Title: We're Putting the Band Back Together
Author: Troll Princess
Rating: R, for your basic bachelor party-turned-road-trip hijinks, times two.
Archive: Aw, why not? Just tell me, 'kay, 'cause I wanna see!
Feedback: Goodness, no! Why would I want to know if you think my story's any good? Pshaw! (Ooops, forgot the sarcasm brackets ...)
Spoilers: Occurs in Season Six, after Buffy's come back. Specifically, it's the weekend before Xander and Anya's wedding.
Disclaimer: Not my show, not my characters, not my idea. Story's mine, but Joss Whedon owns Buffy and the rest. (And I'll bet that thought makes him giggle like a schoolgirl.)
Author's note: I was dared to write a Spike-Xander road trip story. And after much prodding and poking and gnashing of teeth -- which amounts to all of two emails with a pushover like me -- here it is. And also, I know the "nurse" line is Buffy's line in the shooting script from "Intervention" but it's just so 'bot I had to use it. ;)

by Troll Princess

Chapter One: "That Night Train's a mean wine."

Spike, aka William the Bloody (Awful Poet), aka the Big Bad, aka Deadboy Jr., was astoundingly drunk.

At last count, there was an empty bottle of vodka in the corner, a case's worth of beer cans stacked up on the crypt, three empties of hard lemonade rolling around under his easy chair, and even -- God help him -- a quartet of wine cooler bottles singing barber shop on top of his telly.

All right, so maybe the singing bit was a bit extreme.

Spike scowled at the wine cooler bottles and wondered what exactly had gotten him to this particular rather inebriated point in time.

All right, retrace your steps, Spike, he thought to himself. An hour ago, you were nicking all of the liquor you could manage off the back of a delivery truck. An hour before that, you were kicking 'round a fledgling before staking him just for the fun of it. And an hour before that, you were --

Oh. Yeah.

He had been following up an eerily quiet patrol by having another date proposal rejected by Buffy. Again.

Frankly, he was getting bloody sick of trying. He'd been turned down so many times at this point, he was amazed he didn't have "Property of Holiday Inn" tattooed on his forehead. Then again, not like he could tell if he did.

Right. A solid month's worth of rejection, since he'd let the appropriate mourning-her-non-death time pass.

No wonder he'd been drinking heavily. Even as shit-faced as he was, he couldn't help but second it. Get drunk. Good plan, that. Especially in this situation.

Spike found the extra vodka, secreted away in a pocket at the entrance to the tunnel, but didn't drink a lick of it. He stared at it for a good long while, the scent of it on his breath overpowering the scent that came from the unopened bottle. And then he emptied it down the drain in the corner of the crypt, the sweet siren's call of the liquor drowned out by the pitiful wail of common sense, the repetitive are-we-there-yets of anticipation, and the whine-and-cheese moaning and groaning of responsibility.

Oh, yeah. He was Slayer-whipped.

Oh, God. Mental image.

Spike tilted his head and smacked at his ear with his palm. Oh, yeah, like that would get it out.

Right now, the last thing he needed was to see the Slayer.

"You should really see him naked. I mean, really."

Willow clenched her teeth around the mini-screwdriver stuck between them and glared up at the 'bot. It stared back down at her, frozen in a state of joyful nymphomania. Every time Willow hit the yellow wire, the 'bot activated and spouted off another 'Botism. The last one had involved Spike's sinister attraction, and the one before that had made Anya stop marking down the chicken feet, smile appreciatively and thank the 'bot for the idea.

If nothing else, it had been worth it to see the look on Giles's face.

Scowling, Willow plucked the screwdriver from her mouth and dropped it on the table. "I hate it when she does that," she muttered to Tara. "There's a definite eww-factor there."

Sitting beside her at the table in the center of the Magic Box, Tara shrugged as she continued reading her book. "She can't help how she's programmed. If she'd been programmed to see Giles the same way --"

Tara flushed a deep red and glanced over at Giles, who stood behind the counter doing inventory of the newest shipment of mandrake root and salamander eyes. He lifted his gaze from the shipping box just in time to see Tara, Willow, and even Anya staring at him, unsure of what to say next.

He waited a full five seconds before saying, "I can't decide what's worse for my ego. The silence or the fact that it's all-encompassing."

"If it's any consolation, I think you're very attractive for a man saddled with that body," Anya said, as cheerfully as could be.

Giles frowned. "Amazingly enough, that's of no consolation whatsoever."

