Chapter Four Do I Know You?

In spite of what they now knew about both their TA and the teacher, Willow and Buffy felt they needed to attend class; if for no other reason than to keep an eye on their professor and her mysterious military connections. Buffy gave Riley a wan smile and half-hearted wave when he greeted her, reminding herself that it wasn't fair to hold it against him that he hadn't told her what he was when she hadn't exactly volunteered the information that she was the Slayer.

She studied Professor Walsh with new eyes, taking in the cold expression and brisk commanding attitude. A woman who had once seemed like just a particularly intimidating teacher now came across as something much more sinister. The little bits of information that Spike had reluctantly shared with them about the tests being done on the vampires and demons in the lab had been enough to make Willow, and even the less tender-hearted Buffy and Giles, shudder. Buffy made a silent vow that she would stake Spike herself before she allowed him to go back into those labs.

They managed to get almost all the way out of the big room without having to talk to Riley, although Buffy could feel Dr. Walsh's eyes burning a hole in her back the whole way from their seats to the door.

"Is she staring at me?" she hissed to Willow.

"Um...yep. She is. Oops! Now she's staring at me. Eep!"

While Willow scuttled out the door away from the perceptive eyes of their professor, Buffy turned around and returned Dr. Walsh's hard stare with one of her own. She made no attempt to appear to be your average intimidated freshman, putting the full force of a slayer's confidence into her stare. The staring contest might have gone on until the next class had Riley not taken advantage of Buffy's immobility to step up and distract her.

"Buffy! There you are. I thought for a minute that you might be avoiding me." His grin was open and genuine, causing Buffy to lose her slayer glare and replace it with an uncomfortable smile.

"Heh! Wouldn't that be silly?" she said, moving out of the doorway and into the broad hall where Willow waited for her. "Why would I want to avoid you?"

"Well, I thought you might have gotten 'engaged' again," he said, watching her carefully for any sign that he might have hit on something he should know.

"No. Of course not. I told you, Riley. That was just a silly joke. Not a very good one, I guess, but your expression when you caught me looking at those wedding dresses was too tempting. It was either tell you I was picking out a dress for our wedding and watch you panic, or tell you that I was marrying someone else. Either way..."

"Either way you were playing me. Got it." His smile was a little strained, but he put an arm around her and squeezed lightly. "I really do have a sense of humor. I promise. Although, maybe it's not quite as...off beat... as yours seems to be."

Without answering except to give him another "heh" and an insincere smile, Buffy waved at Willow and hurried after her, leaving Riley to ponder the mystery that was Buffy Summers. He turned to leave and bumped into Maggie Walsh.

"How well do you know that girl?" she demanded without explanation.

"We...well, we're dating...I think. I guess. She's a bit...different, but—"

"I want to meet her. In a non-academic situation."

Riley blinked bewildered eyes. "Well, yes, sure, Mag--Professer Walsh. But why?"

