Pairing: Spike/Xander
Rating: Adult
Beta: Mia (chapters 1-3) and Adis723 (chapters 4-current)
Notes: Post BtVS "The Gift." Set during the summer after Buffy's death, Xander struggles to come to terms with the resurrection spell in light of the "reality" of Buffy's death and his changing feelings for Spike.
Attributing notes follow each chapter.
Thanks to: Yindagger and Ladycat777 for their thoughts and at times co-writing; Lunabee34 for beta help; Sharvie for the SMCD banner; Lazuli for my SMCD icon and her support; Uberaeryn, Stoney321 and elcazavampiros for everything else.
Completed: May 2006. Also archived at The Attic

Disclaimer:
Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel the Series are the intellectual property of FOX, Mutant Enemy, and Joss Whedon.
This Fan fiction is written for fun, NOT FOR PROFIT. No copyright infringement is intended.

Sunday Morning Coming Down

by
Crazydiamondsue

Part One

Xander concentrated on the rumble of the lawn mower beneath his hands, using the vague grey outline of the headstone to guide him in the near darkness. Mowing after dark was not on the list of safer things he’d done, but safety seemed to be a concept that had little meaning anymore.

He edged as close as he could to the hard grey stone, not concerned about doing too neat a job, since pulling the few weeds that grew at the base would give Willow and the girls something mindless and comforting to do when they came here tomorrow.

He shut the mower off and listened as its soothing, mind filling noise died away, bringing back all of the thoughts it had muffled. He leaned down and picked up the t-shirt he had tossed aside, using it to brush off most of the grass and dirt that clung to his chest and arms. He flexed his shoulders, feeling the sticky itchiness of grass and sweat on his back and half-heartedly swiped the shirt between his shoulder blades, knowing he was stuck with the discomfort until he went home and showered.

Still, he lingered for a minute, looking at the area around the grave with a detached appraisal. He poked at a pile of grass with his sneaker and then made a decision, dropping the shirt and walking back over to the car to pop open the trunk and pull out a rake. Job worth doing’s worth doing well, he reasoned.

He had just started to rake the grass into a neat pile when he heard it. He stopped, easing up to lean his weight against the rake as he spoke into the darkness behind him. “Might as well come on out, Spike.”

He heard a quiet cough and then the rustle of leather as he turned to face the vampire that strolled out of the darkness.

Xander smiled humorlessly at the look of irritated confusion on Spike’s face. “Yes, I knew you were there,” he said, watching as Spike smoked and affected a bored stance. “My super-human skills alerted me to the flicking of the biggest lighter known to man and then my spider-sense really started tingling as the cloud of smoke drifted over my head.”

Spike shrugged, not meeting his gaze, so Xander turned back to his task, neatly arranging the rest of the pile and then using the rake and the edge of his shoe to push it toward the base of the tree.

“Looks good,” Spike said abruptly.

Xander nodded briefly, his hands clenching on the wooden handle. “I guess.”

“Why’re you doin’ this at night? Seems it’d be easier when you can see. Get the witches and demon girl to help out.”

Xander shook his head, keeping his back to Spike. “It’s easier for me to come after I get off work.” He stopped, still toeing the grass at his feet, crushing it into the earth. “Anyway, I like to do it before the girls come out here. It’s just something I need to do…by myself.”

He cast a glance back at Spike and saw the other man nodding slowly, his gaze still on the ground, the cigarette poised at his lips. “Come here a lot?” Xander asked quietly.

Spike grew even more still, staring at the cigarette in his hand. “A bit.”

Xander cleared his throat. “But never with us.”

Spike chuckled darkly. “Well, sunny Sunday mornings aren’t good for me.” He met Xander’s surprised look and shrugged again. “That night…flowers are always fresh,” he finished simply.

Xander looked back down, seeing the faded lilies from last week and knowing that Dawn would replace them tomorrow, that tight little line of concentration on her forehead, as if arranging them right was the most important thing she’d ever do.

His fingers tightened on the rake handle, feeling the harshness of the wood digging into calluses and fresh blisters, and taking comfort from the pain. He knew what he was going to ask, felt the words rising in his throat even, but saying them would mean hearing them. Hearing them would make them real and real required an answer, and that answer could destroy all that was left of the black and white of good and evil.

