Chocolatey Goodness

Part 17: Pillow Fighting

D: Little Things

rated NC-17 (R for this section, but the whole chapter.. oh wait, you figured that out?)

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"Fuck." Simple. Good. Gutteral. Something nice girls didn't say. Willow said it again. Then she pounded on the table -- in lieu of smashing her fists against her laptop's keyboard- and added a few words in Swahili that hopefully meant what she thought they meant: something obscene but harmless, and not 'please turn me into a hairy three-eyed snot-monster.' She glanced down at her hands and didn't see any hair or snot, so she assumed she'd been right.

Tara looked up at her, startled, from where she sat on the bed next to Spike's stretched-out body. Or should that be corpse? Eww. Willow shuddered just a bit -- which was utterly silly for somebody who'd been spending years dealing with them in one form or another, and this was a body she knew. Still, laid out like that, unresponsive to touch or shaking or yelling, or anything except Xander's involuntary sleep-movements, which Spike continued to match like a freaky synchronized swimmer -- could you have synchronized sleeping? Anyway, he looked more corpse-like than usual, and that, along with everything else, was freaking Willow out.

"Sorry," she said. "Just... there's nothing in here about Gakis at all. At least not that I can find, but the search system is so screwy... And 'Demons, Demons, Demons' -- what kind of name is that for a database, anyway? It's like the Disney version of a real occult knowledge system. It even has a children's section. Which is so cute, if I wanted to teach my kid how to play 'How Many Horns Does A Hrontak Have' -- but right now? Whoever programmed this thing is seriously making my frog-turning finger twitch." Which wasn't the finger she was tempted to flip at the screen.

She looked up to find Tara blinking at her, an awkward 'help me, I don't want to have to have her put away' smile hovering over her lips. Then, without a word spoken between them, her lover was next to her. Strong, sure hands massaged her shoulders, pressing and sliding over muscles that Willow just now realized ached like she'd been holding up a medium-sized planet, instead of sitting hunched over a computer. "Maybe you need to take a break."

Willow sighed and gazed at the laptop again. She thumped the table one last time, more or less for good luck, then nodded. "I know. I'm not really thinking straight anymore, by the time I start threatening grievous bodily injury to nameless database programmers. Wesley's coming with books. Books are good. Books are our friends. Especially stolen-from-the-Watchers'-Council books."

"I think 'indefinite loan' was the phrase he used on the phone." Fingers digging between her shoulderblades, reaching for a tension that Willow couldn't quite let go of.

"Yeah, Giles has some 'indefinite loan' books too. I wonder if the disgruntled ex-Watcher and the unemployed librarian battle it out in his psyche at night, sending each other overdue notices." On the screen, the little dancing Parvo-demon that was supposed to be retrieving the answer to her query on dream-eaters was still dancing. It had been dancing for the last five minutes. She suspected it was sticking its tongue out at her, too, but the gif image was too small to be absolutely certain. It's always the little things that get to you, in the end. She gave in to the temptation, and flipped it off.

"Willow..."

She looked up at Tara, and sighed, reaching for one of those magical massage hands, because holding it seemed more important, right now. "I'm just... frustrated, I guess. There's nothing I can do. None of the spells I know have worked, so I can't help with magic, at least not until Wesley gets here. And Willow the Computer Wiz if ever a Wiz there was? Bupkis. She is Bupkis-Woman. I feel useless. Like I'm just waiting for the grownups to show up and tell me what to do."

Willow felt Tara's other hand stop rubbing at her shoulders, and wrap itself around her in a hug. "Yeah. I know how you feel. I wish I knew anything that might help. All the dream spells I can remember require a willing, conscious subject -- and they're mostly about controlling dreams. Staying lucid so you can explore them. Or charms to keep away bad dreams in the first place. Nothing about waking people up, or fighting monsters."

Willow stood, turned, and rested her forehead against Tara's. Not the only one. It was hard to remember that, when nothing seemed to be working and she felt like a little girl tugging on her mother's skirt -- me, me, I can do something too, I'm big now... But she wasn't the only one who felt like this, and she wasn't alone.

"You are helping, Tara. Just by being here. You being with me is everything. Don't ever think that it's not." Just to have warm arms encircling her, soft breath blowing her hair across her face, large, serious eyes looking into hers, with 'I'll do anything for you' written in letters three feet high across those dark blue irises... "I'm sorry this weekend turned out to be so crazy. It was supposed to be about us, and... it's gone all Scooby. Not in the 'have fun with your friends' sense -- in the 'monster stops in to ruin your popcorn and pizza party nine times out of ten' sense."

