…and a Nightmare

Spike awoke to the insistent and deeply annoying sound of the phone. He opened one eye and checked the alarm clock, surprised at finding himself alone in bed at such an early hour. Then he heard the shower running, and noticed that the bathroom door was open, which answered the question of where Buffy was. He considered joining her, but the phone ringing again broke his train of thought. Cursing sleepily, he reached out, picked up the receiver, and grunted some kind of greeting.

His still foggy brain didn’t quite process the few sentences that followed, though it did recognize the voice of the lunatic who had awoken him in the middle of a quite pleasant dream.

“I swear, Peaches,” he growled, interrupting the rambling man, “if you were in Sunnyhell, I would be on my way to stake you right now. You have any idea what time it is?”

“Uh, 5:21?” the older man replied, sounding a bit sheepish. “Did you hear what I said? I’m going to be human again!”

Despite his shock, Spike managed to pay a little attention to what the other man was explaining. With each excited word though, a cold anger was growing in him, and when Angel finally stopped, he asked, harshly:

“And you call at this hour to tell me?”

“Well, yes,” Angel answered, confused. “I mean, big news, so I wanted to let you know. All of you, that is.”

“You want your son to know, I get it. You want your ex, my girl, to know, a bit harder to swallow. But me? Why should I care? You’ve been pretending for a century that you weren’t a vampire, and now your wish is going to be granted. But, if you’re not a vamp, you can’t have Childer, and that means you’re nothing to me. I thought we had that all cleared up the last time we talked!”

From icily calm, Spike’s voice had changed as he spoke, until he was now almost shouting.

“You decided it was cleared up,” Angel replied blankly after a few seconds of silence. “I’m still trying to understand what that was all about.”

“Yeah, well, it’s not like it matters now anyway, mister ‘I’m gonna be human, let the whole world rejoice’.”

With that, Spike disconnected the call. He stared at the cordless phone in his hand for an instant, before letting it fall to the floor. That was when he noticed his Slayer by the side of the bed. Wrapped in her fluffy bathrobe, she was drying her hair with a towel. Her head was tilted to one side, her expression pensive as she looked down at him.

“Is anything wrong, love?” she asked gently.

He gave her a smile and opened his arms, inviting her to climb in bed with him. She did just that, draping herself partly across his body, her head on the pillow next to his.

“Everything’s fine, pet. Except for the bloody poof waking me in the middle of a very nice dream.”

As he talked, his right hand slipped inside her robe, and Buffy had no trouble imagining what his dream had been like.

“What did he have to say?” she asked, though she had heard enough of Spike’s side of the conversation to know already.

Immediately, his hand stilled on her belly.

“He blabbered something about becoming human. As if we would care.”

She noticed he was watching her intently as he said this, undoubtedly trying to see whether she did care or not. She reached out with a still slightly damp hand and played with his hair, the longish curls mussed by sleep. It wouldn’t be long now before he asked her to trim it for him again. She liked the curls though, it changed his image, softened it a little maybe. Made him look just a bit sexier if that was even possible. She knew she was stalling, but she didn’t care. She could tell him later about them becoming human too. Right now, she needed to tell him something else. But not with words.

Tugging gently at his curls, she pulled him closer to her, capturing his mouth in a searing kiss. The hand that had slipped inside her robe moved again then, opening the garment so that that they were now skin to skin, before traveling to her back, sliding to her ass and kneading the soft flesh. A soft whimper escaped her when he pulled away from her lips, but the fire in his eyes, both lust and love, reassured her silently that he wasn’t going very far. He pushed her flat on her back, and instantly his mouth was on her breast, first tongue and then blunt teeth worrying one nipple into a hard bud, before inflicting the same treatment on the other. Before long, she was arching her body up against his, trying to increase the contact, to get some kind of friction…just there, exactly. Right on that spot his fingers were torturing so deliciously. His mouth had drifted up, his face now buried against her neck, human teeth biting softly over old scars and more recent ones. Buffy could feel the wave rising, fast, and forced her hand to take hold of his and still it.

“Not like that,” she whispered, her voice trembling. “With you.”

He shifted his body over hers, leaning on his forearms, lying between her legs, the moist tip of his shaft just nudging her entrance.

“Do you love me?” he asked.

“I love you,” she replied immediately.