“Did you really love her?” And that was his voice, dark and sort of trembling, but the words were out.

“Did you?”

And somewhere in his mind, Angel was laughing at him, Xander thought. He knew what Spike meant. Not ‘she was my best friend, loved the hell out of her,’ but loving her. The love that had been tangled up in five years of trying to fight at her side, walking in her shadow, intertwining in wistful glances and taking all he could get out of lingering hugs. The love that even he dared not name and never examined; lost in Patsy Cline songs he didn’t play anymore and giving the dreams he’d had of it to another blonde.

But did he want to share any of that with Spike? Getting at best a knowing smirk or at worst a pitying glance and the offer to cry over it into a beer. “I loved the idea of loving her,” he suddenly heard himself say. “She was…” he smiled at the grass stained toe of his shoe. “Just this amazing girl. This brave, pretty, and funny girl who wanted to hang out with me - with us. She was there in between me and Willow, you know? Not keeping us apart, but,” he sighed, “keeping us focused on something besides the way Will felt for me that I couldn’t feel back.”

He shrugged. “She was a distraction and a purpose and to us, a kind of savior, I guess,” he glanced over at Spike to see if he was laughing, but the vampire was just a dark outline and a glowing ember. “But to her we were just…her friends. And that’s all she ever needed us to be. But she was more. More than I could be for her, so I just…gave in. Wrapped it all up in the memory of a first day smile, a flash of blonde hair and a tight little ass.” He smiled as he heard Spike chuckle softly. “So yeah, I loved her. In the only way I ever could.”

They stood there silent for a moment, and then Spike fumbled inside his jacket pocket and pulled out a flask, tipping it to his lips and then cocking his head and offering it to Xander.

Xander started to wave it off, and then reconsidered, feeling the coolness of Spike’s fingers brush against his as he took it from him. He sipped carefully, the burning liquid filling his throat and doing nothing to cool him off or ease his thirst, but nodded his thanks to Spike as he handed it back.

“I get that, Harris,” Spike said, walking over to lean against the hood of Xander’s car as he steadied his flask and lit another cigarette. “But what I can’t suss out is why you can’t bloody see…” he sighed, dragging deeply on the cigarette and then waving the flask out with a short laugh. “Why you, white knight, Slayer’s stalwart, stupidly brave champion could follow blindly behind her and not feel good enough for her while I…” he paused, looking back up at a silent Xander and then glancing away.

“Why none of you could see it was real. Not you, not her, not the bleeding lot of you. Oh, that’s right,” he said, reaching up to tap against his temple. “Evil here, must have some nefarious plan for the Chosen One. Not just seeing something in her, feeling something from her, or wanting to see.”

He smoked quietly for a moment, wondering why, even after Xander had answered the question he’d offered as a distraction, he was telling him, of all people. Maybe because the Watcher saw him only as the means to an end, the witches would just squirm uncomfortably and maybe pat his hand before easing quietly away, and Dawn, well, the less said to her about the Slayer, the better.

“I offered to stake Dru for her, you know.”

Xander felt his throat tighten, not wanting to care about that. Not wanting to believe that vampires could love, because that made them more than monsters, and they had to be…

Xander fiddled with the handle, thoughts occurring that shouldn’t be considered. Could he have killed Willow for Buffy? Even an evil, soulless Willow? That time, that one time he’d believed Buffy had put Angel before them, before Willow, he’d said, God, he’d told Buffy he’d kill her… “Would you have?” he asked quietly.

Spike shrugged, dropping the cigarette and grinding it beneath his boot. “Dunno. Thought I could, but seeing Dru, looking between them…Buffy brought things out in me I didn’t want to see, and don’t want to be there. And then there was Dru, giving me release from all the…fucking light and,” he sighed. “Yeah, for her, I could have.”

