If That’s What it Takes  
 
 
 
 
Chapter One  
“Uh oh” 
 
“That bleedin’ witch. What’s she done to us now?”
 
“Okay. It’s going to be okay. It was a portal. We know about portals.” Buffy’s words projected a confidence her voice couldn’t quite carry off.
 
“We didn’t know that one was going to open just where we were standing!”
 
“Well, in her defense, neither did Willow…” Buffy gazed around. She felt no warning tingles on her neck, not even from Spike, so she relaxed a little as she tried to get her bearings. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she began to make out trees and bushes and what looked like it might be a picket fence.
 
“Didn’t know it wouldn’t,” Spike grumbled, extending his own senses, but getting nothing. “She’s gonna be the death of one of us someday.”  He frowned, odd that he couldn’t seem to smell much except newly mown grass under his feet. He listened, but only picked up on ordinary night sounds – an owl, distant traffic… “Bloody, buggering fuck!” he whispered to himself, noticing for the first time that his heart was pounding so hard he could feel it.
 
“Buffy… I think I’m….” He reached for her hand and put it against his warm cheek, then slid it down to his chest. She left it there long enough to feel the warmth and the way his heart was pounding, then snatched it back.
 
“What the hell?”
 
Almost as disturbing as discovering that Spike seemed to be human, was discovering they were both as weak as normal humans – which they learned when Buffy, frustrated by not knowing where or when they were, tried to throw a trash can across the yard. She frowned and tried again, managing to get it only a few feet. They stared at each other, her eyes wide and frightened. Spike recovered first, going to a nearby stone bench and attempting to pick it up with one hand.
 
“Bloody hell... I’m weak as a kitten.”
 
Buffy gave a half-hearted attempt to lift the same bench, giving it up when it became obvious she couldn’t budge it even as far as Spike had.  She stared around at the darkness again. It was suddenly more foreboding than it had been at first, although their surroundings seemed safe enough.  They appeared to be in a suburban backyard; a small bungalow was just visible at the other end.
 
“I don’t have my powers! How will I slay—”
 
She spun around, searching the night with non-existent senses for any sign of vampires. He took her by the shoulders and stopped her gently.
 
“Don’t have mine either, pet. And my heart’s beating like a trip hammer. Face it, we’re just ordinary humans. Somebody else must be the Slayer here. Or maybe they don’t need one. We haven’t seen any vamps yet.”
 
“We’ve only been here a few minutes! We don’t know if there are vampires or not.”
 
“Well, if there are, we know what mistakes not to make, don’t we? If we can’t survive the night as normal humans… well, doesn’t say much for what I know about being a vampire… or what kind of a slayer you are, does it?”
 
Buffy rounded on him, bristling with indignation. “I’ll have you know, I passed my Cruciametum,” she said. “I killed Kralik without my powers. I’m a hell of a slayer!” A small part of her recognized that he was only goading her as a distraction, but she was offended anyway.
 
He grinned at her, pleased with himself. “That you are, love. I’ve always said that, haven’t I?” He shook his head. “Kralik, huh? I’m sorry I missed that.” His expression darkened. “But when your wanker of a watcher comes back from the Old Country, he and I are going to have words about putting you through that barbaric ritual – and against something like Kralik. Cruciamentum vamps are supposed to be easy kills. It’s how the Council of Wankers weed out the slayers that really shouldn’t be one. Kralik would’ve killed just about any…” He paused when she just stared at him with her eyebrows raised.  “Oh, right. Not their favorite or most obedient weapon, are you?”
 
“Not hardly. They thought he’d kill me and they’d kill Faith, and then they’d get a whole new Slayer that would listen to them. Bastards.”
 
“That they are, pet.” 
 
He looked around, watching Buffy as she stared at the house. He waited until he was sure she was feeling the same pull he was. “Meanwhile, what say we get inside that house. Just in case there are vamps in this world.”
 
“I’m going to kill Willow when we get back,” Buffy muttered, walking toward the little house they both somehow recognized as being a safe place. “Sending me to a world where I don’t have my powers…”
 
“And where I’m just a normal human ponce,” Spike agreed. “Not something I’ve ever aspired to be again.”
 
Buffy frowned as she preceded him to the door. “Oh yeah. ‘Cause being an evil vampire is such an improvement over being human.” She missed the look that went across his face, but heard his whispered, “Was in my case.”
 
She gave him a curious look over her shoulder, then tried the back door, which opened easily.  “Huh. Whoever lives here doesn’t believe in locking doors.”
 
