Angel had said that the lobby in the Chelsea Hotel was something to see. Dawn wondered, as she walked up Sixth Avenue, passing the old department store buildings that housed TJ Maxx and Bed Bath & Beyond—so normal, nice and normal—what that was going to turn out to be. A hotel where vampires were habitués.
It was a little after four, and the sun was low behind the buildings, the air blue and the shadows deep, while above, the sky was pink in places. There were so many people here, like her, walking, so many strangers. She liked New York for its fullness of strangers. But along with all these strangers, New York now contained two who were not strangers, because they were worse than strangers, and she was going to them.
She was going, to get it over with.
She turned left at 23rd Street, went west, crossed Seventh Avenue, and then she could see it, the hotel’s ornate Gothic façade of red stone facing, its iconic sign—she knew it was iconic,
H
O
T
E
L
CHELSEA
in neon.
On either side of the double doors were brass plaques attached to the building. “Dedicated to the Memory of Dylan Thomas” said one. “Dedicated to the Memory of James Schuyler, Poet”, said another. Brendan Behan. Leonard Cohen. National Register of Historic Places. Sir Arthur Clarke, who wrote 2001 A Space Odyssey at the Chelsea Hotel. ‘I Can’t Do That, Dave’, inscribed on the plaque.
“I can’t do this, Dave,” Dawn whispered to herself. She stood there, under the hotel’s awning, and read every word of every plaque, while flop sweat gathered under her arms, and her coat was suddenly too hot, even though it was frigid out here.
The door opened, and a couple came out. They weren’t Spike and Buffy. They were tall and thin and dressed all in black, wearing sunglasses even though it was nearly dark out, and one of them said something to the other in what might’ve been Danish, or Swedish. They walked off without glancing at her.
She took a breath, and pushed her way in.
Inside, it wasn’t what she expected. There was a huge baroque black fireplace on the left hand wall that went all the way up to the high ceiling, and there were velvet chairs, and a chandelier. But the thing she noticed most was a huge painting of a horse. A white horse, it’s head, with a long forelock, like a portrait. She saw that the whole lobby was hung with big crazy paintings, and there was a sculpture hanging from the ceiling, and the whole vibe was not spooky at all, it was like some eccentric rich art collector’s sitting room. All the way at the back was the hotel reception desk. Dawn crossed to it slowly, gawping around at the pictures, wondering what had brought Angel here, and when, which was a good way to divert herself from what she was about to do.
The receptionist looked like a normal person who would not be nonchalant about vampires.
“I’m here to visit …”
“Yes?”
“I’m here …”
She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t say the name, because then this man would hear it, and he would look in the register, and he would call up to the room.
Instead, she could mumble something about just being here to look, at the famous lobby, and its pictures, and she could retreat and not glance back at the receptionist who would think she was some kind of enormous dork. That was what she was about to do, except that the elevator door opened then, and Spike stepped out.
He was the same. He was the same as he’d been last week in Dojo, which was the same as he’d been back in Sunnydale. Still bleached blond, still clad in black leather and denim. Being with Buffy had prompted no change. Buffy hadn’t gotten him to dress better, or wear better shoes, or carry himself any differently. Seeing her, he registered no surprise. He smiled. “Ah, you came.”
The receptionist disappeared into the back, and for the moment, there was no one else near to watch or hear them.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“Blood run. Your sis is upstairs puttin’ her face on.”
Her face. Her face all ridges and fangs. She’d seen it, in LA, and the memory of that, and what she’d done in the bathroom, with the glass, made her shudder.
Spike seemed not to notice. “You go up to her, good time for it, with me out of the way for a while. Have your sister talk in private.”
I can’t do that, Dave.
“No. No! You have to be there too.” She stared at her boot-toes. “Will you go up and tell her I’m here. And I’ll wait for you to come back and get me.”
“Look, you can just come up with me now—“
“Spike. Will you, for once, please let me have some agency here?”
He gave her a look then, and she knew he understood.
“All right, I’ll go announce you. You take a chair over there, an’ I’ll be right back.”
She went back into the big lobby, and sat near the big ornate fireplace. She could feel her heartbeat, making her whole body throb. Five years ago, she thought. Five years ago Buffy had gone on patrol, and she’d met some vampire, some random unknown vampire, maybe male, maybe female, maybe experienced, maybe brand-new out of the grave. And that vampire had killed her, and turned her. Turned her, made her into the one worst thing her sister had always dreaded. And then. And then.
She could still walk out of here. She could just get up and go back out onto 23rd Street. She could get a burrito on the way home, and then go to the library.