Just as the words passed her lips, he pushed into her in one long hard thrust, burying himself to the hilt, and it was enough to send Buffy over the precipice she had been teetering on. Before her body had had the chance to stop quaking, he was moving again, slowly at first, then gradually faster, nourishing the first fire that hadn’t died yet in her core, making it grow even brighter. She gripped his shoulders hard and managed to hook her legs on his back, opening herself even more to him. All the while, his eyes never left her face, and the faintest smile was rising on his lips.

“Why…smiling?” she managed to ask, or rather moan.

His own voice was ragged when he answered, struggling for a breath he had no need for.

“You are…so beautiful.”

With the last word, he thrust deep, deeper than ever, and a wordless shout escaped Buffy’s lips as he spilled himself in her. Immediately, he covered her mouth with his, and as his tongue slipped against hers the taste of his blood amplified her quivering. She suckled on his tongue for an instant, and when she let go she couldn’t help purring softly, too content for any words to express. As he rolled them onto their sides, still buried in her, he started purring with her, his lips brushing all over her face.

For a little while, they remained immobile, silent except for their twin purrs, simply enjoying the intimacy of the moment. It finally dawned on Buffy that this was the perfect time to tell him.

“I had a Slayer dream last night,” she murmured softly, her eyes looking deep into the light blue of his. “Angel won’t be the only one to become human again.”

For the briefest instant, she was surprised at the look of utter pain that flashed through Spike’s face. Then his features softened with a tentative smile, though the pain was still in his eyes.

“Are you happy about it, luv?” he asked in a whisper.

She couldn’t help smiling as she stroked his face gently.

“Very happy. I get to live again and have a human life with the man I love. I couldn’t be happier.”

Again, the pain. Even more than before. He rolled away from her, his gaze now on their sky, his voice cold as death as he said:

“I hope you two will be happy then, Buffy.”

In a flash, she understood. He couldn’t really think she meant… Oh yes, he thought just that. After what they had just shared, he still doubted. If she hadn’t loved him so much, she might have thought about staking him for it.

“God, Spike, look at me!” she demanded, pulling his face back toward hers. “Don’t you know by now? It’s with you that I want to share my human life. No one else. You. Will. Be. Human. Too.”

His eyes widened in surprise, and Buffy smiled as she caressed his face before kissing him.

Kissing was always good, but wasn’t helping when he was trying to think. Spike pulled away from his lover’s lips, asking urgently:

“What do you..? How will..? Why..?”

So many questions were cluttering his mind that the meaning of her words still wasn’t sinking in. He had heard wrong. It wasn’t possible. He couldn’t be human again. He wouldn’t.

“We will be human. You and me. And Angel, but you already heard that. Our next battle will take place under the sun, and whoever pulls the strings decided to give us our humanity so that we can fight. And we get to keep it afterwards.”

Spike wanted to scream to whoever was listening and playing this game that he didn’t want to be human, that no one had the right to change him like that. He was a vampire and was quite content with his unlife, thank you very much. But one look in Buffy’s eyes stilled his tongue. She wanted it. She wanted to be human again.

“You don’t want to be my Childe anymore,” he murmured, fighting the tears that were clouding his gaze.

“Oh, Spike...”

Cradling his face in her hands, she covered his skin with tiny kisses before continuing.

“We won’t be Sire and Childe, but we will still be together. We can…I mean…do what humans do. Marry. Have kids. A house with a white picket fence. Go on picnics. Do a thousand things we can’t have now. If you want, that is.”

She sounded a bit hesitant as she finished, and he instinctively held her to him, to reassure her, as well as himself. If it was what she wanted, he wanted it too, for her, even though he had never even thought about it before. He would do anything for her. Anything at all. But humanity… He had the nasty feeling that getting his life back wouldn’t be as pleasant as Buffy made it sound. With life, if he was to be human, came that pesky little detail. Humans had souls. He didn’t want a soul. He remembered all too well what kind of souled human he had been. He hadn’t known it then, but now he did, could see and judge himself. Weak. Pathetic. If the return of the soul and the loss of the demon changed him back into William, what would Buffy say? What would she think? She would never love William, he was too different from Spike. Unless he managed to hide it from her. Keep trying to be Spike. Cling to Spike. He didn’t know if it would be possible, but he knew he would have to try. Because if she couldn’t love him anymore, the bloody Poof would be there, human as well, to try his luck again, Spike was sure of it.