Back at his crypt, Spike climbed down the ladder and deposited the screaming kid on his bed. It had started crying about halfway home. Spike had been back at the crypt for an hour, and he was already about ten inches from losing his sanity. Any other child he’d ever been around who cried this much, and this loudly, would have already been hor d’oeuvres. But almost every time he tried to shake it to shut it up, his chip fired. A comforting friendly or gentle bounce from a human was not the same thing with vampire strength.

    “Dear god, kid, shut up,” Spike growled. He felt like he was going mad. Not only did the child keep screaming and crying like that – which was like driving nails into his head – it was so delicate that almost every time he got near it his chip fired – which pretty much was driving nails into his head. There was a time when sounds like the kid’s terror and unhappiness were pleasant to listen to, and if they weren’t, you could stick the kid in a trunk until it suffocated, or the noises were brought down to a reasonable level. Or you could just eat the thing. Unable to kill it because of the chip – and sort of unwilling to kill it because of Buffy – Spike had little recourse but to just sit and endure. The kid didn’t need a diaper change (he’d sort of checked) and if it was hungry, there wasn’t much Spike had available to offer it. It wasn’t going to like cocktail olives or lambs blood. He’d even tried a drop of whiskey on his finger, in the hopes he could get it tipsy enough to pass out, but without milk to mix it with, the kid wasn’t that dumb.

    The child’s screaming redoubled, and Spike lost patience. “Fine,” he said. “You can be loud? I can be louder!” He went over to his album collection and yanked out one of his Ramones records. He knew exactly what he wanted to listen to.

    Which was how Buffy found the two of them when she came down the ladder, the old junked record player blaring “Beat on the Brat” and Spike and the kid screaming at one another. “Bea on bat!” the kid squawked in the middle of Spike’s bed. “Bea on bat!” over and over and over, pretty much unable to differentiate between one section of the song and another, and Spike acting out a brutal murder in a macabre version of charades. “Beat on the brat with a baseball bat, oh, yeah! Oh, yeah!” When the song ended, the kid squawked. “Gan! Gan!”

    “Again?”

    “Yeah!” The little boy clapped his hands and Spike turned to lift the needle on his record player, catching sight of Buffy as he did so.

    If the vampire could have blushed, he’d have been redder than his over shirt. He scrabbled at the record, which was just starting up the next song, probably scratching it. “Buffy,” he said awkwardly. “Uh, I was just... playing the kid some music.”

    Buffy was trying extremely hard not to laugh, which was hard, as the little boy was laughing joyously while jumping up and down on the bed. “Bea on bat, bea on bat!” and another squeal of laughter.

    “Interesting choice. I’d have gone with the Sound of Music, personally, but hey, punk rock. Whatever.”

    “He liked it.”

    “You seemed to find it sort of cathartic,” Buffy said, still fighting a giggle. She gave up the struggle. “Not used to kids, are you,” she laughed.

    “Like you are?”

    “Not since Dawn was small. If implanted memories even count,” she said. She set the bag of groceries on Spike’s bed. “There’s two more bags upstairs,” she said. “Sorry it took so long, I had to go to the all night box store by the highway.” She looked in her grocery bag. “I’ve got juice boxes, toddler crackers, some basic stuff like cheese and apples, a thing of diapers – I think they’re the right size – sippy cups, some kind of weird compartmentalized dishes, and this.” She reached into the bag and pulled out a strange looking purple hedgehog.

    “What’s that for?”

    “It’s a spongey thing. To wash him with. He’s filthy. Oh, and some bandaids.” She looked down at the kid. “You want some juice?” she asked him.

    “Duce!”

    “Hey, he’s talking!” Buffy said, surprised at how pleased she was. “Punk rock therapy must be effective, he’s out of shock.”

    Spike smiled. He wasn’t sure it had anything to do with the magical healing power of the Ramones, and was afraid it had more to do with inadvertently making an ass of himself in front of the woman he loved, but hell. So long as she was happy. He hadn’t seen her happy in weeks.

    “Bring him upstairs. You got water?”

    “I can get some,” Spike said. “Here, I’ll get the bag.” He tried to take it from her arms.

    “No, I got it,” Buffy said. “You bring the boy.”

    “You get him,” Spike said.

    “I’m fine, just bring him up the ladder.”

    “Would you please just–” He tried to take the bag of groceries from her forcefully.

    “What is your problem!” Buffy snapped, all trace of her better mood gone. “I’ve got the damn groceries. Jeeze, what is it?”

    “I can’t... it’s hard to touch him.”

    “What the hell do you mean?”

    Spike pointed at his head with two fingers, almost as if it were an obscene gesture. “I can’t touch him! He’s... breakable. Just about every time I get near him I’m all – zzzt!”

    Buffy put the groceries down. This could be a problem. “I thought if there was no intent to harm, it wouldn’t fire.”

    “Yeah, well, obviously I’m just a little shaky around kids,” Spike said. “I guess I don’t know what might or might not harm him.” He actually looked a little sad. “Besides, we know it has certain sensitivities.”

    “Like what?”

    “Like guns. I can’t even point a toy gun at someone, even when I know it’s a toy, so little kids are probably tilted way up on the sensitivity scale.” He threw up his hands in annoyance. “You think they’d give me an instruction manual or something.”

    “I don’t think they cared about that at the time. Besides, wouldn’t you just figure out how to turn it off if you knew how it worked?”

    “I do know how it works. Mostly. I know lots of ways to get around it, just not anything to do with him.”

    “You can get around it?” Buffy asked, suddenly nervous.

    “Come on, you think I’m an idiot? I could probably set up a dead fall trap and wait for victims like a spider, but I haven’t the patience. I’m more in to hitting things.”

    Buffy frowned at him. That thought hadn’t occurred to her. She suddenly realized that Spike was on animal blood, not because he couldn’t kill humans at all, but because he chose not to. That was an issue for another time. Right now they had to figure out how he could stop being tortured by a two year old. The boy was getting fussy, squawking unhappily and rolling around on the bed. Buffy reached into her grocery bag and pulled out a juice box. She stuck the straw in it and handed it to him, which she guessed would buy her about three minutes. “What sorts of things make it fire?”

    “Picking him up, moving him around, even getting too close a couple times. It’s bloody relentless.”

    “It didn’t fire when you first picked him up.”

    “I wasn’t thinking of him as a kid, then.”

    “What was he?”

    “A problem.”

    Buffy raised her eyebrows. “So, at what point did you actually realize he was human?”

    “When he started screaming,” Spike said.

    Buffy almost laughed again. “Try it now,” she said.

    “What?”

    “Try picking him up now,” she said. “He’s quiet. Just... be gentle about it.”

    Spike sighed, and reached for the boy, wincing in advance as if expecting him to bite him. He was surprised it didn’t hurt. The boy babbled something Spike couldn’t understand, and grabbed at Spike’s hair, but it was too short to get a grip on, and all he ended up doing was petting him with his tiny warm hand.

    “You okay?”

    “So far,” Spike said.

    Buffy smiled. “So, exactly how badly did you want him to shut up, vampire?” she asked.

    Spike hadn’t actually realized that with every move he’d made he’d pretty much been wanting to kill the brat. It was such a natural impulse for him it hadn’t registered. He hadn’t held a child without killing it in over a century. “Oh, you shut up,” Spike said ruefully, but it was without anger.

    The little boy kept petting at his impossible hair, with his other hand on the juice box. “Kitty,” he said.