How much, she wondered, would the house go for? She had student loans. Aunt Arlene didn’t have a lot of money, to help her with college. But she’d been generous. She was very good to her, Aunt Arlene, who wasn’t Mom.
Buffy wasn’t Buffy anymore. She’s seen that, at Angel’s place. She’d seen that, five years ago.
Angel and his people were sure Spike had done it. Not killing her, maybe, but the turning. They both denied it, but Dawn knew Angel and his people didn’t really believe them. Of course they’d deny it. They also denied that Buffy had killed anyone since her turning, but how could she believe that, how could she ever really know?
Buffy had wanted it. She didn’t want to be alive, she didn’t want to go on living at home with her little sister, and she’d taken that chance to go away with Spike. To be like Spike.
She could just get up and leave. She rose, and picked up her bag, and zipped her coat. She stepped towards the door. She could get on the subway and be back at school in ten minutes. She could ask Keisha if she could crash at her place for a few days. They wouldn’t find her then, she’d stay away from Dojo too. Opening the hotel door, she felt the cold outside air on her face, and was stepping across when there came the touch on her elbow. She didn’t turn around. Her jaw was set. “Spike, I can’t.”
“Dawnie, wait.”
It was Buffy’s voice. It was Buffy’s hand, which held her arm for one moment, before withdrawing.
Oh. The cold air poured against her face, and behind her was that voice.
“Dawnie. Please.”
She couldn’t help herself. She glanced around.
There was Buffy. The same Buffy. She looked not a day older. Her hair was the same way, the same color. She still wore pink lipgloss, and still had that worried anxious expression that had come on in the months before she leapt from the Tower, and never went away after. Except that under those smooth cheeks, those glossed querulous lips, was the other face, the one that ripped, that roared, that swallowed blood. Buffy had gotten that face, and she’d gone away. She’d taken Spike, and they’d deserted her.
Spike was there, standing behind Buffy, beyond arm’s reach, his hands dangling at his sides out of the sleeves of his black leather, just watching them. She couldn’t meet Buffy’s eyes, so Dawn looked at him. His eyes were full, though his face was still. She saw in them all kinds of pleading, all kinds of anticipation. But he didn’t move, or speak. He waited to see what she would do.
Buffy didn’t move either. She too stood in an attitude of waiting, with hands hanging, and Dawn thought how hard that always was for her, her sister who was used to being bossy, to being in command, to being the one who acted, who marshaled her troops. But she was just standing there, waiting to find out what Dawn was going to do.
“You left me,” Dawn said. She barely recognized her own voice. It came out loud and strange, like a squawk. So loud that a couple of people sitting in the lobby chairs glanced up at them.
Buffy absorbed this into herself; Dawn, who still couldn’t look right into her eyes, saw her chew her lip, shift her weight. Quietly, she said, “Dawnie, I did. And I’m so sorry. I know I had my reasons, and they were good reasons, but I also know they didn’t seem good, or fair, to you.”
“It’s never been fair!”
Oh God, am I four years old? she thought. Apparently, she was. The four year old must speak. She must make her existential protest. Must decry that she’d never even been a four year old, that she wasn’t real, she was a Key, she was a victim, and she was always always always getting left.
They were still standing by the door. No one was going in or out. Dawn wasn’t ready to move yet, neither in nor out.
“Yes, I know I should just grow up, and suck it up, and I will, I have, I DO, but—but—you hurt me, and I’m angry with you, and you can’t just make it better by showing up like this!”
“I know that,” Buffy said. “I know that I’ve made your life hard. You were given to me to protect from a fate that was supposed to destroy you. But I also know that you’re free now, that you escaped that fate, and the rest of your life is yours. And I’m still your sister, and I still want to look after you, not because you’re the key, but because you’re just Dawn Summers and I love you.” She spoke very low. Though there was noise from the street, and some ambient music playing in the lobby, still, Dawn heard them, each word clear and distinct; they seemed to ring in her mind. She thought, Isn’t this what I’ve always wanted to hear?
“Dawn, I miss you so much. I was waiting, hoping you’d tell me you were ready … but I couldn’t wait any more. I need my sister. I need us to know each other. To be near to each other.”
Dawn’s skin prickled all over. She couldn’t feel her feet, her legs. The bag slipped off her shoulder and fell to the floor. The edges of her vision began to boil, and she couldn’t blink.
Then Spike was at her side, his hand on her shoulder, his mouth near her ear. “Sssh, Niblet. Breathe. Breathe now. S’all right. You’re all right.”
