Disclaimer: Every time bec says Willow would bring out the puppy-dog in Spike, I try to tell her that the only puppy inside him is a rabid Rottweiler, but she doesn't listen. Since bec is, however, a goddess, and since all goddesses deserve their offerings, this NC-17 vignette is for her, and for all the other truly twisted adult FemFans (and other fans) who want to see the Rabid Rottweiler make nice with the Fluffy Bunny. It takes place after the events in my previous NC-17 FemFanFics, "All Too Human" and "…on the Highway of…", and was written before "Anne" aired. It is therefore, in an alternate buffyverse from the one we’ve seen in the show’s third season. As ever, I don’t own the copyright, Joss Whedon, the WB and Mutant Enemy do. This is just fanfic, no infringement intended.
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Time: Late September, 1998
Willow was absolutely ecstatic. Not only was Buffy back, but Angel was with her. Angel, whose soul Willow had successfully restored. Angel, who Willow just knew was destined to be the Slayer's One True Love.
Willow frowned. At the moment, Willow and Buffy seemed to be the only ones absolutely sure that this was his destiny. Angel himself was still too busy laboring under loads of guilt to believe he remotely deserved to be anything to Buffy at all. Of course, he had loads of things to feel guilty about; not only all the evil, nasty things he had done for the first one hundred and forty-five years he had spent as a vampire, but also the particularly nasty, vicious things he had done when he'd lost his soul again.
After the first time he and Buffy made love.
But it hadn't been his fault, as Buffy and Willow continually reminded him. Even Rupert Giles, the one Angel had hurt the most --by killing the woman Giles loved-- seemed to accept that. Why couldn't Angel?
Of course, there were others who weren't so quick to forgive, either. Xander, in particular, kept his distance. Which, Willow thought, was odd, considering that Xander had, in a way that hadn't been clearly explained to her, somehow helped Buffy get Angel out of Hell. Then, too, wherever Xander led, Cordy seemed to follow. Which was a whole other level of weirdness that hurt Willow's brain to think about.
Oz was cool. Too cool, maybe. He seemed completely neutral on the subject. On too many subjects, if it came to that. Willow and Oz were dating. They were making out. But he didn't seem in any hurry to do more than that for the moment. And Willow was finding that she herself was growing impatient.
She wasn't exactly sure why, but ever since Xander had returned from L.A., and especially when Buffy and Angel had gotten back as well, she had felt left out. As if there were some secret she didn't know. Additional meanings to what was said, additional nuances to tones of voice, facial gestures. As if her friends were speaking a second, cryptic language for which she lacked the key. A language that she gradually began to suspect had something to do with sex.
She knew Angel and Buffy were, well, intimate. That was what had started all the problems to begin with, costing him his soul and bringing back one of the most vicious demons who had ever stalked the earth. After everything they had gone through, no one in their right mind could begrudge Angel and Buffy their continued intimacy. Even Joyce Summers, Buffy's mom, seemed to be dealing with it...if only by pretending it wasn't going on.
Xander and Cordy were harder to figure. Willow was pretty sure that Xander was also in on the up-close-and-personal thing. But Cordy, the person with whom he would logically have been up close, seemed to be as unfamiliar with this second language as Willow. Which didn't make sense, at first.
Until Willow caught one unguarded glance between Xander and Buffy that seemed just a shade too private, that seemed to say too much. And then it hit her. Sometime during his lengthy stay in L.A., before they had rescued Angel, and probably before they knew it would be possible to rescue Angel, Buffy and Xander must have become intimate as well.
It surprised Willow how deeply the realization upset her. She had Oz, didn't she? She had given up on Xander when he had hooked up with Cordy, hadn't she? She was in love with her boyfriend, not with the boy she had grown up with, right?
Not with the boy who had walked toward her with an ice-cream cone in either hand, one summer's day, making her catch her breath at the sight of this tall, dark, broad-shouldered, easy-going stranger with the sexy smile directed right at her, Willow, who had suddenly taken the place of the skinny, gawky, obnoxious kid she'd grown up with.
Willow reminded herself that she wasn't still in love with Xander, and that if Angel didn't let it bother him that Xander and Buffy had, well, done what Willow was pretty sure they had done, then she shouldn't let it bother her, either.
Which was far easier said than done.
Still, she had more important things to think about, she admonished herself. Like the fact that she had mastered and successfully cast a spell as difficult and intricate as the one that had restored Angel's soul. Like the fact that she was learning new spells, finding new abilities on an almost daily basis, thanks to Miss Calendar's list of techno-pagan web-sites that Willow had found after the teacher had been murdered. By Angel.
