The Naked Truth
by Spring Summers 18-Apr-2004
=====================================================================================
BUFFY: Listen Skirt Girl, we are not going to SAVE him. We're going to KILL him. He knows who The Key is and there's no way he's not telling.
BUFFYBOT: You're right. He's evil. But you should see him naked! I mean really!
=====================================================================================
Now, with Dawn at school, Buffy finally had her chance, and she hurried down the basement steps on a mission.
As she reached the bottom of the steps, she caught a glimpse of black-pump clad feet, sticking out from under a canvas. There it was: The Buffybot. Unable to resist her techno-nerd impulses, Willow had fixed the bot the day after it had been damaged. But she had also respected Buffy’s wishes that it be turned off and put away. And Buffy had been possessed of a fiery itch for a few minutes alone with the bot ever since.
Buffy got closer and stared at the shrouded form. Then she took a deep breath and uncovered her likeness with one tug on the canvas. The Buffybot had apparently been turned off while she was in a very good mood. The big, irresistibly chipper smile on her face momentarily brought a similar feel-good smile to Buffy’s own - until she caught herself and stood up a little straighter. Ugh. The Buffybot was an abomination, after all. She’d been built as a sex toy for Spike – Spike, whose swollen lips she had brushed, just two days ago, with her own.
She had really kissed him, hadn’t she? She’d let her guard down - with Spike. Buffy shook her head in wonder at the surprisingly sweet memory as she gingerly lifted the Buffybot’s blouse to access the control panel. Then she stopped and stared, and found the sweetness going sour. There, on the bot’s belly was a small mole, exactly where Buffy herself had one. Had Spike paid that much attention during their fights? Buffy couldn’t resist lifting the side of bot’s skirt to look at her upper left thigh. And there it was, very high up, near the outer edge: a long, thin, horizontal white scar she’d had since a childhood accident. Buffy dropped the frilly skirt with a shudder. As she continued to check the robot for identifying characteristics, she tried to remember exactly what she had worn during every Spike-skirmish. God only knew when and how he had gotten a glimpse of what and where – because the more she looked, the more it seemed as if he’d drawn up a disturbingly – impossibly! - accurate and detailed set of blueprints.
Spike. There were times when she truly hated him. And could she really put anything past him? She opened the bot’s control panel and flipped a switch. It came instantly to life.
“Hi, Buffy!” chirped the bot.
“Hi, uh . . .”
“My name is Buffy!” The bot began to walk about the basement in her bouncy way, looking around and smiling.
Buffy sighed. “OK, listen, uh . . . Smiley. I want to ask you some questions.”
“I can answer questions!” said the Buffybot, nodding enthusiastically.
She seemed so very happy to serve, so eager to give, so wide-wide open. Buffy could not pin down exactly how the bot’s cheerful innocence made her feel, though some words came to mind: Uncomfortable. Ashamed. Maternal. What do you call that trio when they’re all rolled into one? Buffy had no idea.
“How long were you with Spike?” she asked the bot.
“26 hours, 7 minutes, and 43 seconds.”
A day or so. It wasn’t long, but it was long enough. Spike couldn’t have gone that long without spouting off about something. “Did he ever say anything to you about anyone named Glory or Dawn?”
“Dawn is my sister. She needs protection.” The Buffybot pulled a stake out of her pocket to show she meant business. “And Glory is a witless twit! I can kick her ass, no problem. I’m Buffy, the best Slayer, with the hottest little bod, there ever was!”
“OK,” said Buffy. She felt her anger at Spike, over the manufacture of the Buffybot, increasing. But she was also impressed by what he had done for Dawn, and grateful beyond the telling of it. The truth was that despite the irritating reminder of Spike’s lechery, the bot’s words were reassuring. Add to them the fact that Spike had allowed himself to be tortured rather than betray Dawn, and it should be enough. And it had seemed like enough, when she’d kissed him. But she had tossed and turned that night in bed, remembering Spike’s past treacheries and wondering if she was being a fool. So it wasn’t enough – not really. Because no matter how she thought about it, the fact was that Spike was a soulless vampire. And no matter how long she thought about it, she could not make sense out of his actions.
Buffy furrowed her brow, determined to get at the truth. “So, Spike talked to you about Glory and Dawn, then?”
“No. He had the information programmed in to me. So I could be you.” The Buffybot peeked into a box of memorabilia, and pulled out a sketch. “This is us!” she said.
