Meet The Master

By Michele

Chapter One

"No." Xander rolled over on his side and presented his back to the annoyance currently in his room.

Spike simply walked to the other side of the bed and looked down at the boy. "Oh, come on, Xander! It'll be fun."

"I said no, Spike, and I mean it." Burying his head under the pillow, Xander hoped to block out the voice.

The vampire pulled the pillow away from the dark head and held it away from Xander's outstretched hand. "Why not? It's not like you have anything else to do."

"I do have things to do, I'm just resting until I go do them. So go away." Once again, Xander rolled over and tried to ignore Spike.

"Yeah, I can see how busy you are, what with you laying in bed and all."

"Do I have to pull out the pointy stick to get you to leave?" With a sigh, Xander sat up and glared at Spike.

"Look at it this way: You'll be learning something about vampires that even the Slayer doesn't know. Maybe even be able to use it save the day sometime."

Xander shook his head. "Nope, not going to work."

"Fine. I guess I'll just have to play dirty then. How about you come with me or I tell demon girl just why you don't want to have sex every night anymore?"

Xander dropped his eyes and picked at the loose threads on the quilt. "I don't know what you're talking about, Spike."

Feeling that victory was finally within sight, Spike pressed on. "Oh no? Well, how come demon girl isn't here right now, hmm? And how long was she here last night? The night before?"

Xander's head shot up. "Hey! That has nothing to do with me! Anya has been spending time with Willow, Tara and Buffy because she wants friends. I didn't tell her to stay away."

"And she has this sudden need for friends because..."

"I don't know." Xander began uncertainly before catching himself. "It's none of your business anyway! I'm glad that she's trying to fit in more and make friends. I'm happy that she wants to do sleepovers and shop and talk about. whatever it is that women talk about when they're together."

"Yeah, sure, right. Whatever you say. So, you come with me tonight and I won't tell demon girl why, even when she is here, you don't want to have sex."

How could Spike possibly know any of this? He'd barely admitted the problem to himself, there was no way Spike could know. "And just how is it that you know any of this, anyway? You psychic now?"

"I'm a vampire. I lurk, I listen, I blackmail."

He doesn't know anything, he's bluffing. Xander felt somewhat relieved. "Remind me again why I'm not supposed to stake you?"

A self-satisfied smile appeared on Spike's lips. "None of you lot really wants to stake me. You'd miss me if you did that."

"Uh huh. Try again." Xander flopped back down onto the sofa bed and pulled the quilt up to his chin. It's not fair! Everyone else is off doing things, having a life, and I'm stuck here waiting for my not-so-demony anymore, almost like a real girl-girlfriend to decide she wants my company. Damn! This has got to stop!

"You know what? Never mind. Turns out I do feel like going out after all. So, let's just go." Xander threw the covers back and got out of bed, still fully dressed except for his shoes.

Spike's lip curled in disgust at the flowery shirt. "You can't go dressed like that."

"What's wrong with what I have on?"

"Day-glo colors tend to attract attention and will definitely alert the prey."

"Fine. I'll change. But if this is some kind of trick.." Xander let the threat hang as he crossed the room to the chest of drawers.

"I just want to hunt, Xander and it's just not as much fun doing it alone.. especially since I can't actually kill anyone. But I promise you'll have so much fun you'll be begging me to take you again tomorrow."

With a snort of disbelief, Xander began digging through the drawers for something to wear that was a single dark color. 'Cause I'm going hunting.with Spike.. I hate my life.

---

Xander looked up from the bowl of cereal that was his dinner and scowled at the intruder. "Not you again!"

"You had fun last time, didn't you?" Spike flopped down into what he thought of as his sleeping chair and lit a cigarette.

"No." Xander continued munching on his Capt. Crunch and went back to watching the television.

"You are a very poor liar."

"Spike, I did not have fun. Where was the fun in slogging through dirty, smelly alleys, getting scratched up from our little sojourn into the woods, stepping in a pothole the size of a Buick and twisting my ankle and then nearly getting my head ripped off by a demon you just had to piss off?"