Willow decided not to think about that, either. It hadn't really been Angel, after all.
So she clung to her happy, and tried to think of ways to help Buffy and Angel smooth over what was proving to be a fairly rough spot in their relationship. Intimacy or not.
Willow got back on the net, surfing through sites dedicated to the arcane; sites that could help her find something useful. Her parents had gone out of town so that her mom could look after an elderly relative who'd just had major surgery. A levelheaded, eminently responsible seventeen-year-old high school senior, Willow was deemed capable of fending for herself during the week they would be away. So Willow had as much time as she needed to play Net Girl. It took her a while, but finally, she came across something that might help.
It was a spell called "Faithful Heart", and it was supposed to reveal the true loves of the spell's subjects. Willow perked up. This was perfect. If she could prove to Angel he was meant to be with Buffy, that there was no one else out there who could ever make her happy, maybe he'd stop trying to convince her he wasn't good enough for her and just accept what was between them.
And maybe she could convince another party that the Slayer wasn't ever going to turn to him. Or that the girl he was settling for left a lot to be desired or...
Maybe she should forget about convincing Xander of anything, and stick to Angel and Buffy, Willow told herself firmly. She scanned down the page, looking for the ingredients she would need. Most of them were fairly common. She had already laid in a supply of hawthorn and rue because it seemed every other spell she tried called for them. She was relieved that this spell called for eye of newt rather than bat wing, because she had salvaged a supply of newt eyes from the science lab. She could get bat wing from one of the stores that specialized in the occult, but hated to think of the poor things dying just so she could cast a spell. Rat-tails were an entirely different matter, but the spell didn't require those, either.
There was, however, one ingredient Willow didn't have on hand. Surprising, really, when she considered how many of the spells she read used it. But then, those spells were almost always as unsavory as the missing ingredient: earth from a freshly dug grave.
It wasn't exactly an ingredient you could store, like dried bat-wing or preserved newt eye. The grave had to be less than one week old when you gathered the earth, and it only retained its potency for one week thereafter. This spell was further complicated by the requirement that you speak a charm over the earth every night for three nights before you did the final casting. Well, given where Buffy's patrols usually took her, gathering a bit of fresh grave dirt shouldn't be too....
Willow's eye was caught by another line of text as she continued to scroll. Well, wasn't that just perfect. The spell had to be cast on the night of the New Moon. Which was Sunday. This was Thursday. In order to have the dirt properly prepared, she would have to get it tonight.
She looked at the time displayed at the bottom of her screen. Great. It was nearly midnight. Thank heaven school was closed tomorrow, for some sort of teacher training deal. But Willow knew that Buffy was probably out patrolling right now, and wouldn't be available to help. Sighing, Willow downloaded the information to her disk, printed out the relevant pages, and headed toward her closet to gather the things she would need.
A stout stake and a large wooden cross were the first items she grabbed. Her garlic necklace had gone bad, and she hadn't replaced it yet. A vial of holy water fit into the pocket of the light jacket she donned, while an empty spice jar to hold the earth she needed was small enough to slip into the pocket of her skirt. Willow sighed, turning off her computer, and turning down her lights.
Her parents trusted her enough to give her a bedroom with its own stairway and veranda. Even if they had been at home she could have left without their knowing. But for seventeen years, there had never been any reason for them to think she would. She couldn't help feeling a little guilty as she went down the steps. Tonight, Willow was going to walk down those stairs and do something a little bit dangerous.
Not too dangerous, she assured herself as she quickly covered the few blocks to the nearest of Sunnydale's many cemeteries. She'd done this with Buffy quite a lot. Any vampires trying to rise had probably all left their graves by now, hopefully to be staked by Buffy. Other than that, what did she really have to fear?
It was harder to remind herself of that when she actually got to the cemetery. It was just a little too spooky. And it wasn't as easy to find a fresh grave as she had hoped, either. Sure, there were plenty of headstones for the current year --they were over a Hellmouth, after all-- but none seemed to be that recent. Reluctantly, Willow headed deeper into the graveyard.
She was so relieved to find what she was seeking at last, that she forgot what else she might find. Willow knelt by the grave of one Thomas Winston, aged 85, who, according to the dates on his headstone, had died only a few days earlier. Funeral flowers strewn over his grave hadn't completely wilted. Willow found she felt a bit odd about just taking the earth off the old man's grave. It seemed disrespectful. She sighed. Well, she was doing this in a very good cause. Willow said a quick prayer for the dead, drew out her jar, unscrewed the lid, and was scooping earth into it when the attack came.
