Childe of my Heart ~ Chapter Twenty-seven
by Shanyah
 

Darkness had shrouded the market when they emerged from Rhiana’s storeroom. Xander’s breathing and heart rate were back to normal. His eyes had gone from jittery to blank. He walked home behind Spike, never lifting his gaze higher than his Amo’s heels. Spike took note of the hordes in the market streets, the torches blazing to illuminate overnight shopping. He walked home listening to the eloquence of his demon’s threats towards Xander. On this occasion, Spike and his demon were agreed.

Home; Dawn and Fred were nowhere in sight.

The fire in the cooking pit had died, the fire in the pit of Spike’s stomach was stoked. He went to cool off in the shower then had a lie down, hoping for the respite found in sleep. Xander came in and lay alongside Spike, facing him, looking at him with vacant brown eyes. He smelt of shampoo and water. His hair made a damp patch on his pillow and the hand he placed next to Spike’s on the pillow between their chests gave off a hint of showergel.

Although neither slept, they did rest; Spike’s eyes half-lidded, Xander’s vacant. Xander’s hand unmoving; Spike moving his to run his thumb along Xander’s knuckles.

Minutes went by, hours. Xander’s hair dried and the vacant in his eyes wavered to uncertainty, held steady at apology and sharpened to resentment. Spike took his thumb off Xander’s knuckles and met Xander’s resentment like for like. A wrangle bridled under the room’s skin of calm and a knock sounded on the door.

“Yeah,” Spike said, sitting up.

Dawn poked her head round the door. “Ola!” She greeted, “It’s almost midnight and we haven’t had dinner yet.”

Spike went through the nightstand drawers, lifted out a notepad and a pen and scribbled a note. “You and Fred take this to the dinning hall. Give it to a guard, wait until the order’s filled and come straight back,” he said.

Dawn widened her eyes at him. “Pardon me for breathing.”

“Straight back,” he reiterated as Dawn took the note.

“Yeah, yeah,” Dawn sauntered out and left the door open. “Fred! We’re going for take out. Last one to the gate gets to sit next to Spike.”

Spike snagged a matchbook from an open drawer. “You still got the gifts from that cow?”

“Yes,” Xander said.

Spike tossed the matchbook over his shoulder. “Want to see them after you’ve lit the fire,” he said.

*    *    *    *

A fire roared in the cooking pit and the outdoor table was set with plates, cutlery and oil lamps. Spike smoked in the doorway watching Xander drop items onto a growing pile of gifts on the bedside rug: a blindfold and a paddle from under the mattress; a ball-gag from the wicker log-basket and a cock-ring that had been taped to the underside of the window ledge. Air rushed out of Spike’s nostrils when Xander magicked two, six feet long chains from the depths of the wardrobe.

“Know what sticks in my craw?” Spike pelted the gift-mound with his cigarette butt, “You walk in my blindspot. You’re three steps behind where I can’t see and somehow I’m supposed to trust you.”

Xander stamped out the glowing cig end, looked almost relieved as he added nipple clamps to the gifts. “Works both ways. I can’t see where I’m going with you in front of me and I have to trust that you’re steering correct.” He nudged the gifts with his foot, “I don’t see how you can be going the right way when Tresten’s navigating this getaway car, telling you what’s kosher and what’s not.”

“Tresten doesn’t tell me what to do, no one does.”

Xander walked towards the shelves, careful steps. “Right,” he said.

“No, don’t do that. You got caught cheating, don’t try to save face by making this about Tresten.”

“Cheating implies exclusive. I don’t remember saying I do.”

“Your wristband said it for you.”

“My point exactly – Tresten’s brainwashed you with his dogma.” Rising onto tiptoe Xander patted along the topmost alcove shelf and brought down a pair of cuffs. “He says spank, you ask how hard. He says scent the boy, you ask doggie or reverse cowboy. See why I might have a slight problem falling in with your game plan?” Set of cuffs swinging on his finger, Xander came to him. “You always struck me as the proto-type for rule breaking guy. Be him, Spike. Ditch the conforming and make your own damn rules because Tresten’s a bully and I’ve studied bullies from up close. You lay down for them and they’ll walk on you.”

Plentiful grovelling would’ve have done, down cast eyes, bended knee, that sort of thing. Instead, the boy had gone righteous indignant, more or less saying Tresten was alpha of this compound. “Make my own damn rules,” he echoed, antagonised again. “Would that be an order, boy?” He asked, reluctantly impressed when Xander didn’t flinch at his morphed face.