“It’s me,” said Buffy, taking the sketch away from the bot and putting it carefully back into the box. “A friend of mine drew it.”
“I know,” said the bot. “Angel. He’s a buzzkill. He can’t make girls happy.”
Buffy found herself blushing, and her recent mixed feelings for Spike were being slowly replaced by something much more uniform and familiar: Pure infuriation. “You don’t know anything about Angel,” said Buffy to the bot.
“He’s a vampire with a soul – how lame is that?” asked the Buffybot cheerfully. She grinned at Buffy and continued: “How many vampires with a soul does it take to change a light bulb?”
Buffy gritted her teeth. She was certain she didn’t want to hear this, but she couldn’t stop herself: “I don’t know,” she said, “how many?”
“None, silly!” said the Buffybot, “Because he never screws anything more than once!”
Buffy’s nostrils flared. She had half a mind to find Spike this instant, so she could see about reopening a few of his wounds. He had made the bot, slept with it, programmed it in this vile way – it was loathsome. How could she have kissed him? She hated him. He was a gruesome black bug to be crushed beneath her heel. He, not the poor bot, was the abomination. She ran a hand through her hair, trying to calm herself.
“You didn’t laugh at my light bulb joke!” said the Buffybot with genuine concern. “How about this one, then? Knock, knock!”
Once again, Buffy gave in: “Who’s there?”
“Poofter!”
Buffy narrowed her eyes. “Poofter who?”
“Poof-tern around and I’m gone!!”
That tore it. “Stop talking about Angel!” she told the Buffybot firmly. “This is not about Angel! I woke you up to talk about Spike.”
“I know all about Spike,” said the Buffybot happily, “he is a vampire. He has blonde hair and blue eyes. He is 5 foot, 9 and 11/16th inches tall. When fully erect, his penis is –“
“Stop!!” said Buffy.
The bot stopped immediately and blinked at Buffy. Buffy blinked back and then stared at her, holding her eyes for a long moment.
What the hell. “Continue,” said Buffy.
“- 9 inches long, and its diameter is 1 and 5/8ths inches at its thickest point. His –”
“Stop!” Buffy pursed her lips in thought. This was very interesting information. It tasted good, like cold revenge, to hear it. She went over to the toolbox and pulled out a tape measure, trying to determine the reality of what the bot was saying.
“The 1 and 5/8ths inches - that’s the measurement if you – uh, wrapped the tape measure around it?”
“No,” said the bot. “The 1 and 5/8ths inches is the diameter. Not the circumference.”
“So he hasn’t been circumferenced, then?”
”I don’t understand what you mean,” said the Buffybot, “so I can’t answer, even though I’d like to.”
Buffy took a deep breath. “So the diameter is - what, then?”
“The diameter is the thickness of the cylindrical shape!” replied the bot. “The length of a straight line passing through the center of a circle.”
“Oh. Actually, I knew that.” Buffy played with the retractable tape measure a bit, first pulling out 1 and 5/8th inches, then 9 inches. She stared at it, then she suddenly smirked. “Nine inches my ass,” she said to herself. She turned toward the bot: “This information - Spike programmed it into you, right?”
“No” said the Buffybot. “The information is empirically derived! I know his height because I touched him all over, and I know his -”
“OK! OK! I get it!” Buffy closed her eyes. “It’s just . . . I mean . . .”
“I know!!” said the Buffybot.
“I guess you do.” Buffy made a sour face and threw the tape measure away from her as if it were diseased. She sat down on an old workbench, trying to make her mind a blank. But her mind kept automatically trying to fill in the blank with a picture. Spike! Sometimes she just hated him so much. She wanted to kill him more than anything. She hated him especially for those times when she didn’t hate him, and she didn’t want to kill him more than anything.
She shook her head to clear it, and tried to focus on the reason she had brought the bot to life in the first place.
“Listen, uhm . . . Botty-Boop . . . I just want to know if Spike said or did anything when you were with him, that gave you the idea he might be a danger to me or my family or friends.”
“Spike loves us!” said the Buffybot. “He really really does. He likes us to be very, very happy and very, very satisfied. But he is evil and he is a dangerous vampire.”
Buffy squinted at the bot. “What do you mean? Dangerous, how?”
“Dangerously sexy!” said the bot.
Buffy was feeling more and more agitated with every word out of the bot’s mouth. “Listen, dolly, I’m serious here! Is there any other way you can think of that he might be dangerous – besides the sexy?”
