And All Was Said (Spike/Xander, NC-17) Part 6

[baudown]

Title:  And All Was Said (Part 6)
Author:  baudown
Pairing:  Spike/Xander
Rating:  NC-17
Disclaimer:  Don't own them.  Wish I did.
Summary:  Xander's got a little something on the side.  Alternate season 5ish where nothing whatsoever is happening to any other characters.
Feedback:  Please.  It means a lot.

Parts 1-5 here: http://livejournal.com/tools/memories.bml?user=baudown&keyword=And%20All%20Was%20Said&filter=all

Xander's agitated, excited, a little manic.  He ping-pongs between hyper-alertness and distraction: one minute gesticulating wildly as he shouts instructions to his crew; the next, staring into space, grinning stupidly, as he zones out mid-phone call.  He spends the better part of the morning tearing apart the trailer office, hunting for the monthly invoices, only to find them hours later, exactly where he left them, smack in the middle of his desk.  In a folder marked "Invoices."

It's Thursday.  

It's Thursday, and when he closes his eyes, he sees Spike: Spike's dick, and mouth and hands, yeah, but also, the smooth slope of his shoulders; the contours of his back; the jutting hipbones framing the shallow v of his pelvis; the sleekly muscled calves and thighs; his pale, elegant feet.  The tightly-strung tension in his arms, braced against the bed, as his body coils and flexes and undulates.  His neck, taut and corded, head thrown back.  Spike's face, suspended above his, eyes closed, mouth working silently, urgently.  His eyes opening, blazing, flame-blue.

Xander's hard, on and off, for most of the day, fighting a silent battle to keep himself from jerking off.  It's an agony of self-discipline, aggravated when an end-of-day visit from a planning commission lackey delays his departure for close to an hour.  By the time he leaves, dusk is waning, sooty streaks of gray and umber seeping into a cobalt sky; and he's churning with frustrated lust as he heads to the car.  Where he finds Spike, waiting in the back seat.

He's sprawled out indolently, legs splayed, shoulders propped against the door.  His lower lip is caught between his teeth. His eyes are heavy-lidded, hot on Xander.  One hand rests loose, low on his stomach.  The other is at his crotch, fingers curled on his inner thigh, thumb lightly tracing a line up and down, up and down the length of his cloth-covered dick.  Which, from what Xander can see, is very, very hard.  Spike looks like the waking version of some deliciously dirty dream Xander hasn't even dreamt yet.  He knows, right then, that he'll be jerking off to this image for the rest of his life.

"What are you doing here, you nut?" he asks, smiling eagerly as he opens the door and begins to climb in.  And then he pauses, as the answer comes to him: Spike's here because he's as insanely aroused as Xander's been all day, or more; because desire has overwhelmed him, driven him here.  The knowledge leaps gleefully inside him.

"C'mon," Spike says, impatient, reaching up and hauling Xander on top of him.

"Couldn't wait, could you?" Xander says, his voice teasing, smutty, Spike-like.  "Needed me, didn't you?"

Spike says something unintelligible around a mouthful of Xander's neck.

"I'll take that as a yes," Xander says, giggling, as he drags his lower half heavily against Spike's.

He keeps giggling, for a while.  It's funny, the two of them, humping away in the back seat of a car, like a couple of horny kids.  But the laughter stops, and his focus narrows to the friction between their legs, as they thrust and strain, rubbing off on each other, frantic and clumsy.  Xander's muttering hoarsely, and it's not a joke, now: you needed me, needed me, needed me, repeating the words over and over, like a mindless invocation, like a warning, until finally Spike gasps, yes, oh fuck, yes.  Spike never comes before Xander, but tonight he does, gripping Xander's shoulders and crying out incoherently.  There's a sweet satisfaction in that; and the feeling stays with Xander, long after he leaves the circle of Spike's arms.

