Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

In retrospect, maybe Spike shouldn’t have eaten quite so many hippies.

“What’d you say you were on again?” he asks the bloke next to him. The corpse shrugs or maybe just slumps lower.

Spike watches his own hand move…

~~~

A flash of gold catches his eye, draws him toward it. The light shimmers like sunlight, like a goddess with golden hair, green eyes, and a powerful right cross.

“Slayer,” he whispers, awed, clutching his throbbing nose.

She sneers at him and he falls in love with this golden Slayer.

~~~

Dru shrieks and claws at his eyes and the vision shatters.

Chapter Text

“Nibblet says her and the boy will be here in an hour with tools,” Spike says, slipping his phone into his pocket.

“You said we’d be in and out, quick slay, no problems!” Buffy huffs, pushing against the decidedly jammed door. “This is not ‘in and out!’”

He slips an arm around her waist, drawing her against his hard body. “Shhhh, relax, Slayer.”

His cool lips ghost against her neck, tantalizing. “If you think for one second—”

“In and out, love, in and out.”

He pulls her skirt up and panties down. He slides inside her and pulls out.

“Yesssss.”

Chapter Text

“‘Undulating with desire, Adrienne moves her crimson cape at the sight of Reginald’s quivering member…' God, how can you read this crap?” Buffy says, slamming the book shut. “It’s all turgid shafts and trembling bosoms and pink flowers of womanhood.”

“Not the worst I’ve read,” Spike says, stretching catlike in her lap. She threads her fingers through his loosened curls; he purrs like a cat, too. “One was going on about driving his train engine into her tunnel of love.”

“Oh, ew!” Buffy laughs.

“Here, I’ll show you.” He tackles and pins her.

“Oh god, Spike!” she squeals. “Oh. Ohhhh….”

Chapter Text

“Why are you showing me a potato?” Buffy asks. “Is it evil?”

“No it’s not evil— it’s just a potato!” Dawn protests. “As in, the only food we have in the house?”

Buffy can’t feel hunger around the dread anyway. “Well, with some cheese—”

“No, Buffy, it’s the only food we have!”

“Dawnie, I’ll get groceries, I promise, it’s just money—”

But Dawn’s gone. Her door slams.

~~~

She’s crying. Over a potato.

~~~

Willow says she’ll eat on campus. Buffy stares.

~~~

The next day, the cabinets are full. She doesn’t question it, or the blood in the fridge by the veggies.

Chapter Text

He likes just a pinch of burba weed in his blood. After Angel’s failed apocalypse, he watches, awed, as she makes his blood for him. She wants so badly to get it just right.

She’d cried and kissed him, decked him and kissed him again when she found him in that alley. She’d made him promise to never leave her, and to always come back to her, and sees no contradiction in those promises. He doesn’t either, tell the truth.

Now, she brings his blood to him in bed. How does he tell her it’s perfect because she made it?

Chapter Text

Buffy bursts into his crypt, shouting his name.

“Right here, Slayer. What can I do you for?” he says.

“Well, you know what they say,” Buffy says brightly, pushing him against the wall. “Carpe demon, for tomorrow you may die!”

“Think you mean ‘carpe diem,’ love. Means ‘seize the day,’” he says, grinning fondly.

She takes off his belt, unzips his jeans. She swallows his gasp with a kiss and wraps her hand around his cock. He’s rock hard, but when isn’t he, around her? He hisses as she strokes and squeezes.

She says, “No, I definitely meant carpe demon.”

Chapter Text

It’s been a long stupid day at Council HQ and Buffy is over it. Her steps drag as she heads home.

Opening the door to her apartment, though, is like entering an oasis of calm free from worries of apocalypses, demons, and bureaucrats (sometimes, most of the time, she prefers the first two to the last).

“Smells like Italian,” she calls, then her vampire is there pressing a glass of wine in her hand before she’s even got her coat all the way off. She kisses him.

“Thought you could use a little TLC,” he says.

“Mmm. Must be Tuesday.”.

Chapter Text

12/1/1997

Total hottie, total pain in my ass vamp is dead. Looked for days and no sign Spike survived the church. Must’ve burned up.

10/23/1998

Spike is literally the worst. Hope he burned up after I took his stupid ring.

1/13/2001

Stupid vampire. Gonna burn up one of these days, him and his stupid blanket. Not that I care.

11/9/2001

I would have burned up, if not for him. Then he kissed me, and I think I burned up anyway.

5/23/2003

Spike burned up. He’s gone… and the Hellmouth with him. What am I supposed to do now? Without him?

Chapter Text

“HONK!”

“Bloody hell!”

The goose hisses before honking again. They book it.

“Remind me why we’re trying to track down a bloody bird?” Spike growls. “You’re a bleeding slayer!”

Buffy glances over her shoulder but the evil demon (bird) seems to have given up the chase. She and Spike stop under a lamppost. “Animal Control called Giles to say it was loose and since geese are demons they’re my problem.”

“Can’t say I blame them,” Spike says. “Did we lose it?”

“I think so.”

“How about a snog, then?” He presses her against the lamppost.

“Spike! We can’t… Mmm.”

“HONK!”

Chapter Text

“For the honeymoon, I was thinking…” Buffy says, biting her lip. He wishes it was his teeth in her flesh.

“What?”

“No, you’ll laugh!”

“I promise I won’t.”

She looks down, fiddling with his shirt button. “What if we don’t even go any place far? We just spring for the fanciest suite we can and spend the whole honeymoon together. Making love.”

“Think that’s the best idea I’ve ever heard, Slayer,” he whispers in her ear.