"No, I loved it. It was great. I mean, this isn't great, but... you know what I mean." Tara pulled her head back a little so that Willow was looking at her whole face, instead of just a close-up, magnified view of her eyes. "I like your friends. I liked the convention stuff. I like being with you, no matter where we are or what's happening. 'Cause I love you. Even when you're high on coffee or growling insanely at nameless database programmers."

Willow couldn't help looking back at the laptop, to see the demon still dancing. When she looked back at Tara, there was an apology on her lips, for what she hadn't said back right away -- but Tara's finger got there before she could utter it.

"Don't be stupid. I know. You're just worried about Xander."

And she was. More than anything else, more than the frustration with the computer or the magic or herself, Willow was worried about Xander. But just about the little things. Whether he'll ever find something as simple and right as Tara feels in my arms. Whether he'll ever get a haircut, before his bangs reach down to his nose. Whether he'll ever wake up again. Just the little things.

"Yeah." She walked over to look at him, Tara's arm still around her shoulder. His hair was tangled and sweat-matted on the pillow. His uncomfortable movements had knocked the blanket down into a crumpled mess around his chest, and Willow's hand moved towards him, some ridiculous mom-instinct urging her to pull it up to his chin. The gray mass of fog around him surged in her direction, and she snatched her hand away as the image of Spike flying backwards onto the other bed flashed through her head. "I hate this. He seems so... helpless. You know, he's the one who always protected me from whatever I was afraid of, when we were little. He even tries to protect Buffy, like she needs it."

In a voice that Willow knew was designed to calm her down and make her think straight, and usually succeeded, Tara asked, "I thought Xander was always getting into situations like this. I mean, not that it's his fault. Just that he has really bad luck when it comes to getting got by whatever bad thing is around."

"Yeah -- he does have a tendency to attract dangerous attention. I'm not sure if he's a weirdness-magnet, or he sends off 'hurt me' pheromones, or what. But I hate it. I've always hated it. And this... sucks. Which is all my highly-developed vocabulary can come up with at the moment. Can't the bad things leave us alone, for a weekend? A few days? I just want... "

Little things. Wake up, Xander. Crack a joke. Brush my hair. Tell me who you're in love with. Tell me it's some bagboy at the Food Mart, tell me it's Giles, tell me it's Regis Philbin. I won't care who. I won't tell anybody, not even Tara. I promise. Just wake up. Little things.

"I just want things to go right." Whatever that meant. Willow backed off when she felt her fingers itching to reach for the edge of that dark blue comforter again, and sat down on the bed next to Spike. The 'ack, it's a dead body' thing was gone now, probably just a product of her irritation with herself, which a Tara-cuddle had done a lot to bring down to a manageable level. Tara stood in front of her, long hair slipping out from behind her ear and fanning over her face.

"Do you think we should try calling Mr. Giles again?"

Why not. At least it would give her something to do, aside from think of things that she couldn't do anything about, and things she didn't know what to do about. Last time, right after she'd called Angel, she'd got no answer at Giles' place, but she couldn't imagine what would keep him out of his apartment for very long. Unless he and Olivia had gone on a date somewhere -- but from the vibes she'd been getting on Friday night, Willow thought it was more likely that he hadn't planned for them to leave the apartment all weekend.

She nodded, and started to stand up and reach for the phone, then looked at the silver cord that ran across the room to the little table and her cheerfully click-whirring laptop. "Or not. I don't want to try getting into that database again if we go offline. It took fifteen minutes just to get through their login procedures, the last time. Maybe I should go downstairs and use the pay phone?"

Tara gave half a nod, then stopped. "Doesn't Spike have Wesley's cell-phone on him?"

Er... touch Spike? Not that the thought bothered Willow anymore -- it just hadn't even occurred to her that she could, since the first time she'd shaken him and he hadn't woken up. But there was no gray cloud around him that could make zappy moves at her if she tried to pull the blanket up to his chin. Not that she could, since he was lying on top of it, and what insane brain cell had made her think about tucking Spike in? Spike was the Big Bad, even if he was sleeping the sleep of the just zapped with a million-volt cattle prod right now. He didn't need mothering.

Except he really looked like he did, the confusing, irritating jerk. He was frowning now; Willow glanced across to the other bed and tried to peer through the cloud of fog to see if Xander was as well. She couldn't tell. When she looked back at Spike, his face was blank. Unlined except for a few little ones around his eyes and mouth. Smooth looking Oil-of-Olay-for-the-undead skin, that translucent color that makeup companies called 'ivory' and Willow called 'fish-belly-white' when she saw it in the mirror. Spike's skin was even whiter than hers; the silver-blond of his hair would have shaded right into it without a pause for the eye, if his roots weren't growing out.

