Chapter Two - Home to England

Xander leaned back in the seat, ignoring the fear that always crawled into his belly when the aircraft started to land. Oh, he could face demons and gods and African food and blinding humiliation, but one little aircraft landing and his stomach tied up like… like something really knotty. And for that matter, he didn't know why he was bashing African food because it was good compared to English food.

When Spike's hand slid over his, Xander gave a weak smile.

"Down in a sec, pet."

"I'm fine. See me be fine? Big with the fine," Xander protested weakly. Spike didn't answer, but he tightened his hold on Xander's hand, the one that was clutching the seat's arm. No matter how often he told himself that the fear was stupid, Xander failed to actually believe it so he held his breath until the plane touched ground, bouncing slightly and then rolling down the runway to the screech of tires.

The plane turned and slowly rolled toward the airport, and Spike pulled out his cellphone.

"You're not supposed—"

"Oi, I don't follow stupid rules, do I?" Spike asked as he slipped the earpiece into one ear and shielded the phone in his lap. If a stewardess hadn't been walking by right then, Xander might have argued about signals and towers and controllers, but instead he just smiled silently at the lady as she walked by.

Spike pretty much did what Spike wanted, and right now, making a fuss would just get them pulled off by airport security and frisked so thoroughly that Xander would end up wondering if he should add the guard to his list of lovers. It had happened once at the Bulawayo airport in Zimbabwe, and they'd been all apologetic after going through his bags and leaving him sitting in his underwear in an interrogation room for an hour, but he really didn't think he needed a repeat.

"Hey, we're back," Spike told the person in the phone, but he turned to Xander as if talking to him, and Xander nodded knowingly. They were so going to get caught.

"A ride would be nice…. Then send one of the girls…." Spike paused for a long time, his face impassive as whoever was on the other end went on and on and on. He rolled his eyes and then sucked air through his teeth in a way that suggested someone was about to get eviscerated. "Bloody hell, has to be some way!"

"And I'm really sorry, but no with the wayage. I'm not seeing a way," Xander babbled in Spike's general direction as the man in front of them turned around with a confused expression. "Nope, no way, so sorry, and I'm sorry, we'll just keep our conversation down," Xander told the man as he did his best to cover for Spike's little outburst.

Luckily, Spike had fallen silent again, listening with an expression that did nothing to make Xander feel any better. Maybe if they were all too busy to come to the airport that meant another apocalypse. In general, Xander was not fond of apocalypses; they made his eye socket ache. However, right now a little Hellmouthy action would be good for the distraction.

He suddenly remembered that Willow had sent him off to study Sentinels specifically to get him away from Spike, and as much as he loved Willow, she wasn't really known for going with the flow. She was more the try to redirect the whole river to make it flow where she wanted it to flow, and Xander wasn't really fond of her ways of redirection.

Oh yeah, a little apocalyptic fun might be the thing to distract Willow from any attempts to redefine reality. Yeah, she had given up the magical memory wipes and manipulation, but she still had the Willow eyes and pouting and the all-powerful 'listen to me because I know you better than you know yourself' speech. But then, if that was true, why hadn't she ever noticed that he was a shaman?

"Just do it," Spike snarled far too loudly, and this time a number of people turned and looked. He yanked the earpiece off and shoved the phone in his pocket just as a stewardess came through, her eyes scanning the rows.

"Is there a problem here?" she asked primly in her stiff English accent, holding on to the seat backs as something bumped the plane.

"Just a git who's annoyin' me," Spike said as he turned to Xander. "Andrew must be the most annoyin' piss ant on the whole bloody planet," Spike growled, and Xander got it.

"Sorry," he said with a half-shrug. Let the stewardess think he was Andrew of the annoyingness if it got them off the plane without a police escort. The stewardess looked at them for a second and then wandered off.

"We're on our own for a bit, pet," Spike said as he stood up and retrieved their bags from the overhead.

"I got that," Xander confirmed.

Xander followed Spike through customs and a more thorough than usual body search. It wasn't up to Zimbabwe's standards, but the guard got to at least second base with him. He kept waiting for some sort of explanation from Spike, but he suffered through the security with tight lips and as few words as possible.

