Practice Makes Perfect 

Spike’s room smelt of fresh paint and new cotton, the sunlight coming in from the large skylight and double glass doors rendering the walls and sheets a glaring white. Spike spread a blanket over the mattress and narrowed his eyes, fancying he could still see the sheets glaring through the fleece blanket. Xander, who had volunteered to give him a hand with setting up the room, stood at the sink squeezed in one corner of the room, looking into the mirror above the porcelain washbasin. Wet licks of hair framed his face, and the sun, which showed up every discoloration on the floor’s light grey flagstones, also showed up the effects of Spike’s blood on Xander’s face. Scuffs on his cheekbones healed over and bruises gone, Xander didn’t look like a man who’d been fighting the day before. He barely looked like a man who’d been claimed.

 

Forcibly shifting his gaze from the fading mark on Xander’s neck, Spike stuffed his jeans and T-shirts into the narrow chest of drawers, tumbled his socks and underwear in after them and hung his tunics and duster in the slimline wardrobe.

 

“You probably want black-outs for the skylight and doors,” Xander said.

 

“Have you seen my lighter? It’s gone missing,” Spike said, stowing his knick-knacks in a nightstand drawer.

 

“I tossed it in my backpack with that black gown of yours, which I’ll hang onto because this room’s taken as much as it can fit.” 

 

“It’s not that small.”

 

“It’s tiny. It’s one step in every direction, one child-sized step.” Xander demonstrated by taking a modest step to the armchair and from there, a modest step to the nightstand. “You’re going to be cramped living in here.”

 

Spike looked around for somewhere to store his duffel. The wardrobe was full and the recessed shelves too shallow. “I don’t plan on living here much,” he shoved the duffel under the bed.

 

“Where do you plan on living much?” 

 

Taking a child-sized step, Spike slid his hand onto the back of Xander’s neck and pulled him in. “Where do you think?” he asked, before kissing him slow and ravenous, his thumb homing in on the mark and stroking it. Xander groaned into the kiss, murmured sort of and those murmurs flipped a switch in Spike, brought back to him the sweet, hot taste of Xander’s blood and the sheet-scorching sex of last night. He toppled Xander onto the bed and went down on top of him, at the same time reaching for the lube among the knick-knacks in the nightstand.

 

They emerged from the Pool House at noon; rumpled, glossy-eyed and pulling stares from the guards who never stared at Spike and knew better than to look at Xander when he was with the Amo. It was the same in the cold hall, Drones depositing blocks of ice into the cold plunge pools while staring at the passing duo. Xander didn’t notice a thing.

 

Spike plucked Xander’s mandarin collar slightly more upright, concealing the revamped mark. “Back to work people,” he said, turning the corner into the pool garden. Dawn was in the training pool, levitating arrows and shooting them at a burlap-and-straw life-sized doll of Tresten. Giles was in there with her telling her to concentrate, to feel the arrows by mind. Fred was on the porch under the terrace, tinkering with Spike’s motorcycle.

 

“She’s stealing gas from your bike,” Dawn informed Spike, her arrows going wide of the target.

 

“Borrowing, Dawn. I’m borrowing a teaspoon of gas from the bike’s full tank.”

 

Spike looked for the teaspoon, but all he saw was a rubber tube siphoning petrol from his bike into a bucket. “What’s it for?”

 

“The Launcher,” Fred said ‘Launcher’ as though that should be the end of that; no further explanations necessary.

 

Immediately mollified, Spike asked, “You trying out its engine?”

 

“I tried it our earlier. It kind of died on me,” Fred pulled out the tube and capped the gas tank. “I’ve made adjustments, fingers crossed, it should work fine now.”

 

“Can you mojo the chains durable as titanium?” Spike asked, looking at Giles.

 

“What chains are these?”

 

“The Launcher chains,” Spike patiently explained. “I’m going after Groza.”

 

“I take it you’ll be going after him with an army,” Giles said.

 

“If you call me and Fred an army.”

 

Giles’ rising eyebrows suggested cynicism, his glance at Fred suggested worry. “I’d better fortify the chains to an infinite degree,” he said, transferring his worried glance to Dawn. “Concentrate on the matter at hand.”

 

Dawn levitated a couple of arrows, but her concentration was on Xander. The arrows floated rather than shot towards the Tresten doll, and Dawn was sniffing, eyes going wider as the arrows lost momentum. “Oh my God!” She screeched, the arrows plummeting to the sawdust. “Ohmygod Xander, you’re having sex with Spike!”

 

Fred glanced at the wordless pair, blushed and looked down into the bucket, colour climbing to her hair roots.

