh uh, nice try, but sorry. Today was delivery day.’ Bill waved his hand around the store, where the mewling of many assorted kittens could be heard. ‘Full house.’

‘It was a full house got me into this mess in the first place.’ Xander mumbled under his breath. He had said his final goodbyes to the dozen remaining kittens on the long walked from Buffy’s house to Hank’s Pet-o-rama, but was now being told that they could only take ten off his hands. He’d considered offering one to Giles, but both Buffy and Dawn had poo-pooed that idea as a bad one. Xander was inclined to agree.

Giles with a pet that could potentially knock over his teacups, sharpen its claws on the furniture and, heaven forbid, get cat hairs on the tweed?

Poo. Poo.

So he had gone straight to Hank’s, getting there shortly before the shop closed for the day.

He used the store credit that Bill (Hank was apparently on vacation) offered him to buy cat food, a scratching post and a basket big enough for two young kittens to comfortably sleep in, and left again for home, the door to the store jangling behind him, a snow white kitten in one hand and a perpetually sleepy chocolate brown kitten in the other.

Xander opened the door with his pizza money at the ready, mouth watering at the prospect of the extra cheesy delight he had ordered to celebrate. He was rich, he was no longer overrun by kittens, and best of all, he was still alive. Most definitely not tracked down and slaughtered while he slept by the angry poker demons.

Things were good, the wheels of life were turning smoothly.

What he didn’t expect to see on the other side of the door was everyone’s friendly neighbourhood vampire waiting expectantly, framed in a blue cloud of cigarette smoke.

‘Xander,’ Spike greeted him with a cordial nod of his head.

‘Uh, hey Spike.’ Xander’s brow crinkled in a frown of confusion. ‘I didn’t order any vampires.’

‘Nooo, you probably didn’t. Couldn’t afford me if you did. Mind if I come in?’

Xander blinked, and found that he had to shake his head slightly to clear it before he could answer. Spike eyed him quizzically.

‘Something wrong, whelp?’

‘Huh? No, I just wasn’t expecting you.’

‘Right, ‘cause I make so many social calls ‘round here. But hey, seeing as I'm here... can I come in?’

‘You’re still chipped, right?’

‘Absolutely. But then, if I wasn’t, I'd probably lie. I could punch you to find out if you like...’ he offered congenially.

‘Naw, thanks. I think I’ll pass.’ Xander stood to the side to let Spike enter.

Spike eyed him a little strangely. ‘Uh, yeah, ‘bout that “walking on in” thing. I’m gonna need you to invite me. Come on, you guys should know vampire lore by now, shouldn’t you? I can’t believe you...’

‘Spike!’ Xander interrupted the vampire’s rant, ‘You were never un-invited.’ He held out his hand to guide Spike into his house. Spike drew his head back a little in distrust of the offer, but tossed his cigarette to the side and walked into the house.

‘Huh. No barrier.’

‘I told you.’

‘Pretty dumb thing to do, Droopy.’ Spike strolled to the stairs and descended into the basement. ‘What if I’d got the chip out in the meantime?’ he called back over his shoulder.

Xander slowly closed the door. ‘Well I guess you would just be obligated to suck my blood, wouldn’t you?’

Spike paused briefly, halfway down the stairs and looked up at the boy with a curious glance.

‘I guess I would.’

Xander followed Spike down into the basement.

‘Um, yeah, so un-pleasantries aside, why exactly are you here?’

‘I've lost something. Torn the crypt apart looking for it. Thought I might of left it here.’

Xander opened his mouth to ask what could be so important to bring Spike halfway across town and back into the home of his enemy to retrieve, when there was another knock on the door from upstairs.

‘That’ll be the vampires you ordered,’ Spike said without looking at him.

Letting his mouth snap shut without replying, Xander dutifully went up the steps to collect his pizza. This time the scent of garlic wafted to him before he had even opened the door.

Dinner time.

Spike meanwhile, had spotted the antique silver lighter lying on Xander’s bed.

‘Hey, Xander, I didn’t know you smoked,’ he called.

‘I don’t,’ came the reply as Xander appeared back down the steps.

‘Didn’t think so. Slayer and the witch’d have your guts for garters. Can I have this then?’

‘What?’

Spike held it up. ‘This lighter?’

‘Yeah, sure, whatever. It’s all yours.’

Spike grinned, fishing the battered book of matches he had been reduced to using out of his pocket and tossed it onto Xander’s rumpled bed. This had worked out quite well as far as Spike was concerned. Xander had never de-invited him. That was... nice. In a strange, ‘he didn’t really care’ sort of a way and bonus, this lighter was far better than the one he had lost.

‘Cheers, mate.’

He breezed back past Xander and up the steps without a backward glance.

'See ya around,’ Xander muttered to himself.

The door banged shut above him and Xander was left alone, holding the hot pizza box in his hands, wondering what the hell it was that didn’t feel right since he had gone to answer the door. Something was just a little off. He felt a little panicked, almost like the prospect of a fight was in the air. Something weird, but... familiar. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but he knew if he could just think straight for a moment that the answer would appear.

He was woken out of his daydream by the now familiar sensation of teeny tiny needlelike claws sinking playfully into his foot.

‘Spike!’ Xander yelled at the white kitten, who peered up at him sullenly, ‘Cut that out!’

He did a double take and looked back down at the kitten, who Xander was strangely certain was smirking up at him victoriously.

‘Did I just call you Spike?’ He squinted at the blob of white fuzz at his foot. ‘I guess you do kind of look like him. And god knows you act like him.’ He squatted down and speared the kitten with a knowing glare, causing it to immediate cease in its assault on his foot and gaze up at him innocently.

‘Yeah, now you do the cutsey wootsey thing. You’re not fooling me, you vicious little kitten you. I think maybe we should get you a chip.’

The kitten blinked lazily at him, growing bored with the reprimand, and wandered away, going, Xander assumed, to find its chocolate brown counterpart who would probably be curled up asleep somewhere as always.

As it walked by him, head held high, it rubbed along the length of Xander’s foot, briefly wrapping its tail around his ankle in a fleeting fluffy embrace. Xander was appalled to find his vision blurring at the act. He stood upright again in one swift jerk to wipe a tear from his eye.

‘Pizza fumes. The pizza fumes are getting to me.’

In more ways than one...

Kitten antics notwithstanding, he still felt funny. The pizza which had seemed so tempting to his empty stomach only moments ago was now thrown forgotten onto the washing machine. He stuffed his change into the back pocket of his jeans, not bothering to count it and discover that he had tipped the delivery boy too much and hadn’t even noticed.

He sat on the edge of his bed to try and think, but bounded to his feet almost immediately. He couldn’t sit still. He needed... out. Needed to figure out what was itching at the inside of his skull and growing progressively worse.

A decision reached, Xander grabbed the first item of clothing that came to hand, a close fitting black sweater, and drew it on over the white T-shirt he had been wearing, grabbed his keys, the rest of his poker winnings and headed back up the steps.

~~~

Spike paused just outside the door to light a cigarette. The lighter Xander had given him felt comfortable in his hand as he rubbed his thumb thoughtfully over the engravings on its side. It was old. Not as old as he was, but a couple of decades at the very least. The metal felt strangely warm in his palm.

He held it up to the porch-light, examining the engravings more closely. They weren’t just for decoration, he realised. There were faint words carved into the metal. Words that Spike recognised, written in an ancient demon script that he had never bothered to learn fully. He did however know a few important words. One never knew when these things would come up in spellcasting.

‘... cursed... darker... no, darkest... hunger? Ack’nar stam-bink? Ack’nar stam-stink? Oh, yeah, desire. A warning. No sleep, no eat, no... quiet? No calm?’

He sighed in annoyance. He didn’t feel much like translating an ancient text at the moment. He had felt uneasy since leaving the basement. Something about Xander’s matter-of-factness about his visit, and the... niceness. It was just bothering him.

‘Bugger me, I hate these stupid languages. So the lighter’s cursed, huh? Great. Knowing my luck it’ll kill me, then all those twats who think it’s so bloody funny to tell a vampire that smoking kills will have been right after all.’

With an exasperated ‘tsk!’ he shoved the lighter into one of his pockets and drew deeply on his cigarette. As he exhaled he looked down at the glowing butt with distaste, the mellow tobacco not as soothing to him as usual. Annoyed, and somewhat bewildered, he threw the largely unsmoked cigarette away.

Still standing on the porch, he glared out into the night, his hands clenched into fists at his sides. He had been planning on heading back to the crypt for a comfortable night’s television viewing, sipping at the remainder of his blood, but now this restlessness had come over him, and he didn’t want to sit around doing nothing all night.

His scowl deepened.

It’s that bloody lighter. He’s cursed me! The little bastard cursed me. I'm fucking cursed! That’s just great. With all the other joys in my life, I need this like I need a holy water enema!

Turning around, he reached for the door handle, but as he did the door opened inwards out of his grasp and he came face to face with a surprised Xander.

The two men stood for a moment, glowering at one another, each vexed by their mutual feeling of unease, all thoughts of long walks to soothe frazzled nerves and enchanted lighters forgotten in an instant.

‘Xander.’

‘Spike.’

‘Going somewhere?’

‘No, I, ah,’ Xander looked around, as though surprised to find himself standing there, ‘just locking the door.’

Spike raised a sceptical eyebrow. ‘You got dressed to lock the door?’

‘Um... yes?’

‘Fair enough,’ he said, not believing him, but already bored with that particular line of questioning. ‘Listen, mate, I'm bloody bored. You want to go... do something? Kill something?’ he asked hopefully. ‘Um, I dunno, drink some beer maybe?’

Xander took a moment to process this information.

‘With you?’

‘Well... yeah. Nothing like a nice bit of violence and death for what ails you. Or we can play pool, pick up some fit birds. Forget we’re mortal enemies for the duration. That sort of rot.’

Xander looked unconvinced.

‘You know? Hang out?’

Xander looked at him cynically, wondering what Spike’s ulterior motive was for asking him, but not missing the always enjoyable sensation of watching Spike being both exasperated and embarrassed at the same time.

‘With you?’ he asked again.

‘Yes with me,’ Spike snapped. ‘I'm bored, alright? You don’t exactly look like you’re doing much, so... just... come and entertain me.’

Xander narrowed his eyes at the vampire, pursed his lips for a moment as though deep in thought before allowing himself to grin.

‘Well when you put it like that...’

‘Good,’ Spike said quickly, grabbing Xander’s elbow and leading him away from the house at a forced march. ‘First round’s on you, mate. Oh, and by the way, that’s a bloody nice watch.’

Chapter 5

‘No, no, no,’ Xander said, stopping abruptly as he realised where they were heading. ‘I'm not going to Willy’s.’

‘Why not?’ asked Spike. ‘He’s got the best beer on tap in town plus they don’t serve blood at the Bronze.’

‘Well see, I don’t drink blood, and I don’t wanna go to Willy’s,’ Xander stated firmly. Then, as an afterthought - ‘I can’t.’

‘Can’t.’ Spike tilted his head to the side curiously. ‘That’s an interesting word – can’t. Why exactly can’t you go to Willy’s?’

‘Demons.’

Spike let out a burst of laughter. ‘What’s that now? You’re afraid of demons? You?’ he asked with disbelief. ‘The only person who spends more time with demons than you is the Slayer. And even then it’s a close call. Besides, I'll watch your back.’

‘Not afraid of all demons. Just three demons in particular. I beat them at poker and I don’t really want to... wait, you’ll watch my back?’

‘Well, yeah,’ Spike answered gruffly, taken aback by the abrupt question. ‘You just attract trouble... which suits me fine, by the way. Always up for a spot of violence, but that doesn’t mean I want Buffy coming after me ‘cause I let someone munch on you, does it? And besides, you’re buying, remember?’

Xander remained unconvinced.

‘Spike, listen. You wanna drink, that’s fine. I'm just not really in a party mood.’

‘Oh.’ Spike was surprised at the disappointment he felt. He had been looking forward to kicking back and having a few drinks.

‘Yeah. So how about we just pick up some beers and take them back to my place?’

Xander began to walk in the opposite direction, towards town and the one liquor store that Sunnydale boasted. Spike watched him walk away, talking to himself.

‘I kind of feel bad about leaving the kittens alone, too. Knowing that white one he’ll have the place ripped to shreds by the time we get back.’

‘Kittens?’

Spike ran a few paces to catch up and fell into step beside him.

‘Did you say “kittens”?’

‘Yeah. Part of my poker winnings.’

‘How many?’

‘How many what?’

‘Tuh. How many kittens did you win?’

‘Fourteen.’

‘Fourteen! You won fourteen kittens at poker? That’s a small fortune, mate. I'm impressed. They don’t normally let humans play.’

