Fic: The Spuffy, the Witch, and the Utility Shed [6/11]

Title: The Spuffy, the Witch, and the Utility Shed
Author: bewildered
Era: BTVS between s3 & s4
Rating: NC-17 eventually
Summary: When Buffy encounters Spike at her college orientation, the last thing she expects is to be hurtled with him into a demon dimension. Now they must battle together against hordes of unnatural creatures, talking beavers, and… is that a lion?

AU set between seasons 3 and 4. Don’t let the hints of plot fool you, this is mostly just an excuse for some smut. Well, smut and mayhem; it is Spuffy.

With deepest, most heartfelt apologies to C.S. Lewis for the mutilation of his characters and bits of his dialogue.

Warnings: NC-17 for violence and sex. (As of initial posting, 5/15, the smut is still Future Smut, but is on the way soon!) Lots and lots of beloved childhood character death. Sorry!

Thanks to the_moonmoth, who inspired this fic by sending me fic prompts and then egging me on as I got sillier and sillier, and then beta-reading at the very last minute. I am the luckiest ever. She didn’t get to beta this chapter yet, though, because it’s the last minute. It may change.

Click for a chapter index!

Chapter 6: In the Beaver’s House

Spike’s nose tickled, but his arms felt heavy and sluggish; he somehow couldn’t muster the strength to scratch his nose, and so he stuck his lower lip out and tried to blow the itch away, but inhaling made his chest hurt, and so he stopped breathing altogether, and in the stillness realized that his chest wasn’t the only thing that hurt, in fact every part of him hurt to one degree or another, and that was unusual enough to make him crack his eyes open, but all he could see was a rough wood-and mud ceiling, which was less than informative.

Wolves. He remembered wolves, fur and fangs, and then he remembered the morning, leaving the dam  for his morning patrol, and just happening to look back in time to see the wolves leaping from their hiding place atop the dam, knocking Buffy into a tree, and then things were fuzzy again, or maybe they were clear but they just didn’t make sense, because he remembered rage and fear, the sight of Buffy unconscious beneath the paws of the wolves somehow wrong, and running and leaping, tumbling on the ground, and, well, the fighting made sense, that was just his sort of fight, but not that red haze in his eyes, not the way that he didn’t even remember enjoying the fight, because he was too distracted worrying about…

“Buffy!”

His lips formed the word, he was sure of it, and he made some kind of a noise, but it didn’t sound right to his ears, and it felt like his vocal cords had been replaced with jagged shards of glass, but he was already past caring about that, eyes darting from side to side trying to see where she was, and that was when he realized her head was pillowed on the mattress near his shoulder, her tousled hair wafting right under his nose – which explained the tickle.

She was fast asleep, sitting on a little three-legged stool by his bedside, one arm tucked under her cheek, the other draped awkwardly along the side of the bed, like she hadn’t quite known what to do with it. He couldn’t turn his head, not without pain, but he watched her out of the corner of his eye. He could just see the pulse beating in her throat.

God, he wanted it.

They hadn’t ever spelled out the terms of their truce, hastily-crafted as it was; there had just been an unspoken assumption that she wouldn’t stake him and he wouldn’t bite her, not while they were here in this dimension, but Spike had figured that at some point – either when they got home, or when he got too bored – he would find the opportunity to drain the slayer dry. The talking-animal blood he had been living off was vaguely nourishing, but didn’t quite satisfy, and he had spent many a morning imagining that the heat of the sun on his face was in fact the heat of the slayer’s blood running down his throat. (He had imagined all kinds of heat, if he were honest – the heat of her mouth and the heat of her body, and god, everything about her would be hot, he would bloody bathe in her heat, but he always reminded himself that the blood was the thing.) And now… he was starving, he could feel his body trying to heal, demanding he feed. He needed to feed.

Her pulse beat and beat.

It would hurt to roll over and bite her, it would hurt like bloody blazes, but it would be worth it. It would fill him, make him strong, heal him faster than any other blood. Her throat was right there, naked and exposed. She probably wouldn’t even wake up, not if he did it quick. He could drink her down, consume her, make her his. He wanted her. He wanted her.