 

Dawn wasn’t finished, “And what’s this other thing I feel? It’s like…it’s like a thing around Xander. Like bug repellant and I’m the bug. Why do I feel like a repelled cockroach, Spike?”

 

Regrouping, Spike and Xander started to speak simultaneously and fell silent in tandem, Xander inclining his head at Spike, who faced the audience of three. Giles got there first, hands on his hips and frown on Xander’s jugular.

 

“Please, please tell me the thing is not what I think it is.”

 

“Depends on what you think,” Spike said.

 

Giles ignored him. “Are you aware of what you’ve contracted yourself into, Xander? A claim grants Spike irretrievable access to your life; it makes him your kin and you can no more refute this kinship than you could that with your blood relatives.”

 

Xander hunched his shoulders some, but spoke steadily enough, “At least the claim is kinship by choice. It makes all the difference, you know, having a choice.”

 

“You chose this? Despite everything you know of Spike, you chose a life tied to him?”

 

The words dripped with scathing and Xander couldn’t stand to hear it. “I’m going to get something to eat,” he said, snagging Spike’s wrist and moving off for the staircase to the terrace.

 

“We’re having a discussion,” Giles snapped.

 

Xander dropped Spike’s wrist and came to the very edge of the pool, clashing stares with Giles. “I’m claimed, it’s irretrievable, you can’t do anything about it. What’s left to discuss?”

 

Three seconds, five seconds, thirty tense seconds of Giles fuming and Xander holding his ground. Neither man moved nor spoke and Dawn stepped into the rift. “You and Spike huh?” She said with a grin. “Buffy’s gonna kill you dead and stake Spike deader, you know that, right?”

 

Spike’s jaw gave a brief spasm before clenching. He muttered something too stifled for anyone to make out.

 

Giles turned away from Xander, ending the impasse. “Tresten is distinctly arrow free Dawn, you need more target practice,” he said.

 

Dawn went back to target practicing, Fred took the bucket to the Pool House porch where the Launcher lived, and Spike and Xander proceeded to the terrace restaurant where they sat at a table a short distance from the lunching Select.

 

“You did alright.”

 

“I guess,” Xander said under the buzz of the Select’s conversations.

 

“Giles needed telling.”

 

“I wasn’t expecting to tell him so soon.”

 

Spike’s chin rose a notch higher, his tone stilted as he asked, “You’re having regrets?”

 

“What, about my new erogenous zone?” Xander tweaked his collar aside, fully exposing the claim mark to the Select’s prying eyes. “No, Spike. No regrets about that or you or about Buffy possibly killing me dead.”

 

“Buffy,” it was a powder dry sound. “For months no-one mentions her and now it’s all I sodding hear, Buffy. Can we go one day without bandying her name about?”

 

“I will if you will.”

 

“Done,” Spike said. He picked up his fork and rapped it on a table leg. “Service here!”

 

A waiter laden with a tray nodded at him and shouted towards the kitchen door, “Spirit!”

 

The kitchen door swung open, admitting a girl about Dawn’s age onto the terrace. She wore a white uniform, a multi-coloured leather apron and a long blonde braid. Her steps light and her demeanor unobtrusive, she darted to Spike’s table, pen poised on a writing pad.

 

“Hey Spirit,” Xander greeted. “Good to see you.”

 

She frowned, sliding him a glance from the corner of her eye.

 

“How’s things in the big barracks kitchen…shouldn’t you be there now?” Xander asked. “Did the army chef give you the day off?”

 

Spirit’s frown deepened into vampiric ridges and she parted her lips, letting off a full-bodied growl. Spike intervened, ordering a two-man lunch and orange juice for Xander and three bags of blood for himself.

 

“She hates me,” Xander said, watching Spirit leave.   

 

A smile played about Spike’s lips. “You’re her hero, why would she hate you?”

 

“She’s always growling at me.”

 

“It’s not personal. Spirit growls at everyone,” Spike sat back, fingers linked on the top of his head. “Now the army chef she definitely hates. You shouldn’t talk about him to her.”

 

Wondering who’d be next on the list of the ‘not to be mentioned’, Xander eagerly awaited his meal, fell upon it like the starving man he was, washed it down with two glasses of orange juice, and blood sugars back to normal levels, smiled across at Spike. Like he’d said, he had no regrets and he was going to make a swashbuckling comeback to Sunnydale no matter what kind of reception was in store for Spike and him. Since home would remain a dream if he didn’t ace Court, he went over to Spike, dragged his chair back from the table and knelt at his feet.

