HERE & NOW
1 prologue remembering
and knowing
Once the vampire with
a soul fulfills his destiny, he will Shanshu.
He will live until he dies. He
will become human.
He fought waking much as a small child fights sleep.
Keeping his eyes closed, he stretched his toes to the end of the bed and
reached his arms to the ornate headboard. These
minutes—usually no more than
ten of them at a time, each of them precious—were the best part of his day.
Certainly on a day like today, following last night’s horrible party with the taunting masses and Cecily’s rejection, he needed
to relish those moments.
In that time between dreaming and waking, he has the words.
Fueled by dreams, he has the poetry.
Darkness, he thought on this particular morning, his brow creasing.
So much darkness to write about. It
seemed as though he’d spent an entire
night dreaming of… night.
A dark woman, beautiful and abysmal in her lightlessness.
How many words could he find for black?
For dark? But—
—just before he’d waked, there was
light, licks of fire and eye-searing light.
Effulgent, he thought, wincing from the previous evening’s memory of Cecily. From
his memory, though, a different voice accompanied the fire—
“I love you.”
What? Who was that?
He squeezed his eyes tighter shut, saline moisture leaking out the
corners as he tried to see her behind his eyelids.
It struck him that he wouldn’t have the words, any
of the words, for her. He didn’t have the speech to
describe—
“Buffy!” he gasped, sitting
straight up in the huge bed he was nestled in.
Scrubbing a hand over his face, he mumbled in a much different voice, “I wanna see how it all
ends.”
He remembered, and in remembering, knew.
“I am William
Bryce,” he said
conversationally to the empty room, the classy timbre of his voice showing his
breeding. But when he spoke again,
the hard edge of the London gutter broke through.
“I am Spike.”
2.1 walking and
walking
She was happy.
How
could she not be? For the first
time in her life, not counting her brief interlude in heaven, she had the
opportunity to be at peace. She was not the Chosen One, she was not even one of the
Chosen Two. There were countless
Slayers now, and she could rest when she wanted to rest and slay when she needed
to slay. Nearly everyone she loved
came out of the battle alive.
It
was that “nearly everyone” part that was killing her.
They’d driven to L.A., to
tell Angel that the danger had been averted, that the impossible had been done.
As Giles had told Angel, “Well, there’s not what seems to be an imminent threat.
This plus the addition of countless Slayers should, ah, lighten your work
load a bit.”
She
stayed in a hotel with the others, shopped and laughed and felt a tremendous
sense of relief.
She waited a week and a half
before the dam broke, before the questions she’d kept to
herself spilled out of her with anger and hurt she didn’t even know were
there.
“What the hell was it?” Buffy slammed the door to
Angel’s office, shattering the glass. He
didn’t even flinch, which somehow pissed her off even
more.
“It was just a sheet of
glass,” he said calmly, raising an eyebrow at the shards
on the floor. “But now I’d say it’s a hazard.”
“What was that
necklace? What power did it have that it could…
that it could do that to him?”
She planted her palms on his desk and stared into his eyes, looking for
any reason to pick a fight. Any
reason to break the impossible quiet that had fallen.
Angel
felt a lump rise in his throat and pushed it away ruthlessly.
She hadn’t spoken at all about what happened to Spike, and no one else really
seemed to know. All they knew was
that he was the last one left, and the last person he’d called for had
been Buffy.
Of
course he had, Angel thought. He’d loved her.
The thought made him want to spit, to try and clear his mouth of the
bitterness that gathered there, but he continued staring straight at Buffy, his
eyes unreadable.
“I told you it was
meant for a champion. More than
human.” Neither of which I would
actually attribute to Spike, he thought. “That’s all we knew.”
“It fucking burned him
alive!” she exclaimed, shaking her head so he couldn’t focus on her eyes. It
wouldn’t do for him to see the tears. She
had to know. “Burned him alive from the inside out.
And he was scared, Angel. He
tried not to show it, and he was laughing through it all, but…” She shoved the heels of her
hands up her face, swiping the tears away.
“He’s dead.”
“I know,” Angel said, hurting for her. In
a way, he hurt for Spike as well. Somewhere
in that twisted mass of siring and bloodlust, he had been responsible for Spike.