Figuring that Spike couldn't talk about it with so many people around, Xander just followed him through airport, grabbing the bag they'd checked and searching for something American from the various food vendors. Xander had spent over a year in Africa eating things that where he couldn't identify the meat... or the vegetables for that matter. Now he wanted good old fashioned American ground mystery meat. The airport slowly filled as planes landed, but board after board showed planes being delayed from taking off. But Spike led them away from the crowded center.

They ended up sitting on the floor of the main terminal, Xander leaning on the bags and munching a hot dog piled with all the fixings while Spike bounced a tennis ball against garbage can. The thing would hit with a dull thud, bounce once and then Spike would snag it from the air and throw it again. Thud-bounce-catch.

"I'm assuming that the hang up isn't demonic since everyone else seems to be hung up too," Xander said as he looked at the crowded airport. People clustered around the few public televisions, more crowded around those ones that you had to put a credit card through to get to work. He shoved the rest of the hot dog in his mouth, chewing as Spike sat silent. Thud-bounce-catch.

"Someone blew up the Tube," Spike finally said after Xander swallowed.

"They… WHAT?" Xander looked over, but Spike just kept bouncing the ball.

"Seems like a few dozen dead… maybe more. City's just pretty well shut down, which is why Andrew can't get a car in for us, roadblocks are making travel hard, and the slayers are busy with the nasties who've decided ta take advantage of the cock up. The phones aren't doing well either, so it's lucky Willow mojo'ed ours. Might be here for a while." Thud-bounce-catch.

"Spike, who?"

Spike tilted his head and gave Xander an incredulous look.

"Okay, ruling out demons, I can guess who, but what are we going to do?"

"Pet, people have tried ta shut down the city before." Thud-bounce-catch. "Dru and me left for New York after nearly getting blown to bits by an IRA bomb outside a pub. Now that's just wrong, bombing people who are just trying to get pissed enough to forget their crap-all lives."

"Okay, this changes things. No way can we go pushing in there and announce to them that we're all couply after this," Xander said. That made Spike pause with the ball bouncing.

"No, it doesn't. City'll get up tomorrow, sweep up the streets, and keep right on going. If the jerries didn't stop us, a few cowards with bombs sure as hell aren't."

"But—"

"Do you want to hide us?" Spike asked, the tennis ball still in hand.

"No, of course not, but—"

"No buts. Life goes on, pet, at least for those that survived. And for us, life means telling the others that we're together now."

"Which would be where life ended," Xander tried joking. Spike shifted around, reaching out and grabbing Xander's hand with enough force to make Xander flinch.

"Your life isn't bloody ending."

"Just a joke," Xander tried defending himself. "Jokage, you know, where people exaggerate or say things that aren't true in order to make others laugh."

"'M not laughing."

"Okay, it was bad jokage," Xander agreed. "I'm just…. Look," Xander struggled, "I'm the sidekick, specifically, I'm Buffy's sidekick, only now, I'm not, and change is not always good. Every time I try to change, it actually turns out really bad, and you were there for many of those disasters, like the whole kicking Buffy out thing, which looking back… I'm just blaming the pain pills because that didn't even make sense."

"Pet." Spike shoved the ball behind their bags and pulled Xander close. Xander sagged into that strength, letting his head rest on Spike shoulder and closing his good eye. If some old lady with blue hair frowned at him, he'd get all weird and want to pull back, and right now he just needed to feel Spike's arms.

"You're English, how can you take this so calmly?" Xander asked. He'd ridden the Underground after he wrecked the one car Giles has authorized. He remembered seeing the group of kids who'd bundled on, some adult madly counting heads as the doors closed.

"It's what we do, pet. We've been around terrorism a good bit more than you lot, and there's nothing a good cup of tea can't fix," Spike said softly. "But you're upset because you can't stop it, you can't fix it."

Xander lay in the dark of his own closed eye and thought about that one for a second. "I can't really stop any of the evil," he finally said.

"Bloody hell, Xan. You're the one who brought Buffy back from the dead, and you faced down Angelus. I’m still surprised the wanker didn't grab you after that trick, and if you ever do anything that stupid again, I'll chain ya to the bloody bed. You fought on that last day, thinking you were going to die. You smelled of resignation and bitter acceptance, but you still waded into battle and you helped close the Hellmouth."

"Willow called the slayers, Buffy and the slayers fought the minions of hell, and you died in a big blaze of glory. I just stood at the edges," Xander disagreed.

"Bollocks. You gave everything to the fight, and more than once you did your bit to turn the world back to good."

