Rating: PG, for Spike's use of Spike-like words
Feedback: Yes, thank you very much. Melpomenethalia@aol.com
Spoilers: Takes place after "Wrecked," but ignores everything after it.
Distribution: The Bunny Warren and fanfiction.net. If you're interested, please let me know.
Summary: It's Christmas during season 6. Spike ends up playing Santa for Buffy and Dawn, but the results are... well, not always optimal.
Author's Note: The quote is from Charles Dickens's "A Christmas Carol," and yes, there are hints of "The Gift of the Magi" by O. Henry. Two other things: Dawn has completely forgiven Willow for the car accident, and my version of the Scoobies (particularly Spike) is a bit kinder and gentler than the one Joss gave us this year.
Disclaimer: All characters are owned by Mutant Enemy (Joss Whedon), a wonderfully creative company whose characters I have borrowed for a completely profit-free flight of fancy. Kindly do not sue me, please, as I am terrified of you. Thank you.
Dedication: To the darling people who had to wait until AUGUST for me to finish this fic, yet didn't complain even a little bit.
December 23: Presents
Loud growling woke Spike from a rather uncomfortable sleep around eleven in the morning. It took him a few seconds to figure out that it was no homicidal monster inhabiting the recesses of the basement that was making the racket. It was his stomach.
Yawning widely, he trudged up the steps, rubbing the offending tummy, and yanked open the fridge before he remembered that the Summers girls probably didn't keep a supply of O negative hanging about. With an annoyed grunt, he kicked the door shut and stumbled down the hall to the front door. Wrapping his hand in a nearby woolen throw, he opened the door a slit and thrust his arm outside, fumbling about until he grabbed hold of the morning paper.
Flopping onto the couch, he looked at the day's headlines: "Deputy Mayor Involved in Embezzlement Scandal," "Children Await Santa with High Hopes," and "Cholesterol: Is It Really Bad for You?" He noticed with a sardonic grin that fifteen mysterious murders of the night before had been relegated to page two. Sunnyhell had perfected the art of turning a blind eye.
As he was flipping through the sections, his eyes alit on the words "SALE! SALE! SALE!" scrawled in letters that were almost obscenely large and printed in eye-burning red. After shaking his head in an effort to adjust his understandably light-sensitive eyes to the page, he realized it was an advert for a department store's pre-Christmas shop-a-palooza. Apparently, they were going to be open all night.
Perfect. Now all he had to do was figure out exactly what to get each of the girls. Being a demon, he felt no qualms at all about tramping up the stairs and searching through Buffy and Dawn's bedrooms. He still had a difficult time believing how many clothes people owned today. When he'd been alive, he'd owned exactly three sets of clothes: summer, winter, and Sunday best. Buffy and Dawn had each been known to wear four different outfits in the same day. Mind-boggling didn't begin to cover it.
Getting gifts for Drusilla had been easy. Find something made of silk or velvet, preferably dripping in lace, nothing that would show her dainty kneecaps, and he was all set. Barring that, he could just kill someone wearing pretty jewelry and present it to her. Somehow, he had a feeling that the taste of his current gift-recipients was going to be far, far different.
After a cursory glance at the Nibblet's closet, he'd come to the conclusion she liked things that were pretty but casual. There were lots of pink and other pastel colors hanging from her bar, but there was a fair amount of neutral tones, as well. Grabbing a shirt he'd seen her wear repeatedly, he checked the tag and found she was a size small, while one of her preferred skirts was labeled a two and her shoes were size seven.
Buffy's closet looked a bit barren by comparison. Puzzled at first, he quickly figured out why. Fighting, it stood to reason, would have to be hell on her wardrobe. Dawn's clothes could easily last her years, but Buffy was probably lucky if a new blouse didn't get fried, dust-covered, stained, bled on, or covered in orange goo the first time she wore it. Consequently, with money being so tight, her sister's clothes from last year were still holding out pretty well, but Buffy's were slowly being winnowed away. He checked her sizes, noting that they were the same as Dawn's save for the shoes, which were a six, and that she was also a "petite," whatever that meant.
