The Cost of Butterfly Kisses

[lit_gal]

The Cost of Butterfly Kisses, Part 14-A

Fandom/Pairing: BtVS, Spike/Xander
Prompt: Crumpled Paper

Rated: TEEN (we're still in the manipulation stages here)
Summary: Spike wants to be the one who is there for Buffy, but life has never been that kind to him..

Some days, I hate Taming the Muse.  God, this is so not ready, but the deadline is seven minutes away, and I am out of time.  Hopefully the rest of the chapter will be out tomorrow (and hopefully this will be a little "cleaner" then, but I"m so tired I'm seeing double. 

(Chapter One... )  ( Chapter Two... )  ( Chapter Three... ) ( Chapter Four... ) ( Chapter Five )   ( Chapter Six )   ( Chapter 7 )  ( Chapter 8 )  ( Chapter Nine )  ( Chapter Ten )   ( Chapter Eleven )  ( Chapter Twelve ) ( Chapter Thirteen )

 

Chapter Fourteen

Xander hid behind the corner while Spike messed under the hood of the idiot trio's van. Xander still wasn't sure about this plan, but it was better than Spike's plan A, B, or C. Even if Xander physically could shoot them, he didn't want to, and he was voting no on any plan that involved widespread arson. He voted 'no' twice when Spike got this gleeful expression at the thought of setting half of Sunnydale on fire. Spike finished and slammed the hood down before strolling over to Xander's hiding place.

"Hurry up," Xander hissed, watching the door to their sad little basement hideout.

Spike cocked an eyebrow at him. "Prat," he announced calmly. "Vampire hearing."

"Yeah, yeah, but—" Xander stopped, not sure what to say. Vampire hearing did seem to make the whole sneaking around part a little unnecessary. "Stupid unflappable vampire," he settled for saying.

Spike gave a sniff, and Xander got the impression that Spike didn't mind being called 'unflappable.' "Big word for you, that," Spike commented. He took out a cigarette, but instead of lighting it, he just let it hang from his fingers as he leaned against the building.

"It was one of Willow's words of the week." Xander shrugged. "She had this whole experiment where she was going to make me and Buffy into some sort of vocabulary geeks and that was supposed to trick the SAT people into letting us into college."

Spike looked him up and down, and from the expression, he was finding Xander wanting. "Not one of her more successful plans, mate."

"True," Xander agreed; he couldn't exactly argue the point. "At least I can do a condensate line installation."

Spike snorted. Clearly, he was not impressed.

"Hey, if the air conditioning or heating goes out, that is way more important than knowing ten different words to mean stubborn. If the heat goes out in winter, you'll actually appreciate me."

"Not bloody likely. I'm a vampire, mate."

Xander was not buying that argument at all. Deadboy might be willing to live like a monk when he had the soul attached, but Spike was a pure hedonist, through and through. Hedonist—another Willow word. "You're a vampire addicted to your heat sources. You run the hot water out every single night, Spike. You use the fireplace anytime it gets below 70 and don't think I didn't notice the electric blanket."

"No need ta be miserable when you can get all the little luxuries handed to you." Spike looked at Xander, and his expression made it very clear that he expected Xander to be providing those luxuries.

Crossing his arms, Xander glared at Spike.

"Wot?"

"When did I start understanding all your weird English looks?"

"English looks?" Spike actually looked confused at that.

"Like all your English talk with prat and prams and biscuits that aren't biscuits, only more with the twitching eyebrow and narrow eyes," Xander explained. Now that he thought about it, Spike actually managed to say a whole lot without actually saying anything.

"A look can't be English, you prat."

"Hey, you have English looks, and I'm just wondering when they started making sense."

"Really?" Spike leaned against the wall and ran his tongue along the inside of his lower lip as he considered Xander like a bug under a microscope. "Right then, what am I thinking about now?"

"That I’m a moron," Xander answered with confidence.

Spike's mouth came open like he was going to protest that, but then he closed it again. "That was too bloody easy," he complained. "'Sides, the real morons are coming. Let's get to the car." He headed for the alley, and Xander scrambled to follow.