Spike was wandering around, picking things up, peering at the photographs around the small living room, and being generally nosey.  “Um... Buffy? Those careless people who live here – I think one of them might be you,” he said, holding up a framed picture of what appeared to be Buffy and another girl standing on a beach in bright sunshine.
 
Buffy blinked in surprise, but then nodded.  “Yeah, I’m getting a kind of familiar vibe. Like I know where things are, and what the rest of the house looks like…  Now if I just knew how long we were going to have to stay here. I haven’t been back long enough to go running off and leave the Hellmouth unprotected... again.” She gave him a small smile. “And you’re not there to take up the slack this time.”

They both flashed back to the summer, when, at Spike’s instigation, she’d been forced into taking an unheard-of vacation from the Hellmouth.
~~~~~
The cumulative effects of Riley’s departure, her mother’s death, and Dawn’s almost-death on Glory’s tower had finally overwhelmed her.  Not until the crisis was over – Buffy was too much the Slayer to fall apart when an apocalypse threatened – but once Glory had been defeated and all the loose ends tied up, she'd gone into a depression that had rendered her almost helpless against the weakest fledglings.
 
As soon as he’d recovered from his injuries, Spike became her constant shadow when she patrolled, saving her from death or worse over and over until, alternating between tears and rage, he was finally able to convince Giles that Buffy was going to get herself killed if something didn’t change. After he’d studied her more closely, and listened to Spike’s unembellished reports of her behavior while on patrol, Giles had to agree that Buffy seemed very fragile and probably needed some kind of break from her unrelenting duties.

Taking advantage of the normal summer slow down of demonic activity, and using the excuse of wanting her to report on Glory’s defeat personally, Giles had asked her to visit England with him.  Her listless acceptance of the plan to have her talk to the Council’s Research Department was additional proof of how detached and uninterested in her life she had become. She hadn’t even bothered to ask how Dawn and the Hellmouth would fare in her absence, just picked up her bag and followed Giles on to the plane.

With no nightly slaying duties and no other reason to hold her tightly wound emotions together, the breakdown she’d had after she got there shouldn’t really have come as much of a surprise to anyone. But the hospitalization and counseling that Giles had insisted follow it, were a bit unusual. That lengthy therapy, as well as various other complications, including a strike that shut down the airports just before she was supposed to fly home, conspired to turn what was intended to be a two week trip into one that lasted much of the summer.

Spike had been left to handle the slaying duties and help the Scoobies take care of Dawn. Although they all missed Buffy – including Dawn who had begun to regret her decision to do summer school rather than take a trip to England – having to rely on Spike’s assistance every night had given the Scoobies a chance to get used to the vampire’s presence, and to accept him as part of their lives – if not a full-fledged Scooby.
 
~~~~~~~~~~~
 
 
Shaking off memories of that long, boring summer, Spike said, “True enough. Ought to give Red a bit of incentive, yeah? Without us, fighting evil is going to be left to her witching skills.”
 
“Which are apparently getting stronger all the time…” Buffy gestured around their new surroundings.
 
“Not getting any more under control, though, are they?  ‘Less it was a deliberate choice to send us away for some reason.”
 
“Kinda doubt it.” Buffy said with a shrug. “How long do you think she’s going to leave us here?”
 
“Till she figures out how to get us back, I reckon.  May as well make ourselves at home.”  He followed his words with actions, flopping onto the couch and picking up the remote.  “Come on, Slayer. Maybe we can learn something from watching the telly.”
 
“Like what?” she said, joining him on the couch anyway. She frowned at the screen where two men seemed to be tearing each other’s clothes off. “That you like to watch gay porn?”  She couldn’t contain her laughter at the look on his face.
 
“What? No. That wasn’t… I didn’t… Here! See? There’s news. We can find out what’s going on in the world and maybe where we fit in.” The tips of his now human ears were turning a bright red, causing even more laughter on her part.
 
When she had stopped snorting, and he was glowering at the screen, she said, “I kinda doubt our arrival is going to make the news.  If there are pictures of us here” (she pointed to photo of Spike smiling and holding a soccer ball) “then there must be a Spike and Buffy that already live here.”
 
“Either that, or somebody with some major mojo has managed to make those monks that invented Dawn look like amateurs.”
 
“Or that…”
 
They watched the late evening news, not really learning anything more about where they were than the little bits and pieces they were gradually beginning to “know”.  By midnight, Buffy was yawning and said she was going to bed. She was at the entrance to the bedroom when she stopped, staring back and forth between the room and Spike.
 
The small house had only one bedroom and one bed. She spoke first: “You take the bed, I’ll sleep on the couch.”
 
“Don’t be daft. My mother didn’t raise me to treat women like that. You take the bed.”
 