Willow couldn't help but stop working on the 'bot and savor the Giles-Anya banter a little. She hadn't been able to stop herself from listening in on their conversations with a smile since Giles had returned for the wedding. It had been so long since he'd been back to this side of the Atlantic, and frankly, hearing Anya's side of their telephone conversations had gone from mildly disturbing to downright insulting. The last time they'd spoken over the phone, the nicest thing Anya had said was "Well, I hope you continue to have very bad weather!"

Of course, Giles still kept her on the payroll. Probably because it was her fault there was such a large one.

Willow didn't blame Giles for high-tailing it back to good old England after the funeral. Giles's idea of dealing with Buffy's death was, "Oh, look at the time! I have to leave the continent immediately!"

Oh, he'd come back when he'd heard about Buffy. Well, all right, he hadn't heard about Buffy. Willow, who'd suddenly become the de facto Scooby leader, had thought saying, "Hey, Giles! Guess who's alive?" wouldn't go over so well over the phone. Especially since it had been her spell that had done it.

But they'd already had that argument.

Argh. Now would be a good time for some quality amnesia.

A date.

A date with Spike.

A romantic dinner and a movie with Spike.

Damn it, the thought was not supposed to be as warm and fuzzy as it was making itself out to be in her head. Buffy caught a glimpse of herself in the window of the coffee shop she was walking past and scowled at her reflection.

Bad Buffy. You're not supposed to bring work home and ... well, do it. Or at the very least, you're not supposed to want to. You did that with Angel, and Riley, and look at how good those two relationships had turned out. Can you say two huge steaming craters in the vast wasteland of your love life?

Buffy sighed and stuck her hands in the pockets of her jacket as she picked up her pace. She'd been thinking about Spike and only Spike for the past couple of hours. Ever since he'd asked it again.

Buffy, I know this is probably gettin' to be a bother, but you doing anything later on?

Well, no, she wasn't. Her current plans involved sitting around the Magic Shop with the rest of the gang and listening to Anya ask Giles to help chip in for the wedding again.

Buffy had to give Spike credit, though. After Willow went all "Nothing up my sleeve!" and pulled a Buffy out of her hat, Spike had waited a month before even attempting to suggest the "D" word to her. Of course, he'd spent all that time being all parental with Dawn and all stakey with the other vampires, which definitely got him on the good side of the Buff.

But it still felt mostly wrong to say yes to a date with Spike. After all, she didn't want to screw up a perfectly good friendship ... which still sounded so weird in reference to Spike. Plus, he had spent all that time trying to kill them all. Of course, they'd spent all of that time trying to kill him, too, so --

Oh, God. She was rationalizing it. Now she knew she was losing what little sanity she had brought back with her from the grave.

Buffy practically jogged the rest of the way to the Magic Shop, and casually took in the "Closed" sign on the door before yanking the door open a little too hard and sending it slamming into the wall behind it.

Oops.

She walked in to see Willow hunched down working on the slumped-over 'bot, Tara sitting beside her watching curiously, and Anya fussing over the bridemaids' dresses hanging in the back of the store. As always when she saw them, Buffy breathed a sigh of relief when she saw the soft blue color, and followed that up with sigh of relief number two when the absence of lace, taffeta, and butt bow registered again. It had taken them all way too long to convince Anya that no, bridemaids do not have to wear ugly dresses to make the bride look better.

"Hey, Buffy," Will called out, not looking up from the 'bot.

"Hey," Buffy said, heading down to the table.

One look at the 'bot and Buffy grimaced. "If it isn't Not-So-Mini Me," she muttered, plopping down in the seat on the other side of Willow. Just looking at the 'bot reminded her of the sorry look on Spike's face when she'd left him a couple of hours ago.

Uh ... Buffy, go like this. You've got a little Spike on your brain.

Trying to get her mind off the date thing, Buffy tapped Willow's shoulder and asked, "Still working on the programming?"

Willow nodded, but didn't take her eyes off the wire she was ... doing whatever it was Willow did with wires. "Yup. I think I've got it, though. Another few hours or so and the only thing she'll be able to think about will be poking at vampires. Not, you know, the other way around." She followed that one up with a sheepish smile.

Giles paused in his bookkeeping to look up and ask, "I know this is a ridiculous question, Buffy, but why are you intent on getting rid of that particular line of programming? At this point, it's harmless embarassment for Spike, and I thought we were all enjoying that aspect of it."