The monster hurtled into her from behind, bowling her over, knocking the jar from her hand. Willow reached for the first weapon she could get to, the vial of holy water, pulling off the top and dousing her assailant.
Who was momentarily startled, but nothing more than that. Then the true horror of her situation came home to Willow. She'd been so focused on monsters of the supernatural variety, she'd forgotten that there were plenty of the mundane human sort about. And she was not really prepared to deal with one of those. The guy attacking her looked like one of the clean-cut frat boys who had nearly sacrificed Buffy and Cordellia to their snake-god last year. Except not as sane.
Frantically trying to get out her stake, which was at least some sort of weapon, being pointy and sharp, Willow began screaming at the top of her lungs. If she were lucky, someone in the houses across the road might just hear her. Or someone in a car driving by. Buffy and Angel if she were really lucky and they were still on patrol. She didn't even realize she was calling Buffy's name.
"Shut up!" her attacker snarled, backing up his demand with a slap to her face. Willow screamed harder. He drew his hand back for another blow.
Which never connected. The miracle happened. Frat-boy's hand was grabbed at the top of its arc, and used to haul his body off of Willow by main force. Sobbing, Willow rolled to her side and got to her feet, devoutly grateful that her luck was in, and that someone had come to her rescue.
Then she saw who had rescued her, and how, and wondered if her luck hadn't maybe been much farther out than she'd feared. A vampire held frat-boy in a deadly embrace, and was draining him dry in a few rapid, voracious gulps. Willow reached for the cross she had brought with her, bringing it up before her just as the vampire dropped frat-boy into an untidy, very dead, heap on the ground.
Willow clutched the base of the cross with both hands, afraid that one hand wouldn't be enough, she was trembling so. Vampires in general were bad enough, but this one was particularly bad. Even if he had helped Buffy save the world once. It didn't look like he was still interested in saving it. Except for dinner.
"The term your looking for is 'Thank you,' pet," Spike drawled in his markedly British accent. His pose was casual, relaxed. Although vamped out, Spike didn't look like he was about to spring for her throat, but Willow knew better than to trust to appearances.
"Um. Okay. Thank you," she said tremulously, not lowering the cross. "And please go away?" That hadn't come out as firmly as she'd intended, she realized. It sounded exactly like the hopeless plea it was. He realized it as well, and grinned at her, fangs flashing.
"No, pet. I don't think so." With preternatural quickness and inhuman grace, he lashed out with a vicious kick almost before she knew what he planned. The toe of his boot struck the joined arms of the cross with enough force to pry it from Willow's grasp and send it spinning across the cemetery. Willow fell to her knees, her tears drying. She was much, much too frightened for mere tears.
"Don't much care for crosses," Spike explained conversationally. Then he reached for her, drawing her up and into his arms. "You," he said gravely, despite the lively humor in his eyes, "were being rude."
"Sorry," Willow squeaked. Her heart began to pound so loudly, so quickly, she was terrified it would burst. Gee, what are the statistics on coronaries among seventeen-year-olds, anyway? she wondered in mild hysteria.
Spike decided he had teased her enough. He let his face resume its human appearance. Willow didn't look entirely reassured. He smiled. Perhaps she shouldn't be.
She did not remember, any more than Buffy did, but once Willow herself had spent a millennium with them in the Hell he had ruled as a Prince Infernal. Buffy had been his captive bride, but Willow had been a vampire, and one of the most beautiful, most deadly, most clever of the breed ever produced.
And Willow had also been, from time to time, his lover. So Spike was not surprised at the unexpectedly curvaceous form he could feel beneath the dowdy and concealing schoolgirl costume. He remembered every single curve with a great deal of affection.
But that was in a different reality than the one they now occupied, and the girl in his arms was trembling with fear, not desire. Not that fear didn't arouse its own lusts in a vampire. But she was Buffy's friend, and therefore, not someone he would hurt. Not anymore.
"Come on then, little girl" he said, releasing her. "Let's get you home."
"I...you're going to let me go?" Willow asked, not sure she should get her hopes up too high. He might just be toying with her. Yet, the way he had called her "little girl" argued otherwise. Because she was short and slender, Willow got called "little girl" all the time. Sometimes by well-meaning, clueless, adults who thought she'd be enjoy being found adorable. More often by overmuscled, overconfident, jocks or over made-up teen beauties, none of whom meant anything pleasant by it.
Willow loathed being called "little girl." Except not the way Spike had said it. Somehow, he made the words mean something entirely different than when anyone else said them about her. His next words reassured her further.