He looked nakeder now, in three layers of clothes including boots and a jacket, than he had last night in the bathroom wearing nothing but a smirk and a tattoo. With his face slack in sleep, Spike could have been any innocent collegiate geek, all tuckered out after a weekend of gaming and autograph-hunting. He wasn't anything like innocent -- she knew it. Just because she'd gone bowling with him, didn't mean she didn't know he was a killer. She'd seen him yellow-eyed and snarling, with blood on his lips. Waving a broken bottle in her face. Pushing her down on her own bed with death in his eyes and only the chip, the magical, wonderful, terrible chip, had saved her. Not like she'd forgotten any of that, or ever could. But he didn't look like a monster, now.

"He looks so..."

"Human?"

"I was gonna say 'young.' You know, for all his Big Bad B.S., he doesn't really look much older than any of us." Willow studied the shadows under his closed eyes, and below his cheekbones. "But yeah. He looks human, too. Acts human, a lot of the time. I guess that's why we forget he's not. That he's a demon, and he doesn't think like us."

Though if he didn't -- why had he sounded like the inside of his throat was being torn out when he saw Xander lying there asleep with this obscene gray thing pulsing all over him? Why had he said, "Fuck, this is all my fault..." ? Why had he sounded like he actually cared? Why had he reached out to touch Xander? Heck, why was he here at all, attending a convention he didn't care about with people he swore he hated, just so he could end up lying on this bed all sick and pale and small, even for a dead guy? It still didn't make any sense to her.

She reached slowly into his inside breast pocket, which contained a lump that she assumed was Wesley's cell-phone, and was struck by the fact that his chest didn't rise and fall. Well, duh... But it was disconcerting. Nothing moved, nothing twitched when she grasped the phone and slid it out -- or tried to. It was stuck on, or under, something in the pocket: a stack of cards or small papers, sharp enough to give her a paper cut as her fingers slid along one edge. Willow sighed and pulled the whole mess out, phone included, before putting her finger in her mouth and sucking on it.

"What's that?"

She disentangled the stack of card-things from the flip part of the cell-phone, and turned them over. Then blinked. Then stared. Then blinked again. "Photographs." Spike carried snapshots around in his pocket? How human was he? Though they were probably all shots of Drusilla, she realized after a second. That would be like him, to carry them around and pull them out to mope over when he was feeling morose.

There were three: a wallet-sized one on the bottom, and two square polaroids on top. One of which had bitten her; there was a drop of her blood still on the edge of it. Vampire photos. Snort. Hellmouth humor at its best. She wiped it off with the hem of her t-shirt and studied it, frowning.

"Is that a Dairy Queen coupon?" Tara was asking as she leaned over to peer at the picture.

You'd think so, with the mounds of whipped topping and the chocolate ice cream, and the interestingly-placed banana, Willow thought absently. Not to mention the maraschino cherries. But unless they'd run out of cups and had started serving their sundaes on rounded, pale hills of flesh that she'd last seen standing in the middle of the bathroom last night, this wasn't anything you could buy along with your Peanut Buster Parfait. Though it might increase sales if they made the offer.

"No, it's..uh... it's Spike. Naked. A la mode." Or technically, Spike's ass, a la mode, since the ice cream was mostly centered there. The slope of his back was visible above it, though, and the silver-white blur of hair that identified the subject of the picture better than any label that hadn't been filled in next to the date-stamp at the bottom of the photo. She almost laughed, before her brain went somewhere else entirely.

"Huh?" Tara bent closer, then stood up rapidly. "Oh. Um. Oh." Willow was still staring at the image. "Willow?"

"What? I didn't do it. I mean, I didn't take it. I mean, I saw him naked, but it wasn't this time, it was last night." Yes, that made perfect sense. It also did much to remove the 'Oh dear, maybe I'll have to commit her after all' look from Tara's face.

"That's...um... you saw him naked last night?"

"Shower. Walked in. Thought it was Xander. Not that I was walking in on Xander, I just wanted to talk to him and thought he was behind the curtain and he wasn't, he was in the middle of the room and he wasn't Xander, he was Spike, and did you know he has a Tigger tattoo on his ass?" And way to counter that stereotype everyone has of you that you babble at the slightest opportunity, her inner Cordelia (the High-School Version, TM) added.

"Oh. I...um... don't see one in that picture." Tara was blushing very attractively, a strange, detached part of Willow's brain noticed, before her eyes automatically returned to the polaroid.

Willow blinked, and looked down at the picture yet again, noting that Tara was right -- though she couldn't know where Spike's tattoo was, Willow did, and that spot was devoid of both ice cream and Tigger. She sighed, finally admitting to herself that she was staring at the picture simply because it was, if utterly weird, also extremely sexy. Fine. Spike had a nice ass. Even Tara seemed to be somewhat transfixed by it.