“He’s dangerous in every way! He’s evil!”
“Then you think he could still be a danger to me and Dawn?”
“Of course!” said the bot.
“How? Tell me specifically.”
“He’s evil!”
Buffy sighed with frustration. “That’s it? That’s all you’ve got? He’s evil?”
“Specifically,” nodded the Buffybot.
“All right.” Buffy frowned at the bot. “Time to end this interview with a vampire-toy.” She reached for the bot’s control panel and flipped the switch to off.
Back upstairs, Buffy couldn’t get the bot’s words out of her mind. She paced around the living room, feeling angry with, then sorry for, then disgusted by, then amazed by, Spike. Her certainty that she could now trust him to protect Dawn zoomed from zero to 100 percent and back again. She remembered, word-for-word, his explanation of why he had withstood Glory’s torture:
“Because Buffy - the other, not so pleasant Buffy - anything happened to Dawn, it'd destroy her. I couldn't live with her being in that much pain. I'd let Glory kill me first. Nearly bloody did.”
Could he and Glory be in cahoots, playing her somehow? Had he already known it was her, not the bot he was talking to, when he gave her that explanation? But no - his bruises, cuts, and broken bones had been very real.
“I couldn't live with her being in that much pain.”
But how could that be right? It could not be right. Without a soul, a vampire was a demon. So there was no way. Spike had to be lying. Had-to-be. Buffy grimaced, rubbing her forehead with the heel of her hand as she struggled to understand. But the truth seemed surrounded by an impenetrable shield. She was gripped with the feeling that she was bouncing off of it, over and over, as helpless as a rubber ball. Finally, she grabbed her jacket and headed for the crypt.
She found him sleeping in a stuffed chair, in front of the TV, which was showing a mid-day game show. His black shirt was open, and she could see that both his face and chest had been healing quickly, though some of the bruising remained. She approached the TV and snapped it off, and the sudden silence woke him instantly.
“Buffy!”
She turned around to find him on his feet, looking at her. Her eyes, with a will of their own, immediately flicked right from his face to his zipper and back. And then she did the same thing again before –cursing both him and herself mentally - she managed to keep her eyes glued to his face.
Spike looked down at his pants, and then looked up at Buffy with a confused expression.
“I – uh – I thought your fly was unzipped!” said Buffy, blushing furiously, “but it’s –but happily, it is not.”
“Right.” Spike blinked rapidly at her, knitting his brow and frowning. “So - what’s up?” he asked.
“I – uh - I need to talk to you about some things,” said Buffy.
Spike flopped back down into his chair. “Lay it on me,” he said. He dropped his open hands to his legs, his fingers curled inward along his upper thighs. He raised his eyebrows expectantly.
Buffy took a deep breath, pulled up a small wooden chair, and turned it around to straddle it. “Willow fixed your robot,” she said.
Spike looked down and away from her. “So, what, then? You want to give me an earful about the bot?” He shook his head. “Let me save you the trouble. I’m deeply sorry for giving Warren-the-girl-maker your likeness. I should’ve picked . . . Charlize Theron. She’s got a prettier smile and better legs, and it might’ve tempted Harmony back into my bed.”
“Shut up, Spike. I’m not here to tell you what a disgusting idiot you were to make the bot. I’m here to tell you that I talked to her.”
“To the bot?” Spike widened his eyes in surprise. He sprawled further down into the chair, and tried to sound indifferent. “About what?”
“About Glory and Dawn.”
“Glory and Dawn? The bot doesn’t know much of anything about Glory and Dawn. She’s strong and smart, but I didn’t really make her to provide muscle or battle strategy,” he said.
“Really? I thought for sure you had her built as a war machine.”
There it was again, the looking down and away from her. Buffy was sorely tempted to take advantage of the corner she had him in, to humiliate him good and proper, as he had humiliated her by the use of the bot. But Spike’s bruised face and downcast eyes softened her feelings a bit, and she kept her tone even:
“I talked to the bot to find out if she knew anything about what you might be up to.”
Spike looked at her then, his face registering complete surprise.
“Don’t look so innocent,” said Buffy. She rattled off the words she’d prepared on her walk to the crypt: “This time last year you were acting like you were helping me, but you were setting me up to be torn into a thousand bits by a thousand demons. And since then, you seriously tried to kill me when you thought your chip was out, you bragged to me about killing two Slayers and told me I was next, and you chained me up downstairs.”
