Title: Stitched Up
Author: bewildered
Era: BTVS s2
Rating: NC-17
Summary: Something goes horribly, horribly awry with Willow’s ensoulment spell, and Angel’s soul finds an unexpected home – in his dirty laundry. Read now the tale of a Sock with a Soul; it’s on a mission to help the helpless, and it’s starting with Spike and Buffy.
Departs canon forever during Becoming Part Two. Has about the nuanced characterization one should expect from an Ensouled Sock AU. As seems to be my preferred genre now, this is a shameless smutty Spuffy farce, once I get that pesky canon drama out of the way.
Warnings: By the laws of California, Buffy is still under the age of consent (18) at the beginning of this fic, and will be for many more months. Spike doesn’t care (he’s evil) and Buffy doesn’t care (she’s a teenager who wants to be treated like an adult) and since Spike has the emotional development of a teen (or even tween) himself, we’ll call it good. She’ll be 18 before they get TOO far, anyhow. There will be sexual situations, bad language, character death (or characters-sucked-into-a-demon-dimension, which is close enough), and plain old explicit sex. Also an ensouled sock. If you keep reading, don’t blame me.
Chapter 5: A Sock at a Loss
The summer had settled into a beautiful rhythm; Buffy didn’t want it to end.
Buffy would sleep late, hearing her mother’s preparations for work vaguely as she slept on, eventually getting up for a shower just before lunchtime. She would fix herself a sandwich or a salad and heat up a mug of blood for Spike and bring it downstairs, where she would unchain him and they would sit on the edge of the bed, consuming their meals silently but companionably. Then they would race to the nearest sewer entrance and take the underground path to the school library, entering through the stacks.
Giles was usually waiting there – he was old and liked to get up early – and they would settle in to research. After much eye-rolling and a few sarcastic jibes, Giles had agreed to move one of the good tables out of the direct sunlight from the windows so that Buffy and Spike could work together until dark. Sometimes Willow helped, sometimes Xander and Cordelia showed up, but mostly it was just Buffy and Spike.
Sometimes she would kiss him in the shadows of the stacks. When she couldn’t wait.
They would walk home so that Buffy could have dinner with her mom – Spike joined in most nights, for lack of anything better to do – and then they would head out on patrol. Spike had bitched about how bored he was at one point, especially since most of his shows were in summer reruns, and one night she had offered to take him with her, as long as he didn’t double-cross her. Much to her surprise, he had not only not stabbed her in the back, he had saved her bacon when a smarter-than-usual vamp had tried to sneak up in her blind spot. She still didn’t trust him, not completely, but he at least seemed to be taking their alliance seriously, and so they patrolled together, and it was… nice. She didn’t feel like she had to protect him, like when the other Scoobies helped out. It was really nice.
Then they would come home, wait for Joyce to go to bed, and make out to the swish-and-hum of the washing machine.
They had rules, of course. Lines that couldn’t be crossed. Bridges too far. All of their rules were unspoken, though, negotiated in a subtle dance of exploratory forays and gentle refusals, gradually settling into a comfortable equilibrium.
Kissing was a given, and after a while they had determined that anything above the waist was fair game for the kissage, which was fine by Buffy, because as far as she was concerned Spike’s lips needed to be on her breasts as often as possible. He had a fantastically talented tongue. (She sometimes wondered what his tongue would feel like on other parts of her, to the point of elaborate imaginings when she was back in her own bed, but he had never tried to dip lower than her waist, and she was too shy to ask.)
Shirts were disposable – Spike had A Thing for the reveal, and Buffy loved the look in his eyes every time she pulled her shirt over her head – but pants stayed on. At least, Spike’s did. Buffy had tested this one a few times, trying jeans and slacks and skirts of different lengths, and Spike always managed to get his hands right where she wanted them – he had sworn for a minute straight the time she had worn a miniskirt with no panties – but the second she laid a hand on his belt buckle, he always gently lifted it away. “Dru,” he’d said once, and she had understood.