Dawn didn’t collapse. Spike, who while she’d been in Heaven, had learned to gentle her sister, to whisper her, managed to get her then to come up to the room. In the elevator Buffy gave her as much space as the small car allowed, and again in the room, kept a distance, keeping quiet while Spike encouraged Dawn out of her coat, into a chair, and even got her to sip some of his Jack Daniels. She watched all this with wonderment. Spike’s description hadn’t prepared her for the changes: Dawn at twenty was all different, she could’ve been twenty-five, so erased was all the little girlness Buffy remembered. She had a new style, she’d left behind all her old self. And yet she was herself, Buffy thought, I’d know her anywhere, and not just because I can smell everything now. I know her because she’s Dawn, and we’re part of each other, and I have always loved her, I have loved her retroactively, I love her in all dimensions.
Dawn sipped the whiskey, and didn’t cough, and sat back in the chair, and crossed her long legs, suddenly self-possessed again. She looked around. Unlike the lobby, this room could’ve been a room in any random hotel. Buffy herself had been disappointed when she first saw it. Just a rather shabby room, spacious enough, with a big bed, and a table and two easy chairs, and a couple of bureaus, some lamps. Special only because it was inside the Hotel Chelsea and God only knew what acts of creative or brutal frenzy might’ve taken place in it since 1885.
“Angel said you were in Berlin.”
“You spoke to Angel?” Buffy asked.
“I asked his advice.”
“Ah. Uh-huh.”
Dawn crossed her legs the other way. Buffy thought she’d look good smoking a cigarette, like some mid-century movie star. She knew how to pose, how to deploy her lanky body. “I thought of calling other people too. I thought of calling up Giles.”
Quietly, Buffy said, “Would you like to do that? Do you think it’s time we turned ourselves in?” She’s thinking it would serve us right, Buffy thought.
Dawn’s expression had gone stubborn. “I don’t keep in touch with anybody from back there, except sometimes Angel. I don’t know what’s become of any of them.” She jerked her ankle. “I would be afraid, still … what might happen, if they knew about you.”
“If you think they should be told, Giles, or any of them,” Buffy said, “I wouldn’t try to stop you. I ‘d prefer to stay on the down-low, but I think I understand what you feel about it, and I wouldn’t stop you.”
Dawn was still for a long moment, absorbing this. Buffy saw her stillness, as an alert stillness like a deer in a glade. Then Dawn shook her head. “Willow … might do things.”
“That’s what Spike and I have always … feared,” Buffy said, mildly, as if she was talking about something so very much more minor than being hunted down and slain, or forcibly resouled, or … any unimaginable mistake that Willow’s power and hubris could devise.
“I didn’t really come here to talk about Willow, or Giles, or any of that,” Dawn said. “I came because … well, I knew I had to. You cornered me.” She sniffed suddenly, and gave her head an angry toss. “That’s what you do, vampires, you corner your prey.”
Buffy said nothing.
Quietly, Spike said, “Now it’s you, bein’ unfair.”
“I know! I know. God. Do you think this is easy? Do you think I know what the fuck to say, here?”
Buffy wished she had a cigarette herself, but there was no smoking indoors in this city. “You don’t have to say it all at once. We can take our time, as much time as we need. If you want us to, if it’s okay with you … Spike and I will stay here.”
“What, stay in New York? Right here? For how long? I have to go back to Chicago for Thanksgiving. And then there’s Christmas break.”
“We’ll stay here, as long as you want us to. We’ll stay here indefinitely. I’d like to see you, and spend time with you, as much as you can give me.” Buffy moved a little closer, and when Dawn didn’t recoil at all, she came and sat in the chair opposite her. “I know you’re busy with school, but you could make a little time, couldn’t you, for your sister who lives just a few blocks away? And that way, whatever we have to say … it’ll get said, when the time is right. When the spirit moves us.”
Dawn was staring at her.
Buffy smiled. “You used to like hanging out with me, remember? I always meant to teach you the right way to shoplift the really good lipsticks. But maybe not that, not anymore … we can go for long walks, to the movies, or … I could teach you to ice-skate.”
“I spent three years in the Frozen North, aka Chicago. I know how to ice-skate.”
“So we could go ice-skating.” She laughed suddenly. “Just us. Not Spike. There’s no Big Bad On Ice.”
Dawn was still staring. “I don’t believe this.”
“The only way you’ll believe it, is if you let it happen. Let me, let time, show you that I’m with you. I’m going to stick around, Dawn, and the next time anyone leaves, it’s going to be you. If you want to leave, you can leave. But I’m staying.”