~~~

‘Is it a boy or a girl?’

‘Don’be silly. You can just tell. These two are boys.’

‘I can’t bloody well tell that just from looking at them. Well, maybe I could, but I don’t really want to look that closely.’

Xander smacked him on the shoulder.

‘Noo! You look at their faces. There’s a trick to it. Dawn showed me.’

‘Yeah, what’s that?’

‘Well, I think pretty much it goes like this...’

He carefully picked up the sleeping chocolate brown kitten and sat down beside Spike.

‘You look at the kitten.’

They both looked at the kitten intently.

‘You decide if it’s a boy or a girl.’

He held the kitten closer to Spike, indicating that Spike should make a decision.

‘It’s a boy,’ decided Spike helpfully.

‘’xactly.’ Xander told him, boozily impressed with Spike’s powers of deduction. ‘Huh, they were right. It is simple.’

‘I see,’ Spike nodded slowly. ‘’Sgood that. What about the white one?’

‘He’s a boy, too. Definitely. I think I'm gonna call him Spike 2.’

‘What? Why?’

‘Willow said he looks like you.’

Spike reached down and snagged the white kitten who was happily attacking the laces of his boots and eyed it suspiciously. ‘Doesn’t look a thing like me.’

‘No wait.’ Xander reached over and ruffled the kitten’s ‘hair’, just as Tara had done earlier, making it stick up into unruly curling spikes. ‘See? Now ‘syou. And plus, he attacks everything he can reach. Woke me up th’smorning with a headbutt.’

‘’E did?’ Spike asked, looking at the struggling kitten in a whole new light.

‘Uh huh.’ Xander nodded solemnly.

‘Huh. Maybe there’s more to this pet lark than meets the eye.’ Spike speculated, turning to lie on his stomach on the bed and set the kitten down in front of his face.

Then with no warning, and before the kitten had time to scamper away, Spike suddenly vamped out. The kitten sat very still, watching Spike, heedful of the potential danger. The two feline creatures glared at one another for a long moment, until the diminutive cat rose onto all fours and walked purposefully towards Spike’s lowered face.

Xander was frozen, watching in fascination as the kitten advanced. Spike let out a low warning growl, which the kitten flinched away from, but didn’t stop slinking its way toward him. It finally halted, barely an inch away from Spike’s face, and stood there, eyeballing the vampire, shifting its insubstantial weight from paw to paw.

The tension was unbearable, the silence in the basement absolute.

Slowly, very, very slowly, the kitten closed the space between them, until it bumped noses with Spike and rubbed its way across his cheek, nuzzling briefly into the bend of Spike’s shoulder before digging its claws into his shirt and happily climbing onto his shoulder.

Xander was amazed. Spike 2 hadn’t taken to anyone like that.

Spike sat up, bringing the kitten with him, and turned to the astonished Xander.

‘Xander? Can I have him?’

Xander immediately scowled a little. That one was his kitten, and everybody seemed to want to take it from him, but the scowl faded as he saw the earnest look on Spike’s face, and the purring kitten blithely bumping against his cheek.

‘Yeah,’ he agreed grudgingly. ‘You can have him.’

‘Nice one.’ Spike answered him with a blinding grin. ‘I'm not calling him Spike, though. That’d just get confusing, and be bloody stupid. What do you think about Flick-knife? Or Beast, maybe?’

‘Flick-knife? You really are a vampire, aren’t you?’

‘You know it. Be a pet and get me another beer, will ya? This one’s empty already.’

Chapter 6

Xander awoke the next day with a kitten sleeping on his chest and a dead body beside him.

He closed his eyes, counted to ten, and opened them again.

There was still a kitten sleeping on his chest, but on closer inspection the dead body turned out to simply be Spike.

Carefully manipulating the dead body, he retrieved the arm which had been trapped beneath it, and let out a quiet groan.

‘What on earth did I do last night?’ he asked himself out loud. ‘And why is Spike on my bed?’

‘Uughhh. Stop shaking the room. Pillock,’ said a very grouchy, very British voice beside him.

The as yet unnamed chocolate brown kitten awoke, nuzzled briefly against Xander’s chin, and then proceeded to go through its morning, or late afternoon, ritual of stretching out each leg in turn, before leaping gracefully off Xander’s chest and going to find Flick-knife/Beast (Xander shuddered at the chosen names), who was preoccupied with happily shredding one of Xander’s favourite socks.

Rolling off the bed, Xander got unsteadily to his feet and made his way into the bathroom, where he got into the shower and turned up the heat, resting his head on the refreshingly cold tiles.

After a few long minutes soaking to wash away the ‘ick’ feeling of the morning after the night before, he roughly towelled himself dry and slid into his only remaining clean pair of jeans. He pushed his wet hair back from his face and headed back out into his room with a mission in mind.

Coffee. Gallons of strong, black coffee.

Upstairs, he hunted, gathered and retrieved said coffee, bringing an extra mug for Spike in case the vamp was even more short-tempered than usual in the (Xander checked his watch for an exact time, but it was no longer on his wrist) mid afternoons and needed a little caffeine fix himself.

‘Hey, lazybones. Get your undead ass the hell out of my bed.’

Spike sat up suddenly, as though he were hinged at the waist, blinked several times before getting his bearings and stared sleepily at Xander. The blond hair on one side of his head was sticking up in riotous spikes, and now more than ever Xander could see the resemblance to Flic... Beas...

‘Spike, pick a name,’ he said, gingerly passing the steaming mug of coffee to the blinking vampire.

‘Huh? Whassat?’

‘The kitten. I can’t keep calling him ‘Kitten’. Pick a name.’

‘Oh. Right,’ Spike rubbed his eyes and managed to look about six years old, ‘what were the choices again?’

‘Flick-knife,’ Xander rolled his eyes, ‘or Beast.’

‘Right.’ Spike gulped at the too-hot coffee, swearing verbosely as he burnt his tongue.

‘That was... educational,’ Xander told him when the swearing had finally stopped. ‘A name. Pick one.’

‘Needs sugar,’ Spike complained, before turning his attention to the task at hand. ‘’Sgotta be Beast,’ he decided, looking at the kitten fondly, ‘yeah, definitely, Beast.’

The kitten paused in its methodical destruction of Xander’s sock to look up, as though deep in thought.

‘Beast,’ it seemed to say, ‘yeah, I could go for that,’ and then re-busied himself pulling at ragged threads.

Xander shook his head and wondered if Spike would still be so fond of the kitten when it destroyed all his socks. Then when it was a little older, it could move on to destroying his furniture. Although... he’d seen Spike’s furniture. Maybe that wouldn’t be such a great tragedy.

He glanced up and found that he was being scrutinised by wide blue eyes.

‘What!? What are you looking at me for?’

‘Huh? Oh, your neck.’

Xander’s hands flew to his neck, automatically checking himself for bite marks. Spike’s chuckle made him pause, and he realised that he would have seen any marks when he was in the bathroom looking in the mirror. And, plus, the chip was still fully functional.

