Title:  Pillow Talk

Author:  Miss Murchison

Rating:  PG so far.  That will change.

Disclaimer:  All characters are the property of Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, etc.  Only the lame plots and dialogue herein are mine.

Notes:  A Spuffy story that starts in early Season 6 before deviating from canon.   A slight change in circumstances, a different decision or two, and you wind up with very different results.

Thanks: To Keswindhover and revdorothyl for the beta.

The story begins here.

Chapter 16

Buffy spent a nail-biting twenty minutes perched near the front door, alternating between peering outside for any sign of the members of the dangerous shopping expedition and keeping an eye on her nervous vampire. Spike stayed in grim control until Giles and Dawn returned, answering Buffy's one attempt at a status check with a snarl that was more annoyed than threatening. Still, he leapt on the red-and-white carton Dawn held up the moment she entered the shop.

While Spike was lighting up and Giles was leafing through his new stock of imported loose teas, Buffy interrogated her sister.

"It's nuts out there, Buffy. Not much fighting, in fact everyone seems pretty happy except for complaining about stomach aches, but we had to steal this stuff because there's no one behind the counters most places. No one is being really nasty, but they're all acting pretty crazy."

"Crazy how?"

Dawn rolled her eyes in Giles' direction. "Crazy like old English guys climbing up on the counter at the gourmet food store because they're sure there still has to be some Earl Grey on a top shelf. Crazy like people who are usually boring grownups getting all upset with me because I didn't know 'digestives' were really cookies and couldn't find what he wanted. That kind of crazy. The coffee shop is about the only spot anyone's trying to keep order. We looked in on Wayne, too, and he seems okay, because he's just letting people steal meat."

"What about Nancy and her family?"

"They're hanging in there. Just giving people food, whatever they have, and trying to calm down the ones who want stuff that isn't there. Bess says, 'hi.' She was going to send us some orange scones, but I told her she better keep them for the crazy humans." She glared at Giles again.

"Good thinking," said Buffy, but she was contradicted by a voice from the table.

"Oh, no! I love scones." Willow wobbled to her feet, made as if to head for the door, but was distracted by a pile of Hershey's kisses that had tumbled out of a bag earlier.

"You could help with research, you know, Willow," said Dawn coldly. "Buffy, how come you're not making her do anything?"

Buffy watched Willow scrabbling along the floor after the silver-wrapped bits of candy and tried to work up the energy to do just that. But she wound up saying lamely, "I don't think it would do any good. And at least she's not casting spells."

Soon, the room was filled with the smells of hot tea and burning tobacco, but the notebooks Dawn had found for the researchers to chart their progress were still depressingly blank. Since only Spike, Buffy, and Dawn were doing any actual work and the three of them pretty uniformly sucked at it, this wasn't surprising, but it was still frustrating. Between cups of tea and the trips to the bathroom necessitated by all the liquid he consumed, Giles' contributions were restricted to an occasional suggestion.

When he wandered over to his electric kettle for the umpteenth time, Buffy put down the manuscript she'd been failing to decipher and tried to stop him. "Please, Giles. I'm afraid that something in the water may be making this worse."

"So, the fluoride in the drinking water has finally got to you lot," snorted Spike. Then he went back to frowning at densely written pages in Gothic script, his lips moving slowly.

Giles snorted. "Then you shouldn't be affected, Spike. I've never seen you drink a glass of water!"

"Cut it out," said Dawn with a twisted smile that said she knew they were trying to cheer her up and was trying to play along. "You guys can't fight here, this is the war room!"

Buffy looked at Spike and saw he was watching her with a smile that was only fractionally satirical. Enough of his expression was sympathetic that she didn't feel very much like hitting him. "Old movie," he said.

She felt relieved. It wasn't something she should have known and didn't; it was Giles, Dawn and Spike being geeky together. She didn't mind that. In fact it was kind of nice. Spike could be nice sometimes. She ran her tongue over her lips, remembering that he tasted nice too. Still meeting his eyes, she stepped forward, feeling a surge of an appetite that had nothing to do with strawberry cheesecake.

Before she took a second step, there was a contribution to the conversation from one of the other Scoobies. Willow clutched her stomach. "I feel all full and bloated and hungry at the same time. It's awful." She picked up a cookie, nibbled on it, moaned, and nibbled some more.

While everyone else stared helplessly, Anya cried, "Oh, I have something for that!" She bounced off to the bathroom again and returned with a small brown bottle.

Willow picked it up. "Syrup of ipecac?"