                                           *********************************

Spike is covering Xander's face with the loose cage of his hand.  Xander likes this, sometimes.  It turns him on for reasons he doesn't care to think about, and if Spike tauntingly slides that hand away, Xander will hold it there, grabbing him by the wrist and biting at the meaty flesh between the heel and the thumb.  Spike likes this, too.

Tonight, though, Xander's hands are distracted by the back of Spike's thighs, his ass, the sweet small of his back; and when the fingers trail from Xander's face to his throat, he doesn't pay it any mind.  Spike's hand rests there as he rubs himself against Xander, their legs tangled, cycling in the sheets.  The pressure of the hand builds gradually, until the palm is a solid weight on his Adam's apple, thumb and forefinger digging up and in at the soft spaces just below either side of his jaw.  It's not painful, exactly, but his breath becomes constricted, and it makes the blood pulse harder in his dick.  The hand stays firm on his throat.

A murderer's hand on his throat, comes the thought, and it slams into his brain like a heavy blow, snapping his eyes open, shocked, terrified.   A murderer's hand.  A vampire's hand.  Choking him.

Spike reacts instantly -- of course, a predator senses fear.  Maybe he can hear it, in the scudding beat of Xander's heart, or smell it in the clammy sweat filming his skin.  Spike jerks back violently, snatching his hand away, as if it's been curled over a crucifix.  Still, the blue eyes are uncomprehending, if troubled.  He blinks, searchingly.  Sees it, then, unmistakeable, in Xander's frozen face.  Recognizes it.  Knows why it's there.

Xander's hand goes protectively to his neck, and Spike flinches.  He rolls onto his back, an arm slung across his eyes.  Silence skulks between them, sharp-toothed and dangerous.  

"I can't hurt you, Xander," Spike says at last, without taking his arm away.

"I know that," Xander replies, automatically; and it's only after the words leave his mouth that he understands: Spike isn't talking about the chip.

Another spate of silence, and then Spike, dull-voiced: "Ask me."

"Ask you what?"

"Whatever it is you need to know," he answers.  "What I've done.  Anything.  All of it."  Offering up his entire, ugly history for Xander's examination, judgement, condemnation.

Xander has a little trick, developed with years of practice, for packing away the parts of a person that he prefers not to see.  Like his mind is an attic storehouse of cartons that he can choose to open and rummage through, or keep taped up, ignored, growing dusty in dark corners.  It's the trick that's let him love his mother, looking only at the surprise of a new skateboard, brownie batter off a spoon, cool lips on a feverish forehead; and setting aside nights with no dinner, drunken insults, eyes averted when he's the object of his father's rage.

He's been playing this trick, or a version of it, with Spike.  Not that he's actually forgotten what Spike is.  The broad strokes are always there: vampire, evil, restrained only by the grace of a chip.  He's simply chosen to focus on the other Spike.  The Spike whose snarky banter fits his own like tongue and groove; who fights at his side and has his back.  The Spike who's shared his body; who's taught him the truth about sex, and what it can mean; who's shown him ecstasy, and even tenderness.

It's his own, deliberate schizophrenia that's at the root of tonight's terror.  He's tried to box up Spike's demon, but it's gotten out.  He has to look it in the face, now.  It may well send him running, and for good.  Clearly, Spike knows this, too.

Spike shifts a little, edgy and unsettled.  Drawing up a knee, drawing Xander's eye.  There's a mark there, on Spike's knee, that Xander hasn't noticed before.  A faint, crescent scar.  He traces it with the tip of a finger, and Spike drops his arm, levering up on his elbows to see.

"What's this?"

Spike frowns, as if trying to place it.  He shakes his head slightly.

"From...before.  When I was a boy.  Horse kicked me.  Playing where I shouldn't have been, I reckon."

"Must have hurt."

"Suppose I thought so, at the time."  Spike smiles unhappily.  "But then, they say it's all relative, don't they."