Glaring at the vampire, he asked, ‘What about my neck?’

‘Nothing,’ Spike replied lightly. ‘I'm just hungry, that’s all. I can hear your blood rushing about your body. I can see it pulsing and flowing just beneath the surface. It’s a vampire thing,’ he shrugged, ‘your body... your blood looks good to me.’

‘That’s all?’ Xander asked sarcastically, disgusted and desperately trying to hide the involuntary flush he felt at Spike’s words.

‘That’s all,’ Spike replied innocently, enjoying the boy’s discomfort.

‘That’s all? My body and my blood look good to you... and that’s all?’

Spike shrugged, ‘I’d have thought after last night...’

‘What!?’

Xander’s stomach lurched with worry. Where the hell had this come from? Only seconds ago he’d been sipping coffee, quite happily watching acts of mass destruction on a miniature scale, and now this! Way, way too much innuendo-laden information from the world’s most annoying vampire. And there was something distinctly unnerving about how Spike had just let that last statement trail off.

‘What about last night?’ he asked curiously.

‘Oh, I get it.’

‘Get what?’ Xander’s fear was growing by leaps and bounds.

‘You’re one of those drunks.’

‘One of those what drunks?’

Spike sighed dramatically. ‘The kind who say they can’t remember anything the next morning to save themselves from anything embarrassing they might have done the night before.’

‘Huh?’ Xander’s voice became a little squeaky as he desperately tried to remember anything he had done the evening before that would result in the evil... leer - surely that couldn’t be a leer on Spike’s face? Spike only leered when he was going to do something really evil, or was thinking about something really, really evil he had already done.

Oh boy.

Spike was leering at him. Implying that he’d done something evil to Xander. Or maybe Xander was the one who had done something evil. Why couldn’t he remember? He wracked his brains trying to remember if he’d done anything he shouldn’t have.

He drew a blank.

He couldn’t remember doing anything that he shouldn’t have, and didn’t also think that he was missing out any noticeable chunks of the night. He’d only been drinking beer, not the firewater of the previous night’s bender, and while he’d been good and sozzled when he fell asleep... ok, when he passed out, it still wasn’t a ‘black-out-for-the-entire-evening, wake-up-in-a-pool-of-your-own-vomit, naked, somewhere-in-a-sleazy-motel-in-Vegas’ kind of a night.

Perhaps it was time he stopped drinking. Beer, most definitely, bad. Bad, bad beer.

Spike looked at him almost casually. ‘You really don’t remember?’

Xander shook his head, ‘I really don’t remember whatever it is you're trying to imply, but I really do remember everything that actually happened, so whatever you’re trying to convince me that I did do, you should know that I know that I didn’t do it.’

There. That should have cleared it up. Stupid vampire, thinks he can freak me out so easily. Well, ha! I showed him.

Spike tossed the ragged Playboy he had leafing through to the side, rose silkily off the bed and stalked slowly towards Xander, who suddenly didn’t feel so superior.

‘Think harder,’ he drawled, unnerving Xander even further.

‘But... but I didn’t...’

Spike reached him, placed a hand on either side of the counter top that Xander was sitting on, and leaned in, real close. Their noses almost touching, Spike smirked at Xander’s obvious discomfort.

‘So,’ Spike murmured, ‘you don’t remember a thing?’

‘ ... no,’ was Xander’s timid reply.

‘You don’t remember getting schnockered right here in this very basement and telling me that you wanted to go out?’

‘I told you I wanted to go out with you?!’

Spike rolled his eyes. ‘You told me you wanted to go out of the house. To Willy’s. Something about showing those demons who was boss.’

‘But you stopped me, right?’ Xander asked hopefully.

Spike shook his head slowly. ‘Uh uh. You couldn’t be stopped. You were adamant. A man on a mission. ‘Sides, who the hell am I to tell you what to do? I wasn’t fussed, wanted to get a decent pint, didn’t I? Instead of that piss water you insisted on buying.’

‘Hey! I like that beer.’

‘Amateur,’ Spike scolded.

‘But... but I don’t remember being in Willy’s,’ Xander sounded a little more sure of himself now. He was piecing together the night in his mind, and there was definitely, without a doubt, no cameo appearance by Willy in his mental re-enactment.

‘Well you wouldn’t, would you? We never made it that far.’

‘We didn’t?’ Xander squeaked, now thoroughly confused. ‘What happened?’

‘We got jumped by a demon halfway there,’ Spike informed him. ‘Real nasty bugger ‘e was, too.’

‘What? Did we beat him?’

‘Are you crazy!?’ Both Spike’s eyebrows raised in response to that. ‘We could hardly walk straight. Nope, I told him you were the Slayer’s bitch and gave him your watch to leave us alone. ‘Course,’ he shrugged, ‘I could’ve taken him, but I didn’t want to waste any good drinking time.’

‘No,’ Xander agreed, a little sarcastically, ’ of course you didn’t.’

‘Bloody right. So anyway, that’s when he invites us to this party.’

‘A party?’ Xander frowned, beginning to wonder if Spike was sticking exactly within the confines of the truth here.

‘Yep, he was on his way there when we bumped into him. Actually, you bumped into him. Literally, you big lush,’ Spike admonished. ‘Anyway, a bunch of sorority birds were having apparently having a bash and had asked for his blessing to, and I quote, “Invoke the spirit of funky party weaselness” at their dorm party.’

‘Hey, that’s my line!’ Xander cried indignantly.

‘Uh huh,’ Spike continued without paying this remark much attention, ‘Yeah, well, it lost a little something in the translation, so when we got there,’ he tutted disapprovingly, ‘there were a whole lot of weasels running around.’

‘Weasels?’

‘Yeah, well, any fool knows you shouldn’t put slang in an invocation like that. Messes everything up. Although,’ he considered, ’there was no doubt it was one hell of a party, and it was damn funky.’

‘No doubt,’ Xander agreed a little dubiously.

‘This not ringing any bells, mate?’

‘Uh, not really, no.’

‘So you don’t remember rescuing a girl from a particularly vicious weasel attack, and her and her two friends taking you into the closet to say thank you?’

‘What?’ Xander’s eyes widened. ‘I missed that part?’

‘I guess so,’ Spike empathised, before flashing him a wicked grin. ‘Those sorority girls are right little goers, aren’t they? They just couldn’t get enough of my accent. I put it on real thick too, insulted them ‘til I was blue in the face (and I'm a vampire so that takes some doing) and they just thought I was being cute. Thick as Harmony, they were.’

‘Uh huh.’ Xander shook his head to try and clear it. ‘This was while I was in the closet?’

‘Yeah, well you weren’t in there for very long. In fact, you could almost say that last night was your coming out party.’

Xander decided that Spike was having a little too much fun at his expense, and waved for a time out. ‘Spike, I really don’t remember any of this. Are you sure you’re not just making it up to freak me out?’

Spike leaned in a little closer, sliding his hands further back on the counter top, leaving just little enough space between them to be mildly impressed when Xander didn’t back away from him.

‘Maybe,’ he murmured, ‘or maybe I was just buttering you up so you wouldn’t jump ten feet in the air when I do this...’

Then Xander did jump, but not quite as far as ten feet, when he found himself being kissed by a teasing vampire with spectacular bed-head and a wicked tongue, who tasted like coffee. He would have jumped again when he felt himself tentatively kiss back, but was held in place by deceptively strong white fingers threading through his still damp hair.

All too soon the cool, teasing lips pulled away.

‘Mmm, I bet you don’t remember doing that, either.’

‘Huh?’ was all that Xander could get his mouth to say.

‘I knew it.’

Xander swallowed heavily. ‘Knew what?’

‘I knew you’d taste as good as you looked.’

Fear merged with heat as Xander once more lost the power of rational thought.

‘As I...? You... Huh?’

Spike’s fingers were kneading lightly at his neck, making Xander feel strangely liquid inside and roll his head unconsciously.

‘Spike, we-ah, we never actually did any of that last night, did we?’

‘Well... no,’ he admitted wryly, ‘we drank all the beer, taught the kittens to Cha-Cha, watched Baywatch Nights and then you passed out.’

‘We WHAT?’

‘We drank all the beer...’

‘No, no, not that.’ Xander looked horrified. ‘We watched Baywatch Nights? That’s it. That’s really it! I'm never drinking again!’

‘Yeah, well maybe if you’d spring for cable down here, we could have watched the Sliders reruns on Sci Fi.’

