Out of Africa

by
Witling

Part Three

Spike walked in a few minutes later, while Xander was rummaging through the cupboards over the refrigerator. He'd been through all the others, and hadn't found any alcohol at all. Not a cheap bottle of Chardonnay, not a Miller High Life, not a can of shoe polish.

"Is this one of those dry Slayer houses?" he asked, the minute Spike walked into the room. "Are we Mormons now?"

Spike looked a little taken aback, as if he'd expected some other kind of greeting. Probably he had, Xander realized. It had been five years, after all—give or take a disoriented "Oh" at the front door the day before. Considering all their history, all the years they'd spent together in Sunnydale, all the times they'd fought side by side to save the world and their own sorry lives, he probably should at least work up the energy to insult the guy's hair.

"Uh," Spike said, fingering his Allen wrench.

"Hi," Xander said. "Great seeing you, good job on the not still being dead thing."

"Thanks."

"Is there really no booze in this place, or did you just drink it all already?"

Spike squinted up at the cupboard, and Xander opened the door helpfully. "Don't think there's much of anything right now. Sorry."

That was true—the refrigerator held a few blood Tetrapaks (discreetly sleeved in a brown paper bag), a quart of milk, and half a loaf of sad, sagging supermarket bread. The cupboards held white IKEA plates and bowls, but no food except for a shaker of Chinese five-spice powder. There was a lone apple on top of the stove. Morosely, Xander picked it up and polished it on his shirt.

"Are you conscious?" Spike asked, watching Xander demolish half the apple in a single bite. "Because I've spent all night fiddling with this shit, I'm about to throw the bloody Ektorp through the window."

Xander glanced at the stove again. The clock read 5:45 am. Outside, it was still dark; they had another hour or so of clearance.

"I'll tell you what," he said, crunching the apple messily and deliciously in his ravenous maw. "You drive me to the supermarket, I'll put together all the Ektorp I can before I collapse again."

"Done," Spike said, tossing the Allen key onto the counter and turning on his heel.

"You're paying," Xander said, and ate the rest of his apple.







American supermarkets were a giddy wonderland, an incomprehensible funscape of endless, beckoning delight. It was like being inside a cornucopia, Xander reflected, grabbing a package of white-fudge-covered Oreos off a stack taller than he was. Like walking around inside one of those Thanksgiving horns of plenty, the ones they used to draw in grade school, until Willow read up a little more on the Pilgrims and started drawing stacks of smallpox blankets instead. American supermarkets were totally insane, packed to the gills with gleeful nutty feats of food science. Food science, for God's sake. Most of the world didn't even have food, let alone food that had been professionally badgered into a whole new conceptual category.

"Look at this," he said, studying the package in his hands. "White fudge. What the fuck is white fudge?"

"Revolting," Spike said. He was draped over the handlebar of the shopping cart, as if his bones had stopped supporting him. "Sun's coming up soon."

"Yeah," Xander muttered absently, trying to get his eye to focus on the list of ingredients. It was longer than most books he'd read. "Unbelievable." He dropped the package into the cart and headed for the pickles.

"I was thinking of not catching on fire this morning," Spike said quietly, somewhere behind him.

"Uh-huh," Xander said, running his finger over the shelves of dill, sweet, bread-and-butter, relish, chili, garlic, amen. "You don't want to ruin the interior of that awesome Honda Civic you're driving these days. And did I mention I love this country?"

Spike muttered something mostly inaudible, and Xander started grabbing bottles.






They made it back to the house with time to spare—time that Spike spent smoking a cigarette at the kitchen table while Xander brought in bag after bag of groceries. There were eight total, and when they were all on the kitchen table he had to stand back and just look at them for a minute.

"You're like bloody Oliver Twist," Spike said, practically horizontal with disdain. "How long since you were anywhere that doesn’t use kine as currency?"

"One million years," Xander said, and started unpacking.

Spike watched him do it, interrupting himself only to turn around and close the blinds when the sun started to come up, and to knock each successive empty bag onto the floor with a negligent flick of his wrist. Xander stacked nonperishables on the floor around the table, until even he had to admit he'd probably overdone it. Balancing the twelfth bag of pasta on the pile, he looked up and caught Spike giving him a strange, narrow look.

"What?" He looked down at the pile of carbs. "We've got Slayers coming, right?"

"So I'm told." Spike toed an empty bag. "Not an actual army, though."

Xander sighed, eased back onto his heels, and rested his chin in his hands. "What happened to the DeSoto?"