Buffy gaped at him. “Your mother didn’t raise you to eat women for dinner every night either, but you do—did. Anyway, I’m shorter than you are. I’ll fit better on the couch.”
 
He glared at her, shaking his head. “You’re shorter than everybody. And, no, she didn’t. But, in my defense, I was usually very polite to them… at first,” he finished in a much softer voice.
 
“I heard that.”
 
He sighed. “Just go to sleep, Slayer. If we’re lucky, we’ll wake up back in Sunnyhell, and if we aren’t, we’ve got a lot of catching up to do so we know what’s expected of us here. Like why we ended up in the same backyard, and how we knew this was where we—you live.”
 
“I hate it when you make sense,” she grumbled, acknowledging his laugh with a small smile. “Goodnight, Spike… and thanks for the bed.”
 
“You’re welcome, pet. Sleep well.”
 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 
They spent the next day fielding phone calls from friends they were only just beginning to understand they had. Friends who wondered why they hadn’t made some agreed-upon social event the night before.  When not on the phone, they went over the house, looking for clues as to what else might be expected of them.  The wedding picture they’d somehow not noticed the night before – although Buffy swore she’d looked right at the table it was sitting on – brought them both to a halt. Spike stared at it with wistful awe, Buffy in complete bewilderment.
 
“Married? We’re married? To each other?”
 
“Is that so hard to believe?  It seems like we live here together. Would make sense, wouldn’t it? To be married?”
 
As if the picture had opened some sort of psychic door, they began to “remember” more and more about who they were and what their lives were like. While they were absorbing more about themselves all the time, it still took some creative lying to explain away their absence when Buffy’s friend Susie berated her for ditching them.
 
“Well… I told everybody you were either too busy fighting to leave the house, or you’d been fighting all day and were too busy having make-up sex to bother meeting us.  And I still think I’m right,” she added before hanging up.
 
Buffy put the phone down and peered at Spike out of the corner of her eyes. “Did you hear that?”
 
“Every word. I’m ready for the make-up sex anytime you are, Slayer.”
 
“In your dreams, Spike.”
 
“Just trying to fit in. Sounds like fighting and shagging are something we do a lot of.”
 
We don’t do a lot of anything. Whoever the ‘we’ here is, they apparently do a lot of… whatever. We don’t.”
 
“We fight a lot,” he pointed out. “Or, we used to, anyway. Now you just punch me in the nose a lot.”
 
“Shut up and help me figure out what to tell people about us.”
 
“Make up your bloody mind – is it ‘shut up’ or help?”
 
She sighed and sank down on the bed.  “Help. Please?  How are we going to do this?”
 
“I don’t know about you, but I’m starting to… know… more things. Like, I saw a paystub on the table in the kitchen, and now I know I work at a bar downtown. And I know that I just happened to be off last night, but tonight I have to be there by six.”
 
“What do you do there?”  She paused and frowned. “Wait. I think I know this. You’re a bartender. You mix drinks… and I… Oh, no way!”
 
“You’re a dancer!” he crowed. “You stand in a cage dangling from the ceiling and you dance! The Slayer is a go-go dancer in a bar.  Oh this is delicious.”
 
“This is not happening. You’ll have to tell them… something. Tell them I’m sick, or dead, or… something.”
 
“Nope. Can’t do it, luv. We have to go to work in just a few hours.  You might want to take a nap. Could be a late night…”
 
Buffy fell backwards with her arm over her eyes, moaning. “This cannot be happening. I know how to wait on tables… I don’t know how to dance on them!”
 
“Well, technically, pet, you’ll be dancing above—” She lifted her arm to glare at him. “Right. Not your style.”  He waited, sitting down a safe distance away. “But do you really want to get the Buffy who lives here, and likes dancing in cages, fired? Doesn’t seem right, somehow, does it?”
 
“I hate you.”
 
“No you don’t. Not here. Here you love me.” With her arm over her eyes, Buffy missed the sadness that flickered across his face. “Here, you love me,” he repeated in a whisper, standing up and walking out of the room.
 