Xander opened his mouth to argue, but was cut off by the rather distracting sensation of Spike wriggling between his thighs to kiss him again.

~~~

‘You’re leaving?’ Xander winced at the disappointment in his voice.

And his leaving is a bad thing because...?

‘Uh, no. I would, but,’ Spike waved his hand at the ceiling, ‘daylight.’

‘Oh. Right.’

The two men stood awkwardly staring at one another. They had spent an enjoyable morning... mid afternoon making out on the counter top, and then later on the bed, but Xander had skittered away like a frightened lamb the second that Spike had tried to initiate anything else.

So now here they stood, noticeably not talking about the rather enjoyable way they had spent the morning.

Mid afternoon.

‘Yeah. Well, I'm stuck here, but don’t let me keep you. Don’t you have a job to be toddling off to?’

‘No. I'm amusing myself being gainfully unemployed these days.’

‘You could go to the... whatsit... the unemployment office. Look for something.’

‘I would, but there’s never anything good.’

Thanks for the employment tips, but hey, listen, Spike? About that kissing thing? Now - and stop me if I'm out of line here, but - aren’t we both men? Oh, and while we’re on the subject, don’t we hate each other?

‘Huh. You’d think the Council would put you lot on the payroll or something. Looks like the pay for saving the universe isn’t as high as you might think.’

Xander looked at his feet, their attempt at small talk taking an unexpected turn. ‘I didn’t save the universe. I research. I bring donuts. Once in a while I get a nasty concussion. I leave the universe saving to Buffy.’

Spike made a ‘pffft’ sound and waved his hand dismissively. ‘Don’t sell yourself short. I've known you for how long now? Two years? More if you count the time I spent tryin’ to kill you all, and failing miserably I might add. I've seen you get battered around by all manner of goblins, ghouls and beasties when you were tryin’ to help your friends. You save their lives, they save the world, that means you had a part in it. Things happen because of you. ‘Sides, saving the world isn’t so hard. Any fool could do it. Right time... right place.’

He sniffed modestly. ‘I did it once, remember? Well, I helped. Same as you. Savin’ the world’s easy when you think about it. In fact, when you get right down to it, all I really did was beat the ever-loving shite out of Angel with a crowbar.’

He grinned broadly at the happy memory, and perched himself on the edge of Xander’s battered armchair, resting one booted foot on the cushions, ‘’Course, I would have done that part for free.’

Xander grinned back. ‘I know what you mean.’

He was caught then, sharing a smile with the vampire who sat so casually draped over his favourite chair. Inwardly he sighed, knowing that if he didn’t ask this now, he never would.

‘Spike? Uh, listen, about this morning.’

‘This afternoon.’

‘Whatever. I'm a little lost here. Okay, scratch that, I'm a lot lost here. And you could maybe throw in a touch of waaay out of my depth.’ He shuffled his feet.

‘Is there something you’d like to get off your chest, mate?’

‘Yeah,’ Xander nodded. ‘Firstly? I, uh, think you’re a bastard.’

‘Thanks, pet,’ Spike deadpanned. ‘Mutual.’

‘Secondly?’ he waved his hands around, trying to make his mouth actually say the words, ‘the... the... um, the whole lips thing.’

‘Oh that,’ Spike replied nonchalantly, ‘what about it?’

I'm freaked out. You’re a monster. I'm a kid. We both happen to be guys. And there’s something I promised myself I'd never do again. One time. One time with Larry. That was going to be the end of it. Never again, I said. Just once to try it out. And he was kinda gross. Larry. Way too much drool for one mouth to produce. And now I've done it again. With you, Spike. Would you like to hear how much I'm not regretting it this time? Although I'm sure I will live to regret it. Or maybe you wanna hear about that irritating itch I've been feeling all day, and how it just upped and disappeared when you were touching me?

Then you left. As soon as you could you left me, and then you come back and you do this to me, and I can’t deal with this. I just can’t. I wish you’d never come back here, and I wish you hadn’t touched me. Oh god, I wish you hadn’t touched me, because now I only want more. I want it all.

‘What about it?’ Spike asked again after a moment’s silence, more forcefully this time.

Come on Xander, luv, just say the bloody word.

Xander finally met his eye. ‘Wanna do it again?’

~~~

Xander awoke the next day with a kitten sleeping on his chest and a dead body beside him.

He closed his eyes, counted to ten, and opened them again.

There was still a kitten sleeping on his chest, but on closer inspection the dead body turned out to simply be Spike.

Carefully manipulating the dead body, he snuggled in closer and traced the pattern of bumps making up the dead body’s spine, and let out a quiet sigh.

‘What on earth did I do last night?’ he asked. ‘And why does my entire body hurt?’

‘Don’t you remember, pet?’ came a muffled voice from the pillow beside him.

Xander grinned, ‘Oh I remember all right. I remember having the sex. And then having more of the sex, rounded off with a nice portion of the sex. Waiting about an hour, and then, of course, we had the SEX.’

Spike smiled against his pillow without opening his eyes.

‘Sex you say? I don’t seem to recall... perhaps you’d better refresh my memory.’

‘I don’t know,’ Xander said thoughtfully, ‘I could, but then we’d disturb Angel.’

‘What!? Angel? What the bloody hell...’

Spike’s eyes snapped open and he glared up at Xander, only to be more enraged by the laughter in the boy’s eyes. Xander pointed at the kitten on his chest.

‘Spike? I'd like you to meet Angel, version 2.0. Angel, this is Spike.’

The chocolate kitten opened its eyes, blinked once at Spike and then settled back in for a hard earned, post sleep nap.

‘I think he likes you,’ Xander said to Spike, smiling as Spike raised himself up on his elbows so that he could lean forward for a kiss without waking the slumbering Angel.

‘Not bloody likely,’ Spike said after kissing Xander thoroughly, ‘He’s yours. Just a damn pussycat. Not like my wee Beast. See?’ he pointed across the room where a flying bundle of white fluff was busy attacking Xander’s only suit hanging visible in the open wardrobe.

‘Now there’s a real hellcat. Worthy to be a vampire’s pet.’

With a yell, Xander leapt out of the bed, and streaked across the room to rescue his one and only suit from grasping kitten claws. Spike deftly caught the flying Angel who had been thrown in the air following Xander’s mad dash from the bed. Propping himself up on the pillows, Spike tickled Angel under the chin and settled back to watch the not unpleasant site of a naked Xander crouching down and trying to wrestle a mischievous kitten away from his suit without getting any of his vital parts scratched in the process.

‘Spike?’ Xander called in mid-wrestle.

‘Yeah?’

‘Remind me never to play poker again, ok?’

Spike grinned, managing to get the kitten he was holding to wake up enough to grab hold of his tickling finger with both its paws and bite him playfully.

‘Sure thing, whelp, whatever you say.’

Chapter 7

At exactly 8.23pm, precisely twenty-seven minutes after the sun had set, Rupert Giles answered the loud knocks at his front door with his nose still buried in the morning newspaper.

‘Yo, G-man! What’s shaking?’

‘Xander,’ Giles said by way of welcome, ushering the boy, no - boys, he revised upon seeing a familiar blond head - into his home. ‘Nothing is, ah, shaking insofar as I can tell, and I thought that we had agreed to leave that particular moniker far, far behind us.’

Sensing an imminent cute, but ultimately pointless exchange of banter between the two humans, Spike butted in immediately.

‘Watcher. I hear there’s a new nasty on the loose. Fancy telling me where it is, what it looks like and how to kill it, like a good boy?’

Spike was in a hurry. He had places to be, gorgeous, hot-blooded young boys to shag, and he wasn’t getting any younger. He wasn’t getting any older either, but that, as far as Spike was concerned, was entirely beside the point.

‘Spike,’ Giles sighed, closing the door behind them and realising how utterly pointless it would be to lose his temper with the vampire. If anything, this was Spike in a helpful mood and the best way to deal with him would simply be to give him what he wanted and hope that he would go away.

‘We’re still researching this new menace. Willow and Tara have been here all day, letting that new kitten,’ Giles looked as though he had just swallowed something rather unpleasant, ‘of theirs run around in here.’

Spike and Xander exchanged a conspiratorial grin as Giles muttered something about a ‘dreadful creature... cat hairs everywhere...’ under his breath.

‘However, as far as we can ascertain it’s not due to reach its full strength and rise for at least another week or two, so I’m afraid your trip here was wasted. Didn’t Willow tell you this yesterday?’ he asked Xander.

‘Yeah, Willow gave me the 411, but I wanted to stop by and make sure there wasn’t anything I could do to help. I, ah, I’ve been kind of shirking my Slayerette duties over the past couple of days. Just wanted to show my face.’

‘Well, as nice as it is to see your face,' Giles smiled, 'there’s nothing to be done here. Unless, of course, you feel like doing a general sweep of the area. Buffy is patrolling the northeast of the town tonight, so if you felt up to it...’

‘Ah, the Buffster has taken the good side of town. So me and Spike could start two blocks over and take in the bad side of town.’

‘Only if you feel up to it, Xander. And if you think you can rely on Spike to watch your back.’

Xander glanced towards Spike who wasn’t paying the slightest bit of attention to them, flicking through the notes strewn across Giles’ desk.

‘I think I can trust him,’ he said with a smile.

‘Hmmm,’ was Giles’ reply, ‘Spike and trustworthy are two concepts which I just wouldn’t link together in the same sentence.’

‘Hey, is this the demon you’re after?’ Spike asked, interrupting them once again.

Giles squinted at the picture Spike was pointing to. A powerful, well-muscled demon with two dangerous looking large curving horns on its head, and a strangely delicate tail trailing down to its ankles.

‘Yes, that’s the one. A Ractang.’

‘A rectangle?’ asked Xander, coming to peer over Giles’ shoulder.

‘Noooo, a Ractang. Very dangerous, very committed to finding its “icon”, and I can’t find a damn thing that tells me what that might be.’

‘Its icon? What’s an icon?’

‘As I just said,’ Giles rolled his eyes, ‘I haven’t the faintest idea. Could be its power centre, or something of near religious significance for the demon. So far all the texts I have examined state categorically that this demon will, um, let me see,’ he lifted the heavy book and turned a page in search of the appropriate information.

‘Ah, here it is. The demon will rise and search unending for its icon, and unless the demon or the icon can be destroyed it will track down those who have come in contact with it, the icon that is, and, ah, consume them.’

‘So we find this icon and we find the demon?’

‘In theory, but it’s just so damned frustrating that all our research has turned up nothing but hearsay and old wives’ tales in this case. There is one text that I found that might be of use, but as usual, it’s extremely vague.’

‘Well?’ Spike asked impatiently, ‘What does it say?’

‘Something about the “mischance reversal of demonic fulfilment” being able to defeat the demon.’

‘Well that’s nice and specific, innit?’ Spike snapped in annoyance. ‘Why can your prophets never just say, “on September the 28th at 9.27pm, in the year of our Lord two thousand and one, go to the corner of Maine and Clement Avenue where you will find a large demon. To kill this demon, chop its head off with a gardening implement of your choice.” Done, dusted, simple. But no, we have to go through this palaver every. Single. Sodding. Time. It’s as though they want us to fail. We never seem to get any warning, these things just pop up, and we’re expected to deal with them; clock’s always ticking, bomb’s always seconds away from exploding and destroying the world. It’s really not the smartest way to operate.’