"The pothole wasn't that big, you're just clumsy. But you did have fun. A person not having fun does not look like you did. You enjoyed yourself, despite the few mishaps."

"I'm not debating this anymore. Go. Away."

"I'll let you in on a few more vampire secrets."

"No."

"We'll stay out of the woods."

"No."

"We could pick up some birds instead of hunting."

"I don't need a 'bird', I have one. No."

"We won't get into that again. I'll teach you how to fight so the Slayer doesn't try to leave you behind all the time."

"What part of 'No' don't you understand? Are you suicidal again? Is that it? Are you trying to drive me so nuts that I'll stake you?"

"You are really repressed, Xander."

"What? What does. never mind, I don't think I want to know."

"You are afraid of enjoying yourself too much. Afraid you'll find something you like and then it'll be taken away. You liked hunting. You liked being out with me. You had fun lurking about and being the dangerous thing in the shadows instead of the victim for a change."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Yes, you do."

"You aren't going to leave until I agree to go with you, are you?"

"No."

"This time I get to pick where we hunt, got it?"

---

"I don't think you've really gotten the concept of hunting down yet."

"You hunt your way, I'll hunt mine. Now shut up."

"But this is a supermarket!"

"You agreed that I could pick the hunting grounds and I'm hunting up some Twinkies, peanut butter and juice. Why don't you go bully the butcher into giving you a snack?"

"Is this going to be the sum total of the hunting tonight?"

"If you don't stop bugging me, yes."

"Fine. I'll be out front. But if you're not out there in fifteen minutes, I'm going without you." Spike stomped away, pushing a stock boy out of his way as he went. After a yelp of pain and a string of unidentifiable curses, he was finally gone.

"Okay, Twinkies, aisle six. Peanut butter, aisle four and juice, aisle ten. Right." Xander slipped a basket over his forearm and went hunting.

---

"Will you stop with the crinkle, crinkle?"

"I need my energy. Some of us are not of the un-dead variety you know." Xander shoved a Twinkie into his mouth and chewed vigorously. "What are we hunting, anyway?" he asked around what remained in his mouth.

"Depends."

"Depends? We're hunting adult diapers?"

"What?"

"Never mind, just fill me in a little, would you?" After taking out a juice box from the backpack at his feet, Xander leaned back against the wall and speared the drink with the straw. The alley they'd been lurking in for the past twenty minutes was, as far as he could tell, a very low traffic area. They hadn't seen one single person, vamp or demon, just the occasional rat.

"I meant, it depends on how far you're willing to go, how serious about this you are."

"Still needing a few more specifics over here." He tossed the empty juice box in the general direction of the dumpster and leaned over and picked up his pack.

Spike huffed in irritation but bit back the harsh retort that was on the tip of his tongue. "Do you want some real action or do you just want to play at this? Do you want a fight or just scare the piss out of someone? Do you bloody well want to have some fun or not?"

"Oh. Well, why didn't you just say so?" Xander hoped that Spike hadn't been able to see the grin he couldn't stop at the vampire's exasperation. It really was just too much fun getting on Spike's nerves. "Um.. well. I guess if it won't get me killed or anything, we could go hunt something evil that needs a good killing. Oh, wait.. that would be you, wouldn't it?"

"Ha fucking ha. Very witty. Now will you answer the damn question?"

"I did. Let's go kill something evil -besides you- and try not to get me killed."

"Well, that would leave us with a two pound possessed puppy or maybe a really determined pair of demonic lemmings."

Xander snorted. "At least I could hold my own against a ten year old wielding a bat, unlike some vampires in this alley."

"Wielding? Been at the Watcher's thesaurus have you? Look, are we going to trade insults all night or are we going to actually get to the having fun part?"

"I'm having fun, you're the one with the short attention span." Xander swung his backpack up to his should and stepped further away from the wall. "But this alley is a little rank and I wouldn't mind getting out of it. So, where to?"

Spike narrowed his eyes and tried to make out Xander's expression in the darkness. "You're actually trusting little ol' me to pick the target? How do you know I won't pick a fight and then leave you to it?"