 

“Would you like to put me through my paces Master? I don’t think I got the hang of being a flawless Earned,” he said.

 

The Select at the nearest table respectfully vacated it at the drawl of Spike’s soft, overtly randy laughter.

 

 

Dawn’s changes became more pronounced over the next four days. Her skin and hair roots were milk-white and her nails grey. The scales covered not only her back, but also her nape, elbows and knees. Run like the wind was not a figure of speech when applied to Dawn; she literally had the velocity of a tornado, whizzing about the place when she was not training or overseeing the final touches to the party costumes. As her physical changes progressed, so too did the changes to her psyche; she levitated heavier objects, hit her targets nine times out of ten and developed an ability to read demony. Hugely impressed, Giles asked her to read to the group after supper one evening, and it became the norm: a long reading from the Demony book in demony, followed by a long interpretation in English for the sake of the ungifted ones. Spike rarely looked forward to the after-supper story telling hour, but he endured it because reciting pacified Dawn, made her less, “freaked out about becoming Tresten’s patchwork Barbie.”

 

On the same day that Dawn’s spontaneous demony reading abilities appeared, Jude appeared in the Arches to retrieve the book, saying, “it has served its purpose.” Dawn wouldn’t hear of it. She gave Jude five seconds to disappear from her sight. He left without the book, and story telling hour was once again safe, much to Spike’s disappointment and Giles’ amusement. In fact, Giles seemed to be constantly amused of late, his wit dark and occasionally expressed in barbed commentary on various matters ranging from Spike and Xander’s, “doomed and entirely unconvincing partnership,” to Dawn’s, “incredibly obtuse,” refusal to speak by wind.

 

“Ease up on her. Maybe then she’ll wind-speak,” Xander suggested.

 

“See to your own lessons and kindly leave Dawn to hers.”

 

Xander had learned his lessons. There wasn’t a rule he didn’t follow when out rehearsing in the Trail with Spike. He’d had problems with his posture the first day of lesson week and by that evening Spike had devised a language of touches to prompt Xander into correcting his bearing - among other things. “When I put my hand on your left shoulder,” Spike had said, indicating with a hand on Xander’s left shoulder, “means your shoulders are slumped. Square them, push your chest out a little.”

 

Hand on the right shoulder meant Xander’s back wasn’t straight. Tug on his earlobe meant head’s too low Harris, lift your chin off your chest. Finger on the small of his back, hold that posture, it’s perfect. Two fingers on the small of his back, my room, now. Knuckle on his chin, where’s that smile? One raised eyebrow, hello smile. Both eyebrows raised, who are you looking in the eye? Fingertip on Xander’s cheek, kiss me, no tongue. Thumb on his lips, kiss me like we’re alone.

 

Spike touched two fingers to the small of Xander’s back an awful lot. My room, now. They’d adjourn rehearsals, race to Spike’s room, and it wasn’t the lessons they’d be practicing in that room. Three times in four days Spike had claimed Xander and meeting his glance from across the War Room now, he longed to make it four times in four days.

 

Cut short the Watcher’s rambling and re-claim Xander, Spike thought.

 

Shouldn’t though. He was becoming obsessed with the idea of keeping their claim visible, Xander liked his fangs too much and besides, Giles was giving his daily progress report on Dawn. Apparently, her hand-mind telekinetic co-ordination was coming on in leaps and bounds. Astral projection was easily her forte, but Giles strongly felt that she needed to curtail projecting on impulse…

 

“Once, Giles,” Dawn interrupted. “Apart from that time on the ledge, I impulse projected once and I only did it to see if the Drones’ rumors about Dr Diane’s new talking picture box are true.” She stood from the sofa and came to sit on an arm of Spike’s chair. “They’re true. She has a 28” flat-screen TV and a DVD player. I don’t see why we can’t buy in an entertainment center too.”

 

“Ah, but according to you, Diane has solar panels. We have the small problem of no electricity,” Xander said from his slump on the bean-bag beside the fire-place.

 

They’d been very creative with that bean-bag earlier. Yeah, Xander hadn’t been slumped in it then. He’d been…

 

“Did you hear any of that, Spike?” Dawn rapped her knuckles his knee.

 

“You want a telly. Fred can solve the electricity problem with wires and a car battery. Watcher thinks you should focus the mind on wind-speaking and forget television,” he glanced at the corners of Dawn’s mouth. They were gummy with strands, every twelve hours a new strand sprouted. Weedy and transparent to begin with, fleshy and pink at the end of another twelve hours, sewing her lips together. She wouldn’t be able to voice-speak soon. And he didn’t like her impulse projecting onto Seventh Ranking to watch T.V. either. Best put a stop to it before it became a habit. “Telly’s yours Bit,” he said, disregarding Giles’ eye roll. “But you’ve gotta learn to wind-speak, yeah?”