‘Are you quite finished?’ Giles asked as soon as he could get a word in edgeways.

‘Yeah, I'm done,’ Spike muttered, continuing to grumble under his breath.

Giles folded his arms and looked down at the books, deep in thought. He couldn’t help but agree with Spike, although wild horses would never be able to drag that admission from him. And since when, he wondered, did Spike feel that ‘he’ and ‘they’ had suddenly begun to constitute a ‘we’? Perhaps, the Watcher mused, about the same time he’d begun to spend so much time with Xander.

And they thought he wouldn’t notice anything was going on. Giles rolled his eyes. Again. He was a Watcher, watching was in his job description, and he’d been around the block a few times himself, another thing he would never admit to out loud. He could see the way they stared at one another when they thought no one else was looking.

I may be getting on a bit, Giles thought, but I'm not blind.

Dragging his thoughts away from musing about his two errant visitors, he looked back to his soothing books, until a loud British voice managed to distract him once again.

‘... bloody stupid. You remember that one prophecy about the demon who was going to “Rise in a time of great darkness” or the one about “the Slayer who walks in the path of light and dark”? Piffle, the lot of it. You could interpret these things in a million different ways. Here,’ he said, lifting a book at random off the table and opening it. ‘Here’s one – “in the city of heavenly hosts, the demon mother mortal will rise, heavenly being’s torment surmise, windows to the soul; the eyes, choices made, destruction or reprise.”’

He flung the book back onto the table in disgust, ‘See? What the bloody hell does all that mean? And the poetry? Terrible. Just awful. It doesn’t even flow.’

Giles looked up from the passage he was rereading, the arm of his glasses held between his teeth, ‘What’s that?’

‘Nothing. Just slagging off your precious books,’ said Spike.

‘Hmm? Oh, right you are. Jolly good.’

‘So now you’re a poetry critic?’ Xander grinned, ‘Interesting. I wouldn’t have put you down as a high brow type.’

‘Except that he was an upper middle class poet of astonishingly bad proportions in his heyday,’ Giles muttered under his breath.

‘Hey! I heard that, Watcher!’

Without looking up from his book, Giles asked innocently, ‘Xander, did I ever tell you exactly why he’s called “William the Bloody”?’

‘Hey!’ Spike yelled, ‘You know I'm still standing in the room, right?’

Giles looked up in amusement at the vampire, but scowled when he saw that Spike had an unlit cigarette dangling from his lips.

‘Spike,’ he growled, ‘I've told you before, you can’t smoke in here.’

Spike huffed out a breath of air, but dutifully snapped his lighter shut. The silver lighter in his hand glinted under the lights of the room, catching Giles’ eye.

‘Oh, that’s nice. May I?’

‘Yeah, sure,’ Spike passed him the lighter in annoyance, slapping it into the outstretched hand, ‘knock yourself out. You’re not keeping it, mind!’ he added, a little too forcefully, causing both Xander and Giles to stare at him questioningly. ‘It was a gift from, eh, from a friend,’ he told them quietly, feigning nonchalance. ‘Or, uh, no... I mean, I won it off a bunch of demons in a poker game.’

‘Won it from demons, did you? Well, you’re quite safe, Spike. Grand larceny is not one of my strong points.’

Spike caught Xander looking at him in surprise at the “friend” remark and shot him back a look which said “yeah, what of it?” Xander just smirked, made a mental note to ask Spike later about Giles’ “William the Bloody” comment, and went back to examining the books on the desk before him.

‘Spike? You are aware that this lighter is cursed, aren’t you?’

‘What? I...’ Spike’s brow wrinkled in confusion as Giles’ examined the lighter more closely under the desklamp. ‘Uh, yeah, I think I knew that. I guess it must have slipped my mind.’

‘Slipped your mind!? What are you, high?’ asked Xander incredulously.

‘No,’ Spike looked at him evilly, ‘just preoccupied.’

Xander hastily shut up.

‘I can’t be sure,’ Giles’ told them as he turned the lighter in his hand, ‘but it appears to be some form of a love curse. I'm quite rusty in ancient Sumarian, but I think what it says is that the owner will want what they don’t want and cannot rest until... hmmm.’

‘Hmmm?!’ Spike and Xander exclaimed, both startled at this new information.

‘Hmmm? What the hell do you mean, “hmmm?” I'm under a love curse?’ Spike bellowed.

‘What?’ Giles looked up, distracted. ‘Yes, it appears that whomever has been in ownership of the lighter will be effected by it. I'm just not entirely sure about this word.’ Setting the innocuous lighter upright on the desk, Giles wandered from the room. ‘I just need to go and check the meaning of...’

For a moment there was shocked silence in the room. Xander was the first to speak.

‘So what he’s saying is...’

‘This was all just a lie,’ interjected Spike grimly. ‘Bringing out some basic instinct from both of us. It was probably just find a warm body and fuck it ‘til you feel better.’

The words caught in Spike’s throat as Xander looked up at him, hurt and anger evident in his eyes, no matter how hard the boy tried to hide it.

‘Oh, right. Thanks.’

‘*Grrrr*, no wait, Xander, I didn’t mean...’

‘I'm going to try and track down this demon,’ Xander interrupted, not wanting to hear what Spike had to say. Whatever it was, he was sure it would hurt. The whole thing, the sparkly new thing he had been offered in the form of a gorgeous, irritating vampire, had just been a lie. Worse than that, it had been a curse. It was a curse for Spike to be with him. Apparently Xander was destined to spend the rest of his days never finding companionship unless it was tainted somewhere along the line by magic. Do-the-wacky, mess-with-your-head and rip-your-still-beating-heart-out-of-your-chest magic.

‘How?’ Spike asked sharply. ‘You wouldn’t know where to start.’

‘Oh yeah? Right here,’ Xander pointed to the text in front of him, ‘says the demon likes it in the dark. It likes subdued prey; dank, crowded conditions and doesn’t mind the company of other demons. If that doesn’t scream “Willy’s”, I don’t know what does.’

‘Xander, all demons like those kind of conditions, it’s just what we do. Why do you think demon bars do so much business? That’s like a standard entry in these books... Xander!’

But Xander was already halfway across the room. With a final glare towards the vampire, he strode out the door, slamming it shut behind him.

Spike closed his eyes, his jaw clenched in anger and balled his fists tightly at his sides, battling the urge to hit something really, really hard. What the fuck had just happened here? Five minutes ago they were happy as larry. Xander had insisted on leaving the basement they hadn’t set foot outside of for two days to come and check in with the Watcher. The walk here had been spent in laughter, with stolen kisses and lewd innuendo. Kinda perfect, really.

And now? Now it was all spoiled. He should have known better. The boy would never ordinarily let Spike anywhere near him. It was common knowledge that vampires were not his favourite people and yet he had managed to get up close and personal with Spike just fine.

He should have known there was magic involved. Magic was always involved. There was just no escaping the stuff in Sunnydale. It got everywhere and chafed, just like wet sand in your underwear.

Although, he reasoned, the door swings both ways. He would never have come onto the boy like he had otherwise. And, kittens... hello! What the hell had he been thinking there? Evil vampires simply do not keep kittens as pets, no matter how much they might like to scratch and bite.

It didn’t matter that he had always kind of liked Xander in the “you get under my skin, you’re cool, I see your hidden depths and you might be worth turning one day if you finally stopped hiding behind the Slayer’s petticoats” sort of a way. It didn’t matter that he had just spent the most enjoyable two days in a long time in the boy’s company.

It had all been a lie. All of it.

And the damnedest thing was that he must still be under the effects of the curse, because the only thing that he wanted to do was run out the door after Xander to tell him that he didn’t care about any poxy lighter with stupid squiggles carved into it. That it couldn’t be true because he liked him, and he felt good when he was with him, and the constant pain he was in Every - Single - Day because he couldn’t be the monster his nature told him he was, eased just a little when he was with Xander Harris, because Xander knew what he was, and somehow, he didn’t seem to mind.

He wanted to tell him that it couldn’t be true.

‘Bloody. Buggery. Hell.’

With a low growl, Spike opened his eyes and moved for the first time in several minutes. He swept from the room, leaving the front door swinging behind him in the night breeze.

Just as he disappeared around the doorframe, Giles strolled back into the room, book in hand and opened his mouth to speak. Seeing that there was no one in the room to speak to, he closed it again, his gaze falling to the silver lighter lying forgotten on his desk.

Chapter 8

Xander sauntered effortlessly into the smoky depths of Willy’s bar. Or rather, he tried to saunter effortlessly into the bar, but as every fibre of his body was telling him to run as fast as he could in the opposite direction, it was actually more of a strained tiptoe into the bar. Without making eye contact with any of the huddled figures in the room, he made his way as unobtrusively as possible to the bar and slid onto a stool.

‘Well, well. Didn’t think I'd be seein’ you back here anytime soon.’

‘Whaa?’ Xander jumped as the voice addressed him, nearly falling off his stool with surprise.

Willy paused in his haphazard polishing of a glass to peer curiously at Xander.

‘Geez, take a valium, kid. You weren’t this jumpy last time you were here. Need a little Dutch courage?’

‘Uh, no, I'm just...’ Xander cleared his throat and pulled himself a little more upright, ‘I'm looking for a demon. Perhaps you’ve seen one.’

Willy let out a bray of laughter. ‘You are kidding, right?’ he said, waving a hand around the bar at his clientele.

Xander slapped himself on the forehead. ‘Sorry, forgot who I was talking to. I'm looking for one demon in particular.’

‘Isn’t this where you came in?’

‘Yeah, yeah, I know. Same demon, different day, but this time I'm not getting distracted by booze and cards and wild women.’