So why --aside from her innate sense of decency -- did Willow's gaze keep slipping down the ice cream sundae to the legs that stretched out beneath it, slim muscular thighs giving way to firm calves, strong ankles, and -- Nononononono. Can't be. Uh-uh. No. No way. Willow stared at the feet that were showing at the very edge of the photo area, just above the white border and the date-stamp, as if whoever had taken it only had room to back up far enough away to get Spike's whole body in the shot, if he cut off the toes.

He. If he... Oh, come on. Come on, Willow. Come on, Willow. You know those sheets, you know that blanket, you know that beat up plaid mattress peeking out from under the blue tarp thing that you --thank god-- didn't know Xander keeps in his room, and will now have to spend the rest of your life trying to convince yourself you haven't seen. You know that tiny little cramped basement where there isn't room to take a decent picture even if there were enough light... Yes, she knew. But... You know damned well that if you stand up and take those boots off his feet and look inside, they'll say nine-and-a-half. Not that you need to know that, since it's Xander's bed, and Xander's pillows, and not Xander's feet, just like it wasn't Xander's foot the last time.

Not to mention that the date stamp was 6/29/00. This Thursday. Three days ago.

But... her mind continued to hammer at her. But Spike lives with him. He could've been using the bed when Xander wasn't home. But Xander was home. Who do you think took the picture? And you know he was home when you saw fishbelly-white-foot-guy in person, just before Xander chased you out the door with a panful of chocolate crispy treats and much babbling on both parts. You know, a little voice whispered in her mind. You knew when you saw him last night, and you put it away, because you were too busy staring at his ass, not to mention other naughty bits, to notice the little things. Little things like the fact that you saw a vampire sleeping in your best friend's bed.

As she handed the sundae picture to Tara without looking her in the eye -- anything not to have to open her mouth and say something -- Willow was almost afraid to look at the next one. Sundae being eaten? A bubble of laughter rose in her throat, but she choked it down, and flipped over the photo.

Polaroid. Date-stamp in the same place, but this one read 6/30/00. Same half-lit basement room, same bed. No tarp. Just Xander. In close-up. Looking at the camera. Willow closed her eyes. Breathed. Opened them again.

It wasn't that he was naked. He was, but there wasn't anything in this picture that you couldn't show on primetime TV. Nothing to make even the Willow who had drooled over him in high school go eep. Just a bare, tan shoulder, the length of an unclothed back fading into the dark background. Maybe the suggestion of the curve of a hip, but nothing you could prove in court. It wasn't that he was naked.

It was the look on his face. Chin propped on crossed arms. Tangled brown curls falling on his forehead, wide smile bared to the world. Un-self-conscious, maybe a little amused, but mostly just... happy. Like she'd been seeing little glimpses of all weekend, between the appearances of Xander's usual jester's mask and the scared little boy who peeped out from behind it.

In this picture, Xander didn't look like any kind of little boy -- he looked like a man. A man whose brown eyes stared steadily into the camera in a way that made Willow close her own eyes again.

She wondered if the man lying next to her, who wore size nine-and-a-half, or whatever the British equivalent was, Doc Martens, saw what she saw in that picture. She wondered how she'd manage to adapt the standard beat-you-to-death-with-a-shovel-if-you-hurt-him speech, to deal with a guy who was already dead. When he woke up. Assuming he woke up. She wondered if Xander was certifiably crazy, or if she was, and she was making the whole foot-size thing up in her head.

Willow opened her eyes and looked at the picture again, closely. Brought it to her face while Tara stood in front of her, still studying the sundae picture as if Spike's ass was the beginning and end of all that was weird in the world. It wasn't. Reflected in each of Xander's eyes, in the picture Willow held, was a tiny polaroid camera, floating in mid-air. Held by no-one. Held by Spike.

She laughed. She had to laugh. What else could she do but laugh? Xander the weirdness magnet. Xander the demon magnet. Xander the boy she'd been in love with back when she thought love was like those black and white pictures of a little boy in Dad's fedora, handing a red-tinted rose to a little girl in high heels and a floppy hat.

She glanced at Xander's crumpled fedora, still lying on the floor where Spike had stepped on it in the dark. The little things. Willow laughed again, and she couldn't stop, and she couldn't explain why, when Tara sat down next to her and put an arm around her, and said things would be all right. She wanted to explain, but she couldn't. She'd made a promise, after all. But that last little knot of tension, that Tara's fingers couldn't quite reach, faded away as Willow laughed.

A few minutes later, after she'd managed to start breathing normally again, and convinced Tara she was over her fit of hysteria, and slipped the stack of photos into her own pocket with the last one still unexamined, she punched-in Giles' number on the cell-phone. Still no answer. She'd touched the icky dead guy for nothing, the third-grade part of her mind informed her. Willow thought about laughing, but decided against it.


Part 17-E
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