"Blew up."

"Is that British for 'broke down, sold it for parts'? Or did it actually—"

"Blew up," Spike said again, tonelessly.

"Uh-huh. And when did you go back to being a sultry brunette?"

Again, Spike looked momentarily taken aback. He straightened up slightly and ran a hand over his head. He was self-conscious, Xander thought with surprise. "Dunno. A couple years ago."

From the last grocery bag, Xander fished a six-pack of Corona. He pulled a bottle out, set it on the floor, and glanced at Spike. "You want one?"

Spike seemed actually to consider this, which was in some ways an even more outlandish character shift than the dark hair or the Civic. Well, not more than the Civic. Seeing Spike walk up to the driver's side of a family sedan had almost tipped Xander into a fugue state. This was indeed a kinder, gentler Spike. A Spike who used turn signals. A Spike who flossed, if his sole contribution to the shopping cart was any indication.

"Yeah," Spike said, restoring solidity to the world. With a sigh of relief, Xander went to get the bottle opener.

They drank their Coronas while Xander crammed groceries into the cupboards. He sampled while he did it—a pickle here, a handful of Chex Mix there. The sheer variety of food was giddifying. He hadn't had a Fig Newton in six years.

"You hear much from the rest of the gang?" Spike was leaning back in his chair, tipping it back methodically onto its back legs, balancing with one hand touching the tabletop. Xander shrugged.

"Willow's in England, witching up a storm. She calls sometimes. Buffy—" He paused. It was weird to mention Buffy's name after all this time and distance, especially to Spike. To Spike of all people. Enough water had gone under the bridge to keep him from getting automatically wrathful, which he knew was a bad thing. It just meant he'd seen enough really bad stuff, enough child rape and immolation, to put things in some kind of fucked-up perspective. See enough thirteen year-old girls on auction blocks, and frustrated love in a Sunnydale bathroom started to pale a bit. Not that he didn't still have a seed of hatred in his heart for Spike, for that. He did. He just didn't care enough to tend it anymore.

"Buffy's trotting the globe," he finished, aware of the awkwardness of the pause. "She's busy. We did Christmas in Dakar last year, that was cool."

Spike nodded, studying his own hand on the top of the table, as if Christmas in Dakar was about what he'd expected. "Rupert?"

"Watching away."

Spike snorted, almost overbalanced, and grabbed the edge of the table to steady himself. "That Watcher boy's rising in the ranks."

"Who, Andrew?" Xander shelved a can of spaghetti sauce. "Apparently he's a natural at whatever those guys get up to in English public schools. Consider me unshocked."

Spike grinned. "I went to English public school. Think I could get a job?"

"You've got a job," Xander said quickly, before he could think too much about the implications there. "Your job is to make sure I don't die a bloody death the first time Gilmore Girls is showing opposite Project Runway."

"Oh, please." Spike studied his bottle with a frown. "You grew up with girls. You're practically a bloody girl, yourself."

"I can't tell you how I've missed our little talks."

"You'll be fine." Apparently Spike was bored now, because he righted his chair with a bang, stood up, and stretched. "I'm off to bed. You run into any trouble with any of that Swedish crap, you be sure and not tell me."

"Just tell me you didn't throw any pieces away."

Spike looked shifty and left.

Part Four

Having a soul had changed a few things about Spike. It had made him less of a taunter, and it had definitely toned down his personal style. There was the Civic, the irony of whose name was not lost on Xander. And there was the mystery of the floss. You didn't need a box of Girl Scout cookies in the refrigerator to see that there had been some changes in the complex, shadowy hinterlands of the Spike psyche. Changes for the better, Xander reminded himself—this Spike didn't roam the streets at night hunting virgins, nor did he rifle your duffel bag for pocket change while you were conked out for twelve hours straight.

Having a soul did not, however, make Spike a handyman. It also didn't prevent him from ripping unhelpful instruction booklets into tiny, savage pieces, or from stomping on unco-operative but essential parts of the self-assembly process.

"You have got to be fucking kidding me," Xander said, surveying his latest find: a cache of tiny smashed plastic pills, nigh-unrecognizable as the shelf supports they'd once been. They'd been swept furtively beneath a pile of hopelessly intermingled instruction leaflets. "I'm going to be putting this stuff together with tape."

"Tried that," Spike said. Xander jumped and craned his neck around; Spike was standing in the doorway, with bedhead. Spike opened his mouth to emit further pearls of wisdom, then paused, his gaze arrested on Xander's face.

