Forward to Time Past by Unbridled Brunette

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Chapter 57

It was a long walk back to the cemetery, and, under other circumstances, Spike might have enjoyed it. The autumn air was still and cold, the silent woods and misty fields bathed in the faintly orange glow of a harvest moon; a century ago, he would have written a poem about it. Not now, though. He hardly even noticed the beauty around him because it was after two a.m. and reaching the crypt was the only thought in his mind.

The tasks outlined by the Dark Suit (whose name he still did not know) had taken much longer than Spike had anticipated and they hadn’t been quite so simple. The delay had set his teeth on edge, but he’d said nothing about it, just as he’d said nothing about the blow to his head or the powerful shove into a wall that had left him with a limp in his left leg. No point in jeopardizing what still seemed like a golden opportunity, after all.

Golden but maybe not entirely perfect.

He gnawed on the inside of his cheek impatiently and then winced, carefully running his fingers over the gash that stretched the length of his cheekbone. His fingertips came away stained with blood and something else, something clear and tinged in yellow. His bottom lip was split—no chewing on that either—and the lower part of his left eye socket throbbed. Something was wrong with his hip—he didn’t know what and he didn’t want to—but it made him drag his left leg like the humpbacked accomplice in a horror film. None of it particularly bothered him; he’d been wounded plenty of times before and far worse than this. It was just that the limping put him even further behind, and she might have left already. And he had to—had to—see her.

The tightness in his chest finally began to relax as he passed through the cemetery gates, his boots slipping a little on the damp grass as he quickened his pace. His head throbbed and his hip screamed in protest with each footfall, but he was too focused on the ultimate goal to even notice it.

Buffy. Buffy. Buffy.

He smelled her before he saw her, caught her scent even before he wrenched open the crypt door. The vague sweetness of violets and the distinctive musky smell of her flesh sent a pleasant shiver down his spine, and he pressed the heel of his hand against the heavy iron door, leaning against it for a moment before pushing it open.

Get a hold of yourself, you sodding idiot.

A few slow, deep breaths and he thought he had. He didn’t throw open the door, didn’t rush in like some foolish, lovesick child. He kept his dignity.

But beneath the calm façade, his knees were shaking.

She was sitting on the armchair, her head tilted away from him and slightly bowed. She didn’t startle at the sound of the door opening, didn’t even turn, and he knew she must be too lost in her thoughts to have heard it. There was something small in her hands, something that she cradled as carefully as if she were holding a baby bird. Spike had to take a few steps forward to see what it was she held.

Her ring.

He stopped dead, suddenly afraid to move, to breathe, to break whatever spell it was that had caused her to touch it. He’d tried to give it to her once before, had pushed it into her hand and told her that it was hers, that it had always been hers, but she wouldn’t take it. She hadn’t been cruel about it, just pressed it back into his palm and didn’t say a word. It had hurt him, but he hadn’t said anything. Anyway, her eyes and her hands and her mouth had provided temporary relief, if no understanding as to why she felt she needed to decline the tribute he had carried for her for so long. He hadn’t put it back into his pocket after that; he’d placed it beside the candles that lined the windowsill. Now, she was holding it.

His injured hip threatened to betray him and Spike quickly braced himself on the sarcophagus, knocking over a stack of books in the process. Buffy looked over at him sharply. Her eyes were cold, closed like doors, and Spike immediately knew that he had done something wrong; he also knew what it was.

Buffy pushed herself out of the chair and made her way to the door, dropping the ring-box into the pocket of his shirt as she passed him.

“I’ve got to get going. I’m getting up early to make Dawn breakfast before she goes to school, and I need to get some sleep.”

Jesus Christ.

He followed her as quickly as his misused body would allow, offering an excuse in a shaky tone that attempted to mask his anger. After the night he’d had—after all the things he’d gone through for her—was a little bloody sympathy too much to ask?