~~~

When they marry for real, it’s their honeymoon he loves best. Just them, in a hotel suite, all week.

Turns out they both remembered.

Chapter Text

She flexes her wrists against the ropes tying her down but they hold.

“Finally got you just where I want you,” Spike snarls and runs his hands down her naked body. She shivers not from the coolness of his touch but the predatory gleam in his eye and his control over her.

He dips his head between her legs, slowly kissing her inner thighs.

“I need…”

“Gonna have to say it, Slayer. Say ‘pretty please, won’t you eat my gorgeous cunt,’” he says.

She knows she’s really in control. She just has to beg.

“Spike! Pretty please!”

“As you wish.”

Chapter Text

As a kid, Buffy always locked her diary and carefully hid the key. (Dawn snoops.)

She stops keeping one after Angel loses his soul. There’s no point; everyone already knows her secrets and she’s expected to share every thought and feeling she’s ever had with the gang.

After she dies, she locks herself up again — her heart and mouth this time instead of a book. Except somehow, Spike has the key. He always knows how to open her up, read her darkest secrets.

He never shames her for the darkness, either. Sometimes, she hates him for that.

Sometimes, though….sometimes…

Chapter Text

After the bus of newly-minted slayers pulls up to the hotel, Buffy asks Angel about the Gem of Amara. She has a theory Spike might still be alive if they’d had it, be trying to get her to relax and “bloody well eat something already, Slayer, you’re skin and bones as it is.”

She knocks Angel out with one punch when he tells her he’d destroyed it.

Maybe that’s why, when the amulet arrives on his desk at Wolfram & Hart, he doesn’t tell her.

She’s gonna do a lot more than knock him out, now that she knows Spike’s back.

Chapter Text

“Cunt! Cock! Tits!”

“Can’t you shut him up?” Buffy snaps.

“Cunt!”

“I’ll do it. Permanently,” Spike snarls, pulling Buffy tight. Ever since they reunited, they can't stop touching.

“Cock-a-doodle fuckhead!”

“You can’t kill Mr. Grundle Pants!” Andrew cries. “He has a little hat!”

“No one will be killing the parrot. It might have information on our lost Slayer,” Giles says. He approaches the bird. “If we can get it to cooperate, that is.”

“Your mother’s a whore!” the parrot says to Giles with a whistle.

“There has got to be a better way to find Caridad than this,” Buffy mutters.

Chapter Text

She learns the word during a rare SAT prep session with Willow that doesn’t get canceled due to slaying.

Ephemeral.

It’s an objectively pretty word.

She hates it immediately.

She’d already died once, which hammers home the lesson: Buffy is ephemeral.

~~~

She dies again, and it’s a relief. She only lasted a short time.

~~~

Turns out, even her death is ephemeral.

She sits with Spike in his darkened crypt, the ephemeral and the eternal, Slayer and vampire, and it’s the only place she can find peace anymore. He’ll last forever. Maybe if she holds him tight, she can last, too.

Chapter Text

“Don’t you walk away from me!” she yells at his back. “This discussion isn’t over!”

“Yes it bloody well is!” He sweeps on his duster, intent on escaping. On leaving.

“Where do you think you’re going?” she demands.

He spins around, jaw clenched tight. “Where am I going? I’ll tell you where I’m going! Out. For. A. Walk. Bitch!”

All she can see is other men walking away from her, and Spike, burning to ashes, Spike gone.

He came back—she won’t let him leave again.

“Don’t go,” she whispers. “I’m sorry.”

His tension melts. “Oh, love. I’m sorry, too.”

