White is to milk as crunchy is to Granola

 

A broken nose, a dislocated shoulder, a crushed shoulder blade, four smashed ribs, eight fingers and two thumbs broken, a thighbone, a shinbone and a kneecap shattered. He’d put up with all that so Xander could throw his band away?

 

Boy doesn’t know he’s born, Spike thought with vehemence.

 

He was going up there and cram the replacement band down Xander’s throat. Make him eat it, could eat his words too while he was at it. 

 

“Might be jailbait, but I own the ungrateful brat. Own his big gob an’ all,” he told the Earners loitering in the Third Ranking tunnel.

 

“It seems Amo Spike has perturbed Pandora’s Box,” said a Third Ranker.

 

“I have troubles alright. Three of them,” Spike ran up the staircase to Fourth Ranking.

 

First trouble was Nibblet. Being near her made his gums itch, aggravated him. 

 

Second trouble was Tresten’s instruction. He could just hear himself trying to explain that to Buffy – I shagged Xander, but I didn’t want to. It was Tresten, see, he was big on scenting and I couldn’t say no so I had sex with your best mate who also happens to be the ex-fiancé of your other mate I shagged.

 

He didn’t believe the truth of the impossible situation himself, how was Buffy going to?

 

Scent the boy and lose the girl, came down to that, and his heart and brain, the parts of him that mattered did not want to scent the boy or lose the girl. 

 

Spike closed the courtyard gate behind him, stalked to the hammock and sat in it, pulling his third trouble out of his pocket. It was addressed to ‘Amo Spike and His Boy.’

 

The invite was a hunter stamping through the woods to flush the prey out. He and Xander were prey together. He’d used the same tactic himself: hunt a man on his own, and there were chances he would get away. Hunt a man with someone weaker dragging him down and chances were you had two meals. If he’d been Tresten, he would have homed in on Harris too because the boy still didn’t get that his anger was piss-easy to exploit.

 

What he needed was for Xander to vanish like the wristband he’d dumped.

 

*    *    *    *

Xander sat on the window ledge, shivered as the air chilled the sweat on his back.

 

That crap had happened a lifetime ago, so far back that it had happened to someone else. Not to him. Why come back now? The past was the past and it should stay where it belonged, in the past. He circled his fingers on the band of pale skin where the wristband had been, regretted sniping at Spike but didn’t miss the ball and chain. Where was Spike anyway and his magic hands? They’d stopped the bad kind of shakes and given him the good kind.

 

Xander glanced up as the door opened, and needy feelings at the fore asked, “What took you?” He twinned the question with the first heartfelt smile he had given Spike in a long time, maybe in ever.

 

*    *    *    *

 

He didn’t force the thought. It was just there like the nose on his face. Harris on the window ledge, arse hanging half out. A five-storey drop to the rocky roof below, a spire of weather sharpened granite pointing up at the window. Shortening his stride, Spike donned a cloak of disinterest and estimated the distance to the window: one leap.

 

A leap and a shove made one absent liability and two solved problems.

 

“What took you?” Xander smiled – welcomed.

 

The artless smile punched Spike’s solar plexus. Winded, he trailed a finger down the pillar as he walked round it, stooped down and, with the precise hand of a surgeon, picked up the matches on the rug.

 

“Come away from the window,” he said.

 

Click of closing shutters, scent of oil smoke curling off lamp wicks, slap-slap of feet on tiles as Xander padded to the wardrobe. He half-turned, watched Xander lose the tunic, moved to sit on the bed as Xander stepped out of his trousers.

 

“Leave the pjs off,” he said.

 

Xander usually slept in pajama bottoms and a vest, and now turned from the wardrobe with a black vest in his hand. “This isn’t pajama.”

 

“Leave it off,” Spike took off his tunic, unlaced his boots. “Got any slick?”

 

Xander went through the side pocket of his rucksack, produced a small tube of KY and a pack of three condoms. “I’m a little out of catcher practice,” blunt tone, matter-of-fact discarding of his boxers.

 

Spike didn’t need telling that Xander preferred to pitch, had twigged as much a while back. “I’m sure it will all come flooding back to you,” he said, kicking his trousers and briefs off his foot.

 

*    *    *    *

Head pillowed on his folded arm, Xander lay on his back, not panting from the five-minute fuck. On his side and facing away from Xander, Spike panted from the seizure of jealousy that had been the single intense feature of their coupling.

 

He slid the condom off his still hard dick, hadn’t been too impressed with having a rubber skin between him and Xander, wasn’t sure what to do with the condom now pinched between his thumb and finger. Empty it over the boy to scent him, or have another go without the sheath?

 

He dropped the spent condom over the side of the bed. Xander would know what to do with it, knew everything else, didn’t he? Xander had caught his lip between his teeth and closed his eyes, knowing his body would fight the first feel of Spike’s fingers. He’d known how to breathe, relax, breathe, letting one then two, three lubed fingers in. Clued up Harris knew when to lift and push his hips, angle them so his sweet spot would get a touch. Knew when to sheath him with the condom and when to hold still for the penetration of thick cock.