He had elaborated one night, when they were lying side-by-side on his cot, gasping and dizzy after he had done something indescribable with his fingers that had literally made her scream – she had always thought that was just a hyperbolic expression, but apparently not. Good thing they were in the basement.
“Vampires aren’t usually faithful,” he’d said quietly, stroking her bicep absently. “Part of the deal, when you’re turned. You don’t care anymore for the strictures of society, the trappings of civilization. Fidelity. Relationships. Family bonds.” He had fallen silent then for a moment, pulling her a little closer before continuing. “Dru has even fewer ties to the world than most. Angel took them all away, killed her family and her friends, and then when she ran away to a convent, he slaughtered them all, every one of them. He drove her mad. So she just goes where the demon leads her, yeah?”
Buffy had nodded against his bare chest.
“She loves me,” Spike had said, voice determined. “She loves me, but she doesn’t know how to stay true. So I always stayed true for the both of us.” He shrugged, settling his arm around Buffy more securely. “She probably doesn’t even care, yeah? Dunno if she even notices. But there are things I always save for Dru, because it matters to me.”
Buffy had curled into him then, wrapping her arms around his waist, squeezing tight, because that was really sweet, even if it wasn’t about her, and she guessed it shouldn’t matter that it wasn’t about her, because she was totally in love with Angel.
Except…
She couldn’t ever do this with Angel. Couldn’t lie half-naked in bed talking, couldn’t risk that whatever they were doing was close enough to Perfect Happiness that she would turn him evil again, couldn’t risk her friends and family and the world again. When she finally got Angel back, body and soul, she might as well be entering a convent. And it would be worth it, of course it would be worth it, she loved him with a perfect forever love, but… there wasn’t any point in saving anything for him, because he wouldn’t be able to accept it.
As far as sex was concerned, this was all she would ever have.
The next night, she had locked Spike into his manacles and then stood just out of reach, silently stripping off every article of clothing until she was completely naked, watching his eager eyes the whole time, and then stepped forward into his embrace.
She wasn’t saving anything.
She was going to spend it all.
***
The sock was running out of ideas.
Every night, it slipped into the washing machine for a bath, wondering just where it was going wrong. It swirled around through the rinse cycle, trying to come up with new and improved cunning plans to make the love magic happen. But no matter what it tried, every day Buffy and Spike just ate and researched and patrolled. Like they didn’t even notice the UST between them. Like they didn’t even want to be happy.
What was up with that?
The sock had been trying, it really had. It had tried so hard.
It had waited until they were in the same room and then locked them in, multiple times, but as it turned out it was hard to find a door in the modern world that actually locked from the outside, and they always just shrugged and unlocked the door and left. The sock kept hoping against hope that they would encounter a walk-in freezer, or a bank vault, something with a lock on the outside, but no such luck.
The sock had made an attempt at writing poetry that it could pretend was a secret love note from one to the other, but it had quickly learned two things: one, that its handwriting was atrocious, looking more like the scrawl of a kindergartener than a grownup, and two, that poetry was really hard to write. Even when it snuck into Joyce’s room and tried to type something up on the computer, it got all caught up in trying to find rhymes, and worrying about meter, and the eventual results were unmistakably bad. It debated using one of its less-mediocre completed works at one point, reasoning that neither Buffy nor Spike seemed like they would be much good at the wordsmithing anyhow and it was the emotion behind the poem that really mattered, but in the end, it was just too ashamed.
It had tried setting the mood, lugging a boom box down to the basement – that had taken hours – and popping in a CD of high-quality love ballads, but Spike had quickly demonstrated a complete lack of musical taste, pulling the “Barry Manilow’s Greatest Hits” CD out and breaking it in half. (The sock had pouted for a couple of days after that, because Spike hadn’t even waited for “Mandy” to come on, the Philistine.)
It had even spent a few days avidly watching the Weather Channel, hoping for a rainy day that it could somehow exploit, figuring out a way to get the couple stranded under an awning or something, or at least force them to share an umbrella, but Sunnydale was having a very sunny summer, so that was a no go as well.