Buffy stared at him as if he had a squid attached to his head. He was joking, right? "If the thing with Glory proved anything, it's that a spare Buffy is of the good. I'd just kind of like it more if the spare Buffy didn't sound like so much like Nymphomaniac Buffy."

"Why don't you call Warren and have him take the programming out?" Tara asked.

Buffy didn't bother keeping from letting a little venom out as she said, "Because Warren's a toad."

"Who's in Orlando," Anya piped up. "His mom said Disney hired him to make pirates that attack the tourists."

Yeah, there was that, too.

"So, how much more do you have to do?" Buffy asked.

Willow shrugged. "Well, I figure, fry a couple of wires, sautee a couple more, and they should be all --"

The Buffybot went animated again for a moment, yelling, "I'll nurse you back to health! I'll wear the nurse's outfit!"

For a moment, there was another deafening silence through the shop, before Willow croaked out, "-- gone."

Buffy got a momentary mental flash of ice blue puppy dog eyes and a "Wanna go out sometime?" before shuddering and grumbling, "Just when I think I've forgiven him for this, he pulls me back in." She shook her head and suddenly noticed a couple of missing faces. She knew where Dawn was -- sleeping over a friend's house for the weekend -- but ... "Where's Xander?"

"Oh, I sent him on an errand," Anya called out over her shoulder.

"Oh, yeah? What for?"

Spike couldn't believe what he was seeing.

Well, all right, he could believe it. His bite might still be in a sling, but his eyesight was perfect. And when he'd sauntered into the nearest mini-mart to set himself up with a carton of smokes, he'd never expected to see Harris here, much less buying --

Oh, bloody hell. If this wasn't so soddin' pathetic, he'd be curled up in a ball on the floor, giggling like a schoolgirl.

Luckily, the boy hadn't noticed him yet, too intent on waiting to pay and getting the hell out of the mini-mart with his purchase. Good.

Giving the girl behind the counter a wink, Spike sidled up to Xander and said, "Planning to go horseback riding?"

Spooked, Xander spun towards him and whacked the box right off the counter. "What?" As soon as Xander caught on to who was standing next to him and what he'd said, the whelp did that sheepish look he did so well. Usually after the ex-demon opened her trap.

Then again, he deserved to look that way. Especially when buying tampons.

After a long stretch of silence, he said, "Oh."

Oh, it was.

Spike couldn't wipe the smug smile from his face as he leaned against the counter and watched Xander pick up the box, dropping it back on the counter like a hot potato before any of the other customers saw him holding it. "Roller-skating with your mum, maybe? You can do anything with a box of those. Says so on the adverts."

If looks could kill, Spike would fit in a sandwich baggie. "Why are you here?" Xander snapped.

"You after the existential answer, or the literal one?"

Xander glared at Spike for a minute, and Spike was positive he was about to get the bloody demon beat right out of him. Planning a wedding with the little woman must have been tiring the poor bugger out. Dark circles under the eyes, clothes actually more wrinkled than usual, and the whelp was even going up against him in the paleness department.

Bloke needed a good time badly, from the looks of it. One that didn't include bridesmaids' dresses and tuxedo fittings, by Spike's guess.

"Do you mind? I'm not in the mood for --"

"That doesn't bother you?" Spike said, cutting Xander off and gesturing to the box as the cashier rang it up and bagged it.

"What is this, twenty questions?" Clenching his teeth to keep from saying something to Spike he wouldn't regret in the least, Xander said, "Spike, I'm engaged. Two of my best friends in the world are female. One has a younger sister, and the other is a lesbian. This hasn't bothered me all that much since the time I was sent to Sam's Club --" He paused, noticing the look on Spike's face. "--which you won't be hearing about."

"You're on my Christmas card list for that, I'll have you know." Spike watched Xander hand the cashier a twenty and got the other guy who'd just shown up behind the counter to ring him up a pack of smokes. "So, when's the bachelor party?"

You would have thought he had asked Xander when he was planning to donate his head to science. "What?"

"Don't tell me I'm not invited, Harris," Spike joked as he snatched his cigarettes from the cashier and followed the whelp out the double doors of the mini-mart.

Frustrated, Xander spun around and smirked at the bleach-blonde vampire. "Why not? What are you going to do? Gum me to death?"