Dawn looked at her as she spoke these words, and her expression was still composed, and rather sullen and shut off. Then she got up, and glanced around, then followed Spike’s pointing finger to the bathroom, where, a moment after she shut herself in, Buffy heard the water go on full. A sound mask her sister hoped would keep her from hearing anything else. Buffy would never tell her it didn’t work like that any more.
She looked at Spike, who sidled over to perch on the arm of her chair.
She whispered, “How is this going?”
~~~
The bathroom was just a bathroom, like the hotel room was just a hotel room. On the counter by the sink was a make-up bag, and various lotions and cleansers, her sister’s hair brush with a couple of blonde hairs stuck in it, toothbrushes, sticky hair gel that must belong to Spike, two boxes of dental floss, one mint, one not. Dawn looked at herself in the mirror. She wasn’t going to cry and ruin her eyeliner. Isn’t this what you want? What you’ve been too proud and too afraid to even wish for, but in all actual fact WANT WANT WANT?
But oh shit, what if it wasn’t … WHAT? Wasn’t what? Wasn’t good? Wasn’t sincere? Wasn’t real? Wasn’t enough to start filling up the bottomless yawing maw that existed inside of her and could never never never ever be filled up no matter how much love she was offered?
I am a fucking broken thing. We are two broken things, the Summers sisters. Destroyed but still walking around.
Dawn opened the door. Buffy was still sitting in the chair. Spike rose from the chair arm and moved away towards the bed. He treated her, Dawn thought, like a queen. Like he was some kind of higher servant, a majordomo, to a very imperious queen. I bet she really likes that.
She addressed her sister. “What do you want from me?”
“If you mean, what do I demand from you, what am I going to force from you—nothing.” Buffy rose, and started towards her, and stopped half way. “I don’t want anything from you that you don’t want to give me. I just want to try to be, in this one little bit of our weird existences, normal. I want us just to be sisters, for as long as possible. Like … normal.”
“Like Mom and Aunt Arlene?”
“I hope we can be closer than they were. I don’t think either of them meant to let so much distance get between them. But yes, I want you to know you can rely on me, like Mom could on Arlene. She knew Arlene would take us if we needed somewhere to go. And Arlene would’ve been there for us when Mom was sick, except, maybe you don’t know this, but Mom wouldn’t call her. She wouldn’t let me call her.” Buffy sighed. “I don’t know why.”
“She didn’t want to be fussed at,” Dawn said. “Aunt Arlene’s kind of a fusser. It took me some getting used to.”
“But you get along with her, right? It’s okay there, right? Really? I never knew if you were telling me the truth.”
A sheepishness overcame Dawn. “Yes. I had a nice room, and went to a good high school, and Arlene has a lot of friends and they were all good to me, and you know I did really well and got some scholarship money. You know that, right? Did Angel tell you?”
“Angel forgot to tell me about the scholarship.”
“I got into all the colleges I applied to.”
Buffy sidled a little nearer. “Of course you did.”
“But I always knew I’d pick NYU.”
“And you’re doing so well. Have you made friends?”
“There’s a little pack I run with.” She smiled abruptly, thinking of Keisha, and Liv, and Paul and the others, whom she saw every day, and lived with as if they were in each other’s pockets. “I’m a double-major. English and Psych. I want to go to grad school. I think I want to be a therapist.” The great therapist I never had.
“That’s wonderful. I’m so proud of you.” Buffy took another couple of steps, and now she was standing conversationally close. Dawn, who had been taller than she even in Sunnydale, was taller still. Buffy was wearing three inch heels, but so was she. Dawn found she could look at her now. Could see the greeny color of her eyes, and that she was wearing mascara—how did she put on mascara without being able to look in a mirror?—and her earrings were little diamonds. Up this close, searching for signs of change in her, it was kind of reassuring, albeit uncanny, that Buffy looked just like she had five years ago. She would always look this way, now.
“I like your earrings.”
Buffy put a hand up to touch one of them. “Spike gave them to me.”
Like a dog that hears its name, Spike perked up, and drifted over to stand just behind Buffy. Who turned and looked up at him with a soft gaze that reminded Dawn of … of the way Spike used to look, sometimes, at each of them. Back in the day. Buffy slipped her hand around his, and squeezed it, and held on.
Dawn wondered how Spike had managed to get a hold of a pair of diamond earrings, but decided to save that question for another day.
“Speaking of jewelry … I still have the silver cross you gave me. The one from Angel.”
“Good. I wanted you to have it.”