He looked back at Xander, knowing the boy was hearing him, seeing him for maybe the first time. “Doesn’t matter now, Harris. Doesn’t fucking matter. Not to you, not to me. And not to her. And I don’t care if you want to wrap her up and tuck her away in some special place inside where you think I can’t touch and won’t ever sully. Because I did, you know. Doubt the stars are fire, doubt that the sun doth move, doubt truth to be a liar,” Spike looked into Xander’s eyes, seeing the confusion at the unfamiliar words as well as the grudging realization in them, “but never doubt I love.”

Part Two

Anya turned the jeweler’s box over and over in her hands, unconsciously rubbing her thumb against the velveteen. Her fingers tightened around it, her nails digging into her palm. She rose from the couch and looked out the window again.

Xander had eaten dinner and changed clothes after work. She had glanced at the clock as he left. 7:09. Ten minutes to get from their apartment to Buf…the Summers' house to pick up the lawn mower. Five to ten minutes there if he stopped to talk to Willow, which he certainly had, she thought with a brief flash of irritation. Twenty minutes from there to Breaker’s Woods. Five minutes to unload the lawn mower. Ten minutes to mow. Ten minutes more to do that obsessive grass clearing and flower re-arranging. Twenty minutes back to the Summers'. He never stayed to chat after, so ten minutes back to their apartment. Roughly an hour and a half from start to finish, meaning that Xander should walk through the door, sweaty and glistening, at 8:39.

She looked toward the door. It was 9:05.

Anya glanced again at the phone sitting on the table. It was centered exactly, as if someone had picked it up and put it back several times. Her fingers twitched toward it and then she could hear Xander telling her that calling to check on him every five minutes was needy and clingy and not what normal girlfriends did.

Anya wasn’t sure if that was true or not, but it seemed to be borne out by the few female acquaintances she had. Willow was always with Tara, so no need to call there. Buffy had always seemed surprised and belatedly happy to see Riley show up somewhere; as if the thought of calling to check his location had never occurred to her.

But Xander was thirty minutes late and that was really late. Sunnydale call-the-morgue late. Her fingers twitched again. She wouldn’t call him. She frowned in frustration. She should have been using this time to plan what she was going to say. So far she had, Xander, we need to talk, followed by shoving the ring box in his face in case he had questions about the topic.

Xander had proposed in May. It was now almost August. They had buried Buffy, guarded the Hellmouth, kept the Slayer’s death quiet in the demon community, and tried to give Dawn a normal home with two lesbian witch foster-mothers, three cajoling uncles and wacky Aunt Anya.

Xander worked, Giles worried, Willow and Tara spelled, Spike skulked, Dawn grieved and Anya…waited.

As each day passed, their lives had crossed further and further back into normal. Anya had looked at the ring box on the dresser every day, hoping that one day it wouldn’t be there and there would be a suspicious lump in Xander’s pocket. But still it sat there every night, just getting dusty. Anya had tried scooting it closer to Xander’s side of the armoire, but he’d seemed not to notice.

So tonight she was going to ask him. If he was waiting for the right moment, she was going to make the moment. But he was late. Her fingers were cramped painfully around the box and then they were opening and reaching for the phone.

Xander unlocked the door and stepped inside, his t-shirt slung over his bare shoulder, his chest, arms, shorts and legs flecked with grass. He smelled warm and sweaty and like dirt and grass and…whiskey?

“Xander, I was worried,” Anya said, dropping the hand with the ring box behind her back. “It should have been 95 minutes but it was 120 minutes and that’s an increase of twenty-one percent, and I didn’t call, Xander, did you notice I didn’t...”

Xander had his head ducked, toeing off a tennis shoe and shaking it out onto the floor mat. His socks followed, rubbed green around the ankles, and then his hands were at his waist, unbuttoning his shorts and pushing them over his hips and down his legs. Naked, he scratched absently below his navel, brushing off the line of grass that had worked its way beneath his waistband.

Anya stood looking at him for a moment as he piled his grass stained clothes together and stepped over them. “Xander,” she said softly, reaching up to loop her arms around his neck.

He jerked back from her slightly, grabbing at her hands. “Ahn. I need a shower,” he said shortly, backing away. His eyes met the hurt, uncertain look in hers and he smiled tightly. “I’m sorry, sweetie. Sweaty. Gritty. Grumpy. Just let me get clean, okay?”