Her pulse kept beating, and he let his eyes drift shut.

Tomorrow.

He’d eat her tomorrow.

*

Buffy sucked at being a nurse.

Spike wasn’t complaining, but she could just tell she was not cut out for this whole comforting business. Sure, she wrapped a mean bandage, and she could pat him on the forehead and say nice things for a little while, but then she got… impatient. Her fingers started twitching and she started feeling all quivery in her stomach, and she caught herself fidgeting, tracing her fingers along his arms and chest, pacing up and down next to the bed… She didn’t know why she was so antsy, but after sitting and watching Spike sleep for a while, she just needed to do something.

If she was lucky, some more vicious animals would attack, and she could beat up on them for a while and bring Spike back some dinner, but they were coming less frequently now, and there was something odd about the way they attacked. Like they were testing their defenses instead of truly trying for the kill. It was worrisome.

But in any case there wasn’t much to fight any more, and if there wasn’t anything to fight, Buffy found herself sitting next to the bed, her brain coming up with constantly weirder ideas to pass the time.

Today, she was counting freckles.

She had noticed when she was washing blood away, that very first day, that Spike had somehow acquired a dusting of pale gingery freckles across his cheekbones, and once she noticed that first bunch, she just kept finding more. On his shoulders, scattered like constellations across his chest. They were so faint they could barely be seen, and there was something compelling about them. Buffy had caught herself tapping her fingers on them, tracing patterns from one to another like connect-the-dots… They were fascinating. So when he fell asleep – he slept a lot, convalescing, especially after she fed him – she started to count.

She tried at first just looking at them and counting, but she kept getting lost, so she sighed and started to touch each one as she counted it, but she thought after a bit the poking might wake him, so by the time she had moved from his bicep to his smooth pale chest, she was trailing her fingers from one to the next, lightly so as not to wake him. His skin was strangely soft and cool, and as she passed a hundred she noticed that her hand was starting to tremble, and then she noticed that she was breathing hard, like she had been running, and she licked her lips and watched her fingers moving across his skin, freckle to freckle to freckle, and wondered what they would taste like, those little speckles, like cinnamon? if she were to just lean down and run her tongue along them and…

Oh. Oh no.

Buffy leapt to her feet, shaking her fingers out as if she’d just burned herself on the stove, except it was worse than burning herself on the stove, it was so much worse, because she was having… she was having thoughts.

She was having lusty thoughts.

About Spike.

Oh god, what was she thinking?

It had been a long time, she thought suddenly. A long time since she had been kissed, or touched, a long time since… Well. There had only been the once, and it had ended so badly that she couldn’t exactly look back at it with nostalgia, especially after Angel had come back from hell and spent months getting her all wound up before nobly taking himself off and leaving her and her hormones behind, but she had kind of been thinking maybe when the fall semester started she might, well, start looking again. Find someone.

Oh, why was she dancing around it? She had wanted to get laid. Some cute above-room-temperature college boy with a pulse.

Except there weren’t any college boys here. Just Spike. Spike and her, and more than a year of simmering hormones. It wasn’t her fault she was almost boiling over…

She took a deep breath, and another, sinking back to her stool. It was all right. She could handle this. She was a grown woman, and she could handle this.

She could handle Spike.

She was just counting. To pass the time.

Trembling, she laid her fingers on Spike’s flat stomach, the clean strip of skin between his bandaged chest and the sheet that covered him from the waist down. The sheet that was the only thing that covered him from the waist down, because she’d had to take off his torn jeans in order to treat some of the nastier bites, and while at the time she had been all matter-of-fact and just averted her eyes, now she was wishing there had been less averting and more noticing, because… oh, god, she was curious. Even now, her hand was tracing the edge of the sheet, dipping just a hair below it, the tiniest, most plausibly-deniable bit…

Counting. She was counting.

She started over at one.

Go on to Chapter 7!

 

Originally posted at http://seasonal-spuffy.livejournal.com/556333.html