Willy resumed his glass polishing. ‘There weren’t any wild women the last time you were here.’

‘I know, but a man can dream, can’t he?’

Willy shook his head, ‘Listen... Xander, is it? I'm a busy man. You wanna buy a drink, or just annoy me for the rest of the night?’

‘I think I'm safer if I stick with the annoying part of that plan.’

‘Fine,’ Willy told him, already walking away, ‘just stay out of trouble, and don’t piss off anyone that you shouldn’t. Remember the only reason I let you in here is ‘cause you’re one of the Slayer’s crew.’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ Xander said, now talking to himself, ‘that’s me. Good old Xander, sidekick extraordinaire. Anybody need a warm body to use and abuse ‘til the urge goes away, I'm your man.’

‘You shouldn’t make offers like that in a place like this, boy,’ came a low familiar voice from behind him.

Xander answered without looking around, ‘Spike. I'm sorry. I thought I'd made it perfectly clear that I didn’t want you to follow me here. I'm just riding the mellow,’ he stated. ‘Alone.'

‘Right,’ Spike said, swinging his leg over the empty stool next to Xander. ‘You came here to relax. Sure. And what about the mighty demon slaying plans you had earlier?’

‘Oh I'm slaying,’ Xander told him with conviction, ‘Just here casing the joint, scoping for clues. So if you don’t mind...’

‘Actually, I do,’ Spike told him, motioning to Willy for a drink. A moment later a mug of beer appeared in front of him and he sipped the foam from it thoughtfully.

‘You’re still here,’ Xander said, folding his hands on the bar having yet to look at the vampire.

‘Observant, aren’t you?’

‘Don’t answer a question with a question, that’s really annoying!’

Spike raised an eyebrow, ‘You didn’t ask me a question, pet.’

‘I... !’ Xander paused. ‘Okay, you’re right, I didn’t,’ he backtracked, ‘but the fact remains that you are still here. Why don’t you just take off? Go find yourself another warm body to fuck. And don’t call me “pet”!’

‘Ouch.’ Spike replied without inflection. He sipped his drink again. ‘Why should you care? It was only a curse, after all?’

‘Yeah,’ Xander finally turned to face him, ‘it was just a curse. So why are you here? What did Giles say?’

‘Dunno. I left before he came back.’

‘You... why did you do that?’

Spike gripped his glass tightly, staring into its foamy depths. ‘I couldn’t help it. I had to make sure you didn’t get yourself killed by coming here again and pissing off another angry demon just ‘cause you’re mad at me.’

‘Mad at you? Mad at you? I'm not mad at you! I hate you! I hate that you came here just because whatever the hell that curse has done is still effecting us!’

‘Keep your voice down, Xand. You want the whole world to know?’

‘I don’t care about the whole world. I care that it feels like my heart is breaking, and I'm making a complete fool of myself and by tomorrow it’ll all be gone because none of it’s real! Don’t you get it? Giles will find a way to undo it, and then all I'll have are the gross memories of what we did messing with my head because they were never real!’

Xander noticed that somewhere during his little speech, Spike had abandoned his drink and was looking at him with something akin to wonder. At least, he had been. Now he was staring at something over Xander’s left shoulder.

And he looked rather concerned.

‘That’s great. I'm embarrassing myself, and you’re not even listening to me,’ Xander frowned, ‘and yet you are having an expression. What the hell is...’

‘Behind you, you stupid git,’ Spike hissed. ‘Is it just me or is that the spitting image of the demon Giles said wouldn’t rise for another fortnight?’

An icy shiver of dread ran its way down Xander’s spine as he slowly spun his stool around to face the back of the bar. He immediately saw what Spike was referring to. There stood the charcoal drawing from Giles’ research, brought to living colour and greatly increased in scale. It was covered in bulging corded muscle, its skin the colour of wet clay and had two jagged spiral horns on its head. At its hindquarters was the thin tail which hung down to its thick ankles and trailed lightly across the floor behind it.

‘The Rectangle! He looks meaner than he did in the books,’ Xander hissed in a horrified whisper. ‘What do we do?’

The Ractang was currently holding a lesser demon off the ground by the lapels of the oversize trenchcoat it wore. A strangely familiar looking demon with scattered playing cards fluttering to the ground all around him.

(...huuumaaaan...)

‘That’s the... oh shit. The little one - that’s one of the demons I played poker with the other night.’

To Xander’s horror, the trenchcoat demon raised a scaly arm to point right at him. He couldn’t hear what was being said over the loud music in the bar, but the intention was clear.

They were next.

Struck dumb beside him, Spike watched as the Ractang calmly ripped the head off the shoulders of the trenchcoat demon as easily as a child pulls the petals from a flower. Holding the decapitated head above its open mouth, the demon drank down the green droplets that fell from it. Having consumed the demonic goo, it tossed the head over its shoulder, letting out a bellow that sounded to Xander eerily like the T-rex from Jurassic Park.

Only louder.

The Ractang stared at them across the bar with murderous glee, and roared.

‘I think that’s our cue to leave,’ Spike told him, grabbing the shocked Xander and yanking him to his feet. Xander didn’t need to be told twice.

They ran from the bar, Spike’s heightened senses telling him that the demon was lumbering after them, knocking chairs and tables flying as it made its way through the bar. Willy’s voice could clearly be heard as they fell out the door, the Ractang only paces behind them.

‘Hey! Somebody’s gonna have to pay for all this!’

They tripped over a couple of garbage cans just outside the door, knocking them over with a clatter. Stumbling through the garbage and struggling to keep their balance, they sprinted around the nearest corner into a convenient side street. Spike pushed Xander towards the end of the alley, into a tiny alcove at the side of a building while he dived for cover behind the nearest available dumpster.

He peered around the cracked plastic of the dumpster and saw the Ractang, haloed by a streetlight, bellowing its anger, screaming at them in a language that Spike vaguely recognised as the same as he had read earlier on the lighter.

Ancient Sumarian, funky demonic dialect. Why would it be speaking the same language as... oh no. The icon. The fucking icon! I can’t believe the amount of bad luck this town has brought me. That bloody lighter will be the death of me! I'm gonna kill Xander! But first I'll have to get us away from big and horny over there.

Sucking in an unneeded breath, he crouched low and then sprung from his hiding spot aiming to land as close as he could to the alcove where Xander hid.

‘Damn, damn, damn, damn, waaaaahhhhhhh!’ he turned in midair, twisting himself away from the slashing claws of the Ractang who had managed to get much too close for comfort. ‘Shitshitshitshitshit!’ he cried, hearing the unwelcome tearing sound of claws through the leather of his coat tails. He leapt quickly away from the demon, darting around it, reaching the other side of the alley and temporary safety in the shadows.

The stunned face of Xander Harris was visible to him in the darkness.

‘Xander,’ he whispered with a nod towards the demon, ‘the icon that bastard’s after. I think it’s the lighter.’

‘What lighter? Wait, you mean the lighter I gave you? The cursed lighter? Why the hell would a demon be coming after a lighter? It’s not exactly a very demonly artefact, is it?’

‘I don’t know,’ Spike snapped, ‘and right now, I don’t care. It’s speaking the same language as the curse was written in. We can worry about the ins and outs of it later, but for the minute that’s my theory and I'm sticking to it.’

‘Oh god, if you’re right... but we both owned it,’ Xander paled. ‘So it’s coming after us? Like specifically? It’s going to consume us?’

‘Looks that way. You up for this?’ Spike asked bluntly.

‘What the hell do you care?’

‘Would you just forget all that! Don’t be a prat, now is not the time to argue. You wanna die here? Just keep it up.’

Xander looked suitably chastised so Spike continued, his voice strained, but a little calmer. ‘I can’t take him by myself. If you don’t help, then we both go down. Now are you able?’

Xander met Spike’s earnest gaze for a moment as he made his decision. ‘Yeah, I'm able. No problem. Like shooting fish in a barrel. Or, y'know, paying someone more manly to shoot them for you.’

‘You’re plenty manly,’ Spike told him without hesitation. ‘Now I need you to circle around behind him and distract him. Pull on his tail, or insult his mother. Something, just make it good.’

‘Ah, the well known and documented “NA-NA-NA-NA-NA-NA” approach to battle. You do know that this is all making the kind of sense that is not?’

Spike simply glared.

‘Okay, okay,’ Xander relented, ‘I guess I can pull his tail. What are you going to do?’

‘I'm going to wait ‘til his back is turned, and then shove this,’ Spike hefted up a wrought iron bar, which had until only moments ago served admirably as a handrail, that he had yanked from the wall beside the dumpster, ‘through its chest. Maybe its eye if I can get that close.’

‘Will that stop it?’

‘Buggered if I know, but it’s gotta at least slow him down. After that, it’s just a simple matter of beating it to death with our bare hands.’

Unpleasant as that sounded, Xander couldn’t find fault with this logic, and readied himself to be Diversion Guy.

‘Just so as you know, I still think you’re a bastard.’

‘Just so as you know, the feeling’s still mutual.’

‘So long as we’re clear.’

Keeping low to the ground, Xander peeked around the corner and saw the Ractang systematically knocking garbage cans and boxes out of the way as it searched for them, still screaming in the language that Xander couldn’t understand.

‘So, this is it. It’s tail pulling time.’

Spike nodded. ‘Don’t get dead.’

Before he could change his mind, Xander hooked his hand around the back of Spike’s neck, pulling the surprised vampire towards him for a kiss.

‘What?’ he said innocently when the all too brief kiss ended. ‘It’s the curse.’

And with that, he rose to his feet and ran around the corner towards the demon.

‘Hey you! Rectangle guy! Yeah, you! I'm talking to you.’

The demon raised itself up to its full height, towering above Xander, and its screams reverberating in the enclosed space.