He turned away from her and walked toward the bathroom, pausing at the door to toss her an apologetic smile.

“Okay,’ Anya said softly, nodding to herself as Xander closed the door behind him. She spun the box between her hands. “Xander, we need to talk. Xander, we need to talk…”

Xander stood under the shower spray, the water as hot as he could make it, watching blades of green puddle at his feet and swirl down the drain. His head throbbed with that ache that came when you’d had enough hard liquor to feel it but quit before you got drunk.

He felt a little weak and empty, too, like after a hard cry. He hadn’t cried, though. He’d given Spike a look inside the mind of Xander Harris, but he hadn’t given him that. He’d seen Spike cry, once, the day that Buffy had fallen. They’d all seen it, but they’d turned away from him and to each other, because it had been, well, embarrassing. Embarrassed to think that he cared that much and they hadn’t known, and embarrassed for the vampire at having to reveal that much in front of them.

Xander closed his eyes tightly, letting the water fall full on his face. He’d shared warm and fuzzies, well, more like cold and bitters, with Spike. Sat on the car, talked about the ‘old days’ and shared a flask. Like two guys. He hadn’t felt like calling him 'Fangless' once. And when Spike left, he’d said, “All right, then…Xander.”

Xander turned off the water and stepped out of the shower, wrapping a towel around his waist. He opened the door and walked into the living room to find Anya sitting on the couch, with the ring box cupped in her hands.

Xander cleared his throat. “Um, Anya, I’m just gonna head to bed, okay? It was a long day and we have to be at Dawn’s early tomorrow and -”

“Xander. We need to talk.”

Xander tucked the towel in tighter and edged back toward the bedroom. “Not tonight, okay, Ahn? Tomorrow, I promise we’ll - ”

“Xander, ask me again.”

Xander stopped, his hands tightening on the towel. “What?”

“Ask me again. You promised. You’d ask me again, when the world didn’t end. So, I’m asking you to, Xander.” She looked at him, her lips trembling, but her gaze firm. “Ask me again.”

“Not…just not now, Anya. I…”

“Well, when, Xander? When the Hellmouth opens? When you finally decide that I’m the best that you’re ever going to do? When Willow says it’s okay to?”

“Okay – A? Willow is not the boss of me.” Xander paused. “Not as far as you and I are concerned, anyway. And second? You know I love you, Anya. You are the best. There’s just so much…with Buffy, and patrolling and Dawn.” He couldn’t quite meet the glare in Anya’s eyes. “But soon, I promise.”

Anya shook her head, standing up to cross the room until she faced him. “I’m sorry, Xander. But there’s always going to be a ‘something and a someday.’” She pressed the ring box into his hand. “So I’m telling you it’s now. Ask me.”

Xander looked down at the ring box in his hand, flashing back to the day he had picked it out, brought it home and hidden it. To the day in the Magic Box when everything seemed to point to this and all the answers seemed so easy. To the moment when he looked at Buffy’s broken body on the ground and felt everything he’d ever believed tilt. To the look in Spike’s eyes tonight, that seemed to reflect everything in his. He looked back up, seeing the hope and the fear in Anya’s eyes, and knowing only one of those was in his, and not the one she needed to see. “I’m sorry, Anya. I can’t.”

Anya nodded slowly, her movements jerky as she turned and grabbed her purse and started silently toward the door.

“Anya, wait!” Xander started after her, catching her as she stepped out into the hallway. Anya turned back, her look expectant. “Where…where are you going to go?”

Anya’s face closed and she shook his hand off of her arm. “I doesn’t matter anymore, Xander. Not to you.” She walked quickly away and Xander started after her, feeling his towel slip down his hips.

“Damn it!” he jumped back into the apartment, holding the towel in front of him. He looked around and then walked quickly back into the bedroom, jerking on a pair of jeans and pulling a t-shirt over his head. Dressed, he shoved his feet into shoes and grabbed his keys.

He had to figure this out, had to talk this out, no matter what it cost him or how much…stuff he had to share. His drove carefully through the Sunnydale night, calling himself an idiot the entire way. Even as his hand reached up to knock, he told himself to just let it go, that everything had been said and there was nothing left but to deal with it.