Armed with the necessary information, he returned downstairs, wrote everything down so he wouldn't forget it, then jammed the paper in his pocket and scuttled quickly out the door and to his car, gray blanket smoking like a barbeque on July 4th. Setting his jaw grimly, he pointed his Desoto towards his crypt and burned rubber up Revello Drive.
Flinging open the door, blanket still smoldering, a sudden realization hit him, one that didn't present an immediate solution. He pulled open the door to the fridge and grabbed himself a couple bags of blood, then carried them downstairs. His moneybox was hidden beneath a lose flag of the stones on the floor. Grimacing, he opened the box and saw one very limp portrait of Jefferson returning his gaze. Twenty bucks. He'd had to spend the rest of his money paying off the literal card shark last week. Siamese did not come cheap. Absentmindedly, he bit into the bags and slurped down his breakfast, almost forgetting to shudder at the repellent coldness. Couldn't be helped. His microwave had been what he'd hocked in order to get the money to buy the kittens in the first place.
A sudden idea occurred to him. There had to be something else around here that would bring him a few quid from the local pawnshop. Vainly, he searched the room for something relatively portable that was worth money. The record player and albums weren't going to do the job. The bed and the rest of the furniture were all far too large for his Desoto, plus he strongly doubted Smiling Sammy, the proprietor of Sunnydale's Pawnshop Pavilion, would be interested in his mode of décor anyway. Red vinyl dentist chairs just weren't selling like they used to.
Upstairs, the pickings were still slim. Corpses generally did worse than dentist chairs as far as pawnbrokers went. At last, he noticed the marble angel that graced his front room. The statue was about four feet tall, relatively pretty, and, quite frankly, he'd never liked it much to begin with. With a grunt, he hoisted the heavy statue over his shoulder, threw the blanket over them both, dashed to his car, deposited Hortense, as he'd taken to calling her, in the back seat, and was soon on his way to Sammy's.
Happily for Spike, the alleyway in back of the pawnbroker's shop was covered, and he was able to lug the sizable statue through the back door with little trouble from Mr. Sunshine. Why, he asked himself, did California have to be so bright and cheerful by day even in winter? Bells above the door jingled off-key as Spike, starting to feel that hernias and vampires may not be an impossible mix, trudged into the store. The dank, unpleasant smell in the air reminded him of when the sewers had backed up in the subterranean apartment he'd shared with Dru in Paris. Disorganized huddles of objects of all sorts – appliances, clothes, jewelry, toys, TV sets that looked like they dated from the Nick at Nite era – littered the countertops, shelves, and floor.
"Whatcha want?" asked a sullen voice from a corner.
"How much you give me for this here statue. Rare. Antique. Hand carved marble from the early 1800s. It's been in the family for generations, but I need the cash," Spike invented quickly.
Smiling Sammy, a wizened, bitter-looking old man who greatly resembled a grumpy toad, emerged from a set of shelves and looked at the statue with a critical eye.
"Gotta chip in its wing," he muttered.
"Yeah. Adds to the charm, don't you think? That distressed look is very in for spring, I hear."
Smiling Sammy grunted. Or it's possible it could have been a belch. It was rather hard to tell.
"It's dirty."
"That's a genuine antique finish. Don't want to remove the patina or it'll devalue it."
Smiling Sammy shook his head disapprovingly. "I can give you eighty bucks."
"Eighty!" Spike yelled, enraged. "That's highway robbery. It's worth five times that! Give us at least two hundred fifty." "Ninety."
"Two twenty-five."
"One hundred."
"Two hundred fifteen."
"Ninety."
"Two... wait, you went down, not up, on that last one."
"That's right. Try me again and the price goes down to sixty, take it or leave it. Ninety dollars."
"Sammy, my friend, you're cracked! Look at the workmanship on this beauty! The lines! The artistry! Here, you just can't see it properly," Spike enthused as he grabbed the angel none too gently and, in a fit over the low price he was getting, plopped it down on top of a nearby table that was right next to an appallingly tacky bronze and maroon floor lamp from the seventies.
And Smiling Sammy could indeed see Hortense much better... for the whole two seconds that the statue sat upon the table before the table legs collapsed from the weight. Spike's reflexes, fast as they were, weren't anywhere near quick enough to save the angel from breaking into a pile of marble chunks all over the floor.