"You may be evil but, no matter what the other demons say, you're not stupid. Besides, who would you have to annoy when you got bored if you let me get killed?"

Spike shrugged and turned towards the mouth of the alley. The boy had a point about that. And Spike knew he wouldn't last a day if the rest of the Scoobies knew he'd gotten Xander killed. Even if they ignored him he was still one of them. "Come on then, let's find a not-too-dangerous-for-Xander demon."

---

"Ow! Watch it!" Xander pulled away from the hands trying to get his shirt off.

"You have a dislocated shoulder, idiot. I need to be able to see to pop it back in."

"No popping! There will be absolutely no popping of any of my body parts!"

"You want to go to the hospital then?"

"No. Be a little hard to explain claw marks way too big for a dog." With his good hand, Xander pulled at the hem of his partially shredded t-shirt. After a few seconds of tugging and lifting he dropped his hand and sighed. "Fine, help me get this off, would you?"

"My pleasure."

"Better not be," Xander mumbled. He lifted his right arm to help Spike maneuver his shirt off and didn't comment when the neckline nearly strangled him going over his head. Or when the materiel scraped across the four long, still oozing blood, gashes on his back. But he couldn't hold back the gasp when the material slid over his left shoulder.

"Sit down on the bed and brace yourself. I'm going to have to pull real fast and hard and then push it back in place."

"Why do I have to be on the bed?" Xander asked suspiciously.

"'Cause when you pass out from the pain, I don't want to have to haul your ass off the floor. Now sit down and stop whining."

Xander sat as instructed and grabbed onto the bed frame under the thin mattress. "You've done this before, right?"

"Yeah, pretty regularly for a while there. Don't worry, pet. You'll only be in agonizing pain for a minute or two. Once it's back where it belongs your shoulder will be sore but it won't hurt."

Xander didn't bother asking what 'pretty regularly for a while there' meant because Spike had already taken a hold of his arm. There was a white hot flash of pain, the feeling of bone against bone and then blessed numbness as his shoulder literally popped back into place.

"There. All done. Wasn't so bad, was it?" Spike grinned as Xander heaved a sigh of relief and experimentally rolled his shoulder.

"You could have warned me you were going to start, but, no, it wasn't so bad." He looked over at the smug face and mumbled, "Thanks."

"Lie down on your stomach and we'll see about those nasty claw marks next."

"You're only doing this because you know it's all your fault that I got hurt and you don't want me to tell Buffy."

"Think what you want, but it wasn't my fault that you didn't bring the proper weapons for the job. Now lay down."

Xander ignored the command and stayed upright. "It's my fault that you didn't bother to mention that we'd be fighting one of the few demons on the planet that can only be killed using bamboo? I mean, who carries bamboo around with them? I got wooden stakes, I got crosses, holy water, even a nice high silver content knife, but bamboo?"

"If you'll remember, I didn't pick the fight. He jumped out of the bushes at us. And I did tell you to run towards the Japanese Gardens. Now lay down."

"Yeah, without telling me why! From now on, you need to be a little more specific in your commands. If you'd said, 'Run toward the Japanese Gardens because we need bamboo', I might have actually done it. But no, you still think you can just order people around and they'll obey without question. In case you haven't figured it out yet, I don't trust you."

Spike rolled his eyes and snorted in amusement. Even with the tantalizing smell of Xander's blood in the air he was having too much fun arguing with the boy to take any real offence at his words. "I'll try to remember that next time. But since I don't fancy having to explain to Slutty why I let you bleed to death on your own bed, will you please lay your ass down and let me look at your back?"

Xander's eyes widened and he reached around with one hand to feel his back. His hand came away smeared with blood and he paled. "I'm still bleeding?"

"Not as much as before." Spike leaned over and snatched Xander's t-shirt off the floor, holding it up for the boy to see. "This soaked up quite a bit. You didn't feel it?"

"I guess my shoulder hurt more." Xander stared at his hand for a moment and then tried to grab the shirt out of Spike's hand to wipe it.

Spike tossed the shirt away before Xander could grab it. "No need to waste it."