And his death meant one more lost soul.
Maybe
not lost, Angel amended. He didn’t want to push
any harder than that. Theology wasn’t his strong suit by a long shot.
“He died for me.
For all of us,” she insisted.
He died and rejected my last words to him.
But even though the memory of that twisted like a burning skewer through
her brain and heart, she knew why he’d done it.
If
he hadn’t, she would have
stayed. Staying, she would have
died.
“I’m leaving,” she said. “I wanted you to know.”
That
broke his calm, his monotonous expression and unchanging demeanor.
He stood to face her, now towering over her small frame.
“What? You
just got here. You’re not even a fortnight away from the biggest battle you’ve ever been through, you’re not even completely
healed yet, and you’re leaving?
Leaving where?”
Buffy’s lips quirked.
That was the largest number of words she’d heard him string together in quite some time.
She
missed Spike’s rants.
“I don’t know. Well, not exactly.
I’m looking for quiet,
Angel, a place where I can concentrate on me, focus on what I want.
Focus on bringing Dawn up and maybe even myself.
Los Angeles isn’t that, Angel.
It’s too loud, it’s too fast. I was thinking…” she broke off, playing with a pencil that sat on the edge of his desk
and wondering if Angel knew how dangerous it was to keep sharpened wood so close
at hand. “I was thinking
somewhere in the Midwest. I want to
be bored.”
It
wasn’t entirely true, but
it was close enough. She wanted to
forget the last seven years, forget any of it had ever happened.
Forget Angel and Angelus, her failure with Riley, her rejection of Spike.
Her dishonesty to Spike. Her
dishonesty to herself.
<God,
I’m going crazy,> she
thought.
“What about Willow?” Angel asked, hating the note of desperation in his voice.
“And Xander, Giles,
Faith. The new Slayers.”
“They all want to help,” she said wearily. “So… happy
birthday, Angel, I brought you an army.”
“I don’t want an army,” he burst back,
knowing she was already gone. “I want you!”
“I’ll say goodbye before I leave,” she insisted quietly,
and crunched over broken glass as she walked out the door.
~~~
It
was like, William thought, being torn in two.
“What’s for breakfast, mum?”
He pushed his spectacles up a little and saw the shocked look his mother
gave him. “Sorry. Mother.”
“Well, darling, Eliza
has some ham on and also a rasher of bacon.
There are biscuits in the tin if you’ve a need for
food immediately.” She
patted her hair and moved to the chair at the head of the table.
I
killed you, the street voice said in his head.
Killed me own mum ‘cause I’d turned her--
“William,” she said sharply, rapping her knife against the hard wood of the table.
“Aren’t you paying any attention?”
Her face softened and she smiled as he looked back up at her.
There
now, he thought. I can see a bit of
that demon…
“I’m sorry, mother, my sleep was…
restless. I beg your pardon.” William’s eyes narrowed
in distress. The thoughts he was
having were unimaginable.
They
felt like the cold, hard, truth. Truth
was something he’d been a bit too sheltered from in his life, and now that he was faced
with a truth so bizarre it was laughable, he didn’t know what to
do.
“I was just expressing
my curiosity as to your plans this evening.
Had you planned on calling on Cecily this afternoon?
She looked quite lovely last night.”
She
looked like a cruel, ball-breaking bint, she did.
Lovely like a bleedin’ shark is lovely.
“I’m afraid not, mother.
Cecily is—”
A tease only a soddin’ blind idiot could
love.
“—indisposed,” William
finished, nearly out of breath with his efforts to control his voice and his
thoughts. And since when was it so
bloody hard to breathe?
Since it hadn’t been necessary to do so for a great long time.
“Well, William, I think you should take a rest
before noontime,” his mother said, her brow wrinkled with concern.
“You look as
though you were up all night.”
No, he thought, neither William
nor Spike but finally an agreement of both.
Only for a hundred and some years.
3.2 leaving and
looking
“Indiana?”
Angel made a face that strongly resembled a four-year-old presented with
peas. “Buffy…”
She
was sick and tired of his whining. She
was sick and tired of his begging her to stay.
She never thought she’d see the day when she was just plain sick and tired of Angel.
But for once, she could see how one would want to give in to the
overwhelming urge to call him a nancy-boy.