Chapter Text

“I look sodding ridiculous.”

“You look cute.”

“Did you rob an Old Navy?”

“Shhh, someone will hear you.”

Buffy straightens Spike’s collar. She checks her own outfit and tugs at her pantyhose as discreetly as she can considering they’re in a parking lot.

Once she’s satisfied with their outfits—normal people costumes for a normal people night—they walk into the school for ‘Parent Teacher Night.’

“I can’t believe Dawnie’s already a senior.”

“Bit’s growing up fast.”

~~~

Later, when Spike is helping to sweep vampire dust from the halls, Buffy wonders why she thought they could ever go anywhere undercover.

Chapter Text

“Stay home with me. I’ll be your kitten,” Buffy says with a pout.

“Love… as tempting as that is, there’s a bloke has kittens for sale. I need to get going if I'm gonna make the poker game.”

Suddenly she’s coy and, well, kittenish, stretched in bed, and his cock hardens. “ I’m a kitten for sale. Buy me… Take me home…  Play with me.”

She rubs up against him, her words a breathy whisper tickling his ear.

“Is that right?” he growls, thoughts of poker forgotten. “Be a good little kitten, then, and get that luscious arse naked for me.”

Chapter Text

She probably should’ve expected the demon attack, to be honest. When has a big life event ever gone smoothly since she got Called?

But Xander’s wedding? He’s marrying a human. Not a slayer or a witch, just a regular human woman, not a single demon relative.

But now she is covered in demon blood and it’s time for the speeches. Spike’s hand at her back is reassuring when the DJ calls the co-Best Women up for their speech, but then every eye in the room is on her.

She waves nervously as the guests stare at her big bloody debut.

Chapter Text

He’s not sure who started it, really. He insulted her taste in Hollywood hunks. She scoffed at the blood he’d poured over his popcorn. He made a comment about the film she’d picked out. She insinuated he wouldn’t know a good movie if it bit him.

For one wild moment he’d hoped she was about to bite him, but instead she’d walloped him with a pillow—or maybe he had smacked her with one first.

Regardless, there are feathers sticking to the blood-soaked popcorn and she’s smiling at him, eyes lit up. Who cares who started it? She loves him.

Chapter Text

“I touch the fire and it freezes me,” she had sung.

That whole year, fresh from her grave, she never could figure out if she wanted to be frozen or thawed. When she wanted to freeze, she stayed away; but always, she was drawn back to the warmth he created in her heart.

Without his sacrifice, they would never have defeated the First. The army of ubervamps would have swept out of the Hellmouth, but he cleansed it with the fire of his love.

She’s frozen again, and all she wants is the fire back.

All she wants is him.

Chapter Text

He follows her into the new Council HQ, swaggering to cover his uncertainty. A year since he walked beside her like this—a step behind and to the left, her faithful lieutenant—and it’s like he never left.

As they pass the baby slayers, each girl straightens, eyes on Buffy, ready for orders. She strides the halls confidently, sure of her place and people. He swells with pride.

She melts him back down again soon enough. She’s captain of the ship, but she lets them all know that he’ll always be her first mate—and the love of her life.

Chapter Text

Most days, he’s accepted who he is, his place in the world. Love’s sodding bitch, that’s him all right. For better or for worse.

Sometimes, though, it’s nearly intolerable, always being the lover and never the loved.

It’s why he built the damned robot in the first place, innit?

Now she’s gone, though, and his foolishness haunts him. Nothing but a mockery of her.

And, somehow of him.

“Did I say something wrong?”

For once he’s the loved, not the lover, and he would damn this world to hell if it meant he could change what happened on that tower.

Chapter Text

After, she thinks about how her life has shrunk to what can fit inside her pocket: driver’s license. debit card. A chapstick. Keys for a house at the bottom of a crater.

A lighter.

She empties her new pocket-size life onto the table in the motel room and studies it. This is what she’s reduced to. This is the freedom he gave her (freedom she doesn’t want, not without him, she’s been shrunk down, too, heart small enough to fit inside her pocket, heartbreak too big to fit inside the crater).

Tears dried, she throws the keys in the trash.

Chapter Text

They lost everything when the Hellmouth closed, but it’s the lack of photos that upsets her most. Not one of Mom or Tara. Of him.

She buys a digital camera and takes pictures until everyone is annoyed with her. She learns to back them up so she’ll never lose her memories again.

When she gets him back, when she convinces him she meant it and tells Angel where to stuff his cookies, it’s better than a photo.

She still drags him into every photobooth they see.

Like today.

“Smile for the camera, Slayer!”

She kisses him, wasting the whole strip.