She narrowed her eyes at him, ignoring his question in favor of demanding, "And ask her what it's like to be 'the Slayer'." Without further comment, she turned and walked away, leaving him staring between her retreating back and the direction in which Buffy and Willow had gone.

~~~~~~~~~~

After their afternoon classes and a quick meal in the school's cafeteria, Buffy and Willow walked toward Giles' apartment complex, licking ice cream cones as they strolled through the darkening streets. The sun had just gone completely down when Buffy felt familiar tingles on the back of her neck. She pulled out her stake, then relaxed as she identified the source.

"Vamps?" Willow asked, eyeing the stake now dangling from Buffy's hand.

"Just one," she replied with a sigh. "And here he comes."

"That for me, pet?" Spike asked, nudging the arm holding the stake as he fell into step beside her.

"Maybe," she said. "You almost made me drop my ice cream."

Before she could flinch away, Spike leaned down to take a big bite from her cone, grinning at her indignant "Hey!" and dancing out of reach. His tongue came out to lick the ice cream off his lips with slow purpose and more obviously than necessary. Buffy retaliated by darting her own pink tongue out to lick delicately at the gap he'd left in her dessert. She ran her tongue over the entire remaining ice cream, making soft murmurs of pleasure at each small mouthful that she pulled between her lips.

Willow blinked at them, not sure she was seeing what she seemed to be seeing.

"Uh, guys? Buffy? Spike? What are you doing?"

Buffy blushed from head to toe, and attacked her cone with much less tongue and way more swallowing ice cream in quantities that prevented her from answering. Spike just shrugged and winked at Willow.

"We're just playing, Red. Nothing for you to get upset about. And anyway, you're the one who made us fall in love, aren't you? Can't blame us if it's taking a while for all that pent up lust to wear off."

"There was lust?" Willow squeaked. "Pent up lust?"

"Not like it could be anything else with the Watcher and all in the room, is there? Course it was pent up. What else were we going to do with it?"

"Buffy?"

Having run out of ice cream, Buffy had no choice but to try to reply.

"Um...what he said, I guess. I mean, we were pretty hot and heavy for a while there..."

"That was four days ago!"

Buffy and Spike exchanged looks, reaching mutual agreement that there was no reason to tell Willow about the previous night's events. There was silence while they crossed the parking lot to Giles' front door, broken finally when they arrived there.

"Was a right powerful spell then, wasn't it?" Spike said as he held open the door for them. "That must be the explanation."

"Explanation for what?" Xander asked, peering suspiciously between the two girls and the vampire.

"Nothing," Buffy said quickly, giving Willow a pleading look.

"Right. Nothing. Lots of nothing. No things here. Nothing at all...and I'm shutting up now."

Xander stared at the two embarrassed girls and the smirking vampire before turning to Giles who was just entering the room.

"Why is he here again?"

"A better question might be 'why wasn't he here last night?'," Giles said dryly. "And why didn't you report back to me, Buffy? Was there any trouble?"

"Not really," she said with a shrug. "We did learn some stuff, though. Turns out Spike's bat ears come in pretty handy."

Xander's snicker brought a glare and small growl from the vampire before he moved closer to Buffy to add his comments to hers as she filled Giles in on the armed guards, the sensors they tripped and the machinery Spike had heard running inside the building.

"It was a lift, you say?" Giles asked, directing his comments to Spike who he correctly identified as the one with the most information.

Between Spike's attempts to help during the spell, and his rather obviously changed attitude toward Buffy since then, Giles was beginning to perceive the vampire in a quite different way. It was becoming clear that there was much more to the former member of the Scourge of Europe than the bad boy image he preferred to present to the world.

"Sounded like. I know where they were keeping me was well underground. Not just a basement, either. Something deep. I could feel it. Took me a long time to make my way out of there, and I was climbing almost the whole time."

"I wish you had shared this with us straight away," Giles muttered.

"Why? Were you going to send the Slayer out to dig around until she hit something hard? Didn't seem that important at the time."

Spike shrugged and walked to the kitchen, pulling an old bag of pig blood from the back of the fridge.

"Hey, Watcher. This is the last bag. Need to stock up."

"I was not aware that I had taken you in to raise," Giles said stiffly.

"Well, weren't you just complaining that I didn't come home last night, Dad?" Spike grinned and deliberately used one of Giles' best mugs to warm his blood in the microwave. He waited until it looked like Giles was getting angry enough to physically throw him out before continuing. "Not to worry, Watcher. Found myself a nice little crypt with a view last night. Soon's I get it furnished, I'll be out of your hair."

"Can't be soon enough," Giles muttered, stepping into the kitchen and getting out a glass for himself. He took the Scotch bottle off the shelf and poured himself a stiff drink, sighing when Spike held out his mug of warm blood and looked at him expectantly. He poured a small amount of his remaining Scotch into the mug, then closed the bottle and set it back. The two Brits sipped their drinks in surprisingly companionable silence for a few minutes, watching the young people in the other room. Buffy and Willow were bent over the laptop, their expressions alternately shocked and angry. Xander and Anya were whispering to each other on the couch.