Of course, Buffy had no idea where he’d been, or what he’d done, or that it had all been for her benefit. Nor had she noticed his injuries in the darkness of the crypt.

“You know that I don’t have a lot of time; I told you I couldn’t keep spending all night here. Is it so hard for you to set aside two hours in your busy schedule to wait for me?”

“I moved as fast as I could, love. Do you honestly think I’d go off just for the hell of it? Just to piss you off?” She had sped up, and Spike, gritting his teeth to keep from cursing, attempted to do the same.

The unevenness of his gait as he crunched across the fallen leaves at the edge of the cemetery finally made her turn.

“My God,” she whispered. The glow of a security light allowed her to see him clearly for the first time, and she was visibly shocked by his injuries. “Spike, what in the world happened to you?” A nanosecond later, she was right in front of him, leaning up to touch his cheek, his eye, his mouth; examining each wound and moving so gently that it hardly even hurt.

“Got delayed,” he answered a little bewildered by the abrupt turnabout. “I wasn’t trying to—”

“Did something attack you?” Her fingertips grazed his jaw line and suddenly it became very hard for him to think.

“Well, yeah. Something did.”

The answer was not very far from the truth, not so far that he felt ashamed of it. At any rate, she was touching him again, and her expression was sweet and more than a little bit concerned; he sure as hell wasn’t going to jeopardize that with semantics.

“Vampires?”

“No…not vampires. Something bigger. Dunno exactly what it was, but I got the better of it eventually.” He shrugged nonchalantly, his gaze trained on the slow slide of her hand down his chest and onto his wounded hipbone, which suddenly didn’t seem so wounded after all.

“Spike, I’m so sorry. I thought—”

“Don’t know how you could think that,” he interrupted sullenly. “Knowing how I—how long I’ve—” He didn’t finish.

“It was a stupid thought,” she agreed with a humility that made him feel simultaneously satisfied and guilty. “And I behaved like a complete bitch.”

Well, yes, she had…but he wasn’t going to tell her that. Her voice was a little uneven and when he looked at her, Spike was alarmed to see that she looked almost on the verge of tears.

“Christ, pet. It’s done now, and sure as hell not worth crying about.”

Buffy cleared her throat and wiped at her eyes. To Spike’s relief, when she withdrew her hand she didn’t seem to be crying.

“Oh…it’s not just that,” she sighed. “It’s everything. All the stuff at the Magic Box and then I got home to find another letter from the mortgage company. It’s like they think I don’t know I’m three months behind and it’s necessary to remind me every week. There’s this number I’m supposed to call…the number of some financial representative of theirs whose sole job is probably to threaten to take people’s houses if they don’t cough up their payments. I don’t even have money for food, for God’s sake, let alone three thousand dollars to shut them up.”

“Money for food?” Spike echoed. Buffy looked sheepish.

“Well, I mean…there’s some food. Willow and Tara bought some; it’s not like we’re starving.”

“Nice of them to offer you some crumbs from their table,” he said snidely. “Too bad they can’t throw a little rent money your way.”

“Be fair,” she answered. “They don’t have any more money than I do.”

Bitches don’t have jobs, either, he thought savagely although he knew better than to say it aloud. His temper being what it was, pursuing that topic any further was probably not a good idea. Spike took a deep breath.

“You said something was happening at the Magic Box,” he began slowly.

“I told them.”

Her voice was soft enough he might not have heard right, but the shy and somewhat proud look on her face was unmistakable. The corner of his mouth twitched.

“You what?”

“I told them about us. I went to the Magic Box and told them everything. I—I told them that it didn’t matter. That the girls in the pictures…and all the other people you…Well, I told them that those people don’t matter, that who you were before isn’t important now because—”

Comprehension dawned and he stared at her.

“It was the Watcher wasn’t it? He gave you those photographs.” She nodded and a fierce wave of anger washed over him. “Son of a bitch! That hypocritical bastard, he—”

“You idiot,” Buffy cut in impatiently. “Listen to what I’m saying! It doesn’t matter. They all know about it now, and I chose you.”