Xander heard the words, but he had trouble really believing them. When fingers stroked his hair, he dismissed the whole debate and let himself just feel. Thinking bad, feeling Spike smooth fingers through his curls good. Xander pushed aside thoughts of the Underground and children or of demons and Hellmouths as he just let himself drift to sleep in Spike's lap.


"Rise and shine, pet," Spike voice called, and Xander squinted his eye open. The florescent lighting still made the whole airport feel like noon, but the stiffness in his body suggested that he had slept for a while. Considering the people trying to sleep a scrunched up in chairs, it would seem a lot kinder to turn the lights down, but not so much. Security officers walked through, their eyes scanning the waiting room nervously.

"We need to move?" Xander asked as various body parts check in with complaints. He really couldn't comfortably sleep on floors any more, not that floors were ever that comfortable.

"Our chariot awaits." Spike half pushed Xander to his feet and then handed up the eyepatch. Realizing with horror that it had come off, Xander slipped it back into place before he emotionally scarred some kid who happened to look over at the wrong time. "Willow managed to get here," Spike added, "but we need to head out and do a little hiking. She has the car parked over on Hatch Lane."

"Okay, so here we go," Xander said without much enthusiasm. Spike glanced over, but he didn't say anything as he grabbed the larger bag, Xander's bag, and slung it over his shoulder.

Xander grabbed Spike's much smaller bag and followed him through the maze of the airport. People watched them quietly, the normal chatter of an airport quieted by the disaster that had slowed the system to a halt. Eventually, they reached the front doors. Three busses idled as airport employees ushered people onto them, but Spike pulled him north, away from them.

The night air was cooler than Xander was used to, but summer in England never brought the heat Xander knew from California. The city was quiet, strangely quiet, and the air felt like rain. It was weird. He left for Africa and while he was trying to negotiate with a slayer's family over a bowl of cassava, the Towers fell in New York. He was off playing 'make the vampire jealous' with Angel, and bombers hit London.

Hell, he took a three day trip into the bush to find a slayer north of Habila, and he came back to find Janjaweed militias had rolled through the village he'd been staying in, leaving the dead strewn across the ground. The woman who had laughed as Xander had choked on the local alcohol had laid with her legs splayed obscenely, blood on her cold thighs.

He'd stayed there long enough to help bury the dead. Looking back, he wondered whether he could have used his vision to see the danger coming. Had his instincts sent him out of the village? Xander pushed that thought away. He'd gotten malaria not long after that, despite the antimalarial drugs he took. Yeah, he might end up in the middle of every supernatural disaster, but he seemed to miss most of the mundane ones.

They walked along the side of the road until the airport disappeared behind them and they followed the edge of a field. The traffic was light, and the ubiquitous buses and taxis were completely absent. Two fields, three parking lots, and two very tired feet later, Xander finally spotted the back end of Willow's car, parked outside a house.

"Xander!" Willow called as the door came open, and Xander caught an armful of witch. "Oh goddess, I've missed you, and I was worried." Willow backed off a step and hit his arm.

"Ow!" Xander complained even though it didn't hurt.

"Spike said that Blair was a shaman, and you do not have good luck with magical people, don't make me bring up Ampata."

"No bringing up of ex's. You have a clanky not-so-good ex or two in your closet, too," Xander defended himself, and Willow hit him again.

"Thanks for bringing him home to us, Spike," Willow said. Xander glanced helplessly over toward Spike as Willow dragged him to the passenger side of the car. Spike just tossed the bags into the trunk Willow had popped open.

"Yeah, no problem." Spike slammed the trunk and then opened the door behind Willow. Xander got into the car and twisted around to look at Spike, but the vampire just gazed back with no clue about how to handle this.

"Seatbelt," Willow chirped. Xander pulled the belt across his chest before he even registered the words.

"So, you met a Sentinel, and how cool is that. I know you weren't all excited-boy about going, but you're looking good, really good. I bet you're happy now that you went, right?" She asked as she drove through the quiet streets toward the edge of town.

"Totally happy," Xander agreed with a smile toward Spike. Spike gave a small smile of his own, a smirk that let the tip of his tongue slide out from between his lips. "Totally happy, and as soon as we get back to the house, I'll tell you all about it." Xander watched as the smile on Spike's face vanished, replaced with something a little more wary. So not good.