“It’s an honest opinion. If you don’t like it,” Xander looked daggers at the cache of toys, “there’s the ball-gag, you know where my mouth is.”

Like Spike had said, none of this was about Tresten, not for him anyway. He looked at Xander’s mouth and wondered where it had been, the thought cutting through his antagonism to gnaw on his bones. At times like these, William seemed almost wholly alive and though unwilling, Spike channelled him, became once again the maladroit lover fixated on the sweeter things in life.

“Did you kiss him?” He asked, his voice hoarse.

Xander’s shoulders wilted, his eyes went bright, he said, “No,” and Spike didn’t believe the tears or whisper. He believed the hill of gifts on the rug at Xander’s feet.

“Fucking tell me Xander. Did you?”

“No Spike, I didn’t. I never kiss…them,” Xander dragged his hand through his hair, crinkled the collar of his tunic. “I am so sorry, it’s…I-”

“Them?” Spike’s fists were clenched and he wasn’t feeling too Williamish to use them. “How many?”

Xander backed to the bed and sat on the edge of the mattress, elbows on his knees, cuffs swinging in his hand. “Not here. In Sunnydale.”

Spike stared Xander down, chief in his mind the good-looking young beings that abounded in The Trail. Beautiful-bodied temptation around every corner. “Clean your act up,” he said. “Clean it up.”

He left Xander to the hypnotic pendulum of the cuffs.

*    *    *    *

The red numbers on the stove clock read 17:46.

Tony plonks his car keys on the counter, pecks Jessica on the lips and drains her glass.

“Your mother phoned me at work and told me you won’t play ball, son.”

He dumps his coat over a chair, takes off his necktie, ties it around Xander’s waist and the back of the kitchen chair. He lifts the chair closer to the table and spills the box of Crayolas onto Xander’s blank sheet of paper.

“You’re gonna keep at it till you’ve nailed it,” he walks out of the kitchen.

Jessica is sitting across from Xander and looking at his drawing from art class. A plastic bottle of pills at one elbow, her tumbler with a slice of lemon at the other, Jessica massages her temples and looks at the picture.

“Your teacher doesn’t like your pictures. She’s getting the lady with a note pad to come and talk to you again about your pictures.”

He had art class today. In art class, they draw what Mrs Platt says. She said to draw his family and said his family is the people he likes the most cause they make him happy the most. He drew his family and he doesn’t know why his mom says Mrs Platt doesn’t like his picture.

“The Note Pad Lady is gonna put you in a home for naughty boys because no mommy and daddy want a kid who draws bad pictures. Do you want to go into a foster home, baby?”

He doesn’t like the Note Pad Lady. She asks a lot of questions and smiles too big.

Jessica drops three white pills and two blue pills into her hand and swallows them dry. “We’re a regular family and you’re a regular boy, a happy boy. I want you to draw it right.”

Xander picks at a corner of the paper, tearing tiny triangles off it with his chubby fingers. He doesn’t feel like a happy boy.

Tony comes back into the room. He places a fresh drink at Jessica’s elbow, gulps from his own glass of scotch and paces behind the boy. After a while of this, Xander wriggles and the tie bites into his tummy. Jessica points at the picture, her nail is painted with blue varnish. Xander thinks her nail is brighter than the blue Crayola.

“Look at it Tony,” she says, “look at it…look, he cries in all his pictures. He’s got no parents in this one like he’s a piece of shit orphan.”

“Do you wanna be in that chair all night, sonny?” Tony asks.

Xander shakes his head, takes a pink crayon and draws a lollipop. He takes a red one and puts two pigtails on the lollipop. Jessica yanks the paper away when he’s putting a red smile on the lollipop and the smile is a red line that runs off the paper onto the table.

“Goddammit kid, are you stupid?” She screws up the paper and throws it in his face. It bounces off his forehead. She slaps another sheet of paper down in front of him. “Draw it right.”

Xander puts his hand on his brow where the screwed up paper hit him, his eyes well up and he thuds his feet on the underside of the table.

“Don’t you cry, that didn’t hurt,” Jessica glances away from him, biting her lip as she wipes the corner of her eye.

Tony sighs and rakes a hand through his hair, “I’ve just about had it with you,” he shakes Xander’s chair, rattling him. “Do as you’re fucking told,” he yells.

Xander snatches up the pink crayon…

The parents’ heads are slumped on their arms on the table, the numbers on the stove read 00:27. Xander is using a black crayon on his newest family portrait.