 

“I’m not using the wind and then taking it back into my mouth,” she kicked a cushion across the floor towards Xander and dropped into it, her shoulder fused to his arm. “It’s disgusting.”

 

Xander curved his arm around her upper back. “I’m with Spike and Giles on this one, Dawnie.”

 

“Easy for you to say, tailing Spike isn’t exactly tasky.” She shrugged his arm off and huddled next to Fred on the sofa. “Shut up, Fred,” she said before Fred even opened her mouth. Fred put a cushion on her lap, Dawn tipped side-ways into it and wrapped her arms around her knees.

 

Absolutely no point in coaxing Bit in her mood, Spike thought. “How’s the contraption coming along?”

 

“It’s all done,” Fred carded her fingers through Dawn’s hair. “Giles mojo’d the chains this morning.”

 

Spike glanced away from Dawn’s white roots, feeling bone weary and finding the end stages of her changes unbearable to watch. He wanted a night off from the pressures of being Amo, just one night so he could take Xander out on the town. Granted, there wasn’t much going in the Trail in the way of bars and nightclubs, but there were other things they could do. Things that didn’t involve Launchers and wind-speaking and trawling the walls with bloody Indi lamps looking for homage games. 

 

But no, duty called. “Right,” he said. “Let’s wrap this up and head down to Third Ranking. Want us to get that and Fourth Ranking done by sundown.”

 

“That’s a lot of wall-patrolling to do in two hours,” Fred said.

 

“Clock’s ticking, we’ve got miles of wall to patrol yet. What do you suggest, Fred?”

 

She looked uncomfortable, squirming as though she was sat on a pin cushion. “I just think we’re wasting our time on the lower Rankings.”

 

“Anyone else think so?”

 

“There’s nothing but chess games and Roman all-you-can-eat-and-barf buffets painted on the lower Ranking walls,” Dawn said. “Unless the homage game is competitive eating, we’re sunk ‘cause I’ve watched you play chess Spike, and honestly? My money’s on Tresten.”

 

Spike bristled. “I’m still not hearing a suggestion.”

 

“We could start at Seventh Ranking and work our way down instead of working our way up from First Ranking like we’ve been doing,” Fred said. “I bet there’s more than eating competitions painted on Seventh Ranking.”

      

Maximum security started where the Seventh Ranking staircase began. Shallow steps to the wide, long staircase, armed guards on each side every five steps. Never one to wholly trust in hocus-pocus, Spike lead the gang up the staircase, half-expecting the guards to shoot an arrow through his Indi lamp, setting him on fire.

 

“What I want to know is how these lamps work,” he whispered, glancing behind him. “How can light mask when it’s supposed to unmask?”

 

“By magic,” Xander said.

 

“It’s Indigo masking us,” Dawn said with eerie knowledge that didn’t surprise Spike in the slightest. “The flames in our lamps are a little part of her, we’re carrying her around and when the guards look at us, they see what she wants them to see – nothing.”

 

“Indi’s conjured us into nothing,” Fred said.

 

“I couldn’t have summarized it better myself,” Giles said.

 

It didn’t make sense to Spike that a conjuring firestarter was living in a hovel beneath the Unbonded. He’d have conjured himself an eighth ranking if he had Indi’s skills that was for sure.

 

“Spike?”

 

“Yes?”

 

“You’re walking too fast, not giving us a chance to check the drawings,” Xander said.

 

He slowed down and checked the drawings.

 

A copy cat Michelangelo had taken a brush to the domed ceiling and crammed it with paintings; rosy cheeked cherubs circling the heads of laurel crowned emperors, Tresten on an ebony throne, his feet being kissed by a philosopher. Groza standing with legs braced apart on the deck of a ship, hand lifted high overhead and holding aloft a golden fleece. Sargo clipping a Gorgon’s snake hair with his claws.

 

The walls were not spared from the profusion of bright drawings; Artemis aka Diana, ministering to a woman in labour and a few steps on, Artemis holding two identical babies upside down by their ankles. Jude with a winged shoe on one foot, slipping the other shoe off the foot of wounded Mercury. Ruby thrashing Jupiter’s rain clouds with her veil. Tresten’s head attached to the body of wolf suckling a set of boy twins – Romulus and Remus.