"At least I'm the moron who knows how to keep a job and not spend my whole life living in a basement making invisibility rays." Xander thought about that for a second as he got into Spike's car and shoved aside a mountain of crumpled paper and enough empty bottles of Jack Daniels to build an altar to drunkenness. "Actually, that doesn't sound very moronic. That sounds a whole lot of smart."

Spike snorted and started the car. "If they were smart, they'd bugger off before turning themselves into a target. Those three don't have the common sense ta come in out of the rain. You'd be doing the human race a favor if ya took 'em out of the gene pool."

"Forget it, Spike. I'm not killing them." Xander kicked a bottle that rolled into his ankle from the force of Spike taking the corner too fast. "Okay, shouldn't the van be breaking down at this point?"

"It will." Spike had that grim look on his face—the one that said his plans weren't going exactly the way he'd planned.

"Uh-huh." Xander crossed his arms and glared at Spike. "Tell me you didn't screw up."

"I didn't bloody screw up, moron."

"I'd feel better if you didn't have your 'oops' face on when you said that."

Spike turned to glare at Xander for so long that Xander could feel the growing panic as the car kept barreling down the street—right toward a dead end, emphasis on dead.

"Spike!" Xander pointed out the front window of the car. "Road! Spike!" Spike slowly smirked as he definitely didn't bother looking. "You're going to kill us!"

"Already dead here." Spike's smirk got just a little wider before he finally turned back toward the road. His eyes went wide. "Bloody fucking hell." Jerking the wheel to the right, he barely avoided a pole as the wheels jumped the curb and they took out a bench. Spike wrenched the wheel and the car bounced back into the road.

Xander clutched at the dashboard, his heart pounding so fast that he could hear his own blood pounding in his ears. "You... you... moron!" Xander gasped. It wasn't the best insult in the world, but it was the best he could do when most of his concentration was going into not peeing his pants.

"Don't get your knickers in a twist." Spike had his cool firmly in place, but the car had a weird thump-click in the transmission it hadn't had two seconds ago.

"Hey, my knickers have every right to be twisty. Geez, Spike, some of us would like to survive our twenties."

"All downhill after twenty-five, mate. Be better to get turned young and handsome."

"Um... what? That's a no. How did we even start talking about turning because I will never be turned. I'm going to be old and wrinkly and grandfatherly with all the little grandkids."

Spike looked over, but this time, it was only a glance. "That's not going to be easy. Not when you don't plan on letting the bit have sex."

"It's called immaculate conception," Xander countered. Ahead of them, red lights flashed as everyone put on brakes. "Spike!"

"I see 'em. Bloody hell, you're going to give yourself a heart attack before you're thirty. I'm all in favor of dying young and leaving a soddin' pretty corpse—" Spike smiled wide and preened just enough to make it clear that he considered himself a particularly pretty corpse. "But a heart attack would just be a bloody waste. If you're going to kill yourself, slitting the wrists is a better way to go."

"I'm not letting you drink me," Xander said, his words clipped. Part of it was aggravation with Spike, and part was good old-fashioned terror because this was his first official kidnapping. "Are you sure they're going to split up?" Xander asked.

Spike snorted. "If you were stuck in a van with any two of those three, would you want to stick together?"

"Point," Xander conceded. They were working together, but from what Spike said from his spying missions, they didn't exactly like each other. Xander was starting to understand bits of Spike-thought just by watching which parts of the idiot trio confused Spike the most. Spike sure as hell couldn’t figure out why Jonathan and Andrew kept having the same fight—one that usually started with one of them touching the other's stuff. His comment that one of them should just kill the other and get it over with did make Xander think that maybe Spike didn't understand horseplay. At least, Xander was pretty sure it was horseplay. If Andrew was touching Jonathan's comic books, it might have been semi-serious, but the whole fighting without expecting anyone to win was definitely not impressing Spike.

Spike pulled the car over to the side, and now Xander could see the van's hood up, smoke pouring out from the engine. "Worked like a charm," Spike said smugly.