In an upstairs bedroom of his picture is a boy with brown hair, a big smile and no eyes so he can’t cry. In a downstairs room is a red patch on the floor, a bunch of purple flowers next to the patch. In the basement are two green blobs with orange eyes and their yellow smiles look like lemon slices. One blob has bright blue horns, the other has brown hair and no horns. Between the green blobs is a pink blob with no eyes, horns, hair or smile. It’s just a pink splodge.

Xander is colouring the space around the blobs black.

*    *    *    *

“Xander! Dinner’s here!” Dawn called.

Standing up, he threw the cuffs and they cartwheeled through the air and fell onto the other toys. He didn’t move until the burning on his ass had dulled, stopped when his four steps to the door fanned the flames again. Leaning his palms on the door with arms stretched and locked at the elbows, he lowered his chin to his chest and breathed.

Two days of boozing, threatening and fighting. Two days of lost income and lost schooling, of ripped drawings and multi-coloured Crayola marks on the table. It took two days of living at the kitchen table for the Kid to draw it right. He was a happy, regular boy when the Social Worker and her note pad visited and in art class, he produced pictures without blood-splashed carpets.

Xander finally got it, God he understood. The sooner he learned to behave like the happy, unquestioning slab of Earned meat Spike wanted him to be, the sooner he could leave the kitchen table.

*    *    *    *

Whereas Dawn, Fred and Xander made dinner chatter, Spike listened to the moths flapping around the lamps and watched the trio under hooded eyes. Xander wolfed his food down, Fred made slow and steady progress. Dawn sipped orange juice, chased fruit salad around her bowl with her spoon and bored the heavens with snippets from her book.

She waved away a moth that had discovered the drops of juice on the lip of her glass, gave a flat eyed study of the moth’s flight path around the lamp and back to her glass. “Ruby gives eww a new meaning,” she said.

Suspicious of strange women he asked, “Ruby who?”

“Ruby Veil,” Dawn opened the book to the page with the picture of Tresten and his Advisors standing at the Seventh Ranking railings. “That’s Ruby, the tubby is Sargo and the No-fat Jack Frost is Groza. They’re Tresten’s Advisors – sidekicks with superpowers.” Striking like a cobra, Dawn caged the moth in her fist, “Sargo’s claws cut rock, Groza’s a spoon bender and Ruby’s a snitch. She sends her breeze out to spy on the Trail and reports back to Tresten.”

Wind summoned a wraith of smoke from the fire pit, drifting it over the table and the moth in Dawn’s fist beat frenzied wings. Pins and needles pricked Spike’s spine when he recognised the No-fat Jack Frost as the man in the window, same man who’d levitated Xander to the hammock.

“The stench Nibblet, like rotten meat – it’s Groza?”

She tightened her fist, ending the scuffle within it on a crunch and carried on talking, “The smell’s what I was saying about Ruby. Her wind goes out and kills things for her, it’s dead-smelly from all the corpses it’s made and she takes it back – into her mouth. I mean eww?” Dawn giggled, opened her fist and the moth’s body flopped into her fruit salad. She clapped particles of moth dust off her hands and finished her orange juice. 

Xander looked up from the dead bug. “How’d you know all this? The Book’s two percent English and ninety eight percent Demony.”

“Someone told me today,” she pushed her bowl to the side. “Jude, he’s always telling stories.”

“It can’t have been today,” Fred was still looking at the crushed moth. “Jude delivers the cooler tomorrow and we were in The Baths most of today. We didn’t see Jude.”

Spike heard, but for a moment didn’t quite comprehend Fred. “Come again?”

Fred glanced at Dawn and Dawn glanced at Fred. In unison they darted Xander a look.

“I wouldn’t make him ask twice,” he said quietly.

“We were careful and I was going to tell you…I mean before, but I didn’t get a chance before so…so…” Fred tapered off as Spike twitched his head at angle.

Those things that had been niggling him, the feeling that something was stirring in his compound, it stirred again and it was a breeze drifting over the table, bringing to him the scent of watered down bleach from Dawn and Fred. Bleach; swimming baths. He reared onto his feet, heaved the table over his shoulder. Dawn’s elbows had been resting on it and its upsurge knocked her to the ground, the same happened to Xander. Unharmed, Fred sat glued to her stool, chicken bones and broken crockery littered around her feet, Spike zipping towards her at an alarming rate.

“Congratulations,” he said, the ‘s’ curling around his fangs, “You’re my last straw.”

CHILDE OF MY HEART ~ CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

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