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“Did you even have a job?” Spike was half asleep when Buffy’s voice brought him back to life. She was flipping through a magazine with her head nestled in the crook of his shoulder, and that situation always made him feel calm and safe enough to fall asleep immediately. Or at least, it did if he ignored the New Kids On The Block posters and how their eyes drilled into his soul. Buffy never believed him when he insisted they were all demons.
“What’s that, pet?”
“Did you have a job? In the olden days? When you were alive?”
“You know damn well I was a poet and if you want anything else reading to you, you have to wait til your birthday and promise not to laugh.”
“I never laugh.”
“You want to. I can tell you’re thinking about it.”
“Oh my god, you totally have a complex.” She shifted her weight so that her eyes could find his. “I genuinely think it’s beautiful. I’m not a good enough liar to pretend. But did you have a job that paid you money? What was the plan? Other than waiting for the powers that be to let you meet me?”
“I was training, I suppose. I was still young, remember..”
“You’re the youngest at heart immortal monster I know.” Buffy’s hair caught the last fractal bits of light that came in through the window, open a crack to let in the long late June evening. Their sides of the bed were chosen to distribute the light right, to keep Spike safe (safe-ish, he needed some danger in his life) but keep giving Buffy her light in the morning. It also gave him the sight of the gold and copper in her hair, his favourite thing about the daylight, and the subject of ten or fifteen poems no one would ever read. “What job was it?”
“Who wants to know?”
“Your loving partner.”
“I wanted to be a philologist.”
“That is not a word. You can’t make things up to make me stop talking. You know that never works.” She pulled away to maintain eye contact without craning her neck and mournfully he let her go. Tragedy. She was going to deprive him of her hair on his arm and also torture his century old career aspirations. She knew he was always on his knees in front of her, always yearning, even after all this time and all the times she had said she loved him, and on long slow nights in she was happy to use it to make him look very stupid. “Say that word again.”
“Philologist.” He talked very slowly in his low dark voice, and the sound rumbled in both their chests.
“You’re just making an excuse to do obscene things with your tongue.”
“You’d probably call it a literary critic now. Universities were very different then. Less footnotes and more reading out a paper on what you thought around a dinner. And drinking. The philo- is love and the -lology is language. Go on then, tell me I’m a nerd and remind me of your cheerleading days, love. Then we can go to sleep and you can think of new ways to laugh at me in the morning.”
“I think you’d be good at it. I think William would have been good at it. You’re good at language and you’re good at loving things.”
“I wasn’t much of a translator, I suppose. Looking at it with a hundred and fifty years of hindsight.”
“You translated?”
Spike’s eyes drift to the tangled sheets at the bottom of the bed and he reconstructs something in his mind’s eye. “I was working on a translation and commentary of a poem called Sir Orfeo.”
“Sounds very sexy.”
“There’s a man loses his lover and travels through the stars and dreams to hell to beg for her back.” When his voice went longing and subdued, it was possible Buffy had been coming up with questions that would get this tone from him, the tone he used describing poetry and her.
“I’d like to read it.”
“Probably a version in the library at UC Sunnydale, I’d bet, though it’s probably not a page turner.”
“I don’t want to read it like that. I want you to read it to me. You can read your version or the old one, the old… um… Latin? Not Latin. German. French…”
“Middle English…”
“Middle English version. Then you can tell me what all the words mean and why you love them. Then we’ll read it again.”
Spike huffed. The light was almost gone now, the wind that drifted in was colder. You could almost think you were in London, a long time ago, with a lot of things wrong and a lot of dreams you couldn’t put into words. If he’d seen her then he couldn’t have taken it, his inadequacy and her effulgence. “Why on earth would you want to do that, love?”
“I’d like to have met you.”
“I’d have liked to meet you too.”
“Hang on though, did you have washboard abs? I’m only interested in soulful poetry William if he has washboard abs. Was your hair terrible? Oh god did you have stupid little glasses?”
“I’m going to sleep now.” He rolled away in protest and she nestled into him from behind.
“I want to know what you loved. Other than me. I’d like to learn about it.”
“Get the book and we’ll talk.”
“I will get the book and we will talk.” The slayer always won her battles with all creatures of the night.
“Will you take the New Kids On The Block poster down?”
“No. But I will love you forever.”