Biting her tongue, she sighed. “I’m only saying this one more time. I
want quiet, and I want Dawn to see snow at Christmastime.
We will visit. We will write. We
will call. We will be fine.” The speech took on the
cadence of rote memorization, as well it should.
She’d only said the same damned thing a hundred times.
She
had changed.
In
the time between the school bus arrival of Buffy’s motley crew and now, she had changed.
He wished he could say when or what had changed her, but he knew the
exact moment. When he’d admitted to her that they’d known next to
nothing about the necklace they’d given Spike, she’d all but shut down.
She
blamed him. Though she might not
realize it and might not mean to, Angel knew her.
He knew she was blaming him for Spike’s death. He
figured one more pointed finger among the thousands didn’t make that much of a difference. But
because it was her finger, delicate and irrationally strong, it hurt all the
more.
“We could have found
another way,” was all she said when he tried to broach the
subject again.
“We will be fine,” Buffy reassured him softly, bringing him back to the moment.
She stepped forward with a hand extended just as he stepped forward with
his arms open. She saw the hurt
flash over his face at her gesture and quickly changed her stance.
When she embraced him, he was stiff with the awkwardness of it.
Before he could say anything, she released him and walked outside where
her friends waited.
A
hug for Xander, a quick kiss on the lips. Tears
glittered in his remaining eye, and Buffy started the count in her head.
One, for Anya. Anya whose
death made Xander gone to nearly everyone but himself. One for a death that wouldn’t have happened
had it not been for Buffy and her mission.
A
hug for Willow and a whispered reassurance in her ear.
“You know, if
Kennedy doesn’t work out and you can’t hook up with
Portia de Rossi, you can always come visit me.
Check out the ‘Midwest farmers’ daughters.’” Two,
for Tara. Tara who died from a
gunshot meant for Buffy.
A
hug for Giles, and the extra moment to bury her face in the softness of his
shirt, inhale the smell that was Giles: the soap he used to make shaving lather
and the smell of tea. She wouldn’t cry, she promised herself.
He smoothed her hair down with his big hands like a father, and she added
another to her list. Three, for Jenny. She
didn’t even want to think about that one.
A
handshake for Faith, her quick grin that spoke volumes, more than words between
them ever could. In that fast and clever grin, Buffy saw the good times they’d had together, the hard truths they’d shared.
The things about them that had been the same.
Four, for Faith herself and her lost years.
If you’d only stayed gone, then she wouldn’t have had
someone to compete with. She would
have been what she was meant to be.
Waves
to Wesley, Andrew, Robin, and the Slayers who were still in L.A.
Gently
ushering Dawn into the taxi that idled at the curb, Buffy took one last look at
the sky and buildings around her.
“Goodbye, sunny
California,” she said brightly, the chipper tone of her voice
belying her thoughts and feelings.
In
his office, Angel put his head in his hands and tried to hold himself together.
~~~
He
couldn’t even remember what
excuses he’d made to her to leave the house.
It was no matter; she would be out calling on her friends all day,
anyway. Social appearances were
important to his mother, and today that was a lucky convenience.
William
walked the streets of London with his head down, calling up memories from more
years than he’d actually
lived.
Over
and over again was her, glowing, gorgeous her.
Effulgent, he thought ruefully, a corner of his mouth turning up.
Bloody
fuckin’ gorgeous, another
corner of his mind spoke up. Absolutely
perfect.
He
couldn’t agree more.
He’d been awake for three
hours, away from her for that same amount of time, and it was killing him.
He stopped and leaned on a lamppost, pressing his forehead to the cool
iron as he tried to rationalize the pain, the great gaping hole left in the
middle of him.
“I have gone insane,” he said to himself, taking yet another jab at the nosepiece of his
glasses. Shoving a hand through his
mop of curly hair, he resisted the urge to pace the sidewalk.
He didn’t want everyone
else to know he was insane, after all.
Prove
it’s real, you stupid
git, he told himself. Though he was
frightened of the intensity of that other voice, that other him, he was
fascinated by it. Fascinated by the
fact that the other him was everything he wasn’t.
The
other him was completely crass, completely classless, and more likely than not,
wouldn’t take shit from
anybody. Thinking this, William
sighed. Just several more facts
that severely weighed against the likelihood that his memories were real.