It starts Xander thinking, about Spike as a boy, once upon a time, with a home and family and friends.  Wearing fussy, old-timey clothes; and playing games, and going to school; getting into mischief, and getting hurt.  About Spike as a baby, with a mother who held him, and sang to him, and probably loved him more than anything in the world.  And as a young man, not much older than Xander himself, his whole life just waiting to happen, only to have it stolen away when he was made into a monster.  Xander hasn't ever looked at this Spike, at all.

It makes him wonder if the man Spike was still lives inside him.  If he's been a silent prisoner to the demon all these years, showing himself only now that the demon's been caged.  Is it the man who's their ally, who cares for Dawn, who shares a peculiar, British affinity with Giles?  Is it the demon he’s seen, summoning up a semblance of the old, angry swagger, as if struggling into a coat that no longer fits, but has to last another winter?  

And then it comes to him that he's looking at it wrong.  Thinking of Spike as some kind of Jekyll and Hyde, as if two separate beings occupy that body, when really, there's only the one.  Xander's been trying to avoid the demon, but it's been right in front of him, all along.  The demon is Spike and the man is Spike, too -- a monstrous, marvelous paradox, an eternal, confounding contradiction, and Xander sees all of him, with clear eyes, for the first time.  Not a prisoner of the chip, but a sort of exile, banished to a wasteland between home and an unfamiliar country.  Separated from everything he’s known and loved for more than a hundred years.  Not fighting his way back any longer, not seeking what he's lost, but stumbling forward, toward a new world, although the road that leads there is sunlit and dangerous.  Not hoping for a reward at journey's end, or even safe haven, but still, plowing obstinately ahead, changing just a little with every lonely step.  And not blindly, but by choice.  By stubborn, fucking will.

Xander thinks he's never seen anything so brave.

He doesn't know where it all ends; but he knows who Spike is, right now.  And he believes, with utter certainty, that what Spike says is true: he can't hurt Xander, and it's not just about the chip anymore.  

"Didn't know you'd scare so easy, is all," he hears Spike say.  The tone is deliberately casual, Spike’s face denuded of expression.  But Xander can feel the effort he's expending to achieve the attitude of indifference; and he wants to tell Spike, no, you don't need to do that, not with me.  He wants to tell Spike, I see you.  But they don't speak to each other that way.  They never have, and Xander doesn't know how to start now.

"Tie me up," Xander says, instead.   But what he means is, I trust you.  

Spike's eyes go wide, as if he can hear the words under the words; though he turns away with a skeptical frown, a shake of his head.  The reluctance remains, until Xander takes matters into his own hands, unearthing a length of rope from under the bed.  Only then does Spike acquiesce, offering up a handful of scarves, and an uncertain smile.  They'll do this again, in the future, and it'll feel risky and reckless and wild.  But tonight, Spike's hands touch Xander so humbly, and with such gratitude, as if he finds solace in the tying of every knot.

                                    ********************************************

Xander feels like he's been hit in the head with a two-by-four, and it's because he's been hit in the head with a two-by-four.  The new kid, wheeling around, oblivious, catching him with a solid thwack that makes light flare and fade like a flash going off in his eyes.  He's woozy enough that he doesn't protest a trip to the hospital.

It's a busy day in the ER, the fall-out from two car accidents and a bad house fire landing him at the end of the triage list.  By the time he's discharged, hours later, with a dose of Tylenol 3, and an assurance from the weary resident that he isn't concussed, the bruises have already blossomed.  His eye is grossly swollen, a shiny, pale purple that will deepen to eggplant by morning.  The skin along his cheekbone is scraped and raw.  There's a reddened gash near the bridge of his nose, covered by a small web of butterfly stitches.  He's achey, bone-tired, nauseated.  Shaking with exhaustion, and if he doesn't sleep soon he's going to topple, but it's Thursday, and he makes his way to Spike.