The enormity of it wasn’t lost on him and, once again, he found himself speechless. He stood dumbly, amazed by the rapid shift in her mood, the way she smiled at him almost playfully as she wrapped her arms around his waist.

“Poor boy, you’re bleeding all over the place.”

Poor boy? Spike wasn’t sure if the shiver of pleasure he felt was an appropriate reaction to have—it certainly didn’t seem like a label that a vampire should appreciate—but he didn’t give the matter too much thought. Her mouth grazed over the swollen, bruised flesh and the cuts that crisscrossed it. Even the slightest pressure hurt, but it was her mouth, her touch, and she might as well have had her hands down his trousers; it all had the same effect.

“So, what happened anyway?” she whispered against his jaw.

“Nothing important.”

Spike braced himself, but she didn’t pursue that line of questioning any further. Perhaps, she didn’t really want to know; maybe she sensed that it was better that she not.

The ring-box in his shirt pocket pressed into both their chests as she leaned against him. She rubbed at it as if she were caressing his heart, and he knew it was her way of apologizing for using it to hurt him. He sighed, his eyelids drooping.

“It belongs to you, you know.” His voice was low, weary and content, almost a mumble. “Told you before that it’s yours. You should…have it. Even if you don’t want to…”

The rest of the sentence remained unspoken, although he could see that she understood what he meant. She glanced from the box to his face, her expression uncertain.

“Thank you,” she whispered finally and dipped her hand into his pocket. She didn’t open it, just tucked it into her jacket. Spike had figured she would choose not to wear it, but it gave him no pleasure to be proven right.

He swallowed.

“You’re welcome.”

There was a moment of awkwardness after that, but it didn’t last. Buffy rested her cheek against his chest and sighed, clouding the air with warmth and the scent of peppermint.

“I really do have to go,” she said regretfully. “I’ve been neglecting Dawn a lot lately and I want to make it up to her. I thought that if I’m there to make her breakfast before she goes to school in the morning, and there when she gets home in the afternoon, then it would almost be like…”

“Like your mum was still alive?” he suggested.

“Well, as much as it can be anyway.”

Spike nodded. “Guess she’d like that…to spend time with you. They left her pretty much to her own devices while you were away, I think. It’s why she was so quick to forgive yours truly for his past indiscretions. She was lonely.”

Nothing in his bland expression would have suggested the disappointment he felt, the jealousy. As much as he loved the Bit, he would have felt no compunction about cutting into her quality time with her sister. It had been a hellish night all around and he didn’t want to let her go.

“I thought…” Buffy began as she carefully extricated herself from his embrace. “I thought that maybe you could come with me. If you want to, I mean. If you’d like to…”

Like to? There was nothing he would enjoy more than going to her house and flaunting their relationship before her bigoted, stupid friends. But he reluctantly dismissed the idea. If he went with her, it would be with the understanding that he would stay with her. Maybe all day. Doing that would cause all his other plans to unravel and, judging from what she’d said tonight, time was running short. Once again, his own personal comfort would have to be sacrificed in order to ensure hers.

So, Spike heaved a sigh to let the universe know how unhappy he was and then gently declined her offer.

“Can’t right now, love. I’ve got to stop here a bit before making another trek across town. Got a couple of bones might need sorting out. Give me a few hours to rest, yeah?”

Buffy didn’t seem put out by the request, nor did she ask him for a timeframe in which he might appear. If she had, he thought he could have predicted it with fair accuracy. After all, the Sunnydale Regional Bank opened its doors at nine o’clock.

At the bank, they looked at him suspiciously.

