Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Xander was dreaming about the firing squad when the phone rang just after noon. He woke up drenched in sweat, tasting the Jack Daniel's from eight in the morning. He fumbled with the phone, dropping it twice before he managed to croak "H'lo?"

"I'm sorry, is this a bad time?" Giles asked.

"Yeah. No. You just woke me up. It's fine."

There was a pause at the other end, and Xander imagined Giles doing the math. "Still a bit jet-lagged, are you?" he suggested politely.

"Actually, I was up all night. Up and around I mean, not—not with the nightmares again." The one he'd just woken up from was fading already, and he didn't feel the need to share. "I found your girl."

"The Slayer?"

"Not a Slayer. Turns out she's some kind of primordial god, I didn't follow the whole story." Xander snatched his jacket from the floor by the bed and fished the cigarette pack out of the pocket. "But that's not even the big news of the night. You'll never guess who not-a-Slayer lives with."

"Yes?"

He lit up a cigarette, took the first drag. Smiled a bit. "Come on Giles, it's no fun if you don't guess."

"You did say I'd never guess."

"Okay, okay. She lives with Spike."

"Oh." There was the glasses-cleaning silence at the other end of the phone. "I did know Spike was alive, in fact; Andrew encountered him last winter. I suppose I should have mentioned it to you, but it hardly seemed likely that you'd meet him randomly in a city the size of Los Angeles."

"Giles, I'm from Sunnydale. The laws of probability work differently around me. Anyway, I bet you didn't know he was alive."

"Sorry, I think we have a bad connection; I just said I knew he was—" Giles stopped, catching the emphasis. "Wait. Alive? As in, no longer a vampire?"

"As in human. Un-undead. Pulse confirmed by yours truly."

"Oh my." Giles paused again, which was understandable under the circumstances. Not that a vampire turning human was any weirder than ten thousand other weird things in their everyday lives, but it wasn't just any vampire; it was Spike. "Did he say how it happened?"

"No." Xander ashed his cigarette into the empty Coke can on the nightstand. "He was still a vampire when Andrew met him, right?"

"Yes, definitely."

"So what do you want me to do? I mean, there's no Slayer here."

"Well..." A shorter pause, this time. "Did Spike happen to say anything about whether he's still working for Angel?"

"He was working for Angel? He hates Angel."

"He hated us when he first started cooperating with us," Giles pointed out.

"True. But I don't think he's with Angel now, not the way he acted when Angel came by last night."

"You met Angel, as well? You've certainly had a full night." There was a light edge of sarcasm in Giles' voice, a reproach for not mentioning Angel right away. "Did you meet anyone else interesting? Ethan Rayne, perhaps?"

Xander felt himself tensing up. "Okay, okay, don't bite my head off!" he snapped. "I would've got around to Angel in a minute, he just didn't seem as important as all the other stuff. I'm still half asleep, y'know. I spent most of the night in a fucking emergency room with a former vampire who apparently doesn't understand the concept of 'not to exceed recommended dosage.'"

"I'm sorry," Giles said, in that backing-off gentle tone that let Xander know he sounded like he was about to totally lose it. "Why don't we start again from the beginning, and you can tell me everything that happened. It sounds like you had quite a difficult night."

So Xander finished his cigarette in one long drag, settled more comfortably back on the bed, and told Giles everything—starting with finding the girl who could kill a Polgara demon barehanded, and ending with leaving Spike at his apartment in the care of that same girl.

"I want you to learn as much as you safely can about this Illyria," Giles said finally, when the story was exhausted and they were back to the what-does-Xander-do-next? part of the agenda. "Is she a danger to us, or a potential ally? And on a related note, I want you to convince Spike to come back to Rome with you."

"You want me to what, now?" Xander's voice nearly cracked, he was so much not expecting that one. "Not only is Spike at pretty much the bottom of our list of trusted allies—well, okay, not as far down as Angel, but still—but he doesn't even have any powers anymore. What the hell could he do for us?"

Giles kindly refrained from pointing out that Xander didn't have any powers himself, unless you counted not getting killed despite ridiculous odds. "I don't need to tell you how thinly spread we are," he said instead. "Spike knows about the shadow world. He certainly knows more about vampire society than any surviving Watcher, myself included. Good lord, if nothing else he's the only living person who speaks Fyoral, and what with the Council library having been destroyed we could certainly use his help writing a new dictionary."

"Okay, let's say I go along with this. How do I convince him to join us? What's in it for him? 'Cause I gotta say, last I checked we weren't offering much in the way of benefits."

"Hm." Silence on the other end while Giles thought.

Neither of them mentioned Buffy, or the strong possibility that Spike would come to Rome if she just asked him to. That had Not Going There written over it in big red letters. Besides, there was the question of why he hadn't gone looking for her yet—maybe he finally was over that obsession. Xander still wasn't convinced Spike wasn't screwing Illyria.

"We might be able to offer him help with the headaches," Giles suggested. "He said they started after he became human, correct? Perhaps they're magical in origin, something to do with the transition."

"Yeah, okay," Xander agreed reluctantly. "I'll try."

And that pretty much wrapped up their business. They did the small talk thing for another minute, then Xander told Giles to tell Dawn 'hi' for him and they hung up.

Xander rubbed his gritty eye, considered smoking another cigarette, and decided to go out for lunch instead.