"You know," Spike said, his voice casual, "Anyanka's been responsible for a
lot more deaths than I have. And yet, there she is, one of the gang."

Giles slid his eyes to the side.

"You want to be 'one of the gang'?" he asked, his eyebrows going almost up to his hairline.

"What? No! Not on a... No. I'm just saying... Forget it."

He turned around and rinsed his cup out in the sink, setting it carefully upside down to drain on a handy towel. Giles watched him, his eyes quietly studying this totally unexpected version of William the Bloody.

"It's forgotten," he finally said as Spike went to walk past him. "You know it'll never happen. They'll never trust another vampire. Not after..." He paused, unable to bring himself to talk about the things Angelus had done.

"I'm not him, Watcher," Spike said with a soft growl. Then he sighed. "But I expect you're right. That git's shadow will hang over everything I do."

He walked out to the living room and draped himself over the chair in which he and Buffy had spent so much time just a few days ago. Her eyes flickered to him, then quickly away when he sprawled out, one leg over the arm, the other stretched out in front of him. She missed the sad smile that twitched his lips when she looked away from him so resolutely, but she found herself acutely aware of his presence just behind her.

Willow was filling Xander and Anya, and Giles who had now joined them, in on what she and Buffy had seen of the Initiative's activities. Willow had managed to access Professor Walsh's files listing the experiments that had been done on various demons and vampires, along with the usually fatal results. It was obvious that Spike had been very lucky to get out with nothing worse than a scar on his head and an inability to kill.

"I think the only thing we can do is just be out there every night until we can catch these guys in action."

"And by we, Buff, you mean you, right?"

"Well, me and Spike," she said, pointing over her shoulder.

"So, Deadboy Jr is going to be the bait, huh?"

"Oh," Buffy turned around to stare at Spike. "I wasn't really thinking about it that way. I guess it's not such a good idea, is it?"

Spike just waited stoically for her to explain what she had meant.

"Why not? Sounds like a plan to me. They want their escapee back, you want to see them in action..." Xander seemed genuinely puzzled.

"Well, what if they try to capture him again?"

"Let them have him. It's only Spike." Xander shrugged in Spike's direction. "No offense."

"They can't have him back," Buffy said. "I'll stake him before I let him go back to that place."

Spike sat up a little straighter and cleared his throat. "As much as I appreciate what I hope is the thought there, pet, I'm not really enthused about your plan of how best to keep me out of their hands."

"I just meant...never mind. I guess you'd better stay here. I'll go by myself."

"They could be gunning for you now, too," he objected, leaning forward for emphasis. Her glare reminded him of how she'd reacted to his warning the night before and he backed off with a shrug. "I'm just saying—the dozy bitch with the notebooks knows what you are. No reason to think she's keeping it a secret."

"Well, if you can't go out at night, and I can't go out at night, who the hell is going to find out what these guys are up to? Not mention, keeping Dr. Inkfell from becoming something's dinner. Be serious, Spike."

Willow's "Dr. Inkfell?" resulted in a short recap of Buffy and Spike's encounter with the anthropology professor; and Xander shook his head in disbelief.

"She lives in Sunnydale and she wants to study vampires? Why doesn't she just hang out an 'all you can eat' sign?"

"That's what I tried to tell her, but she wouldn't listen. She acted like I'm the bad guy because they're all afraid of me."

"Technically, pet, not all vamps are—" He lowered his hand when Buffy turned to glare at him. "Right you are, Slayer. Afraid. All of us. Every single one." He ignored the snickers from Xander and Willow as he tried to hang on to his dignity by leaning back and pretending he wasn't listening to the conversation.

Giles brought a halt to the discussion by clearing his throat and interrupting to say, "Buffy, I'm afraid I—and you have no idea how much this pains me—do agree with Spike. Until we know more about these commandos and their intentions, it may be best for you to keep a low profile. As far as they are concerned, anyway. Perhaps a quick patrol through the cemeteries tonight and then back to your dorm room. Try to avoid any confrontations with anything else for the present time."

Buffy frowned, stuck out her lower lip, noticed Spike's eyes focused on it and quickly changed her expression from pout to reluctant agreement.

"All right," she said, standing up and collecting her stakes. "But I'm not going to hide from them forever. I'm going to tell Riley I know what he is and see what he has to say for himself." She pulled on her jacket and kicked the back of Spike's chair. "Come on, fangface. You can watch my back while I work out my issues on some fledges. And then you can show me this crypt that you think you want to live in."

While the Scoobies exchanged looks of disbelief - both at Buffy's comments and at Spike's silent compliance with her orders - she waved her hand at them and left the apartment, telling Willow not to wait up for her.