The door opened and a suspicious, hurting gaze met his. “Spike. Can we talk?”

Part Three

Thirty minutes later, Xander had worked his way through most of a pint of Jack Daniels and his begrudging host was still staring at him with a mixture of suspicion and confusion.

Spike watched over the neck of his own bottle as Xander attempted to right himself atop the sarcophagus, only to list to the side again, snickering. First of all, Harris had showed up at his crypt and knocked – knocked, for fuck’s sake – instead of just barging in bellowing, “Fangless! Demons! Come!” Secondly, the boy was all earnest eyes and too-wide smile, asking if they could have a chat, as if their brief and never-to-be-repeated graveside moment had made them mates for life.

So far, the only attempts at conversation Xander had made were, “Got any more whiskey?” and “Soap.Net, huh? How’d ya get cable?” Spike had answered obligingly, “Suppose I do,” and “Saw a man about a hook-up,” and then left off, watching Harris drink himself into oblivion and stare back at him, start to speak and then drink again.

When those dark and increasingly bleary eyes darted his way again, Spike wedged his bottle between his knees and leaned forward, sighing. “Something on your mind, Xander? ‘M guessin’ the Bit’s not in trouble and there’s not another bloody world ending afoot, or you would have already blathered my ears off. So just spell it out, already. The not caring’s killing me.”

What followed was an eruption of babble so over-lapping that even Spike’s vampire hearing had to strain to sort it out. Something about “Anya” and “ring” and “fucked up big time” and what could have been a terribly off-key rendering of What’s Love Got to Do With It, followed by a stream of hysterical giggles and ending with a whimper of “nothing matters now, anymore” and “why did you have to say that?”

Spike sat and considered all of that for a moment, watching the other man suck desperately at his drained bottle. “So…let me get this straight. Anyanka left you because you refused to propose again, because evidently once wasn’t the charm, so you decided to come over here and butcher Tina Turner an’ drink my whiskey because I care? Isn’t that, uh, Red’s job?”

Xander snorted. “Yeah. Willow. That’d be helpful. She’d be all ‘ding-dong, the demon’s gone’, we’ll make cookies and poof – all better, and anyway she doesn’t have whiskey and itwasallyourfaultbuddy!”

Spike choked on the mouthful of whiskey he’d just gulped. “My fault? You didn’t have the stones to honor a promise you made to a sodding vengeance demon and it’s my fault?”

Xander frowned, swaying a little and scraping his palms against rough stone as he attempted a graceful dismount. This wasn’t going at all the way he’d imagined. Some evil friend Spike was…

“Oh, don’t go, Harris,” Spike said, waving him back to his ungainly perch. “You Scoobies have tried to pin a lot on me in the past, but this has got to be the most creative. Please, enlighten me as to why I am the fly in your matrimonial ointment. Is it some good soapy plot? Get suspicious that Anyanka and I were having a steamy affair?” Spike grinned wolfishly. “Or did she get a whiff of me on ya tonight and think that maybe you and I had some steamy secrets of our own? Oh, tell, tell, Xander. I’m intrigued.”

Xander’s jaw hung open and he snapped it shut just in time to avoid a deluge of drool. “You and Anya?!” Then he glared, pissed off into a sudden sobriety. “Take that back, you…impotent menace. And you and me? Bah-leah.”

He started to attempt another indignant exit and caught himself right before a face-to-cement impact. “It was what you said tonight. About you and Buffy,” he muttered, not looking at the lord of the evil smirk.

Spike leaned back, his hands clenching on the armrests of his chair, all signs of laughter gone. “What about me and Buffy?” he asked quietly, the words soft and even, but the implied threat in every tense coil of his body.

“That she made you…you said you would have changed for her, if she’d wanted it. I think your exact words were, ‘go all poofy and whipped like Angel,’ if she’d asked. You’d give up everything that meant anything to you, because she was everything. And I don’t know what that’s like.”

Spike’s shoulders relaxed minutely as he looked at Xander, seeing the sadness and loneliness in the boy’s hunched stance, the ‘kick me now, please’ stamped on his face alongside whiskey scented belligerence.