"Phase one, anyway. We still have to get through the kidnapping part."

"Easy enough. I've done it a million times," Spike commented with a shrug. That made Xander look over at him.

"Okay, that's just creepy."

"Wot?" Spike turned to Xander, and clearly they had reached another piece of human logic that was not working its way into Spike's brain.

"Please do not remind me that you're a mass murderer, not when we're in the same car." Xander could feel his stomach roll at the thought. He was kidnapping an ex-potential-friend with one-quarter of the Scourge of Europe driving the car. At sixteen, his whole vampire-bad rule might have been simplistic and stupid, but at least it never left him wanting to throw up in his mouth.

"I am evil, mate."

"See, I know this. I'm just trying really hard to forget it," Xander said. Before Spike could answer, Xander pointed out the front window. "Jonathan!!" They'd already decided to target either Jonathan or Andrew, whichever one ended up on his own, but Xander was a little relieved to see the short, dark-haired man get out and start walking down the street. From the body language, he was pissed.

"Oh yeah! Double back at you!" Andrew yelled from the side of the van, waving his fist toward Jonathan who just started walking faster.

"Good crossbow, and you could take him out easy from here," Spike said, curling his lip in disgust as Andrew started complaining to someone in the van—more than likely Warren.

"I'm not killing anyone."

Spike sighed, but he pulled back into traffic so they could pass the van. Since Spike had traded the old clunker with spray painted windows for a medium-old semi-clunker with tinted windows, hopefully Warren and Andrew wouldn't notice them. And if they did... well, Xander would revise his policy of not killing people if he had to, he just really didn't want to have to. "Daft gits," Spike muttered as they passed the van, and Xander chose to believe he was talking about Warren and Andrew who were now loudly arguing about whose job it was to keep the van running. From the little bits Xander could catch, Warren seemed to think that as grand-master poopah dork, he was above chores like getting the oil changed.

"Right then, you still sure this is going to work?" Spike asked. They passed Jonathan and a half block farther down, Spike pulled the car over to the curb again.

"Sure? No. But hey, the advantage is that if it doesn't work, he won't be dead."

Spike gave Xander a withering look, one that made it perfectly clear that he was fine with any plan that ended in death. However, instead of having another round of calling Xander stupid for not wanting to commit murder, Spike just arched his back and slithered into the backseat in a move that would have made a pole dancer envy Spike's flexibility.

"You ready?" Spike asked from the back seat. Xander nodded. Spike could grab Jonathan, but the chances were that he couldn't hold him for long, not without hurting him, and with the chip, that was not going to be pretty.

"I'm ready," Xander said as firmly as he could. Shifting around, he got on his knees and prepared to jump on Jonathan as soon as he was in back. The handcuffs dug into his ass, the metal making hard circles in his flesh, but Xander ignored that and just tried to not hyperventilate.

Throwing the back door open, Spike sprang out just as Jonathan went to pass the car. Jonathan gave a startled yelp, but Spike half flung, half stuffed him into the backseat before he could really get any defense together. Xander squirmed over the front seat and sort of flopped on top of Jonathan, yelping when Spike slammed the car door and Xander's shin got in the way. Colorful British curses answered, and Xander knew that Spike was hurting bad, but he really didn't have time to worry since Jonathan turned into a bucking bronco under him.

"Help! Help! Fire! Kidnapping! Rape!" Jonathan seemed to be calling out random crimes, and Xander struggled to get a hand over his mouth before he attracted too much attention. Yeah, this was Sunnydale, but sometimes people did actually notice things. Not often, but sometimes.

The driver's side door opened, and Spike was still cursing as he threw himself into the seat and started the car. "If you can't fucking convince him, I'm having him for dinner," Spike snarled. He then gave a roar of pain that suggested his chip didn't like that plan. Xander cringed in sympathy, but with Jonathan fighting the handcuffs, he really didn't have time to worry about it. The car pulled away from the curb, and for better or worse, Xander had just committed his first felony with Spike. If this went wrong, Buffy was going to kill both of them.