"Ehm, whoops?"
"Whoops is right. Ten cents... might be decent for making a gravel walk if it's thumped down a bit. That means you only owe me $6.90 for the table you broke," Smiling Sammy declared as he made sure to step on the fallen table's $2.00 price tag, hiding it from view.
"Look, I need the money. Bad. I've got this red vinyl dentist chair..."
"No!"
"Black and white TV. Classic model. Hardly any static."
"Same one you tried palming off on me last week? It only got one channel. Not on your life."
He had no idea how he'd get by without it, but... "There's a small refrigerator. Working order."
Smiling Sammy pointed towards a group of ten refrigerators lined up against one of the walls, "See those? Been here months. They don't sell. No."
"Oh, come on! Cut me a break here! I'm a desperate man."
The old shopkeeper's eyes suddenly raked over Spike's form appreciatively, and he grinned, the first time Smiling Sammy had smiled in probably a month. It was not a nice smile.
"Hold on just one minute! I'm not quite that desperate, you old perv..."
"Not you. The coat," he said, walking around Spike and examining the garment in question. "Real leather?"
"Ehm, yeah," Spike apprehensively answered. "Why?"
"I'll give you a hundred and fifty."
"For... for my duster?" Spike felt a bit sick. "Nothing doing. I've had it for over twenty-five years!"
"What, was it your baby blanket?" laughed the old geezer croakily.
"I mean, it's over twenty-five years old. And no. No deal."
"Your choice, kid. It's probably the only thing of any value that you possess, though."
"Yeah, well, I'm just gonna keep right on possessin' it," he growled as he turned towards the door. He was almost out of the shop when he saw an almost unbelievably kitschy painting of a little girl with long brown hair and enormous, oversize, pathetic-looking blue eyes. There was a little tear coursing down her badly painted cheek. Spike stopped for a moment, marveling at just how horrifying the ox-eyed girl looked, but, in spite of himself, feeling guilty as sin.
Whirling around, his beloved duster fanning out behind him in its accustomed manner, he called out, "Two fifty."
"One seventy-five."
"Two hundred twenty-five."
"Two ten, and I won't charge you for the table."
"Done."
Two minutes later, a very naked-feeling Spike found himself the owner of a handful of money and a squashed card table. He gave his beauty a loving pat on his way out the door and willed himself not to think about what he'd just done. It smacked far too much of selflessness for his moral taste.
After a few minutes drive, Spike was within view of the Sunnydale Mall. His mouth was agape in shock. Cars. Vans. ATV's. Buses. As far as the eye could see. It seemed as though every single vehicle in running condition, and several that weren't, had gravitated to the shopping complex by an unseen force. Every parking spot was taken, and shoppers had begun improvising by turning the vacant lot across the street into overflow spaces. It was just after one in the afternoon. There was no possible way he could hike across the treeless, shadeless expanse of concrete from all the way out in the boonies without his duster. He'd be reduced to ashes before he was even halfway there. Feeling like a moron, he began to slowly drive up and down aisles of parked cars, wishing mournfully that someone would magically pull out of a spot close to the door. Several times, he sank so far as following a package-laden shopper down a lane, only to have the person either open the trunk, deposit their bags inside, and then head back to the mall, or suddenly cut across three other rows of cars at the last minute, the open spot disappearing to another, luckier driver. It took him a full two hours to find a person who pulled out of a space close enough to the building so he could get inside without turning into vampire flambé.
By that time, he was livid, and being packed inside a gigantic building with thousands of people he couldn't even eat, as well as what he thought had to be the tackiest giant plastic Christmas decorations on the Pacific seaboard, was not improving his mood in the least. He'd figured he'd already be back by this time, and he hadn't even begun shopping yet!
The stores also didn't seem to be arranged in any logical order, either. Shoe stores were next to candy stores that were next to bookshops. When he'd notice a shop he wanted to get to on the floor above him, there was no visible way of getting there. By the time he'd managed to find stairs or an escalator, he invariably had lost sight of the place he wanted to be and couldn't find it again. Through all of this, people were milling about in equally ill tempers, pushing, jostling, swearing, and looking completely miserable. Above all the pathetic, almost psychopathic shoppers hung a banner proclaiming, "Joy to the World!" Spike found himself wishing fervently that Christmas had remained exactly as it had been when he was a boy: a plum pudding, carols around the out of tune parlor piano, home-made gifts, and an orange in the toe of his stocking. As he remembered, he'd enjoyed it a lot more than this hubbub.