Spike's been watching TV, sprawled easily in an easy chair, a leg draped and dangling over the arm; and he's already twisting toward the door, halfway to a pleased, oi-you're-early smile, when Xander steps inside.  But the smile's progress is halted as he takes in Xander's mottled face, and his lips draw back in a snarl.  Xander doesn't even see him close the distance, but all at once, Spike is on him.  Sparks of amber and yellow flicker in his eyes, and there's a furious movement under his skin as he struggles to hold onto his human features.  His hands are gentle, though, holding Xander's face like a precious object, ten fingertips arrayed along the skull, turning his head this way and that.  

"What did this to you?" he asks, lethally calm.  And then, almost pleasantly: "It's going to suffer first, before it dies."

"It was just an accident at work," he replies, feeling both weirdly flattered and guilty at the misplaced, vengeful ire.  "Hey, we have a common enemy -- it was a piece of wood!"  His laugh sharpens into a wince.  Facial gestures clearly not of the good.  "Seriously, Spike," he adds, this time close-lipped, like a ventriloquist, "I'm really okay."

But Spike isn't satisfied by words, and his certain, steady hands, and keen, discerning eyes inspect Xander, inch by careful inch.  It's different than when Anya fusses over him, all accusing questions and clucking concern.  Spike stays silent as his fingers creep under Xander's hair and explore the surface of his scalp.  A thumb sweeps in soft arcs over bumps and bruises.  Palms travel from neck to shoulders, lightly pressing and palpating.  His head is rotated, front to back, side to side.  Spike peers intently into his pupils.  The hunt for damage, methodical, meticulous.

Spike's hands on him are usually about sex, and even affection.  But this is something else, something Xander doesn't quite recognize.  It's not about caring, precisely.  More about care-taking.  Spike handles him in a way that's unmistakably proprietary.  Possessive.  Territorial.  As if he's acting on some primal, animal instinct -- a lioness tending a wounded cub.  There's a persistent rumble in Spike's chest, and it passes into Xander's body, thrumming; and there's a language in the sound and the vibration.  It says, protection.  It says, you're safe.

Spike leans in close, his face proud and savage, and he's...he's smelling him, and Xander knows that he's scenting for blood.  For evidence of injury that's hidden from the hand and eye.  And that does it, it cracks him open, cracks him wide, wide open.  He feels himself give way inside; feels the puddling warmth of submission suffuse him.  Xander's bigger than Spike; he's got a good four inches on him, and at least thirty pounds.  But he suddenly feels small, needs to feel small.  Longs for it.  He finds himself bending at the knees, scrunching his shoulders, lowering his head.  It's not quite enough, though.

"Can we...can we just..."   Low, pleading sounds, trailing off as he waves a hand vaguely in the direction of the chair.

Spike moves, sits, arranges Xander in his lap.  One arm hitched around Xander's legs, the other along his back, fingers stroking.  Xander feels the tip of Spike's tongue, tracing lightly over his wounds.  Feels Spike's brief, violent shiver as he licks at a stray spot of blood.  The touch settles deep inside him.

"You're all right," Spike murmurs, assuring himself as much as Xander.  "You're all right, you're all right."

Xander tucks his face against Spike's neck, and his hand latches onto Spike's shoulder.  "Please?" he whispers, a helpless, hapless kind of question, and he's not really sure what he's asking.  But when Spike's arms tighten around him, drawing him even closer, it's the exact right answer.  He feels himself harden, slightly, and he can feel that Spike's hard, too, but it's not important; or maybe it's just a part of what's important, and they're in synch in not needing to do anything about it for now.

Years ago, another lifetime, when he and Willow first miraculously found each other, they would sit on the floor of her room, backs against the bed, taking turns tickling the insides of each other's arms.  Sheltered and together in that tiny, perfect world.  Flower-sprigged wallpaper, the smell of lemon furniture polish, a lawn mower's distant drone.  The lingering taste of licorice on his tongue, the soothing scritch of bitten nails on skin.  Raising gooseflesh, sighing, dreamy.  Loving her.  It was the first time he'd ever known peace like that, and he hasn't known it since, until right now.

Xander closes his eyes.  Spike is watching over him.  He can rest.

Part 7: http://baudown.livejournal.com/9274.html