lit_gal | Butterfly Kisses

The Cost of Butterfly Kisses, Part 17

Fandom/Pairing: BtVS, Spike/Xander

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..

Xander decides that it's time to take care of the danger before it targets his family... either of his families.

(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 14 . ) ( Chapter 15 ) ( Chapter 16 )

Seventeen

Xander stood at the corner of the house and fingered the gun he had tucked under his shirt. The metal was cold against his skin.

"Best best if you just knocked and shot him before he had a chance to react," Spike said. He'd said some version of that same thing about ten times now.

"If I didn't know better, I'd think you were worried about me," Xander accused him. The sun was barely down, and yet Spike was standing next to him, an unlit cigarette hanging from his lips. Spike just shrugged. At this point, Xander was so mixed up he wasn't sure if Spike wanted to help or just watch as Xander screwed this up and got turned into Xander-meat, extra rare.

"I have to do this my way," Xander said firmly, despite the fact that his stomach was knotting. He'd talked Jonathan down. Hell, from the sounds of it, Jonathan and Wesley were best friends, and Angel was ready to pull his hair out because Jonathan was almost worshipping the giant dork. On one hand, Xander was not in favor of anyone worshipping Angel. On the other, anything that caused Deadboy to pull his hair out in frustration couldn’t' be all bad.

Spike's lighter made a familiar clicking noise as he lighted his cigarette without comment.

Taking a deep breath, Xander headed for the small house where Warren had set up his new shop. It was a small house with a white picket fence that leaned drunkenly in every direction. Xander wondered how many of Warren's little toys were pointed at him as he walked up the front, but he fought the urge to reach under his shirt and touch his gun.

Stepping around a rotted hole in the front porch, Xander knocked at the door. Inside, he could hear a television click off and footsteps scramble around, but he just waited. After several minutes, the door flew open and Warren stood there with a shocked expression on his face.

"Warren," Xander said calmly.

"Xander?" Warren stood staring at him for second and then he pointed his finger at Xander. "Freeze. Just freeze right there."

"Usually people have guns when they say that."

"Shit." Warren reached for something beside the door, and Xander's whole body clenched. His hand reached for the gun out of fear, but if he pulled it out, he was going to have to shoot Warren. The man had forgotten to bring a gun to threaten Xander at all, so shooting someone that dorky just didn't feel right. Xander was still debating with himself when Warren pointed the end of a freaky looking ray gun at his stomach. "Okay, now freeze." Warren had a sadistic grin on his face.

"I haven't actually moved," Xander pointed out. "I came here to talk."

"Talk?"

"That thing people do with their mouths."

"I know what talk means, moron." Warren backed up a step and raised the gun. "Inside. Close the door behind you." Xander figured Spike was out there cursing him in British, but Spike couldn't do anything, and Xander really didn't want to back Warren into a corner where he felt like he had to shoot, so Xander stepped inside and pushed the door closed. The house was small and they stepped right into a tiny living room that Warren was clearly using for a workshop. Xander recognized a few of the things on the tables—a clip from an automatic weapon, the guts of a coffeemaker, something that might be a shoe horn. But for the most part, it just looked like a junkyard had thrown up in the room.

"So, the slayer sent you to negotiate? She's finally willing to parlay with me?" Warren asked, nodding his head faster as he got excited. Xander ignored the large quantities of dorkiness Warren was showing by using the word "parlay."

"Okay, that would be a no and an even bigger no. Buffy didn't send me; I just came to talk. Man to man. Nerd to nerd."

"I am a genius, not a nerd. I was going to Dutton Technical College when you were all memorizing Spanish verbs. They saw my talent." Warren's face twisted into something dark, and for the first time, Xander could actually see the killer lurking just under the surface.

"Okay, scratch that last one, but we can still talk man to man," Xander said carefully. "This is gone too far. We're so far past 'too far' that you can't even see it from where we are."

"I say when it's gone too far, and it hasn't until Buffy and her band of do-gooders is defeated."

"Which would be never," Xander said slowly. If hell gods and giant snake demons couldn't take them down, Xander really wasn't too worried about Warren making the big move to rule the Hellmouth. Now Warren killing someone out of sheer stupidity—that might happen.

"That's what Buffy thinks."