‘Are you lookin’ at me?’ Xander asked, sounding much braver than he actually felt. ‘Are you lookin’ at me? You must be lookin’ at me ‘cause I don’t see anybody else standin’ here.’

Xander slowly circled around the demon as he held its attention. His feet inched their way over the ground, at one point slipped out from under his shaky legs as he stepped on an oil-sodden newspaper, but he scrambled to his feet in an instant and resumed his taunts. The demon raised a huge arm to swipe at him, and it was instinct more than anything else that saved Xander from being decapitated as he ducked under the arm and found himself behind the demon.

The Ractang was powerful, but reacted slowly. It was seconds before it realised that the snapping puppy of a boy in front of him had disappeared, but now there was new prey. Better prey. This one smelt like a demon. White crested, and it held a weapon. He too was marked by the icon, the Ractang could feel it in its bones. They would both die, but the white crested halfling would be first.

‘Spike!’ Xander called from behind the demon. ‘He’s strong, but he’s real slow. Use your speed.’

Spike nodded to show that he had heard, but he didn’t take his eyes from the huge clay-coloured demon before him. Spike grinned. This was going to be one hell of a fight. Suddenly game-faced, and letting out a vicious roar of his own, he lunged forward with all of his considerable strength, slamming the iron pole against the Ractang’s chest, hitting the spot exactly where the heart would have been on a human.

Abruptly silenced, the Ractang looked down in shock at the attack, and then at the little vampire who had struck him. It then scratched absently at its chest where the iron javelin had glanced off its skin without so much as breaking the skin.

Spike’s mouth fell open in shock as it looked at him... and grinned.

‘Oh. Fuck.’

‘What happened? Did you kill it?’ came a voice from behind the grinning Ractang.

‘Uh, not exactly,’ Spike called back nervously. ‘We, ah, may have bitten off more than we can chew here.’

The sudden ringing silence was broken again by an earsplitting screech from the Ractang. It grabbed the useless, and now slightly bent, iron rod out of Spike’s hands and tossed it to the side, advancing on the alarmed vampire. Xander saw the rod clatter to the pavement and through clay-coloured legs the size of tree trunks and a slender swinging tail, he saw Spike trip in the garbage to land on his back, scrambling away from the howling demon.

‘Oh no you don’t!’ Xander shouted and did the first thing that popped into his mind. He grabbed the Ractang’s tail.

‘It’s tail pulling time!’ he yelled and yanked the tail as hard as he could.

The Ractang let out a high pitched whine of pain as its body tensed in shock. It rocked back and forth on its heels as the whine continued, a strange orange glow lighting its body. Xander stared in astonishment as the Rantang seemed to melt before his eyes, fading away until there was nothing left standing in front of him.

A blessed silence surrounded him as the slight weight of the tail disappeared from his hands. Xander sat on the ground with a bump, his eyes open wide.

‘Xander?’

There was a faint rustling of someone scuffling in old newspapers somewhere nearby.

‘Xander?’

Spike knelt down beside him, looking at the boy intently.

‘Fire bad. Tree pretty.’

‘What?’ Spike looked at him with concern. ‘Xander? What the matter with you? Did you hit your head again? What the hell did you do?’

‘I... I pulled on its tail like you told me.’ Xander looked up into blue eyes and shrugged slightly. ‘Maybe that was his Achilles heel. His Achilles tail.’

Seeing that the boy was at least physically ok, Spike stood up, pulling Xander to his feet beside him.

‘I've said it before, and I'll say it again. There are some bloody funny ways to kill demons, but I think that one takes the biscuit. Pulling on its tail, indeed. Whatever will they think of next?’

‘Well hello Mr I-Can’t-Walk-In-The-Sun. And how would sir like his *steak* this evening? A little extra garlic, perhaps?’ Xander asked sarcastically.

In spite of himself, Spike smiled, grudgingly happy to see that Xander was back to his usual wisecracking self. ‘All right, all right, point made and taken.’

Xander returned the smile, and made a move to leave. He was looking forward to going straight home to bed, tuck the kittens in and have dream number 7. The one where he and Buffy were alone on the beach. Except it was a nudist beach, and Buffy had brought lots of suntan lotion and was having trouble with those hard to reach spots on her back. And then they... who was he kidding?

He wanted Spike to come back with him. But he wasn’t going to ask. Demon attacks aside, he still hated him, and anything he felt to the contrary, no matter how strong, was just the effects of the curse. The curse that he would be getting Giles to reverse first thing tomorrow morning, so by the next time he saw Spike (tomorrow night at the very earliest, after the sun set) they could begin the long and thoroughly humiliating process of putting this all behind them.

He could resist this for just one night, because there was no way in hell he would be letting Spike back into his home, and even less chance of letting him back into his bed because...

‘I don’t like this, Xander.’

‘Huh?’ Xander glanced down at the restraining hand on his arm, and was about to tell Spike to get the hell of him, when he realised that Spike was looking around them in a way that suggested that he still thought there was something dangerous around.

‘Why not? Evil is vanquished, we live to run away another day.’

‘No,’ Spike shook his head in annoyance. ‘I mean can’t you hear that?’

‘What?’

‘YOU!’

They looked up sharply towards the end of the alleyway where half a dozen demons had just appeared, looking really pissed off.

‘You!’ the leader said again, pointing at them, ‘You busted up our poker game. Again. Then you trash the bar. Willy’s closed up shop for the night. Now where are we supposed to get a drink? Somebody’s gotta pay, and we’re gonna take it outta your hide.’

Spike looked at Xander and sighed. ‘That.’