“I’m not wearing it now.”
“It would be fine if you were.”
“I don’t … I don’t really wear it, honestly. I’m not a Christian. I’m kind of getting into … I might be a Buddhist.”
“I hope you’ll tell me about that, sometime. Sometime soon.”
“I’m still mostly just reading up on it.”
“I hope you’ll tell me everything,” Buffy said. “Everything I missed. Everything I should’ve noticed about you, and didn’t. I want you to know that you can. If you want to.”
Dawn said, “We’ll see.” She glanced at Spike, who, his hand clasping Buffy’s, stood listening to them with his head cocked, a familiar pose. He seemed infinitely patient, like he’d stand there for days, holding Buffy’s hand, if that was what she needed.
God, is there ever going to be someone like that for me? Then she thought, He’s her only one. The only one like her. The only one who shares it. Maybe that’s what keeps them together, that affliction. A wave of pity, unexpected and sharp, came over her. Poor Buffy. She pictured the Tower, in that terrible lightning-shot darkness, and what Buffy did there. Everything happens to her. How does she stand it?
All this was too uncomfortable. “I think I need to go now.”
“Already?”
“I still have to study tonight.” The urge to get out, instantaneous, couldn’t be withstood. She dived for her bag, and for the door. Opening it, she glanced back. Spike and Buffy were still standing there in the middle of the room, hand in hand. They looked, Dawn thought, in that last moment before she pulled the door shut behind her, like two lost children, waiting to be found.
~~~
“Spoke to the management about us moving into a suite,” Spike said, a few days later. “There’ll be a vacancy, end of the month.”
“Can we afford it?” Buffy was putting up her hair; she had pins in her mouth.
“We can afford it,” Spike said. “Got a bit of a break on it, for taking it on a long lease.”
“How long?”
“Manager knows me of old. Knows I can commit to a long long time.”
This was another one of those things Buffy decided not to probe into, how the management had come to know that Spike was a vampire, like where exactly all the funds came from, and what exactly Spike had done in all the years before he’d come to Sunnydale. He’d implied once or twice that somehow the money had to do with Angel, not that Angel gave it to him, but that theirs being an old line, there was some fortune accrued over centuries, to be drawn on, when needed.
It was easier not to think about it too much. Maybe in fifty years, in a hundred, she’d ask some more questions.
So they moved, at the end of the month, into a suite on the Chelsea’s top floor, with a large sitting room, and two bedrooms, one larger than the room they’d had before, the other ample enough, and a kitchenette, and two bathrooms. Unlike their previous room, this suite was not shabby and nondescript; someone, relatively recently, had had it nicely renovated. There was some furniture in it, kind of Danish modern-y, which was quite good, so Spike said, though she herself didn’t have much of an eye for that kind of thing. They got more furnishings, too. They made it comfortable.
Spike watched her, the first few days after they’d relocated. Here was the thing she’d always talked about and always evaded: the place they could settle down. He’d half expected her to wriggle out of it somehow, before they’d received the keys, and even now they were here, he wasn’t sure what Buffy would do.
On the first full day they’d been in there, he’d helped Buffy make up the bed in the second bedroom. She’d bought beautiful bedclothes, sheets, comforter, everything, stupidly expensive and luxurious. But as they put them on, she’d said, “Don’t say anything about this to Dawn.”
“No? This bedroom’s for her. Whole point of moving up to the suite, yeah?”
“I hope it will be. But please don’t say anything yet.”
Dawn hadn’t come back again, to the Chelsea. Instead they met her, on Sunday nights just after dark, in Washington Square, and went for walks if it wasn’t freezing and icy, and to a bar-restaurant they liked on the far west side, where there were no student types, where one could sit for a long leisurely meal with lots of cocktails, excellent service and no one rushing you. During these visits, Buffy ordered and ate. Spike knew she did it not because she wanted the food, but because she wanted Dawn to be at ease. It would call too much ostentatious attention to her undead state, if she sat there with nothing in front of her.
Spike paid. He liked to see Dawn tuck into the most expensive steak on the menu.
The first time they went there, Dawn said, “I hope you’re not going to make me do a runner when the check comes.” And “If you had money, why didn’t we know it before?”
Spike just raised an eyebrow. “Did I ever stint you pizza an’ ice cream an’ a tenner to go to the flicks with your pals, that summer?”