"Buffy doesn't think much of anything about you. She mostly is worried about paying the bills, and if she even found out that I came over here, I'm pretty sure she'd smack me. Actually, I'm very sure she'd smack me." Xander shrugged. Buffy seemed to think he was always her backup, there to follow her lead, and nine times out of ten, he was. However, if he needed to lie about a little soul spell or face down Angelus in a hospital or even hide a daughter he fathered by a demon, he would.

Warren frowned in confusion. "Buffy didn't send you?"

"That would be a huge 'no.' If she knew I was here, she would give me that look that meant she was questioning whether I had fat blocking up the brain cells. I guess I hoped that maybe we could figure out a way to stop making each other miserable. Or rather a way to keep you from making Buffy miserable because Buffy is pretty much not doing anything to you."

"She's not doing anything to me?" Warren's voice rose. "She's not doing anything?" he demanded in a voice so high it nearly squeaked.

"Pretty much, yes. She has other fish to go fishing for."

Warren stood up straight, the barrel of the gun dipping towards the floor as he seemed to pose. "I am her arch rival."

Taking a deep breath, Xander wondered just how screwy in the head Warren was and how to talk him off this ledge before the man jumped. 'Cause going after a slayer was so many kinds of stupid that Xander couldn't even count them. "Okay, that's not making sense to me. You know about the whole slayer thing, so why would you want her to come after you? As someone who was recently hit in the head by Buffy, I can say that it is not fun."

"She has to come after me."

"Why?" Xander's question stopped Warren. He opened his mouth like he was going to answer, but then closed it without saying anything. Xander watched as a dozen emotions crossed Warren's face, and most of them inspired pity, not fear.

"I'm her arch rival," Warren said in a small voice. However, then grimaced and stood up a little taller. "When I kill her, people are going to know who I am. They will know my name. They will."

Xander just stared at Warren, struggling to come up with an argument against that. He was starting to feel like he was talking to Spike. As much as Xander was starting to realize that Spike had more going than bloodlust and weird curse words, the vampire didn't seem to understand that other people existed outside of him. Buffy's pain from being ripped out of heaven was something that Spike had to fix or something that he resented, but he never seemed to think about how it just affected Buffy.

Even the people he loved, like Dawn and Buffy and Bonnie, he looked at how they fit into his life or how he fit into theirs. If Dawn wanted to go away to college, Xander figured they were all going to have their hands full trying to deal with Spike. The vamp would either want everyone to move with Dawn or Dawn to stay home. And no matter how much Xander tried talking around that roadblock in Spike's mind, he couldn't.

Up until now, he'd thought it was the missing soul that made it impossible for Spike to really consider people separate from himself. However, Warren had a soul, and he was doing pretty much the same thing. Xander existed to carry a message. Buffy was nothing more than an obstacle to throw himself against so that he could prove himself. Give him some yellow eyes and fangs, and Warren was already a vampire.

"Hey, did you hear there's a mated pair of Kiest demons near the library. Those things are ferocious, but I bet you have some fancy gun that could make short work of them," Xander said with the largest smile he could paste on. If Warren was going to think like a vampire, maybe Xander could distract him from his Buffy obsession using the same sort of bait a vampire would fall for—the promise of greater glory.

"Kiest?" Warren snorted. "They're nothing compared to a slayer."

"Can we maybe do a logic test here? I know that you think the whole arch rival plan glitters with greatness, but all that glistens is not gold or even gold wrapped or gold colored. Sometimes those sparkles are the yellow in the eyes of the vampire that's about to eat you. Only in this case, it's going to be Buffy's fist coming at your face if she decides that you're a real threat." Xander didn't say that Buffy never would. Warren had shot at the house, he'd sent demons after her, he'd turned her invisible and then nearly turned her to goo, and she still had this weird hands-off policy because Warren was human. If Xander wasn't feeling guilty about the whole pulling her out of heaven mistake, he'd kick Buffy's ass, only with less kicking and more words about being stupid.

Warren was shaking his head. "No. She will realize that I'm a serious threat, and then she'll have to come after me, and I'm ready. You guys got Andrew, but I'm not going down that easy. I'm going to kill the slayer, and the very fact that she sent you means that she knows it. She won't even face me." That last thought made him smile.

"I don't think she's worried about—"

"Why won't she face me?" Warren interrupted.

"Maybe because she's got work and a kid sister to raise and a house that—"

"She isn't a slayer anymore, is she? That's it, isn't it?" Warren was talking faster now, too excited to actually listen to Xander at all.