"I'm not letting you go anywhere alone at this hour in this part of Sunnyhell," Spike told her frankly. "Your Slayer would have a stake through my heart before I could say 'innocent bloody bystander' if I let anything happen to you." That, at least, was perfectly true. Willow decided it was okay to get her hopes up, at least a little. Another question occurred to Spike. "What the hell are you doing here without her, anyway?"
"Um. It's for a spell," Willow said.
"What is?"
"The earth. Which I am collecting. From the new grave." Spike raised his left, scarred eyebrow in inquiry. "For Angel," Willow finished, as if that explained everything.
"Angel sent you here?" Spike said incredulously.
"Ah, no. The spell is for Angel," Willow backtracked. Spike continued to look skeptical. "The spell that he knows nothing about because I haven't told him about it."
"Oh, lord," Spike began to laugh. "Spare me the explanations, love. This is getting too complicated. Just pick up your jar and lets get going, shall we?" Willow took a deep breath and did as he asked.
It was entirely too bizarre. She and her other friends had spent so many months fighting Spike, Willow knew exactly how deadly, how remorseless he could be. That he was tamely walking her home –reminding her, in the black leather trench coat he always wore, of a large, handsome, extremely vicious guard dog-- was a level of weirdness that outstripped even the weirdness of Xander and Cordellia.
Willow stole covert glances at him as he walked by her side. He didn't seem disposed to speak, which was of the good. Willow had no idea what she could possibly say to him. Looking at him was unsettling enough. It was sort of like having double vision, or one of those hologram card things she'd had as a kid, where you'd see a three dimensional image of, say, a beautiful princess, but if you tilted the card, the image changed to that of an ancient witch or fire-breathing dragon. And then you'd tilt it again, and it would change back.
Willow had always seen the monster; the deadly, implacable evil who made a sport of hunting her best friend. But she had also known, at least intellectually, that the face covering the beast was a particularly beautiful one. She just hadn't been aware, until now, of what that meant.
Beautiful. It wasn't the sort of word you usually applied to men, but it fit Spike. In profile you couldn't miss the high, sharp cheekbones beneath those compelling, night-black eyes, the wide brow, firm chin -- the mobile, sensual mouth. Oh, yes, 'beautiful' was not at all an inaccurate description of this particular demon. Even the way he walked and moved, all leashed power and lethal grace. But then, wasn't that true of so many predators? The stalking jaguar, the hunting wolf, the striking hawk. Except that ninety-nine out of a hundred vamps were ugly, clumsy and stupid. Spike, Angel and Drusilla were so the exceptions. Willow came out of her musings when her brain finally registered that the house she was passing by was the one on the corner of her street.
"I'm okay from here," she said, trying to sound confident. "My house is just up the block."
"Good," Spike said. "Then we don't have far to go." He smiled sardonically. Willow weighed her options, reluctantly decided she didn't have any, and turned down the street toward home. If Spike really wanted her dead, he'd probably have killed her by now. If he was just toying with her, he could rip her throat out before she could manage a scream. If she hadn't wasted all that perfectly good holy water on a perfectly useless target, she'd have taken her chances. But even her stake wouldn't do much good against this particular demon. If she pulled it on him, he would doubtless get rid of it as easily as he had gotten rid of her cross. And if he thought her holding a cross on him was rude, Willow shuddered to think how he would respond to her attacking him with a stake.
Then, too, it wasn't entirely impossible that he was on the level, for once. Unlikely, yeah, but not impossible.
The moment of truth was fast approaching. They reached the steps to her bedroom, and he climbed them just behind her. Reaching the veranda, Willow took a deep breath, turned, and faced him.
Then she took another deep breath, because he was just too deadly --and just too gorgeous-- to be that close to and not disturb her breathing.
"Um. Thank you for saving my life?" Again, her voice had done the pleading thing. Willow tried to sound more confident. "And walking me home. Which I am now. Home."
"So I see," he said pleasantly, making no move to leave. He also saw that her parent's car was not in the driveway, and that there were no other lights on in the house. And his vampiric senses could detect no other life nearby. Meaning that the lovely Willow was home alone. Which opened up a number of interesting possibilities.
"Well, okay." Willow said. How did one politely bid goodnight to a deadly monster that had just saved you from death at least, and probably the fate that was supposedly worse than? Willow tried again. "I would invite you in--"
"Why, thank you, pet!" Spike said, an absolutely wicked grin breaking across his face. Black lights danced in his eyes. Willow went into full panic mode.
"I said I would invite you in, as in, I'm not inviting you. In. To my house. Where you are not invited."
Spike laughed low in his throat, reached across to her bedroom door and twisted the handle gently. The locked door opened as if charmed. Which it probably was. Spike pushed the door open. His arm was definitely in her house. Specifically, in her bedroom.