It was a glimpse, Buffy saw, into that time she’d been dead, and she listened eagerly. Dawn looked into her cocktail, twisting it in her hand. “No. I didn’t think where your money came from, I guess I thought you stole it. But then—“
“Your sis wouldn’t have taken a penny from me in those days,” Spike said, with a shrug. “Anyway, never mind all that, now we’re here, no copper pipes to be responsible for, an’ you’ll have the t-bone.”
Apart from those regular Sunday evenings, most weeks Dawn would text Buffy, usually on a Wednesday, to meet her when the library closed at midnight, and they’d go to an all-night diner nearby, just the two of them, to visit.
Buffy always stayed out all night, though the amount of time she actually spent with Dawn might be as little as half an hour, or as much as four. She always took a stake with her, and “did a spot of work”, as Spike called it, before coming back.
Buffy would be in various moods when she returned from these outings. Spike didn’t quiz her. He could guess, when she came in silent and somber, that perhaps Dawn had been moody, that they’d quarreled. Other times she’d seem contented.
She always fucked him on those mornings, before they went to sleep, and it was good, she worked him hard, but so tenderly. Left him feeling things she wasn’t going to say in words.
It was a winter of waiting for the other shoe to drop. When Dawn went back to Evanston at Christmas time, Buffy was nervous. What if going back there made her start to think differently? What if Giles decided to reach out to her again?
But Dawn came back, resumed her classes, and when Buffy, meeting her that first Wednesday night, asked about her trip back home, Dawn talked about parties with high school friends, and presents, and she felt reassured.
Then one night, returning from a foray to the Village, she complained to him, “I always get her to talk about her future, about what she wants to do, all her plans and dreams. But she keeps asking me what I’m going to do. What I’m doing.”
“An’ what do you say?” They were lying on the rug, because they’d just finished one of those fucks where the bed was just the starting-off place, and they’d had to travel the room, pouncing and crawling and capturing and mauling.
“I answer her questions. She knows I still slay. That I’ve had jobs here and there. But what she doesn’t get is what’s it’s about. My future. As a Vampire-American. It worries her.”
Spike didn’t like this line of thought. It was the same one that had led Buffy, back in Berlin, to hint around about not being able to go on. And it was damn annoying that Dawn, after all her complaints about being abandoned, shouldn’t keep whatever spiritual existential dread she had about her sister’s ongoing unlife to herself.
“I told her, that I came to New York to be with her, for as long as she needs me. I said that’s all she needs to know, that she shouldn’t worry about anything. But she doesn’t like it. She wants all these disparate things to make sense. She wants to know that there’s some kind of moral purpose, like there used to be.”
“Does Dawn have a boyfriend? Or a girlfriend, or a hook-up, or whatever?”
“I don’t think so. She hasn’t mentioned it.”
“What she needs is a good rogerin’.”
“Spike. Crass much?”
“I mean, if she was havin’ a bit of what we just did, on the regular, she’d get a better perspective. That it’s the here an’ now that matters. Sensation, an’ trading spit. Cock an’ quim. This,” he seized hold of her sex with his hand, and jiggled it, “this is the seat of joy. Future’s only nebulous.”
It bothered him. He kept thinking about it, after that conversation. He could imagine how Dawn needled her, with that way she had of knitting her brow, bringing up nagging moral questions that even the great philosophers of history, let alone Buffy, weren’t going to have pat answers for.
He went downtown. An unscheduled visit. Found her, after looking in a couple of places, where he first did, at that beansprouts and hummus joint, Dojo.
This time when she spotted him coming towards her, she didn’t panic and turn over her chair, but she still looked like he must be bad news on two legs.
“Is everything okay?”
“What, I can’t stop by for a chat without somethin’ being wrong?”
“No, just—“
“Your sister’s fine,” he said, taking the chair opposite. “We’re not joined at the hip. She does her thing, I do my thing.”
“And your thing right now is coming to see me.”
“You in the middle of some deadline?”
She shook her head.
“Look, reason I came … what’d you two talk about, last time you were together?”
Dawn went on the immediate defensive. “What did we—? Stuff. We talk about, you know, stuff. I thought you wanted us to.”
“Bit, Big Sis does the best she can, with the hand she was dealt.”
“Uh … okay.”
“She’s done her part, saved the world, more’n once. She still wears the white hat. But I don’t think you get what it’s like for her, when you ask her these questions.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Think the phrase was ‘moral purpose’. I hear those two words come out of the Slayer’s mouth, I know she didn’t come up with that all on her lonesome.”
Flummoxed, Dawn fell back in her chair. “Did she send you down here to tell me off?”