 

A section of wall showing palazzos diminished by a storm, bath-houses torn by lighting. A coliseum bulldozed by a blizzard and gladiators impaled by giant icicles. “Rome conquered,” Giles whispered, trailing his hand along that section of wall. “Not only that, Greco-Roman gods and heroes subjugated by Tresten.”

 

Yeah, Spike thought, Tresten fancies himself almighty.

 

The staircase gave way to a marble-tiled landing, superbly shined flooring that reflected none of their faces and that lead through an avenue of intimidating black marble columns to a wide silver gate. The guards lined up in front of the gate weren’t the reason Spike hoisted his Indi lamp, growling. On a panel of wall to one side of the gates was painted a market. Not any old market this, but jumbled in with a party; courtiers mincing among traders, Groza lurking beside a vegetable cart, in his hand a white leather leash. It weaved between a wine fountain and a laughing fishmonger and was attached to a white collar around Xander’s neck. It was Xander, no two ways about it; Xander gazing his cherish at Groza.

 

Spike wheeled into a pace. “Who’s that meant to be – you? You don’t gawk like that,” he ran up to the painting, smacked his palm on the gawk and thudded his fist into Groza’s leer, “son of a…” thud, thud, thud. His knuckles roared with pain, blood splattered over the cabbages in the vegetable cart, the wall cracked into crazy paving and Groza’s face crumbled. Giving his fist a break, Spike hammered his boot heel into the picture, dislodging a cascade of plaster.

 

“Please control yourself,” Giles hissed, “the walls aren’t masked and those guards are…”

 

Marching to the wall, one of them calling, “fetch Amo Tresten!” 

 

Spike’s platoon dispersed as two guards opened the silver gate and ran into the Ranking beyond.

 

Giles peered around a pillar, “Well done Spike.”

 

Dawn’s head peeped out below Giles’. “We should go,” she said.

 

Xander stepped from behind another pillar, sheepish look on his face. Fred trundled into sight after him, turning the wick on her lamp to full when Tresten’s laughter sounded. Something popped, like a cork shooting out of a champagne bottle. Spike turned to investigate, edging through the guards who were muttering at the wall.

 

“Spike for the love of god,” Giles whispered.

 

“Cast your eye over this Giles,” Spike said, casting excited eyes over the wall. 

 

Fresh plaster skimmed itself onto the defaced surface, popping as it dried. Cracks mended, paint sprayed out of the thin air to make new the vegetables and cart, laughing fishmonger and sea bream on his stall. Everything back to pre-Spike’s fist and boot - everything except Xander, Groza and the rest of the demolished party scene. In their place was the grey background of unpainted wall.

 

Spike spun away from the wall as the gates clinked. “Take no notice of me, Tresten. I’m just having a look.”

 

Tresten strode through the gates, Sargo and Jude behind him. “I had my heart set on white, but I fear it does not flatter me as it does Groza,” Tresten was saying. “Perhaps Tresten will wear blue to the season’s opening celebrations.”

 

“White is the color of the gods Mi Amo. Zeus himself assuredly wears white robes,” said Sargo.

 

“Does he now?” Spike sniggered, angling his head when Jude looked squarely at him. “We have a seer, ladies and gentlemen,” he said.

 

His face impassive, Jude stopped three steps behind and to the side of Tresten.

 

“Is this Indigo’s work, Jude?” Tresten’s sighed, gesturing a hand at a bare patch of wall.

 

Crunching through the rubble, Jude came to the wall, shuffling so that his boots ground the plaster to a multi-coloured powder. “I cannot swear to it but I believe the Vampire is behind this desecration.”

 

“Why you little ass-kisser,” Spike chuckled. “You’re dead.”

 

“What does Sargo advise?” Tresten asked.

 

“Our first course of action must be to discover by what means Spike evaded the guards. This will give us grounds upon which to charge him with the wanton destruction of imperial property, trespassing on superior Rankings…” and the list of crimes went on. “We could lawfully put him to death on the strength of the multiple charges,” Sargo concluded.

 

Jude spoke tentatively, “Spike placed an order for automobile batteries, Mi Amo. I will make discreet enquiries with his Unbonded when I deliver the batteries in two hours’ time if it pleases Master Tresten.”

 

“I didn’t place…” Spike turned his frown on Fred, “did you order more batteries?”

 

Fred shook her head.

 

“I think he’s making an appointment with you,” Xander whispered. “Are you making an appointment with Amo Spike, Jude?”

 

Jude maintained poker-faced silence.

 

Suddenly Dawn laughed, sounding like little Tresten. Big Tresten lumbered at her, clutching the air above her head, so close to her if he only knew. She flitted past him and streaked down the staircase, screaming all the way.