 
~~~~~~~~~~~~
 
Their arrival at the bar was greeted with warm hellos and much joking about what they’d been doing on their day off.
 
“You two must have worn each other out,” the manager said with a leer. “You haven’t even held hands since you got here. Usually, I’d have to pry you apart to make you get to work.”
 
“Heh,” Buffy said with a weak smile. Spike put his arm around her and pulled her into his side.
 
“Just taking a breather,” he said, squeezing Buffy in warning when she tried to pull away indignantly.  “We’re still the same shagging machines you know us to be.” He leaned down and nibbled on Buffy’s ear, his warm breath sending a shiver through her body that had nothing to do with the temperature in the bar. “Play along, Slayer. It isn’t going to kill you.”
 
That isn’t what I’m worried about. Buffy tried to control the fluttering in her stomach caused by Spike’s attentions to her ear and neck. She assured herself that the nervous reaction was because she knew he was really a vampire and that’s why his warm lips on her neck were making her…
 
“Okay!” She pulled away. “Time to get dressed for work.”  She let her feet, which seemed to know what they were doing, take her to her dressing room where her costumes were hanging under a sign that read “Buffy”. 
 
“Oh joy.” She yanked the one on the hanger labeled “Tuesday” off the rack, never questioning how she knew it was Tuesday.  She changed in a small curtained area that she assumed was for that purpose, then came out to see herself in the full-length mirror.
 
“You are soooo dead, Willow,” she muttered, staring at her reflection. The tiny bikini she was wearing was saved from being totally humiliating by the fringe dangling from it that covered most of her untanned body parts.  She huddled in the dressing room until another girl came in, toweling the sweat off her face.
 
“You’re up,” Susie said. “Are you okay? You look kinda strange.”
 
“You’ve got no idea how strange I am,” Buffy said with a grimace that she turned into a smile. “But I’ll be fine.”  She walked out and stepped into the cage that had been lowered to allow Susie to get out.  The man working the pulley whistled at her and grinned in a friendly fashion.
 
“If your hubby wasn’t my best friend, I think I’d have to kill him so I could be there to comfort you in your grief.”
 
“Heh,” Buffy tried to smile her appreciation as she panicked at the idea of not having Spike around to share the weirdness with. Suddenly she was much happier about his presence than she would have expected to be. “Well, good thing he is then, huh?”
 
“Yep. Good thing.  Up you go. Have a good show.”
 
When the music began, Buffy had another brief moment of panic before her body seemed to know what it should be doing and she began to move to the music.  The time dangling above the busy bar passed more quickly than she’d expected. She met Spike’s gaze one time when he got a short break from mixing drinks, and he gave her an encouraging wink that made her smile before she remembered who he was and looked away.
 
At the end of her shift, she changed back into her street clothes and joined Susie at one of the back tables. She’d already figured out that the beer and sandwiches were part of their pay, so she wolfed down a hamburger while she waited for Spike to join them. It was almost disturbing that they seemed to be growing more and more like the Spike and Buffy who apparently lived here. Not that Buffy wasn’t grateful not to be stumbling around completely bewildered in this world, but it was a little eerie how easily she and Spike were slipping into their new personas.  She didn’t even blink when he walked up and ran a hand over her hair before leaning down for a quick kiss.
 
Seeming to be as startled as she was, he pulled back and frowned at her, then his eyes shifted to Susie and he remembered that the behavior, as strange as might seem to them, was perfectly in character.  He relaxed and slid into the chair next to Buffy, setting down his own beer and leaning back with one arm on the back of her chair.
 
“Lookin’ good tonight, ladies,” he said, including Susie in his leering smile. “Could take you both home with me.”
 
Susie laughed. “Yeah, sure you could. If you wanted to sleep on the couch for the rest of your life.”  She didn’t notice the guilty start Buffy gave, or the sideways look she got from Spike.
 
“Right. Can’t have that, can we?  Guess you’ll have to do without the pleasure of my company.”  His hand was absently stroking Buffy’s arm as he spoke. She assured herself she wasn’t throwing it off only because they needed to remain in character.
 
“Do you want a ride home?” Susie asked. “Or are you going to hang around and wait for him?”
 
Buffy glanced at Spike, who said without missing a beat, “Why don’t you go on? I have to close up tonight, so I’ll be pretty late.”
 
“But what if—” She couldn’t think of any way to say that they needed to be together in case the portal opened.
 
“It’ll be alright, love. Know you wouldn’t leave me here.”
 
Susie frowned at them. “She leaves you here all the time,” she said. “I know how much Buffy likes her sleep. She’s not a night owl, like you are.”
 
“Right. I know that. Was speaking of… something else. Of course, she should catch a ride with you.”  He leaned over and kissed Buffy, drawing it out until she
made herself pull away, giving him a quick glare to cover her increased breathing. “I’ll be home later, sweetheart.” 
 
“Okay. See you at home. Don’t be too late. You know how I worry.”
 
“Not a moment longer than it has to be. I promise.” He brushed another quick kiss across her lips and stood up.  “Take good care of her,” he said to Susie.
 
“I always do,” she said, sounding offended. “Not that Miss Martial Arts 2000 needs any help from me.”
 
Spike nodded and went back to the bar, leaving Buffy to mull over that new piece of information.