"What? Okay, we've officially left the logic tracks here and we're heading for the cliffs. Warren, are you maybe not feeling well?"

"The demon. It did its work. It changed reality, and now Buffy isn't a slayer. She's totally helpless, so she sent you to beg me for mercy." The wide smile on Warren's face made Xander want to punch him. "She knows I would never listen to her, but she's hoping that maybe you could get through to me."

Xander sighed. "And here we go off the cliff."

"It all makes sense now."

"Yeah, all except for the part with the not making sense," Xander said. "Warren, I know about the demon, but Willow broke the spell."

Warren was shaking his head again, his gun pointed at the floor like he felt totally safe now that he'd won. "No. No, she couldn't have. Andrew promised that this plan would work, and I didn't believe him. Once I take over Sunnydale, I'll have to break him out of prison and apologize."

"Which is not happening," Xander said firmly. "None of that is happening. Warren, Buffy is still the slayer, and if you go anywhere near her, she will kick your ass. I am trying to keep your ass from getting kicked, and I have to tell you, I'm starting to wonder why I'm bothering."

"Oh please," Warren looked at Xander with this expression that was a cross between pity and disgust. "You're so unimportant that I'm not going to even bother shooting you. I should go after Spike, though. He's important enough to kill." And again, Warren was sounding creepily like a vampire. Xander briefly wondered if a person could lose his soul without getting vamped.

"I guess I should thank you on the not killing of me, but Warren, you are not tracking with reality," Xander tried again. "Your plan failed. Yeah, the demon made Buffy think that she was in some mental institution and if that demon's magic is anything like vengeance demon magic, that means that somewhere out there, some version of Buffy is still sitting in an insane asylum, but our Buffy broke the spell. She figured out that she's real, and she broke the spell. When she died, she came back out of heaven. Do you really think your stupid little spell could hold her?" Xander stopped himself just short of calling Warren a pathetic little pimple. He really didn't want to get shot in the guts by a ray gun.

Warren looked Xander up and down. "You sound desperate," he said in this haughty voice.

"Well, duh. I kind of am. What does it take to get you to see that you lost? You lost. L. O. S. T. And if you keep this up you're going to be dead as in not breathing as in... dead. You have to stop this."

"No, you wouldn't be here if you weren't desperate, if you hadn't already lost." Warren leaned against one of his tables and pursed his lips like he was deep in thought... or faking being deep in thought, anyway. "So Buffy isn't the slayer, and now I just have to decide how to split up the spoils of war." Putting his ray gun down on the edge of the table, Warren actually rubbed his hands like some sort of comic book villain. "You can go back to whatever little life you have, but Willow... I have always wondered what a redhead would be like in bed. I'm going to find out."

"Do not go there," Xander warned. This wasn't working the way he'd planned. Warren wasn't listening.

"Or maybe the slayer herself will be my reward—the old queen reduced to nothing more than a blonde bimbo chained to my bed." Warren's eyes seemed to glaze with lust, but when Xander took a step forward, he grabbed his gun. "Oh no. No, you do not get to stop me. I beat Buffy, the great slayer who returned from the dead. Me. I beat her, and everyone's going to know it."

"And you're going to celebrate by raping Buffy? That's kinda slimy. Actually, no. That's seriously, huge, enormous layers of slimy."

Warren narrowed his eyes. "Fine. If you're just a fan of the slayer, maybe I'll let you have her if you're nice to me. I can take the sister—Dawn."

Xander felt the pull of the gun in his hand, smelled the hot air and heard the thunder-like explosion as it went off. He saw Warren fling his hands up as he body fell back, a tiny red stain on his shirt like a flower blossom. He felt the wave of warmth, either from the gunpowder or from his own adrenaline. He saw his own hand rise up, pulling the gun farther out from its hiding place under his shirt and felt his finger tightened again the warm metal trigger.

He watched Warren hit the wall, his hands still spread, fingers wide as he slowly started sliding down. He couldn't hear as dozens of trinkets and weapons, mostly in pieces, clattered to the floor when Warren caught the edge of the table in his slow slide down the wall. Behind him, Warren left long streaks of red, and the twin flower blossoms, red-stained, ragged circles on Warren's green shirt, seeped blood. The stain spread and then drifted down, the blood turning into a teardrop as gravity pulled at it.