 

Spike wanted to know the name and address of the man who’d learned his boy these things.

 

He turned onto his other side to ask just that, got waylaid by Xander who was smoothing down the fine hair in his armpit, eyes far away and lips parted, slight tremor when goose bumps rose up on his arms and torso. Brushed his palm down his chest. Dipped his hand to wet his fingertips in the pre-cum glinting on his lower abs. Tantalized himself with a slow wank of his unfulfilled cock.

 

Spike exhaled a groan as heat flashed to his groin. Xander stilled his hand, fixed him with that burnt-sugar gaze, and it reached into him, tugged his veins something vicious. He was up, hands and knees braced on either side of Xander, wedge of humid, sex-spiced air between their bodies. He couldn’t stand it, stand having anything between them. Lay full length on Xander, brow on his, lips slanting over his. Deep and hungry, more like fucking than kissing, tongues sliding and cocks too, sliding one on the other, pelvic bones bruising as they ground their hips in the chase for friction.  

 

Xander grabbed his shoulder. In his palm was a cold square of foil, very bad.

 

He drew his head back so that Xander had to lift his if he wanted the kissing to continue. Drew back a tad more when Xander brought their lips into contact.

 

“The hell?” Xander asked.

 

“Not with the johnnie.”

 

Three shallow grooves instantly joined the two creasing Xander’s forehead. “I never go bareback.”

 

This delighted Spike. “Nothing like it, skin on skin,” he said, feeling a trill in his spine at his own voice, roughened by lust and softened in seduction. “Don’t you want that too love, to feel every damn inch of me fuck into you?” He pressed every inch of his cock against Xander’s, “you and me, nothing in between.” 

 

Xander swallowed, lashes sweeping down to part hood his eyes. Johnnie wasn’t mentioned again and more intoxicating to Spike than this was the knowledge that a handful of words could get him his own way. He lined up and forgot to gloat as Xander drove his hips up, slid him in balls deep. Sealed around him tight and slick and searing.

 

“Bloodyhell,” he said, loud enough to wake the statues in Trafalgar Square.

 

Xander smiled, no polite person smiled the way Xander did just then. “Move Spike,” he said. “Fuck me…want to feel every damn inch of you pound into me.”

 

Well.

 

Well well, he laughed to himself, draping Xander’s leg over his shoulder. “Think it’s smart, asking a vampire to pound you?”

 

Xander clenched around him, pulling back at the same time and an unbelievable sensation hummed through Spike’s cock, dragged in his lower back. He moved. Firm strokes, firmer. Long, hard strokes, his lungs aching in connection to the explosion of Xander’s breath on each thrust.

 

“Je-sus…!”

 

“Too much, pet?”

 

“No, no, no, fuck no. Harder.”

 

And the harder he fucked, the hotter Xander became, winding his waist and hips in circular motion, smooth like his bones were made of liquid. Jacking himself off, talking dirty, making those sounds, those steamy groans that stiffened Spike’s nipples, melted his mind.

 

Xander cupped his nape, pulled him closer. “Spike?” he said, face in the crook of his neck, and he could feel Xander’s brow, damp with sweat and his lips, shaky with stutters and his voice like sandpaper rasping on stone. “Spike, I…I need you, need…”

 

The words and tone, they did the same thing to him as the tight ass and winding hips, flayed him. Pleasure whipped, loving every ripple of Xander’s channel, every turn of his waist. He slipped a hand between their bellies and joined it with Xander’s; eight intertwined fingers and two thumbs fisting the hard, wet cock, all pulsing shaft and velvet tip, fucking tasty, wanted it in his mouth. Faster, a blur: of mingled groans and thudding heart, wide, dark eyes, surge of salty scents, drenched hands still clasped together and still moving, Xander’s hips glued in an upward slant, muscle ring squeezing down on him, wrenching come from his balls and gasps from his throat.

 

*    *    *    *

 

He jolted awake, ears ringing as though someone had wailed into them. Xander shivered against his side and no bloody wonder, the room was freezing. Spike glanced at the window and all signs of sleep bled from his body. The shutters were open. A snow-white, spindly-limbed man sat on the window ledge. His tunic and pants were white, his hair was white fuzz, his wristband indigo and his eyes a watery, pale blue.

 

Spike flared his nostrils, caught no hint of life or death.

 

Curling his arm around Xander’s shoulders, he asked, “How may I fucking help?”

 

The man in the window dissolved into a haze of startling white and frail pink. He solidified into Xander Harris. Had Xander’s passion-stormed eyes, messy brunet hair and supple skin. He’d even stolen Xander’s smile. The hairs peeled back on Spike’s forearms, they stood at a ninety-degree angle and creaked backwards to make one hundred and eighty. Fire ants swarmed his scalp, primordial compulsion pushed out his fangs and ridges.

 

Arms spread wide, the smiling boy on the window tipped his head back and reverse dived to the rock spire five floors below. Spike heard the crunch.