"Huh?" But he got his answer when Spike wrapped his fingers around Xander's wrist and brought the blood smeared hand to his mouth. Xander resisted but Spike was stronger. He could only watch, eyes wide, as Spike delicately and with obvious pleasure, licked his hand clean.

When it was over, Xander shivered and stared at his own hand in amazement. Who would have thought that hands could be so sensitive that way?

"Now lay down." Spike's voice was a little husky but he didn't figure that Xander would notice since he was still staring at his hand like it was a biology experiment. "XANder!"

Xander blinked a few times and shifted his gaze to Spike. "Oh, right, laying down." He toed off his shoes and crawled up on the bed, flopping face down once his head was near the pillow. He heard Spike moving around behind him and then the sofa bed creaked as the vampire shifted his own position.

"Doesn't look too bad. I don't think you'll need stitches or anything. Do you have any of those little butterfly things to hold the edges together?"

"In the bathroom cabinet. Spike?"

"Hmm?"

"Why did you. how come it. why didn't I." he trailed off, unable to ask any of the questions he had.

"Why did I lick your hand when I said I wouldn't even bother to bite you if I could? How come it felt so good and why didn't you think it was disgusting?"

"Yeah." Xander buried his head in his pillow and hoped Spike couldn't see how embarrassed he was. There must be something really wrong with him if he was getting turned on by Spike licking his hand.

This was an unexpected opportunity to humiliate and degrade but was it worth the momentary satisfaction as opposed to the possible long term benefits of handling it a little differently? Xander really was a good companion when he was away from the influence of the Slayer and the witch. And Spike didn't exactly have a gaggle of other people waiting around to entertain him. So. "You're not the moron you pretend to be, you already know the answers. Don't move, I'll be right back."

The bed shifted again as Spike headed to the bathroom. Xander could hear him rummaging around in the medicine cabinet, the water turning on and off and then he was back.

"Do you know that you have everything except disinfectant in there? The way you lot get into scraps you'd think you'd own gallons of the stuff." Spike sat down on the edge of the bed and started wiping the dried blood off Xander's back with a wet washcloth.

"I usually get patched up at Giles' and trust me, he does have gallons of the stuff." Xander fell silent except the occasional hiss of pain whenever Spike got too close to one of the gashes. If he closed his eyes and kept quiet, maybe he could pretend it wasn't Spike behind him, gently washing his back like he really cared if Xander got an infection or not.

"They're still bleeding a bit, do you want me to go ahead and close them up or leave them for now?"

"Giles always said to leave those kind of things open until they stopped bleeding. Something about letting the body get rid of any ooiges the demon might have had on his claws."

After a pause, Spike cleared his throat and asked, "Giles said 'ooiges'?"

Xander chuckled and shook his head against the pillow. "Well, no. I don't understand half of what he says when he's in lecture mode but I think that was the gist of it." When Spike didn't say anything after a few minutes, Xander turned his head the other way to see why he was so quiet all the sudden.

Spike was in full vamp mode, staring at Xander's back, almost shaking from the control it took to keep from falling on the boy and sucking him dry. Well, at least trying to suck him dry until the chip went off and caused his head to explode. There was no way anyone could have thought of a worse torture than this. So close to the thing that defined his world and yet, unable to have it. Being unable to have human blood didn't usually hit him so hard, but having it literally right in front of him, the delicious smell surrounding him, having tasted just a little.

"You can if you want. I mean, I know I probably don't taste that great but. you did fix my shoulder and stuff and."

Spike snapped his eyes up to meet Xander's to see if he was serious. "Trust me, pet, you taste wonderful." Without giving the boy time to change his mind, Spike flattened himself to the bed and set his tongue to work lapping up every drop that oozed out of the four gashes.

---

Xander yawned, cracked open his eyes and remembered just in time not to stretch. It had been two nights since he'd fallen asleep while Spike licked his back. Two nights since he'd last seen the biteless wonder. Not that he'd gone looking for him or anything, or that he even really wanted to see him. Still, he'd been a strangely, disturbingly, disappointed when he'd woken up after a few hours and found him gone.

