For fotada,who contributed generously to Jolie's anti-leukemia fund, and wanted something a little bit like this. I'm not sure this is going to fit the bill exactly, but I hope it'll get close. I admit I'm also shamelessly using this as an excuse to write some of that Spike/Xander running-a-Slayer-house-post-S7 fic I've been dreaming about lo these many long years.

Also thanks to the esteemed and generous romanyg, who very kindly donated paid LJ time to my account. Thank you so much, romanyg! I'll do my best to use it wisely.

Out of Africa

by
Witling

Part One

It was inevitable that sooner or later, if he didn't fall prey to any of the three million threats to life and limb in Angola—if he survived land mines and tribal warfare and Ebola and malaria and dengue fever and tsetse flies and pissed-off Slayers and pissed-off Slayers' fathers and the local homebrew liquor made from redirected Red Cross grain alcohol and nicknamed, roughly, "Widowmaker"—that Xander Harris would end up in charge of a houseful of Slayers. He'd known that for a long time, mostly from hints Andrew had dropped about favors and strings and backs being scratched. Without wanting to know too much about whose back Andrew was scratching these days, Xander had been looking forward to it. Wrangling a houseful of sixteen year-old girls in sunny California sure beat playing "Is it loaded, and can you reach the trigger?" with disgruntled child soldiers. He looked forward to running a Slayer house the way declining film actors looked forward to franchise television deals. Talking chimp, hand puppets, steady paycheck. Fantastic, where do I sign?

What wasn't inevitable was the revelation that he wasn't going to run the house by himself. That was the first little snag, which Andrew only let slip after Xander was back on U.S. soil, in the cab from LAX to the house itself.

"Hang on a minute," Xander said, squinting at the scrap of paper on which he'd written the address in muddy blue ink. "What do you mean, we?"

"Oh," Andrew said, in his fake-desultory tone, the one that meant he was trying to slip something under the radar. "Didn't I tell you? You're co-managing."

Xander stared out the window at the wide, wide streets of Los Angeles. The cars were huge, and everything looked shiny and new. He hadn't slept in thirty hours. "No," he said, hearing his own voice as if someone else were talking. "You didn't tell me that."

"With Spike," Andrew said. "So that'll be great, just like old times. Listen Xander, I gotta run—"

"With…" Xander trailed off and just watched the median race by. He could hear Andrew exuding discomfort on the other end of the line, all the way from England. "Spike who?"

"Spike Spike." Andrew cleared his throat. "You remember him, right? Um, bleached hair, kind of a hottie—"

"Spike Spike." Xander let his eyes fall closed. All of a sudden he was exhausted, so tired he didn't think he could make it to the house without falling asleep. "You've got to be kidding me."

"We're low on managers right now, and since you're just coming back from Africa, they thought you needed someone to help get you going. Those girls can be pretty fierce."

"I bet." Xander rubbed his forehead, feeling thirty hours' worth of grit and sweat and airport fug. "I don't need any help, okay?"

"It's not up to you," said Andrew. "Sorry, but it's out of my control."

"What happened to all that stuff about back-scratching and hand-washing?"

"I got you out of Angola, didn't I?" Andrew sounded miffed.

"Yeah." That was true, Xander realized. He was out of the hellhole, he was back in California. So he had to spend a few days living in the same house as Spike. Big deal. At least there'd be running water. "Okay, point. I'll…" He rubbed his eyes, hard enough to see colored bursts behind his eyelids. "Whatever, I'll figure it out. Thanks."

"No problemo."

Andrew always lingered a few seconds, as if he wanted to say or hear something more from Xander. Xander always hung up.

Part Two

As it turned out, the house was empty when he got there. Or so he thought at first. He'd been expecting a chaotic Brady Bunch-style welcome, with girls all over the place—and for once in his life, he wasn't really looking forward to the prospect of a house full of excited teenaged girls. It was a relief to realize that he must have beat the first convoy—the "For Sale/Sold" sign was still on the lawn of the house, and the realtor's key box was still on the front knob. Glancing in the front window while he fiddled with the keys Andrew had sent, he saw there was furniture in there—IKEA stuff, bland and new, some of it still in boxes. The house itself was a big old Victorian, mushroom-colored and peeling. He'd agreed to do some fix-up work; studying the dry rot in the porch railings, he was already regretting it.

The door opened suddenly, startling him. He stumbled back, almost falling over his backpack. In the doorway stood a skinny little blade-faced guy in jeans and a white T-shirt. Dark hair and blue eyes. Spike, he realized. After a moment.

"Holy—" He recovered enough to swallow and get straight on his feet again. "Jeez. Hi. Spike."

Spike didn't look startled at all. Well, he had the advantage. He looked smaller, as if in the last few years his leprechaun heritage had finally come through. His hair was dark brown. That was weird. He was also barefoot, Xander realized. That was weirder.

"Hi," he said. Still English, apparently. There was a cigarette between his fingers; he put his hand to the doorsill and it dropped ash on the brand-new rag rug. Some things hadn't changed. "Can't come out, sorry."

"Oh." There was sun on the porch, Xander realized. Feeling like a graceless slob, he herded his bags together and shoved them toward the door. Spike's hair wasn't blonde. For some reason that made everything seem even more surreal.

"Long flight?" Spike was hooking Xander's bags in, neatly and easily, dropping them just inside the door.