“’S that right, now?” Spike asked in a world-weary tone, tipping the bottle again.

“You know the first time I told Anya I loved her?” Xander continued, as if Spike hadn’t spoken. “The night Riley left. I gave Buffy the ‘chase your dreams’ speech and then watched her take off into the night like some chick flick nightmare, racing toward true love. I even had this whole scenario of them running into each other’s arms, power ballad blaring, and love triumphing over vampire prostitution, brain tumors and mystical destiny.” He chuckled bitterly.

“So I went home and told Anya that I was in love with her. Powerfully, painfully in love with her. Because I wanted to be. I wanted to be the hero, get the girl, have the big romance. Get my heart broken; have hot, angry make-up sex. Get to be the one who ached with love, cried over it, would have died for it. So that’s what Anya was supposed to be about.” Xander looked down at the empty bottle in his hands. “That’s what Anya was always about.”

Spike bit back the, Fuck, Xander, you’re such a bleeding girl, that hovered on his tongue as he remembered a century of dancing to Dru’s quirky tune. Remembered blocking out how she had screamed for ‘Daddy’ and the way it had filled an empty, abandoned factory. And the crumbs he’d begged from the Slayer and salted with his snarky innuendo. His eyes widened and he chuckled darkly.

“Seems like I’m not the only one who’s bent over and played the bitch for love.” He sniggered with genuine amusement as Xander shot up from his drunken lurch.

“Hey! I am nobody’s bitch!” Xander stood frozen, his finger pointed stiffly at Spike, and then his finger began to tremble as a grin overrode his manly sneer. “But I am way frickin’ wasted,” he giggled.

Spike’s lips quirked up in an answering smile. “You, mate, are bloody pissed,” he agreed companionably, toasting Xander with a JD salute.

“…so then there’s Dru, simpering around him like he’s the second bloody coming, and Angel leans over…”

“Angelus,” Xander corrected, with only a slight slurring.

"Angel," Spike said pointedly, bumping his shoulder into Xander's for further emphasis. "That 'Angelus' rot is just a sodding affectation; he's the same bastard by any other name. So, Angel leans over and says, 'Any responsibility I can assume while you're spinning your wheels...' and then he runs his greasy, soulless, beady-ass eyes over my Dru and says, 'Anything I'm not already doing, that is.'" Spike downed another shot. "Fuckin' wanker."

Xander nodded firmly, squirming a bit to get more comfortable as they sat leaned against the hard marble bier. "What a dick."

"But you mark my words, whelp," Spike said, grinning as Xander repeated, ‘Whelp,’ with a giggling snort, "you ask the Watcher, the witches, or any of the rest of the truth and justice lot, who they want on their side against the Big Bad? It won't be Spike or Xander. Nooo. The next time the world goes to shit? They'll be ringin' up His Broodiness while you and I stand there, more man than he'll ever be, soul or no soul."

"Hey! I've got a soul, Spike. I'm souled."

"Nah. Seen you dance. I'm thinkin' pure evil," Spike laughed.

Xander laughed back, pushing his hair off his forehead as he grinned into Spike's laughing, open, and eep, friendly face.

Spike snickered back, looking at Xander and seeing nothing - well, besides drunken goofiness - but laughter. And something like what he'd seen in the Niblet's wide-eyed grin when he was telling a particularly gory tale. Acceptance. Interest. Affection.

Spike cocked his head and his smile faded as he looked at Xander's flushed face, a grin still tugging the corners of the boy's lips as he spun his empty bottle between them.

"Harris," Spike said quietly.

Xander looked up; his grin widening as a snappy comeback formed, and then Spike's lips were on his. Tentative, whiskey flavored coolness slid between Xander's lips, a hand coming up to grasp the back of his neck. Xander's mouth was still open in half-spoken reply, his lips lax and shocked. Just as his tongue decided to give up on talking and take up tangling, Spike was pulling away, shaking his head.

"That's a bad idea, Xander."

Xander stared back at him, mouth open, lips numb, yet somehow still tingling. "Huh?!"

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