“And you’re saying, what? That makes a Slayer suspicious?”
“That would make Tickle-Me-Elmo suspicious.”
“So what did the bot say?” Spike scowled, examining his fingernails and trying to look unconcerned.
“That’s just the thing. She said you – you were very dangerous. But she didn’t know, or wouldn’t say, why or how.”
“Right. So - you’re here to ask the suspect whether or not he’s guilty? You think that’ll work?”
“I’m here to observe the suspect during interrogation.”
Spike looked away from her again, resting his head against the back of the chair and staring up at the ceiling as if a particularly good Charlize Theron movie was playing up there. He was still sprawled in the chair, his open shirt revealing most of his chest and abdomen. Buffy’s eyes again traveled from his face to his zipper and back again, only this time they took the long way. She swallowed, overwhelmed by a sudden urge to slap him. Or shake him. Or break him. Or stake him. Or something. She closed her eyes for a long moment.
“Listen - I need to be able to count on you to help me protect Dawn,” she said finally. “I need to be 100% on it.”
“You can be 110% on that.” He looked down to meet her eyes briefly, before looking off to his left.
“Spike, if you’re doing this because you think it can change my mind about us . . .”
“I’m not. I don’t think that.”
“Then why – “
“I told you already, didn’t I?”
“Yes, but - it makes no sense! When a vampire loses his soul, he’s driven by the demon inside to cause pain, not to prevent it.”
A slow smile appeared on Spike’s face. He was now looking her right in the eye. “Vampires don’t have any souls to lose, do they, Slayer?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yeah. I think I do.” He tilted his head at her, that lazy, maddening smile still on his face. He gave her a knowing, droopy-eyed look that caused her cheeks to flame. “And I haven’t got an explanation, luv - not one that’ll make you happy.”
Even through her building anger and confusion, Buffy knew she had uncovered one truth, at least: She could count on Spike to protect Dawn to the best of his ability. 110%. He meant what he was saying; all her best instincts told her so. Her certainty was absolute; her appreciation was boundless; her wonderment was close to devastating.
And oh, God - how she hated him. She hated him so much.
***
by Spring Summers 18-Apr-2004
=====================================================================================
BUFFY: Listen Skirt Girl, we are not going to SAVE him. We're going to KILL him. He knows who The Key is and there's no way he's not telling.
BUFFYBOT: You're right. He's evil. But you should see him naked! I mean really!
=====================================================================================
Now, with Dawn at school, Buffy finally had her chance, and she hurried down the basement steps on a mission.
As she reached the bottom of the steps, she caught a glimpse of black-pump clad feet, sticking out from under a canvas. There it was: The Buffybot. Unable to resist her techno-nerd impulses, Willow had fixed the bot the day after it had been damaged. But she had also respected Buffy’s wishes that it be turned off and put away. And Buffy had been possessed of a fiery itch for a few minutes alone with the bot ever since.
Buffy got closer and stared at the shrouded form. Then she took a deep breath and uncovered her likeness with one tug on the canvas. The Buffybot had apparently been turned off while she was in a very good mood. The big, irresistibly chipper smile on her face momentarily brought a similar feel-good smile to Buffy’s own - until she caught herself and stood up a little straighter. Ugh. The Buffybot was an abomination, after all. She’d been built as a sex toy for Spike – Spike, whose swollen lips she had brushed, just two days ago, with her own.
She had really kissed him, hadn’t she? She’d let her guard down - with Spike. Buffy shook her head in wonder at the surprisingly sweet memory as she gingerly lifted the Buffybot’s blouse to access the control panel. Then she stopped and stared, and found the sweetness going sour. There, on the bot’s belly was a small mole, exactly where Buffy herself had one. Had Spike paid that much attention during their fights? Buffy couldn’t resist lifting the side of bot’s skirt to look at her upper left thigh. And there it was, very high up, near the outer edge: a long, thin, horizontal white scar she’d had since a childhood accident. Buffy dropped the frilly skirt with a shudder. As she continued to check the robot for identifying characteristics, she tried to remember exactly what she had worn during every Spike-skirmish. God only knew when and how he had gotten a glimpse of what and where – because the more she looked, the more it seemed as if he’d drawn up a disturbingly – impossibly! - accurate and detailed set of blueprints.
Spike. There were times when she truly hated him. And could she really put anything past him? She opened the bot’s control panel and flipped a switch. It came instantly to life.