"Yeah." It was weird to step across the threshold, weird to feel like he was a guest in Spike's house. When in fact this was his house, his green ribbon for making it through the last five years alive. Spike was the guest, or maybe his assistant. Xander had a brief, giddy vision of Spike bringing him a beer on a silver tray. Insanity.

Or maybe not that insane after all, because Spike was hefting his bags one after the other, grimacing a little at the awkwardness but apparently not minding the weight. "Bedrooms're upstairs," he said, kicking the door closed and starting for the stairs.

"Oh," Xander said, not moving.

"So's the shower," Spike said over his shoulder. He was just a pair of legs topped with a profusion of dusty, travel-worn bags.

"Okay," Xander said faintly. He took a last look around the front hall—clean wood floors, hooks for half a dozen coats, a few stray Styrofoam peanuts in the corners. Somebody had a whole lot of Stonk and Blarg to Allen-wrench together in the next day or two. Dimly, he hoped it wasn't going to be him. Then he realized he was dithering, and that dithering was all that stood between him and a hot shower. And more importantly, a bed. There were beds upstairs. He wobbled up on gelatin legs.






It was the cleanest, hottest shower he'd ever taken in his life. Well, probably not. But it was clean and hot, and the taps worked, and nobody was waiting outside with a goat and a plastic bucket, and no giant bugs tried to crawl up his leg. It was incredible. He stayed in forty minutes, and only came out when he realized he was in danger of drowning.

"You hungry?" Spike was there in the hallway when Xander emerged. The angles of light seemed longer than they should have been, he thought. Maybe he'd fallen asleep for a bit.

"No. Thanks." He hitched his towel and floated back toward the bedroom he'd chosen arbitrarily, a little one at the end of the hall. He meant to do useful things—get dressed and go back downstairs, look through whatever mail or instructions or Slayer House manuals there were, maybe even have a conversation with the newly-unbleached Spike—but instead he fell into a hole in the bed and spent the next twelve hours dreaming of squid.








He woke up wondering where the hell he was. He was in a room. There was a bed, a bedside table, a lamp with a muted bulb in a blue shade. There was a window with a curtain—he could see it was dark outside. The walls and ceiling were clean and white. No mosquito netting. No smell in the air, or at least not much to speak of. Maybe paint. He was naked but he wasn't hot, and he couldn't hear any guns.

For a few seconds he panicked, sweat springing out of the palms of his hands. Where the hell was he? He'd been kidnapped, misplaced, lost, run over and killed. Death was an IKEA showcase. Then his brain slid back into its old, long-unused, regular American groove in his skull and he remembered. California. Slayers. House. Holy shit, yes, right, Spike. That seemed too bizarre to be possible, but it was in there, part of the mix. He remembered the phone conversation with Andrew, in the cab. Andrew thought Spike was hot. Now that he wasn't disabled by jetlag, he couldn't believe he'd let that go by.

He was sore, he discovered when he rolled over and searched for the floor. Sore and still tired, still kind of out of it. It was instinct to check where he was putting his feet before he let them touch the floor. He sat on the edge of the bed, fighting the leaden sag of his eyelids, and considered marrying the bed. It was clean and soft, and it smelled better than any bed he'd slept in in the last five years. Say what you would about the United States—and after five years of enjoying American foreign policy from the foreign end, he had a few things to say—they made a good bed.

It took a few minutes to work up enough steam to get up, stagger to his bags, dig out some clothes, and get into them. Nothing was really clean—it was all what he'd learned to think of as "clean enough," which was a term with meaning relative to which country he was in and how long it had been since he'd thought about trying to convince someone to have sex with him. Right now, "clean enough" was pretty disgusting. He dug through until he found something that didn't seem likely to try to escape under its own power. The first thing he needed to do was laundry. No, the first thing he needed to do was pee. Stat. Statter. Stattest.

The bathroom was so clean he wanted to fall to his knees and embrace it in gratitude. Instead, he pissed carefully against the side of the bowl, and washed his hands when he was done.

Sporting slightly insane bedhead, he ventured back out into the hallway. The house was silent. There was a light on downstairs—he could see the glow coming from the staircase. Carefully, trailing one hand along the wall to keep his balance, he went that way.

At the foot of the stairs he found himself staring into the living room, at an incomprehensible tableau. The room was scattered with cardboard boxes, peanuts, little plastic bags full of widgets and screws and flanges. Around the room were several piles of what looked like disassembled end tables, wardrobes, dressers, and desks. A squat silver stereo system sat against the wall, under the bay window. From it trailed a long thin cord, like a ribbon snake, all the way across the bare wooden floor and up into a pair of chunky stereo headphones, which in turn were settled on the noggin of a skinny, dark-haired form hunched over something Xander couldn't see. Spike. His back was turned, and he was curled over whatever he was doing with the kind of rapt attention most people reserved for newborn infants. The levels on the stereo display bounced up and down enthusiastically. The room was totally silent.

Xander cleared his throat. Nothing happened. He considered the bony ladder of Spike's spine, which showed through the fabric of his T-shirt like a fossil imprint.

"Hey," Xander said. Spike rocked back and forth minutely on his butt, then reached without looking for a screwdriver lying on the floor behind him. Xander glanced around the room, at the piles of unmade furniture. "I need a drink," he said, and walked away to find the kitchen.