What made matters worse was Spike didn't have a bottomless wallet. After all, even after the gifts were bought, he still had other expenses to attend to. In spite of all the supposed sales going on, the prices didn't seem much lower, and the vampire suspected that everything had been marked up 15% before it was marked down 10%. Normally, he'd approve whole-heartedly of such tactics, but being on the receiving end made him feel rather differently.
Slowly but surely, after the horrors of snippy salespeople wishing him a merry Christmas in tones that suggested they wanted him "buried with a stake of holly through his heart," the agony of being unable to elbow back plump suburban housewives who all but tackled him out of the way to get the best finds, and a brief delay caused by his inability to believe what was hanging in public view in the front window of Victoria's Secret, he managed to find a few well-chosen gifts for the ladies in question. Dawn would be receiving two pretty shirts, one pink and one violet, a music box that played "Swan Lake," and three CD's from bands she'd mentioned to him. Buffy, on the other hand, would be the owner of a pair of brown suede pants, a silk blouse of ocean blue, workout sweats, and a jewelry set made up of earrings, a necklace, and ring, all with emerald-colored stones that reminded him of her eyes. Checking his supply of cash, he realized he had just enough left for some cheap wrapping paper and a gift certificate for the local movie theatre so the two sisters could have an evening out together before he exhausted his money for the day.
His final purchases made, he lugged everything back to his car and tipped the bags into the backseat next to his newly acquired broken table before driving back to the Summers home to begin wrapping up the presents. He figured it should be done in about five or ten minutes.
Spike... such an innocent.
Once he'd brought in all the shopping bags, he dug out the Scotch tape and scissors from one of the kitchen drawers and prepared to wrap the Christmas gifts. Granted, the red paper with blurry sprigs of holly on it wasn't exactly posh, but it was the best he could afford. With a flourish, he unrolled the paper across the kitchen table... and was stunned when it seemed to run out very quickly. There wasn't a whole lot of paper on the cardboard tube. In fact, it was downright skimpy. Squinting his eyes, he was able to barely read the words "twenty square feet" on the crumpled label. Instead of a roll of paper twenty feet long, he'd gotten one less than six.
"Nothing to be done about it now," he grumbled as he took the first package, Buffy's suede pants, out of their bag. Quickly, his fingers dived back into the bag to fish out the box.
They came up empty.
"What the...? They forgot me boxes!"
Spike, inexperienced Christmas shopper that he was, had no idea that boxes were not included unless he asked for them. Consequently, he'd never asked. Frowning in fury, he painstakingly folded the pants into a lopsided rectangle and placed them on the paper. It would simply have to do.
His next task was to wrap the paper around the pants in question. With a loud snick, he cut around the pants, leaving what he thought would be a generous amount of paper on all sides. He then pulled the extra paper on top of the suede and tried to stick it in place with tape. Two things were revealed to Spike when this occurred.
Number one: the paper was not, unless it was made of rubber, going to cover the item in question.
Number two: he'd cut a large, rectangular hole in the Summers's lacy second best tablecloth.
The next three hours were spent attempting to wrap the packages. In that time, Spike succeeded in taping his fingers to the paper four times, giving himself a ghastly paper cut on the fleshy part of his right hand between the thumb and index finger, and running out of paper long before he ran out of gifts. Beggars not able to be choosers, he wound up covering the remaining presents in tin foil and the Sunday comics. He'd managed to give himself a matching slice on his right hand with the serrated edge of the foil cutter.
Midnight had long since chimed when the blond stacked
the presents under the tipsy tree. In the right setting and very
dim light, they didn't look so bad. Not as bad as empty stockings
would have looked, at any rate. Exhausted from the day, Spike securely
closed the drapes in the living room and hunkered down on the couch for
the night. After all, he needed to be well rested for the battle
that loomed ahead later that day. The vamp was asleep in less than
a minute, visions of sugarplums dancing in his head. They were bloody
annoying.