“Hi, Buffy!” chirped the bot.
“Hi, uh . . .”
“My name is Buffy!” The bot began to walk about the basement in her bouncy way, looking around and smiling.
Buffy sighed. “OK, listen, uh . . . Smiley. I want to ask you some questions.”
“I can answer questions!” said the Buffybot, nodding enthusiastically.
She seemed so very happy to serve, so eager to give, so wide-wide open. Buffy could not pin down exactly how the bot’s cheerful innocence made her feel, though some words came to mind: Uncomfortable. Ashamed. Maternal. What do you call that trio when they’re all rolled into one? Buffy had no idea.
“How long were you with Spike?” she asked the bot.
“26 hours, 7 minutes, and 43 seconds.”
A day or so. It wasn’t long, but it was long enough. Spike couldn’t have gone that long without spouting off about something. “Did he ever say anything to you about anyone named Glory or Dawn?”
“Dawn is my sister. She needs protection.” The Buffybot pulled a stake out of her pocket to show she meant business. “And Glory is a witless twit! I can kick her ass, no problem. I’m Buffy, the best Slayer, with the hottest little bod, there ever was!”
“OK,” said Buffy. She felt her anger at Spike, over the manufacture of the Buffybot, increasing. But she was also impressed by what he had done for Dawn, and grateful beyond the telling of it. The truth was that despite the irritating reminder of Spike’s lechery, the bot’s words were reassuring. Add to them the fact that Spike had allowed himself to be tortured rather than betray Dawn, and it should be enough. And it had seemed like enough, when she’d kissed him. But she had tossed and turned that night in bed, remembering Spike’s past treacheries and wondering if she was being a fool. So it wasn’t enough – not really. Because no matter how she thought about it, the fact was that Spike was a soulless vampire. And no matter how long she thought about it, she could not make sense out of his actions.
Buffy furrowed her brow, determined to get at the truth. “So, Spike talked to you about Glory and Dawn, then?”
“No. He had the information programmed in to me. So I could be you.” The Buffybot peeked into a box of memorabilia, and pulled out a sketch. “This is us!” she said.
“It’s me,” said Buffy, taking the sketch away from the bot and putting it carefully back into the box. “A friend of mine drew it.”
“I know,” said the bot. “Angel. He’s a buzzkill. He can’t make girls happy.”
Buffy found herself blushing, and her recent mixed feelings for Spike were being slowly replaced by something much more uniform and familiar: Pure infuriation. “You don’t know anything about Angel,” said Buffy to the bot.
“He’s a vampire with a soul – how lame is that?” asked the Buffybot cheerfully. She grinned at Buffy and continued: “How many vampires with a soul does it take to change a light bulb?”
Buffy gritted her teeth. She was certain she didn’t want to hear this, but she couldn’t stop herself: “I don’t know,” she said, “how many?”
“None, silly!” said the Buffybot, “Because he never screws anything more than once!”
Buffy’s nostrils flared. She had half a mind to find Spike this instant, so she could see about reopening a few of his wounds. He had made the bot, slept with it, programmed it in this vile way – it was loathsome. How could she have kissed him? She hated him. He was a gruesome black bug to be crushed beneath her heel. He, not the poor bot, was the abomination. She ran a hand through her hair, trying to calm herself.
“You didn’t laugh at my light bulb joke!” said the Buffybot with genuine concern. “How about this one, then? Knock, knock!”
Once again, Buffy gave in: “Who’s there?”
“Poofter!”
Buffy narrowed her eyes. “Poofter who?”
“Poof-tern around and I’m gone!!”
That tore it. “Stop talking about Angel!” she told the Buffybot firmly. “This is not about Angel! I woke you up to talk about Spike.”
“I know all about Spike,” said the Buffybot happily, “he is a vampire. He has blonde hair and blue eyes. He is 5 foot, 9 and 11/16th inches tall. When fully erect, his penis is –“
“Stop!!” said Buffy.
The bot stopped immediately and blinked at Buffy. Buffy blinked back and then stared at her, holding her eyes for a long moment.
What the hell. “Continue,” said Buffy.
“- 9 inches long, and its diameter is 1 and 5/8ths inches at its thickest point. His –”
“Stop!” Buffy pursed her lips in thought. This was very interesting information. It tasted good, like cold revenge, to hear it. She went over to the toolbox and pulled out a tape measure, trying to determine the reality of what the bot was saying.