Seriously, how had the human race not died out long before this, with it being so hard to get two people who so obviously wanted each other to kiss already? Not that Spike and Buffy could procreate, the sock amended grumpily, but the principle was the same.
The sock was at a complete loss. It had resorted to watching soap operas over Spike’s shoulder, desperately trying to glean strategies and scenarios for inspiring the loving, but nothing seemed quite right.
It had even, on a particularly desperate night, hitched a ride in the pocket of Spike’s duster when they went on patrol, hoping to scout out another evil vampire lover for Buffy, since Spike obviously wasn’t working out, but every time they had come across a likely prospect, either Buffy or Spike had staked it before the sock could do a thing.
How was the sock supposed to find Buffy hot vampire love if she kept killing all the vampires?
Now it tumbled in the dryer, its thoughts turning over and over in its head. (Oh, hey, was that a scream? It listened for a moment more, then shrugged. Must have been its imagination.) There had to be a way. The sock was going to find a way, no matter how stubbornly they resisted.
It had to make Spike and Buffy admit that they wanted each other.
***
Spike wanted Buffy so much that it hurt.
She was standing in a shaft of sunlight in the center of the library, chatting with Giles, her hair glowing gold, and he imagined pulling her off into the stacks, running his hands all over her sun-warmed skin, kneeling down to devour her glorious wet quim, letting her eager hands unfasten his belt and his button and his zipper and release his desperate cock so he could wrap her legs around his waist and drive home, deep into her heat, fuck her against the bookshelves, hard and fast, then slow and tender, any way she wanted it…
Dru, he reminded himself. Get Dru back and you can fuck for weeks on end, fuck and feast and god, what must it feel like, being inside Buffy, feeling her come around you, the scent of her hair and the beat of her heart and all that life…
He shook his head, sharply. This was all pointless. He loved Dru, his wicked princess, his dark queen. It was just the deprivation that was getting to him, the fact that he hadn’t been inside her for so long, since the wheelchair, and Buffy was here, and willing to kiss him, offering herself up like a virgin sacrifice.
Well, not a virgin – they both knew that – but that wasn’t really his thing anyhow, he liked a woman who knew what she wanted, and god did Buffy know what she wanted, hot and demanding and willing and open, just shy enough to be alluring, with so much passion that Spike felt like he was going to burn to ash every time he touched her. She wanted him to fuck her, she had presented herself on a fucking platter night after night, until he felt like a cad for turning her away, and then she didn’t even run away, she stayed and took what he could spare her and curled up against him, talking about hopes and dreams and life and school, sharing her grief. She let him talk about Drusilla, let him cry into her naked bosom, stroked his hair as he wept. He didn’t even mind when she talked about Angel, even though she obviously had no idea what he was really like, because there was something sweet and adorable about her youthful devotion, something pure, and he liked the idea of it. He remembered being in love like that. It hadn’t ended well, but he remembered the feeling, how sweet it was, and it made him want to weep again, even as it made him want to fuck her and fuck her until she forgot all about Angel and pure first love and everything, until all she saw was Spike.
Watching her now, glowing in the sun, he wondered if Dru would even care. If she would even notice.
He reluctantly tore his eyes away from Buffy, because he had a good feeling about this book, he was sure it was the one. Giles had dismissed it because he couldn’t read it – it was in a rather obscure dialect of Fyarl, written phonetically using the writing system of another demon clan entirely since Fyarl demons generally didn’t write anything, and Spike was only able to read it because the Fyarl bodyguards he had once hired had happened to speak this particular variant, and he was good at sounding shit out.
He had found a passage that referred to Acathla, and he considered calling Buffy over, so he could inhale the scent of her hair as she bent over to look at the text she couldn’t read, but as he read on, he felt suddenly cold.
Once again, Spike was staring at a page that held an answer he didn’t want to know.
The problem was, it was just the answer he had been looking for all this time.
He had found it.
He took a deep breath, let it out gradually, and slowly closed the book.
End Chapter 5
Originally posted at http://seasonal-spuffy.livejournal.com/523847.html