"Yep!" Anya was obviously thrilled to be imparting Important Information to Willow. "You take some, then you throw up, and then you can eat some more. I do it all the time."

"But-"

"You can eat all you want and you never gain weight. I've even been getting skinnier since I've started using this. My collarbones stick way out." She looked around, her face falling slightly as no praise materialized. "What's wrong?"

Giles was the first to respond. "Anya, that's a very dangerous and unhealthy practice."

"Oh, no." Anya shook her head firmly. "That's just one of those things they always say on the TV talk shows when they know no one will pay attention. It confused me at first, but then I figured it out. They have articles about all the fashion models doing it, and tell you not to, but then they put pictures of the same models in the same magazine. That's when I realized it was a kind of a code, because why would they do that if they didn't really approve of all the dieting and pills and throwing up? They'd put pictures of women the way they used to look years ago instead, with boobs and hips."

Willow shook her head too. "No, Anya. You're wrong. Maybe putting those pictures in the magazines is wrong too, but you shouldn't be doing this."

Anya pouted and turned to Xander, who had raised his head from the table and was staring at her. Half his face was covered with confectionary sugar and he looked drugged.

"Tell them, honey," Anya demanded. "It's just like all the people who say sex is bad, and then have lots of sex with inappropriate partners. Or you complaining about your parents being alcoholics and then putting your empty beer bottles in other people's garbage so no one will see how much you drink." But her pride in her grasp of human culture seemed to be slipping slightly, because she added plaintively. "Isn't it?"

"No." Xander rose to his feet, stumbled, and had to hold onto the table, his head down. He swallowed carefully, looking like he was ready to throw up himself. "No, Anya, it's not right." He collapsed back into his chair.

Anya ran to his side, bewildered, and still protesting. He waved her away, and when he looked up, Buffy saw he was crying. "My fault," he said.

Willow, Giles and Anya started babbling all at once then, arguing in fits and starts as Giles gnawed on a cookie, and Willow and Anya kept scooping up handfuls of chips.

Dawn said in a wigged-out voice, "She throws up all the time? Ick."

Spike was leaning against the ladder that led to the books on Black Magic. "And Harris complained about my smokes." Apparently spurred by the memory, he reached for a cigarette.

Tara pulled herself up to a sitting position nearby, and said, "It's all our faults. We all broke the rules. We didn't think about the consequences."

Spike's expression went blank at that, but Buffy was distracted by Xander, who blundered to his feet again and started pawing through a pile of books that she and Dawn had sorted laboriously an hour before. "No, my fault." He stared blearily at a spine, almost retched on the pile, and then grabbed another. "Where's that book? Got to find it."

"Stop it, Xander!" Dawn was on her knees next to him, but Buffy pulled her sister back.

She felt her face harden into a mask. "You did it, Xander. You cast this stupid hunger spell."

His gaze pleaded for understanding. "It was for you. I did it for you, Buffy. You were so unhappy, and you didn't even like the pizza we brought. I just wanted for you, for all of us, to enjoy ourselves. And we were, weren't we, except for a little bit of hearburn? Until just now, snacking and hanging out and--" He looked around, as if seeing Tara's tears and Dawn's grim expression for the first time. "Weren't we?"

Buffy turned away, unable to listen to him any more. She didn't realize how far she'd gone until she heard the jingle of the shop bell when she pushed open the front door.

A group of people surged past. They were eating ice cream bars and laughing, and one of women held a huge package of ramen noodles. The guy on her other side looked up at the Magic Box sign and said, "Nothing to eat here. Let's see if the Olive Garden down the street is still open. I want some of those mushroom things with the cheese on top."

They moved on, revealing a family sitting in the middle of the road, the children snacking on pudding cups and soda while mom and dad guzzled beer and fed each other chips. Other people roamed past, singly and in groups, seeming mostly good natured, although one woman was complaining bitterly that the grill at the Mongolian place had stopped working. Then a man walked by, chugging a bottle of Maalox before taking a bite out of the sandwich held in his other hand.

"Ah, Sunnydale," murmured Buffy. "Not the gourmet capital of California, are you?"

Giles was behind her. "Buffy--" He placed a hand on her shoulder. "I know he shouldn't have done it, but he only wanted you to be happy--"

"It's not just him. It's all four of them. They decide for me what I want, Giles. I'm not allowed to do that for myself." She waved a hand at the crowds. "They decide for everyone now."

The shop bell rang again. "Buffy." Dawn's voice was frightened. "It's almost dark."

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