“The 1 and 5/8ths inches - that’s the measurement if you – uh, wrapped the tape measure around it?”
“No,” said the bot. “The 1 and 5/8ths inches is the diameter. Not the circumference.”
“So he hasn’t been circumferenced, then?”
”I don’t understand what you mean,” said the Buffybot, “so I can’t answer, even though I’d like to.”
Buffy took a deep breath. “So the diameter is - what, then?”
“The diameter is the thickness of the cylindrical shape!” replied the bot. “The length of a straight line passing through the center of a circle.”
“Oh. Actually, I knew that.” Buffy played with the retractable tape measure a bit, first pulling out 1 and 5/8th inches, then 9 inches. She stared at it, then she suddenly smirked. “Nine inches my ass,” she said to herself. She turned toward the bot: “This information - Spike programmed it into you, right?”
“No” said the Buffybot. “The information is empirically derived! I know his height because I touched him all over, and I know his -”
“OK! OK! I get it!” Buffy closed her eyes. “It’s just . . . I mean . . .”
“I know!!” said the Buffybot.
“I guess you do.” Buffy made a sour face and threw the tape measure away from her as if it were diseased. She sat down on an old workbench, trying to make her mind a blank. But her mind kept automatically trying to fill in the blank with a picture. Spike! Sometimes she just hated him so much. She wanted to kill him more than anything. She hated him especially for those times when she didn’t hate him, and she didn’t want to kill him more than anything.
She shook her head to clear it, and tried to focus on the reason she had brought the bot to life in the first place.
“Listen, uhm . . . Botty-Boop . . . I just want to know if Spike said or did anything when you were with him, that gave you the idea he might be a danger to me or my family or friends.”
“Spike loves us!” said the Buffybot. “He really really does. He likes us to be very, very happy and very, very satisfied. But he is evil and he is a dangerous vampire.”
Buffy squinted at the bot. “What do you mean? Dangerous, how?”
“Dangerously sexy!” said the bot.
Buffy was feeling more and more agitated with every word out of the bot’s mouth. “Listen, dolly, I’m serious here! Is there any other way you can think of that he might be dangerous – besides the sexy?”
“He’s dangerous in every way! He’s evil!”
“Then you think he could still be a danger to me and Dawn?”
“Of course!” said the bot.
“How? Tell me specifically.”
“He’s evil!”
Buffy sighed with frustration. “That’s it? That’s all you’ve got? He’s evil?”
“Specifically,” nodded the Buffybot.
“All right.” Buffy frowned at the bot. “Time to end this interview with a vampire-toy.” She reached for the bot’s control panel and flipped the switch to off.
Back upstairs, Buffy couldn’t get the bot’s words out of her mind. She paced around the living room, feeling angry with, then sorry for, then disgusted by, then amazed by, Spike. Her certainty that she could now trust him to protect Dawn zoomed from zero to 100 percent and back again. She remembered, word-for-word, his explanation of why he had withstood Glory’s torture:
“Because Buffy - the other, not so pleasant Buffy - anything happened to Dawn, it'd destroy her. I couldn't live with her being in that much pain. I'd let Glory kill me first. Nearly bloody did.”
Could he and Glory be in cahoots, playing her somehow? Had he already known it was her, not the bot he was talking to, when he gave her that explanation? But no - his bruises, cuts, and broken bones had been very real.
“I couldn't live with her being in that much pain.”
But how could that be right? It could not be right. Without a soul, a vampire was a demon. So there was no way. Spike had to be lying. Had-to-be. Buffy grimaced, rubbing her forehead with the heel of her hand as she struggled to understand. But the truth seemed surrounded by an impenetrable shield. She was gripped with the feeling that she was bouncing off of it, over and over, as helpless as a rubber ball. Finally, she grabbed her jacket and headed for the crypt.
She found him sleeping in a stuffed chair, in front of the TV, which was showing a mid-day game show. His black shirt was open, and she could see that both his face and chest had been healing quickly, though some of the bruising remained. She approached the TV and snapped it off, and the sudden silence woke him instantly.
“Buffy!”
She turned around to find him on his feet, looking at her. Her eyes, with a will of their own, immediately flicked right from his face to his zipper and back. And then she did the same thing again before –cursing both him and herself mentally - she managed to keep her eyes glued to his face.
Spike looked down at his pants, and then looked up at Buffy with a confused expression.