Xander watched, some part of his brain not understanding what he was seeing as Warren's lips moved. They were stained red now. Warren's hands ruined the perfect teardrop pattern forming on his shirt by ripping at the cloth with clumsy fingers. But those desperate movements slowed and soon only Warren's chest was moving, slower and slower until it just stopped.

Xander stood looking at the mess. Hands tugged at him, took the gun from him, and Xander stared at the inelegant pile of twisted limbs that had once been Warren. His mouth was open, a small trail of drying blood at the corner.

Xander was shifting backwards now, his body moving even though his brain hadn't sent any messages. It couldn't. The door started closing, and Xander had one last look at Warren's tangled body, small pieces of his inventions scattered around like rose pedals. Then the door blocked his view. Xander blinked, his brain struggling to restart.

"Bloody hell, you're a fucking nob. You never should have put yourself in the same room with him. Considering that you have the survival instinct of a soddin' lemming, I don't know how you've lived this long." The voice was familiar, but Xander wasn't ready to deal with it. He was cold. So cold. He started shivering, and hands pushed him up into a seat.

"Drink this." Something cold was shoved into his hands, but Xander couldn't seem to get his fingers to close all the way. He couldn't feel his right hand. He let it drop into his lap as he flexed his pointer finger, struggling to get back feeling in it.

"Oh for.... If this were the old days, Angelus would be saying you were ready for the charnel house, mate." Hands lifted the cold flask and brought it to his lips. Xander almost choked as the fire ripped a path down his throat.

"Shit." Xander choked and spit whiskey all over the inside of the van. "Holy shit." He coughed, his whole throat burning. He got control of the coughing, but his heart kept pounding so loud that Xander couldn't hear anything other than the rush of blood through his own veins. Spike was standing in the open passenger side door, his hands on Xander's thighs.

"I killed him," Xander whispered. His stomach jolted, and he might have thrown up, except he couldn't without throwing up on Spike, and even with half his brain stuck somewhere between panic and horror, that didn't seem like a good idea.

"That was the point."

"He's dead." Xander closed his eyes, and he could see Warren's body falling.

When Spike slapped his face, Xander's eyes flew open. "Don't even start that shite. He was threatening to rape Buffy, rape Dawn. What do you think he'd do the first time Willow insulted his manhood? He was a worthless git with less morals than a common vampire, and you don't get your knickers twisted about staking them."

Xander opened his mouth, but he couldn't come up with any argument for that. Warren had wanted to hurt them all just to make himself feel better, which was pretty much what vampires did. But that didn't erase the bone-deep cold he could feel when he thought about shooting him.

"You need to get pissed, pet."

"Don’t have the energy to get angry." Xander wasn't even sure he had the energy to stand up. His legs felt shaky, like he'd been running for miles. Spike gave him a disgusted look, but Xander just looked at him. He was too tired to try and figure out Spike weirdness.

"Drunk, pet. You need to get good and drunk."

Xander shook his head. "Harris family genes and alcohol do not mix."

Spike snorted. "Well, they will tonight. We're going to get you good and drunk—drunk enough that you stop brooding."

"Not brooding," Xander complained softly, but Spike slammed the passenger side door and Xander was left sitting in the seat still clutching Spike's flask. He wasn't brooding; he was wondering how things had gotten so out of control. When he was sixteen, Giles had stood in the library and promised him that the world was simple. People were good. Demons were evil. His hand had held the stake that turned Jesse into dust, and he'd ordered himself to not grieve because Jesse had been a demon, and demons were evil.

The driver's side door opened and Spike dropped his cigarette to the ground, crushing it under his heel before he got into the driver's side. Xander watched Spike as he started the van and then carefully backed out of the driveway. "Wait." Xander looked at the house, and Spike braked.

"Wot?"

"The...." Xander stopped. He couldn’t call Warren a body. Warren wasn't a body, he was a pain in the butt, a nerd, a geek with a robot obsession. He was a person.

"I already arranged to take care of it, pet. Just drink up." Spike started backing up again, and Xander watched Warren's house until they turned the corner and he couldn't see it any more.

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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

skargasm.livejournal.com

Oh my GOD!!!

Warren scared the shit out me, seriously, and Xander was just so sensible and logical until Warren did the threatening thing and then he just acted. And my brain is like whoa, not keeping up and feeling a bit shocked and wondering whether I need to get drunk like Xander to deal.

WOW!

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Butterfly Kisses

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