Reaching around awkwardly, Xander gently probed what remained of the gashes. Not anywhere close to completely healed but it felt like they'd healed enough to take off the butterfly thingies. Of course it would help tremendously if he could see the damn things but since there was no full length mirror down here, he'd just have to go by touch.

It didn't really surprise him that he was healing faster than normal. It was much easier to just assume it was some kind of vampire thing and let it go at that. There was no way he was going to ask Spike to explain it because that would mean bringing up the fact that he'd let a vampire lick him in the first place. and that he'd enjoyed it. And it wasn't like he could really go ask Giles about this kind of thing, either.

The phone on the end table rang and Xander snatched it up before it could ring a second time.

'I just wanted to let you know.'

"Anya?" Xander interrupted. "Anya, where the hell are you calling from? I can barely hear you over the racket."

'The bus station. Listen, I wanted to tell you.'

"What are you doing at the bus station?"

'If you would stop talking, I will tell you. Buffy is going to see her father in L.A. and I'm going with her. We're all going shopping at some store that is very expensive.'

"Who is 'we'?"

'Haven't you been listening? Buffy, Willow, Tara, Cordelia and I are going shopping in L.A. So I wanted to tell you we would not be able to have sex until I get back. Oh, and Buffy said you and Giles will have to patrol until she gets back. Not tonight, though, she already did her stuff before we got to the bus station.'

"Right. Fine. Have a good time."

'You sound angry. Why are you angry?'

"I'm not angry. Go have a good time with your friends and I'll see you when you get back." He hung up the phone before she could say anything else that would make him angry.

"Who was that?"

Xander was half-way off the bed before he realized who it was. "Spike! What are.. did you just come from upstairs?"

"Yeah, the folks are out and Uncle Rory is snockered. Nicked some ice cream from the freezer." He held the tub out towards Xander. "Want some?"

"No, I don't want any ice cream. What were you doing upstairs?"

"I told you, I was getting ice cream. Who were you talking to on the phone that's got you so pissy?"

Xander pushed himself up on the bed until he was leaning against the sofa back. "It was Anya and I'm not pissy. I just don't like to wake up to a girlfriend going off to have fun without me and getting the crap scared out of me by ice cream stealing vamps. What time is it, anyway?"

"Half seven." Spike sat himself down at the little kitchen table and continued to spoon ice cream into his mouth between sentences. "So, demon girl.. can't even really call her that anymore, can I?" Bite. "I mean, she's gone off and gotten friends and hobbies and such, just like a real girl." Slurp. "Not the least bit exotic or exciting anymore, is it? Oh well, that's the breaks."

"I don't know what you're talking about. Anya's a good girlfriend. I'm glad she's." The sight of Spike's scarred eyebrow raised and his lips curling up at the edges stopped Xander from continuing. The damn bloodsucker knew entirely too damn much about Xander's tastes. "Okay, fine. I admit it. Once she started being more like a real girl, the passion really wasn't there anymore. But there's more to our relationship than just sex."

"Yeah, sure, whatever." Nibble, slurp. "I'm sure it'll all work out just fine. Before you know it, you two will be happily married with three or four snot-nosed kids, a house in the suburbs with a white picket fence and a thirty year mortgage." Bite, swallow. "You'll come home from your sixty hour a week job every night just in time to see the kids snug in their beds before you fall into exhaustion into yours. Yep, sounds like the life you've always wanted."

"No, that's not what. That's not what either of us want."

"Well, I know it's not what you want. But has Anya ever told you what she wants now that she's human? Or have you ever even discussed it with her?" Scrabble against the bottom for the last bits.

"No, not exactly, but."

"She's getting real caught up in the human world and the human world is full helpful advice about what women should want." Mouthful, lick the spoon. "If I were you, I would have some fun while you're still young enough and free enough to do it."

"Okay, Spike. I get your point. And I suppose you know just the sorts of things I should be doing before I enter my own form of hell?"

Spike set the now empty tub of ice cream on the table and stood up. "Well, now that you mention it, I do know of a few things."