It was annoying, but Spike tried to view it objectively. He’d shown up a bare five minutes after the employees unlocked the door—had even brushed past a couple of stragglers on his way inside. Spike had been worried about his blanket. He knew he couldn’t show up with his head under a piece of ragged wool; they’d probably call the police. The day was overcast and cool, with a rare threat of rain. The clouds helped some but certainly didn’t guarantee him any real safety, so he had spent a couple of hours rummaging through the miscellaneous junk he’d gleaned from the dump over the past few months, hoping to assemble some type of armor against the daylight. There weren’t a lot of clothes to pick from, but he did his best with a black broad-brimmed leather fedora, aviator sunglasses, and his duster; the rain meant he could also carry an umbrella, which offered extra protection. At any rate, he managed to arrive at his destination without catching fire.

Now, the bitch at the reception desk was staring at him as if he had just descended from a flying saucer. He ignored her and made his way to the nearest teller.

“Yes, sir?” the teller asked, taking a careful inventory of his outfit. One hand slipped from her countertop and disappeared from view; Spike wondered if she had put it on the emergency buzzer in case he decided to pull a gun on her.

If only things were that easy.

He plucked a blank deposit slip from the stack by his elbow and scrawled the account number Dawn had given him across the bottom. At first, he’d worried that he would have to sign it, because forging a signature he’d never even seen would be impossible, but luckily the bank didn’t require a name. He shoved the slip at the teller.

Her eyebrows rose as she read it.

“I think you wrote the amount in the wrong slot, sir.”

“No, I didn’t,” he snapped, digging into the pocket of his duster. The teller’s eyes widened when he began to count out his money, fifty crisp one hundred dollar bills, which he then pushed across the countertop to her.

Suspicious now, the teller counted the bills, drawing a line across each one with a yellow-tipped marker to see if they were genuine. Spike had considered the possibility himself and had wondered what he would do if they turned out to be counterfeit. Beat the guy’s arse, of course. But what else? Buffy needed real money and fast. He peered across the counter, restlessly bobbing on his heels until the teller had proven all the bills to be authentic.

The woman seemed surprised, but she printed out a receipt for him and thanked him in the most insincere tone possible. Spike pocketed his receipt, displayed two fingers at the receptionist on the way to the door, and then exited the building with an overwhelming sense of relief.

The public library was Spike’s next stop. When he stepped inside, the librarians looked at him with the same suspicion as had the bank tellers, but it didn’t bother him because he didn’t have to interact with them. There were computers in the back of the room and he used one to type up a letter, keeping it simple and fairly short to avoid arousing suspicion. Next stop: the post office for an envelope and stamp. Not that he actually intended to mail the thing, of course, but he had to make if look as if he had. He figured if Buffy noticed that the post office hadn’t branded the stamp, she would just assume the employees were incompetent idiots; but he did dog-ear the envelope and rubbed a few smudges of dirt across it to make it look as if its journey to her mailbox had been an arduous one.

Then, finally, he could go to his girl.

Buffy should have known better than to attempt something as ambitious as pancakes on her first day as a chef. She had catalogued all the food in the pantry the day before and perused several of Joyce’s cookbooks (all with crisp pages and stiff spines; her mother hadn’t been much of a cook either) until she found one that looked simple enough. There were only six steps involved, but somehow it all went wrong: the batter was lumpy and the butter scorched when she used it to grease the skillet. The bowl tipped and she accidentally poured twice the amount she should have into the pan, and then none of the oddly shaped flapjacks would cook right, burning on the outside while still oozing in the middle. When she tried to flip them, she overestimated her own strength and threw one into the hood above the stove. In the end, she and Dawn ate Lucky Charms for breakfast.

She was still trying to scrape dried batter off the walls when the front door banged open.

Her immediate thought was of Spike. Although he hadn’t given her an exact time, she had a feeling he would come early. She certainly didn’t expect Giles or one of her friends. Tara and Willow were avoiding her, tiptoeing through the house and leaving for their classes without saying goodbye. Giles was probably at the Magic Box, dusting inventory and gnashing his teeth; Anya was counting money and saying things that were completely inappropriate. And Xander—

Well, she wasn’t expecting him, either, and it came as quite a shock when she stepped into the foyer and found him kneeling at the foot of the staircase. He jumped slightly when she said his name.