Xander's smirk turned into a glare as he noticed Spike studying him curiously. On a scale of one to ten, Spike's annoyance quotient was about twenty-four. Of course, he beat Angel's a hundred and fifty-nine by a mile. But even on the best of days, the guy could find his last nerve and jump up and down on it repeatedly without even realizing he was doing it.

But still, definite improvement over Angel.

Meanwhile, Spike was starting to catch on. Xander wouldn't be this touchy this close to the nuptuals unless the bloke had cold feet. Spike doubted that, since the bed warmer had given the poor kid a lecture the week before about how she'd heard married people have less sex and since she figured that was why the divorce rate was so bad, they were going to have to turn up their sex life after the wedding. Spike wasn't sure that could even be done, since they were already set on eleven as it was, but hey, more power to 'em.

Or the whelp was touchy 'cause he hadn't had a release yet. A last hurrah. A bloody stripper crawling all over him. (Well, not literally bloody. Although in times past, Spike would have gone for it in a heartbeat.)

"You're not having a bloody bachelor party, are you?"

Xander didn't answer, and Spike almost felt sorry for the bloke. They still weren't the best of mates -- his being a vampire was apparently offensive to Xander's delicate constitution. He had to give it to the whelp. It was right smart of him to still be so suspicious. But still ...

"The gang from the construction site not throwing you one?"

Xander squirmed at that. "I'm the boss, sort of. And I'm not even the boss they like."

Ouch.

Then Spike had a thought.

It wasn't even a thought he particularly liked. It involved trouble and more alcohol and exotic dancers and him and Xander hanging out together ...

All right, aside from that last part, he did like that thought.

The words came out of his mouth before he could stop them. "You know, we could ..."

Xander couldn't have looked more shocked if Spike had proposed marriage to him. "You and me? Together? Having a bachelor party?"

Spike looked positively offended at that remark. "No! Bloody hell, the way you put it, it'd be you and me alone in the crypt with a bottle of Jagermeister and a stripper named Tallulah."

"Not a chance," Xander said, starting to walk away. Of course, it's kind of hard to do that when a vampire dives in front of you and blocks your way.

"I'm the only mate you've got who doesn't wear a bra," Spike said as he swiped the plastic bag from Xander's hand.

Xander frowned. "That is a frightening concept. And Giles might argue that."

"You don't know what he does with his weekends," Spike said.

Come on, Xander, you have an argument of why this should never ever happen. "Giles is my best man." Oh, yeah, go with that one. "He's supposed to --"

Spike burst out laughing at that one, so hard he could barely light the cigarette he'd removed from the pack he'd just bought. "You want to go to a stag party thrown by the King of bloody Tweed? I'm picturing hours and hours worth of whist with a dirty deck of cards. How 'bout you?"

Xander tried to come up with something to argue that point and failed miserably.

Spike shrugged as he said, "Too bad. Been feelin' the urge to get pissed neck-deep in strippers, and you're the perfect sodding excuse for it." Yeah, he'd said he wasn't going to get any worse off in the alcohol department than he already was, but with his fading buzz came the audio of his conversation with Buffy.

Spike, I just don't want to ruin our friendship. Well, at least she hadn't said he was like a brother to her.

So, alcohol and naked women it was.

Oh, he was having a bloody relapse, he was.

Xander took a deep breath and said, "Spike, I can't believe I'm asking you this, but can I have my tampons back?"

As soon as he said it, Spike glared down at the bag in his hand as if he'd suddenly recalled what it contained, and the next thing he knew, Xander had a plastic bag and a box of tampons tossed at his chest. He awkwardly caught it as Spike said, "Look, whelp, you go tell the Slayer, Nibblet, the Watcher, and Red --"

"We have real names, you know."

Spike waved him off and continued, starting to walk backwards towards his car as he spoke. "You go tell 'em I'm borrowing you tonight. One hour. In front of the magic shop." Spike got into his car and started it, yelling out, "Bring ones!"

Xander couldn't even find the words. It was as if his brain were suddenly devoid of a dictionary. Granted, his mental dictionary was English-to-Pig-Latin, but still ...

He stared after the DeSoto as it roared out of the parking lot, a little confused. Okay, a lot confused.

Did he or did he not just agree to go to a strip club with Spike?

Yup. He did. Sort of.

Oh, God.

Well, Spike and Xander'll be on the road in no time. Not to mention that the girls are going to ... well, not sit around for the whole bloody story going, "Gee, where are Spike and Xander," that's for sure. *g*

Chapter Two