“Doesn’t know I’m here. Wouldn’t like it if she did. Bloody hell, I don’t like it either, last thing I am is the fellow to deliver this speech. Only Buffy’s more fragile than you know, an’ when you pester her about her Future Moral Purpose … it gets her down.”
Dawn’s elbows came up onto the table, supporting the face she hid in her hands. “My only sister is a vampire. She doesn’t have a chip, she doesn’t have a soul, and she’s … kind of a fugitive.”
“True, true, an’ true. An’ she’s keeping company with the likes of me. But I tell you she’s all right. She tries an’ strives more now than even in her Glory days. An’ she’ll be all right, but it’ll be better if you show a little more confidence in her. A little less holdin’ her to some account.”
Dawn peered out at him between her fingers. She looked weary.
“Do you doubt it? I promise you, she’s by way of bein’ a virgin, in the vampire way, and will remain so. And so far as moral purpose goes, hasn’t her keeping faith with you these last years proven that?”
“Oh, Spike.” She dropped her hands, and he saw two tears start up in the corners of her embellished eyelids. He reached across the table and caught them with his thumbs.
She grabbed his wrist before he could withdraw. “Why didn’t you ever write to me?”
“Eh?”
“’Spike sends his regards’. That’s all I got, fucking fictional regards, at the end of her emails.” The tears were coming down now, too fast to catch. She was still clutching his wrist. “I fucking missed you! Ever since they brought her back, you just, just—you were there for me, all that summer and then, wham! Buffy’s back, and you didn’t know me anymore!” She shoved his arm away. “You never really cared about me—I was a substitute—“
“No!” He tried to keep his voice down, but the thump he gave the table made people all around them turn to look. He leaned in closer. “Not true. Not true. Least—never meant—“
She was full on crying now, hiding her face again, shoulders jerking. “Sweet, never meant to hurt you. M’sorry.”
“Are you? Or do you just want me to fall in line so Buffy can have what she wants?”
The bitterness that was in her, Spike saw, would take a long long time to dispel. If it ever did.
“There’s a truth to that way of lookin’ at it. You’re right to air it out. But I tell you, you’ll never know peace, if you don’t let that go now you’ve said it.”
“’Let it go’. That’s another one of those phrases I love, like ‘closure’.”
“You an’ sis want the same thing, seems to me, which is each other.”
Dawn gave a long sniff, and dabbed at her eyelids with a paper napkin. Then she gave him a fierce look. “And you. I want my friend Spike back. I don’t think I have him yet. I only have the Spike who comes out on the QT to tell me how to treat her.”
He hadn’t expected this. Wasn’t prepared for it. To be claimed, and so angrily.
“Could only deal with the biggest crisis. Your sister was—“
“Has she been in crisis every minute of the last five years? So you didn’t have a hand free to write me so much as a note? Much as you must have wanted to.”
Oh, she was hurt.
“I didn’t know … didn’t realize. That was a situation, that time after the slayer’s leap, an’ I’d promised her. Only later there were others who were closer to you, had more of a right to be lookin’ after you …” He stopped. It sounded lame, he knew it.
“Oh, I see. It was situational. You’re not actually my friend. Outside of that old situation.”
“… no. Christ, I failed you.”
“You sure did.”
It was hard to confront her, those big eyes of hers that were always full of feeling, and somehow made more so by the make-up, smeary now, and the tears. But he made himself do it. “You’re right. I was stupid, an’ didn’t think. M’sorry, Bit, from bottom of my heart. You do have me.”
She heard him, but somehow she was still waiting.
“… whatever happens to Buffy. Long as I’m on this earth … I’m your friend.”
She gave herself a little shake then, and withdrew that drilling gaze. “I better not be sorry later on, believing that. Shit. Let’s get out of here.” She started pulling her things together.
He followed her out onto the night street, where the wind funneled biting between the tall buildings. Now what? Would they just go into some coffee bar, and sit down again at some table? He wanted to invite her back to the hotel, by rights he ought to. But Buffy clearly wasn’t ready yet, to bring Dawn there again.
Why she’d so carefully prepared a place for her, and then kept it a secret, he didn’t understand.
Now they’d fallen into their little groove of weekly meet-ups, it seemed to him like time to get beyond it. For all they saw each other so regularly, the girls still weren’t treating each other like sisters. Spontaneity was missing. He’d just found out something about why, on Dawn’s side. But he knew enough about Buffy not to break his promise. The inviting must be left to her.
The wind had dried Dawn’s face. She looked at him, blinking, her shoulders hunched up, hands thrust into her pockets. “We can’t just stand out here. You can come back to my dorm and meet all my roommates who will probably think I’ve picked up a very inappropriate older man and will do everything they can to cock-block me. Or we can just finish this up at Starbucks.”