“Sorry,” he said, letting go of the measuring tape in his hand and letting it snap back into its case. “I didn’t hear you walk in.”

“What’re you doing?” She almost added the word “here,” but she was afraid it would sound accusatory. After the scene in the Magic Box the night before, Buffy certainly didn’t want to risk losing the civility between them now.

“Oh, well…” Xander stood up and motioned vaguely at the newel post. “Willow told me it was getting loose. I checked and there’s a crack running up the back side, so I thought I’d help you guys out and replace it. I don’t have to be at the jobsite until eleven, so I came by to take some measurements. Maybe on Saturday I can…” His voice trailed away.

Buffy gaped at him. As far as she was concerned, they hadn’t parted on the best of terms the night before; it seemed odd that he would show up at her house the very next morning to make repairs. Then, she noticed the look on his face, shy and apologetic, and she realized that the carpentry work was just his way of trying to make amends.

“Do you understand now?” she asked him. He flushed.

“Not exactly. I mean, the overlooking his past thing I can see. Like you said, I’ve done it myself, with Anya. It’s just the being in love with Spike…when you consider all the things he’s done to you…” Buffy’s face clouded and he added quickly, “But the why isn’t really important—it’s none of my business—and—and I’m your friend. I guess I couldn’t really call myself one if I wasn’t willing to support you.”

“No, you couldn’t,” Buffy answered. She was still stunned. Of all her friends, she had assumed Xander would be the most disapproving. He had never liked her relationship with Angel—even before it had proven to be a liability—and in the eyes of pretty much everyone, Spike was a lot worse. She had expected to receive nothing but snide comments from Xander for a long time.

On an impulse, she threw her arms around him.

“You’re a good friend.”

Xander awkwardly returned her hug, forgetting that he was holding the tape measure and patting her back with that hand. He started to respond, but at that moment the front door was thrown open a second time. Buffy glanced over Xander’s shoulder.

It was Spike and he was wearing what was possibly the strangest outfit in the history of clothing.

“Well, looks like I walked in on a Hallmark moment,” Spike said dryly. He pushed the mirrored sunglasses up on his forehead and added, “You want I should wait outside ‘til you’re finished?”

A look of annoyance crossed Xander’s face, but he kept his voice even when he answered. “Hi, Spike. I was just on my way out.” The words were strained but polite. When Xander bent down to gather his tools, Spike shot Buffy a look of puzzlement; he wasn’t used to having her friends speak to him as if he were a human being.

She shrugged.

“Xander’s going to fix the support post on the stairway and he was measuring it to see what kind of supplies to get.”

Spike walked into the foyer, throwing his hat, umbrella, and sunglasses onto the decorative table by the door and shrugging out of his coat.

“Getting wood for you, is he? Well, isn’t that all manly and thoughtful?”

“Spike.” Buffy whispered his name in a warning tone.

“What?” Spike's expression was sulky and not at all contrite.

“It’s all right,” Xander cut in, ostensibly addressing them both, though his eyes were trained on Buffy. “I was just leaving anyway. You guys just do…uh…whatever it is you do.”

Buffy waited until the door closed behind him, then she turned to Spike in exasperation. “What the hell was that all about? Xander actually came by to apologize for being so judgmental; he gets it now and he’s probably the only one who isn’t planning to make a huge issue out of it. Why did you have to behave like an ass? You’re going to make everything worse…”

Spike just looked back at her, his blue eyes as wide and innocent as they had been back in London. He waited politely until she had finished berating him, and then he pulled a thin sheaf of crumpled envelopes from the back pocket of his jeans.

“I grabbed your post out of the letter box on my way in.”

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