"Too late, sweet," he chuckled. "It's all in the wording, you know, and you chose the wrong one. Would has such lovely connotations."
"Oh," Willow said, as she took that in. "You mean would as in wish to," she continued unhappily, as the enormity of her linguistic error became apparent.
"Or desire," he added helpfully. "As in 'I desire to invite you in.'" Something in his voice. How had he injected a note into his voice that raced along her nerves like a caress? Willow's heart began to do the scary rapid pounding thing again.
"Spike?" she said softly. "You aren't...um. I mean, you did just... eat." Not that she knew how many people a vampire could eat in a night. Buffy had indicated that they usually only took one every few days. But that didn't mean that they couldn't eat more if they wanted to.
Looking at the red-haired girl standing before him, her brown doe-eyes wide, the pulse of her jugular fluttering rapidly, Spike found that his appetite was indeed stirring: just not his appetite for blood. A fact that would not reassure her.
"If I were hungry, little girl," he said softly, "and if I wanted to go up against Buffy, you'd have found out about it by now." Which was perfectly true, he reflected. Spike pushed the door open wider.
There it was again, that note in his voice, this time when he called her "little girl." Common sense said danger; every other sense said not. Caught between the two, Willow hesitated, but she didn't really have a choice. She walked past him into her own bedroom. Hearing the door shut behind her, she knew he had followed her inside.
Whatever his ultimate intentions, Spike made no move to attack her. Yet. Instead he wandered over to the bookshelf against the far wall of her room, and began to scan the volumes. He picked out her poetry anthology and began to leaf through it, adding yet another level of weirdness to an already perfectly wiggy night.
Willow left him to his seemingly innocuous occupation and took off her jacket, hanging it up in the closet. She did not ask Spike if he wanted her to take his coat. Encouraging him to make his visit a long one was so not the idea. Instead, she retrieved the spice jar from her pocket and the pages from her printer. She glanced at her clock. Good. Midnight was still a few minutes off. Technically, it was still Thursday, and she still had the time needed to prepare the earth. She set the jar down, unscrewed the lid, and whispered the required charm. The first step in the enchantment completed, Willow replaced the lid, then turned back toward her unexpected guest.
"So, you don't want to go up against Buffy anymore?" she asked him. He looked up from the book.
"Didn't she tell you?" He seemed genuinely surprised. More: he seemed hurt. It was the expression in his eyes. Willow had the ridiculous, incongruous image of her vicious guard dog turning into a hurt puppy. Even as she realized the absurdity of the idea, she found herself rushing to reassure him.
"Oh, the alliance thing and Acathla? She told us about that. And that you saved her life in L.A. and let her stay with you?" Willow had wondered about that. Neither Buffy nor Xander had had much to say about that fairly astounding turn of events. Perhaps Spike would be more forthcoming. But her curiosity was destined to remain unappeased. Spike smiled, but said nothing. Willow went on.
"Xander said that you went with Buffy into Hell to rescue Angel. But it's not exactly like any of them has given a lot of details. Mostly, whatever happened in L.A. and in Hell seems to be stuff they don't really want to talk about."
"Yeah," he said, his tone soft, almost regretful. "I can imagine." Spike closed the book and replaced it, glancing at some of the other titles on her shelves. He still made no move toward her, no moves that seemed threatening at all.
"I...it just seems so weird, you trying to save Buffy instead of kill her," Willow admitted. "I wasn't there. In L.A., so it's harder for me to understand." She took a deep breath. "It's harder for me to trust you, like they do."
He turned away from the bookcase, and bent the midnight blackness of his gaze upon her. His eyes were truly amazing, and Willow found herself fascinated by the dark lights gleaming in their depths. Like the proverbial mouse before the serpent, Willow could not look away from his eyes.
"Really, little girl?" he said softly, moving toward her with that predatory grace she had recognized before. "When I've just saved your life? And probably more than your life?"
She was a smart girl. Smart enough to hear the words he hadn't said. Smart enough not to call him on them. Except that something inside her decided to override her brain and make the words come tumbling out before she could stop them.
"The question is, what have you saved me for?" she found herself saying, her voice as low pitched as his, her gaze still caught and held by the black depths of his own. Spike was so close to her, she could feel cold radiating from him the way a living body radiated heat. She began to tremble, terrified that she had gone too far. Terrified that she was going to go farther.
"Dessert?" he drawled, almost humorously. And then he did the last thing in the world Willow would have expected. Moving slowly, in a way that Willow couldn't convince herself implied danger, Spike reached out, gently cupped her face, and drew her forward into a kiss.