He opted for Starbucks.
It was a blizzard, in February, that forced the spontaneity. Snow came down all through one night, and it was still driving hard in the morning, when all of Manhattan below 14th Street, and some parts of Brooklyn, fell dark. By the end, there’d been no power for almost four days. But Buffy didn’t wait that long to call her sister and say, “Don’t stay there in your freezing dorm. We have a room for you here.”
~~~
Spring forward. Dawn had never thought about what that meant for vampires, Daylight Savings Time. An hour longer to wait in the evening, before they could venture out.
It wasn’t really spring yet, when sundown made its jump on the clock. Dawn stretched in bed, yawning, and looked at her phone. The time was 9:20, which was really 8:20, but that was still late for her to sleep, with her schedule that semester. Still, she lay there a while longer, on the impossibly soft sheets, under the light warm puffy comforter. The street outside was Sunday quiet, but she could hear some distant radiatorial knocking in the hotel’s old plumbing, and from far down the hall, the sound of someone practicing the piano.
Then a little knock at her door, and Buffy came in, in her nightgown, and she was yawning too because she hadn’t gone to sleep yet. She held the little silver tray, with the two pretty antique coffee cups with the roses painted on them, and the heavy silver coffee pot that held enough for two, and the cream jug shaped like a cow. These were things that Buffy had acquired for their sole use, and they’d already made a little ritual for themselves, on the few nights Dawn had come and stayed over, since the blackout last month.
She perched at the foot of the bed, set the tray between them, and poured out the coffee.
“What are you going to do today?” Buffy always asked this, first. Dawn never said so, but it reminded her of how Mom used to wake her up, when she was small. She’d come in and kiss her and ask what they were going to do that day.
“What do I ever do? Go to the library and study.”
Today, for the first time, Buffy asked another question. “Have you thought about what you’re going to do … this summer?”
“Last year I went back to Evanston. I have to earn money.”
Buffy huddled her knees up to her chin, suddenly shy. “You could get a job in New York.”
“I can’t afford to live in the dorm all summer.”
“Stay here. This is your room.”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t you like it?”
“Buffy …”
“Don’t you know we did this for you? Spike and I … we want you to … this is …”
Dawn leaned forward, and laid a hand on Buffy’s bare foot. “This is what?’
She shook her head. “I don’t know why I can’t get it out.”
“I want to hear it.”
“But you know.”
Dawn thrust out her chin. “Say it. You have to say it, so we both can hear it.”
Buffy picked up her cup again, and balanced it on the top of her doubled knee. Her words came out in a whisper Dawn had to strain after. “You got taken away, you lost it all, everything in Sunnydale, and I hate that. I hate that you got left high and dry. And I know these are just rooms in a weird old hotel. And I’m a vampire and my boyfriend is a vampire and we’re never not going to be vampires. But if you’ll stay with us, Dawnie … we can make it something nice. The three of us here. For however long you want. So that when you’re ready to leave us, to go have all the wonderful adventures you’re going to have in your life… you’ll be leaving from home. And you’ll have home to come back to.” She looked up then, her gaze fervent. “As long as I’m around, Dawn, as long as Spike is around, we’re going to have a home for you to come to. Okay?”
Dawn looked at her. All hunched up and defended, like she needed to hide. But while holding out this shining promise.
Buffy waited, and when Dawn stayed silent, she said, “Can that be what matters most? Just that Spike and I love you and want you to be domestic with us whenever you want. Whenever you can. Could you let that be enough?”
Dawn understood now, it came to her, that as much as she was promising, Buffy was pleading too: she needed her. They both needed her, because without her, there was no refuge, no resting place, for either of them. They couldn’t make that, a couple of on-the-wagon vamps, on their own. Which was why, she realized, they’d been so restless these five years. Waiting for her, hoping for her, so they could find at last, all three together, home.
Dawn took the cup from her hand, and set it on the round silver tray, and moved the tray down to the floor. Then she took her sister into her arms, and pulled her in close. “Oh Buffy, it’s more than enough. It’s just right. It’s just what I wanted.”
Buffy gave off a little laugh, relief, exhilaration, and they held onto each other, letting the promise suffuse them. Then came a little knock on the door, and Spike, who must’ve, Dawn guessed, been lingering on the other side, looked in.
“It’s all right then, is it?”
The look of them, together, made him smile.
END
Completed 12/1/15
Originally posted at http://seasonal-spuffy.livejournal.com/540539.html