"Shut up," Xander said, twisting back around and bending over the pile of mismatched directions. "I can't read without them." The glasses were African, and they'd been broken half a dozen times. There was duct tape on both arms, and a long scratch down the left lens. Not a problem; he didn't use that side anyway.

There was a brief pause, and then Spike said, in what seemed to Xander like a careful tone of voice, "They're all right."

"I liked you better when you were a jerk," Xander said, studying the paper in front of him. He could feel heat in his face, which was annoying. "At least you were honest."

Another pause. Then Spike said affably, "They look like shit." He wandered in and toed one of the night tables. "How'd you get that to hold together?"

"With screws." Xander reached for the pile of scraps he suspected held the key to assembling the dining room table. "You left them in the box."

Spike made the kind of uninterested mm-hmm sound that Giles used to make whenever anyone mentioned sports. There was a soft yellow armchair in the middle of the ruins—no assembly required—and he dropped into it and sank down as if his spine had compressed to one third of its usual length.

"Who ordered this stuff?" Xander asked, keeping his gaze on the instructions, which were in Tagalog. "Tell me it wasn't you. Or tell me it was, and that you killed whoever left two dresser legs out of that box."

"I don't do that anymore," Spike said, in a tone that made Xander look up. Spike was examining his fingernails intently. "Kill people," he clarified, glancing up. For a moment, they looked at each other.

"Right," Xander said. " I know. Sorry."

Spike shrugged and looked away, and Xander went back to his instructions. Spike-with-a-soul was hard to predict. One minute he was being nice about your crappy glasses, the next he was touchy about murder. Xander had a brief, vivid image of himself standing up and yelling What have you done with the real Spike? It passed.

"I thought you were going to bed," he said, to fill the silence. Spike made another hmm sound. This time it was the kind of sound Giles made when you asked him what he did the summer Buffy was dead. It was a deflective hmm. Xander glanced up, pondered, and decided not to go there.

"When do we get Slayers, exactly?"

Spike frowned, successfully distracted. "Today, I thought. Must be some glitch."

"A glitch with the Council? Inconceivable." Xander started to put a screw in, but the threads were wrong and it dropped out. "Crap." He patted the floor for it without looking; changing depth of field too often made him dizzy.

"There's a packet," Spike said. "Start-up stuff. On the mail table."

"We have a mail table?" In frustration, Xander shoved the glasses down and scanned the floor. No screw.

"Well, not as such. Pile of stuff by the front door—I figured you'd put it up when you had time."

"Pencil it in for 2012. I'm not exactly blowing through the living room yet." He'd heard the screw fall, but he couldn't see it anywhere, and suddenly the general state of chaos was pissing him off. "This is fucking ridiculous." He stood up, yanked the glasses off, and tossed them onto the nearest night table. His eye watered and his head hurt. "I'm thinking this isn't such a great plan."

"What isn't?" Spike sounded careful again, even reserved.

"This whole Slayer house thing." Xander scrubbed his hands over his face, then turned and walked out. By the front door, he found a pile of pressed wood—the mail table—and on top of it, a FedEx packet. Sighing, he ripped it open. It was chock full of papers, forms, and folders. They felt thick and heavy, replete with silent admonition. He battled an urge to just drop the whole thing back where he'd found it, grab his stuff, and exit stage left before any Slayers darkened the doorstep.

"It's not as bad as it looks." Spike was standing in the door to the living room, rolling something in his fingers.

"How do you know?" Helplessly, Xander sifted through the pile. Admissions forms, medical reports, assessment forms, quarterly report forms, forms verifying the existence of other forms, everything in triplicate. At the top of everything was the heavy, owlish stamp of the Council, and below that the print was miniscule. His head throbbed just looking at it.

"Because I've done it." Spike sounded patient. He was holding something out, whatever he had between his finger and thumb. Xander frowned at him, stuffing the papers back into the envelope. "Half of it's rubbish, you can forget all about it."

"Yeah? Which half?"

"You're just tired," Spike said. "Have a kip and we'll go through it when you wake up."

It was on the tip of Xander's tongue to snap, Fuck you, I'm not tired, but he didn't. Barely. He turned and let the packet fall heavily back onto the disassembled mail table. When he turned back, Spike's hand was still out. "What is that?" he asked, hearing the petulance in his own voice, but reaching out automatically.

Spike dropped the missing screw into his palm. "Go to bed," he repeated gently. "You look like you could sleep for about a week."