The weary pair took a deep breath and steeled themselves. They gave one last look at their would-be attackers, turned to each other, nodded in agreement... and then took off running as fast as their legs would carry them.

~~~

‘I think... think we lost ‘em.’

Xander bent over, resting his hands on his thighs as he tried to get his breath back.

‘Man... I hate... the number of times... that I have to say... that.’

Confused, Spike glanced at him, ‘Say what?’

‘I think... we lost ‘em. It... implies a lot... a lot of running.’ Xander straightened up as his breathing returned to normal. ‘Sometimes I really wish I still had a car.’

‘Well, you’re right,’ Spike agreed, satisfied that they were alone. ‘There’s no one around but us.’

‘And yet why don’t I feel any better?’ Xander asked, his voice laden with sarcasm.

‘Oh, here we go,’ Spike smirked. ‘You couldn’t let it go, could you? Listen, whelp, in case you’ve forgotten, it was you who gave that bloody lighter to me! It’s your fault I got cursed in the first place! This isn’t exactly something I would have actively gone looking for.’

‘Oh, that’s right,’ Xander said bitterly. ‘I'm just a warm body to fuck! How silly of me to forget!’

With no warning, Spike strode angrily towards him so that Xander was forced backwards until he found his back pressed against a tree trunk. Spike slammed his hands against the bark on either side of Xander’s head with enough force to make the entire tree shake.

‘Shut. Up. Just shut the hell up! This isn’t all about you, you know. I have to live with this too. I have to live with the memory of what we did just like you do, and you know what?’ Spike’s eyes were open wide and burning bright with anger as he spoke, his voice strained and lowering to a raspy whisper. ‘You know what? At the minute it hurts me just as much as you with your delicate little virginal sensibilities. I'm standing here arguing like a sodding woman with you because some curse tells me that I care so damn much about you.’

Xander gasped at the admission, his treacherous body reacting when Spike lifted a hand off the tree to gently draw his knuckles along the line of Xander’s cheekbone. For a long moment Xander just stared, his breath coming in quick gasps at the feel of the chilled caress on his flushed cheek.

A long moment that ended when he came to his senses and knocked Spike’s hand away. He shivered as he heard Spike’s angry growl.

‘I hate you,’ Spike spat. ‘I hate this stupid curse. I hate the fact that it doesn’t seem to effect you as much as it does me.’

‘Effect me? Effect me!? You think I'd jump into bed with you if magic wasn’t involved? You’re a vampire, fang boy. You’re a guy. You do the math. And,’ he added as an afterthought, ‘I hate you more.’

‘Oh yeah?’ Spike tilted his head, his eyes glinting dangerously. ‘Do you know what I really hate?’

Even though Xander knew he was physically safe, he still flinched slightly at the ferocity of Spike’s words.

‘I hate the fact that it’s still effecting me, because all I want to do is protect you. You’re an arsehole, and all I can think about is how much I care about you.’

‘Yeah?’ Xander countered, his supply of manly bravado almost depleted after the harrowing night he’d just had. He was tired of fighting, and tired of the strange unnamed emotions running through him. Too much had happened, and there was much too much for his addled brain to process all at once.

‘Yeah?’ he repeated, still glaring as he searched Spike’s face, but his voice was softer this time. ‘Well all I can think about is kissing you.’

Spike matched his glare, both of them fully aware of the other’s anger and confusion, until the heat between them suddenly melted it into something else and Xander found himself pressed up against the rough bark of the tree being kissed desperately by Spike.

‘It’s... it’s the curse. That’s... that’s why we’re doing this,’ Xander managed to say between kisses.

‘Yeah, but... I don’t care. We can go back to... hating one another tomorrow,’ he ripped the buttons off the front of Xander’s shirt, ‘but right now it just feels right. I'm in for the duration. How... how about you?’

More wet kisses and Xander shivered at the chilled fingers running over every inch of his flushed skin.

‘Yeessss,’ Xander agreed wholeheartedly, ‘I'm in. Tomorrow I'll hate you... but, right now, oh god...’

Spike ran his tongue roughly along Xander’s jawline and began to kiss his way down the exposed throat and chest.

‘Right now I love you.’

‘Love you too, Xand, love you too.’

Chapter 9

A sullen, but noticeably more relaxed Spike and Xander found their way back to Giles’ home just after midnight. This time they had a longer wait at the front door and stood in uncomfortable silence until a very sleepy Giles finally opened it.

‘Oh, ah, hello. What is it? Trouble?’

Giles was elbowed gently to the side as they walked past him without speaking to stand morosely in the living room once again, not looking at one another.

‘Um, yes? Is there a point to your being here? I was just reading the paper in bed, and it has been a very long day...’

‘We killed the demon,’ Xander blurted out.

‘What demon?’

‘The one you said wouldn’t rise until next week, two at the latest,’ Spike said accusingly.

‘Nonsense.’

Spike growled in annoyance. ‘Look. Big angry demon type. Lots of muscles, screamed like a banshee. Bloody stupid dangling tail. Tried to kill us. Didn’t get that far because we – we killed it and then did you the favour of coming here to let you know.’

‘Well, I appreciate the gesture, but really, I destroyed that demon.’

‘You what!?’ Spike took an angry step towards the Watcher. ‘Don’t give me that! I didn’t see you there risking your life to try and kill it.’

‘No, fair point, you didn’t, but the fact remains that I killed that demon by destroying its icon. It should have disappeared from this plane of existence at the same moment as the icon was destroyed.’

‘You did?’ asked Xander. ‘But... but I pulled on its tail and it went *poof*.’

‘How nice for you,’ Giles said, eyeing Xander strangely as he sank into an armchair and drew his cardigan closer around him. ‘While you two have been off gallivanting, I have had a rather productive evening.’

Spike folded his arms and leant against the nearest wall. ‘Do tell.’

Giles allowed himself the pleasure of a smug smile of self-congratulation. ‘Yes, well, after you ran off so suddenly, I did a little translating, and found, by some marvellous coincidence that the cursed lighter you left here was related to the demon. Same time period, same language, so I put two and two together. It turns out that the incantation that I originally, and mistakenly I'm afraid to say, assumed was a curse was actually a charm, and a warning about the Ractang.

Spike’s scowl deepened. ‘What?’

‘The lighter wasn’t cursed at all,’ Giles continued amiably. ‘It was like a mystical eye opener. All that rot about “deepest darkest desires” was only half the translation. Its true meaning was that it made the owner aware of what he or she already knew, or more precisely, what they already contained the potential for. It was more of a blessing really, to those of sound mind and body at any rate.’

Spike rolled his eyes, ‘Oh, what a surprise. A mis-translation by the Watcher, putting us once again into mortal danger.’

‘But what about the not eating, not sleeping, not resting part?’ Xander asked in shock.

‘That was the demon. It would not eat, sleep or rest until it had tracked down its power source and killed the unfortunate creature who was in possession of it. Actually consuming them and anyone else who had been unlucky enough to have owned it for however brief a time.’

Xander paled noticeably. ‘So you mean, it was a blessing? I didn’t do anything, uh, out of character under some wacky enchantment, and it still could have got me killed?’

‘Christ,’ Spike muttered, shaking his head in disbelief.

‘But a lighter?’ Xander asked. ‘It’s old, but not more than a decade or two, right? I don’t get it. They had lighters in ancient Sumaria?’

‘The lighter itself didn’t matter,’ Giles explained. ‘The demon-worshipping Cult of Ract in ancient Sumaria began the link between the demon and the enchantment. They used it initially to bring luck to the followers and to open their eyes to the truth. However, as often happens with magic use, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Their magic created a doorway for the demon, who periodically rises and tracks down all those who have been positively effected by the enchantment.’

Xander still looked confused.

‘You see, it was the incantation that mattered,’ Giles told him, ‘not the lighter itself. The physical object that the words were inscribed on was changed many times through the years to try and hide the icon from the Ractang demon. That’s why I couldn’t find anything in all my books that told me what the icon was. In addition, the attempt to hide the icon from the demon is why it could only be passed on to another who had no knowledge of the magics surrounding it, and in the same way it only effected the owner if they were unaware of what it was that they owned. Someone recently must have activated it, the, ah, eye opener so to speak, and woken the demon. God only knows how, or who for that matter,’ he said, regarding Spike suspiciously.

‘Uh huh. And you just snapped your fingers and ended a couple of hundred years of enchantment,’ Spike intoned sarcastically.

Giles nodded. ‘In a matter of speaking. Earlier this evening. It was quite a simple incantation. A few drops of juniper and thyme oil over a sulphur flame. I’m surprised the demons you said that you won it off didn’t figure it out for themselves. Although if they didn’t know about the consequences, or if they made an incorrect translation...’

He trailed off, stroking his chin in thought. ‘They may perhaps have been fooled by the language used in the inscriptions. It was actually a dialect from an ancient demonic subculture, and not as I originally translated from the main language of Sumeria. A common misconception to those unschooled in the area.’ He swelled with a modicum of well earned pride. ‘It appears that the demon was indeed looking for its power source. It’s “Ack’mar sham-shack”.’

Spike tutted at himself, ‘Sham-shack, not stam-stack. Of course, so close, yet so far away.’ Then louder, he added, ‘And this power source. That was the lighter?'

Giles nodded his affirmation.

‘I knew it. I am so the smartest vampire in town.’

‘Yes, I'm sure you are,’ Giles told him, getting to his feet. ‘Now if there’s nothing else, I know of a warm bed which is waiting for me. I’m quite knackered, and would like nothing more that to read the article about Britney’s latest stalker in the morning paper, which I didn’t get to read this morning, and then pass out.’

Xander looked up, distracted from his disturbing thoughts, ‘Britney has a new stalker?’

‘Yes,’ Giles told him, as he read over the headline, ‘apparently this one burst in through a solid brick wall to get to her, but you know how these things are, probably all hyped up just for the publicity. I remember this once...’

Spike interrupted, not wanting to hear about Britney’s close call with death, ‘So the lighter would stop having the same effect when you destroyed it?’

‘Yes, but...’

‘When did you destroy it?’

‘Well, let me see,’ Giles considered, ‘about an hour or so after you left.’

‘An hour or so after we left,’ Spike repeated, looking directly at Xander. Without another word, he grabbed Xander’s arm and pulled him out of the house, once again leaving the door swinging open behind him.

Giles gritted his teeth in irritation and went to close the door. ‘But that doesn’t matter!’ he called. ‘Once your eyes have been opened, you’ll know the truth about... Gah, kids. They never listen,’ he said to himself as the door closed for the last time that night.

Outside, Spike marched Xander across the courtyard and slammed him up against the opposite wall, shrugging off the resulting zap of pain from the Initiative chip.

‘What did you do?’

‘What did I do what?’ Xander asked in confusion.

‘You know very well what. What did you do to me? You heard the Watcher. When the icon was destroyed and the demon went ‘poof’ the effects of the incantation were cancelled, leaving the truth behind. The truth,’ he repeated, pushing Xander harder against the wall for emphasis. ‘And... and there was never a curse, only an incantation to reveal what was already there. An hour after we left, he said. Before the demons from Willy’s attacked us, before...’

‘Before you told me you didn’t care about any stupid bloody curse and... and that you loved me?’

Spike blinked in shock, glaring at Xander with clear blue eyes. For a horrible moment, Xander was certain that he was going to hit him. He looked so... looked so... beautiful.

Xander grabbed Spike’s head, pulling him closer and kissed him hard.

They were interrupted by the sound of a window opening somewhere above them and an angry voice calling down.

‘If you’d bothered to listen to me in the first place, the curse brings out your own darkest desires, it doesn’t give you new ones. Now if you’ve quite finished with your snogging session, would mind kindly buggering off and stop disturbing my beauty sleep!’

Giles paused in pulling the window shut. ‘Oh yes, and next time? Close the bloody door behind you!’

The slamming of the window made them both jump.

‘Giles saw us,’ Xander said with dismay. 'He knows.’

Spike couldn’t hide his grin. ‘Yeah, what of it?’

‘Buffy! He’ll tell Buffy.’ Xander ran a shaky hand over his forehead. ‘Then there’ll be accusations, and yelling, and... and face breaking.’

‘She won’t break our faces,’ Spike said, still smiling as he noticed that Xander was still holding on tightly to his hand, their fingers intertwined.

‘No,’ Xander agreed, ‘just yours.’

‘Hey! Why just mine? I'm the pretty one!’

‘Yeah, I know,’ Xander told him, kissing him briefly as they turned and began to walk slowly away from Giles’ house.

‘But she actually likes me, and your face will heal faster.’

Spike considered this for a minute. ‘Okay, you get one face breaking. I'll give you that, but just one, mind, and after that we take it in turns.’

Xander smiled.

‘Oh yeah,’ Spike added, ‘and you have to kiss it better for me and take care of me while I'm recuperating. You know, peel me grapes, mop my fevered brow, bring me the blood of young virgins and the like.'

‘You got it,’ Xander grinned, squeezing Spike’s hand. ‘How about we start with the kissing right now?’

Xander barely had time to yelp before he found himself pressed up against another tree being kissed by Spike.

Kissing. Tree pretty. Spike pretty.

‘You have a tree fetish,’ Xander said when they finally broke apart.

‘Nope, I have a Xander fetish.’

‘So we’re really going to do this?’

‘Looks that way. You heard the man – no curse. This thing is the truth. All those things,’ Spike swallowed, working up the nerve to say what he wanted to say, ‘all those things we said that we felt... that was for real.’

‘You sound surprised.’

‘Yeah, well, aren’t you?’

‘I don’t know. I'm starting to wonder.’ Xander cupped Spike’s face, stroking his thumb over the smooth skin of his cheek.

‘Xander?’

‘Hmm?’

‘I’m still keeping the Rolex.’

‘You mean you have the...! I wondered where that went. Okay, keep it,’ Xander told him, sealing the deal with a kiss.

‘And Flick-knife.’

‘I thought we’d settled on ‘Beast’?’

Spike silenced him with more kisses. ‘Whatever.’

‘Yeah,’ Xander agreed happily. ‘Kittens are cool.’

The End.