Vampires,
demons, witches. And the Slayer. Most
importantly of all was the Slayer. If
he could prove she was real, then perhaps—
“Rupert!” William said aloud, stopping in the middle of the sidewalk and causing a
young boy with newspapers to run directly into the back of him.
“Sorry, lad,” he said kindly, waving a hand.
“Sorry y’self, ya bloody ijit,” the boy threw over
his shoulder. “I don’t fancy trottin’ down the walk just to
have me head stuck up your arse.”
“Well, then you’d better bleedin’ well watch where you’re goin’, tyke, else you’ll have yer head
stuck up yer own arse,” he retorted quickly,
the words tripping from his lips before he could even register thinking them.
The
little boy’s eyes narrowed at the
change and he ran, his tiny feet keeping a steady beat along the cobblestones.
“Bloody hell,” William said tiredly. As he
walked the streets, his thoughts took up the rhythm of his steps, and his mind
insisted Prove it, prove it, prove it, with each stride of his long legs.
Hearing
the myriad British accents swirling around him, both familiar and far-removed at
once, he thought of yet another voice.
Giles,
talking about the Watchers’ Council. William remembered
that he—Spike—had commented once
upon the unflagging Britishness of the Council, and Giles had agreed.
No matter what else they were and weren’t, the Council was always overwhelmingly Briton.
So
how did one go about finding the men of the Council?
Get
their attention. The voice was
amused, even a little excited.
Why,
William thought with some shock and pleasure.
I know that tone. I seem to be an attention freak.
He didn’t immediately realize the significance of thinking
of that other voice as “I.”
If
Buffy were real—and the memory
of her warm beside him, beneath him, the memory of the heat inside her (William
felt a blush creep up his cheeks at his wayward thoughts), all those things were
too focused, too sharp to be fake—then Spike had to be
real, as well.
“All right, then,” he said, wiggling his shoulders as though preparing for a fight.
Shaking his hands a little to ease the nervousness, he cast a glance
around him like a rabbit exiting a den. “I’m a vampire!” he said, only slightly louder than an undertone.
No
one heard. No one even looked twice
at him.
Could
be because it’s ten in the
ruddy mornin’, you great bloody moron.
If you were a vampire—God forbid, the state you’re in—you wouldn’t be out in the sun, ‘less you were
lookin’ to become ash.
At
the thought of ashes, William’s fingers itched unbearably and he pursed his lips almost imperceptibly,
yearning for a cigarette.
William
Bryce hadn’t even smoked so
much as a single puff of anything in his life.
“I’m a demon,” he said desperately, this time with more
conviction. At the very least, this
Council could tell him what on earth was happening to him.
“I’m a great, horrid demon, complete with tooth and talon.
You—you can’t see them, but they’re there.
Just try and anger me. Grrr…”
Inside
his head, he heard laughter.
“Oh go bugger yourself,
Spike,” William said crossly.
4.3 fighting and
brooding
He tried to think of a specific demon name—God knew he had
scads in his memory, but now that he truly needed it, could he remember?
Of
course not.
“I eat the skin of my
victims,” he crowed. “Mmm, yummy.”
He ignored the dual feelings of horror and delight he felt while yelling
such outrageous things. The worst part of it was he could taste the blood, taste it
thick and clinging in the back of his throat.
It made him thirsty.
“A bit early in the day
to be so soused, is it not?”
William started at the voice, his eyes careening around for the source of
the quiet tones that spoke of education and propriety.
When his eyes rested upon a small man leaning against the wall of a pub,
his clothing muted and dorky, William felt a flash of hope.
“I’m not pissed, mate, I’m bloody well evil,” Spike’s voice bragged.
“And don’t you forget it,” he added, the smug smirk flashing over William’s gentler
features. Before he could
congratulate himself on what he thought was a clever innovation rather than
second nature, the man had a surprisingly strong grip on William’s elbow and was
leading him through the streets.
“Where in the hell are
you taking me? Let go, dammit, I’m perfectly right in the head, capable of walking by myself, I thank you—”
“Sum corpus,” the small man said at the back door of another pub, sweeping William
through when the door opened.