“I – uh – I thought your fly was unzipped!” said Buffy, blushing furiously, “but it’s –but happily, it is not.”
“Right.” Spike blinked rapidly at her, knitting his brow and frowning. “So - what’s up?” he asked.
“I – uh - I need to talk to you about some things,” said Buffy.
Spike flopped back down into his chair. “Lay it on me,” he said. He dropped his open hands to his legs, his fingers curled inward along his upper thighs. He raised his eyebrows expectantly.
Buffy took a deep breath, pulled up a small wooden chair, and turned it around to straddle it. “Willow fixed your robot,” she said.
Spike looked down and away from her. “So, what, then? You want to give me an earful about the bot?” He shook his head. “Let me save you the trouble. I’m deeply sorry for giving Warren-the-girl-maker your likeness. I should’ve picked . . . Charlize Theron. She’s got a prettier smile and better legs, and it might’ve tempted Harmony back into my bed.”
“Shut up, Spike. I’m not here to tell you what a disgusting idiot you were to make the bot. I’m here to tell you that I talked to her.”
“To the bot?” Spike widened his eyes in surprise. He sprawled further down into the chair, and tried to sound indifferent. “About what?”
“About Glory and Dawn.”
“Glory and Dawn? The bot doesn’t know much of anything about Glory and Dawn. She’s strong and smart, but I didn’t really make her to provide muscle or battle strategy,” he said.
“Really? I thought for sure you had her built as a war machine.”
There it was again, the looking down and away from her. Buffy was sorely tempted to take advantage of the corner she had him in, to humiliate him good and proper, as he had humiliated her by the use of the bot. But Spike’s bruised face and downcast eyes softened her feelings a bit, and she kept her tone even:
“I talked to the bot to find out if she knew anything about what you might be up to.”
Spike looked at her then, his face registering complete surprise.
“Don’t look so innocent,” said Buffy. She rattled off the words she’d prepared on her walk to the crypt: “This time last year you were acting like you were helping me, but you were setting me up to be torn into a thousand bits by a thousand demons. And since then, you seriously tried to kill me when you thought your chip was out, you bragged to me about killing two Slayers and told me I was next, and you chained me up downstairs.”
“And you’re saying, what? That makes a Slayer suspicious?”
“That would make Tickle-Me-Elmo suspicious.”
“So what did the bot say?” Spike scowled, examining his fingernails and trying to look unconcerned.
“That’s just the thing. She said you – you were very dangerous. But she didn’t know, or wouldn’t say, why or how.”
“Right. So - you’re here to ask the suspect whether or not he’s guilty? You think that’ll work?”
“I’m here to observe the suspect during interrogation.”
Spike looked away from her again, resting his head against the back of the chair and staring up at the ceiling as if a particularly good Charlize Theron movie was playing up there. He was still sprawled in the chair, his open shirt revealing most of his chest and abdomen. Buffy’s eyes again traveled from his face to his zipper and back again, only this time they took the long way. She swallowed, overwhelmed by a sudden urge to slap him. Or shake him. Or break him. Or stake him. Or something. She closed her eyes for a long moment.
“Listen - I need to be able to count on you to help me protect Dawn,” she said finally. “I need to be 100% on it.”
“You can be 110% on that.” He looked down to meet her eyes briefly, before looking off to his left.
“Spike, if you’re doing this because you think it can change my mind about us . . .”
“I’m not. I don’t think that.”
“Then why – “
“I told you already, didn’t I?”
“Yes, but - it makes no sense! When a vampire loses his soul, he’s driven by the demon inside to cause pain, not to prevent it.”
A slow smile appeared on Spike’s face. He was now looking her right in the eye. “Vampires don’t have any souls to lose, do they, Slayer?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yeah. I think I do.” He tilted his head at her, that lazy, maddening smile still on his face. He gave her a knowing, droopy-eyed look that caused her cheeks to flame. “And I haven’t got an explanation, luv - not one that’ll make you happy.”
Even through her building anger and confusion, Buffy knew she had uncovered one truth, at least: She could count on Spike to protect Dawn to the best of his ability. 110%. He meant what he was saying; all her best instincts told her so. Her certainty was absolute; her appreciation was boundless; her wonderment was close to devastating.
And oh, God - how she hated him. She hated him so much.
***
Want to comment on this ficlet? Go here to the S’cubie board, where you can see existing discussion and add to it.
Also available are a S’cubie facebook page and Spring Summers’ facebook page.