“I am body?” William translated quickly. “What in the bloody hell—”
“Your incessant
nattering is making my head ache and I’d be an appreciative
man if you could find it in you to shut your gob,” the man said
pleasantly, the grip still unwavering. William
didn’t have the heart to tell him he wasn’t so strong that he needed to be manhandled. It was all a bit exciting, really, and—
Familiar.
So familiar.
“It means ‘I am body’ when literally translated but we like to think of
it more as ‘I am but body.’
Only flesh, we are, but we do what we can.
We’re not as good
as—” the man broke off, clearing his throat noisily.
“Never mind that.” He steered them through
hallway after hallway, unerringly and unhesitatingly turning down corridors that
seemed to stretch for miles. Finally,
he stopped in front of a door, knocked once, and threw it open with alacrity
that William hadn’t expected of him.
“Theodore, fight,” he said tersely, shoving William in front of a middle-aged gentleman who
was cradling a cup of tea. Before
William could even begin to protest and Spike could even begin to clamor for a
fight, the man had set down the tea and was coming at him.
Block,
punch, turn…
Spike knew all the moves, but William didn’t have the
speed, didn’t have the power.
He held his own for all of a minute before succumbing to the other man.
He fell to the floor and scrambled back, his hands held in front of him.
Nancy,
Spike sneered internally.
The
man, Theodore, calmly picked up his tea and eyed William’s captor with amusement. “Any particular reason you brought this lad in to
fight me, Hamilton?”
“He said he was a
demon,” Hamilton said, his voice still quiet.
Despite his demeanor, William could tell that the little man was clearly
the boss. All eyes were on him, and
all ears were perked. “And unless he’s a Iuliago, he’s not a demon.”
William
didn’t understand the
snickers, but after a moment, Spike did. “Iuliago…
I’m not that bloody clumsy.”
The demons were known for one thing and one thing alone—their inability to stand on their own two feet
without bringing catastrophe to themselves.
“Who are you?”
“I’m William Bryce, and you’re all Watchers,” he said matter-of-factly, once again letting his own voice blend with
Spike’s. “Or poor excuses for Watchers, that you’d let me into
the inner sanctum and hear your little clubhouse secret password.” He snickered and climbed to
his feet, feeling better already. “Is there a handshake that goes with it?”
What
he got wasn’t a handshake,
but a hand clamped so firmly to the back of his neck that it made his eyes
water. Hamilton stood behind him
and spoke in that level voice. “We’re going to need to have a talk, my boy.
I will ask questions, and you will answer.”
“Fine, you friggin’ bully,” William said through clenched teeth.
“And it may be that I’ll have a few questions of my own.”
~~~
“Should we tell him?” Willow’s face was a
study in worry as she stared at the data on the laptop Wesley had loaned her.
Wesley
grimaced. Though he’d come a long way from the by-the-book Watcher he
had been, there were still parts of him that clung to the rules so tightly they
squealed. He was afraid this was
going to be one of those parts of him. “As pleasant as it would be to pretend we didn’t unearth this
nasty little bit of information, it occurs to me that Angel would like to know.
Not only for his sake, since it involves him in a roundabout way, but
also for…” he trailed off, clearing his throat uncomfortably.
He didn’t want to speak
for the Slayer he barely knew.
“Yeah, she wanted
answers,” Willow said sadly. “But all this is going to do is raise more
questions. And it’ll make Angel even more broody.”
“Is that possible?” Angel’s voice sounded from behind them and Willow’s face instantly matched her hair.
“No,” Wesley said carelessly, turning to face Angel. “We have some news.”
“And I was afraid today
was going to be boring,” Angel said, ignoring
the twinge in his stomach. If it
was bad news, he’d just get it over with at once.
“We found out more
about that necklace you gave Spike,” Willow said.
“And it turns out it
was more than just ‘Ooh, pretty, look at all the glowy light.’”
“Well, I figured as
much. So far we’re still on
stuff we know.” Angel
looked at the witch with an intensity that told just how seriously he was going
to take the matter.
“It has to do with
Shanshu,” Wesley said quietly. “The necklace…” He looked at Willow and
motioned for her to finish.
Preferring
the unemotional glare of the monitor to the unemotional glare of Angel, she read
straight from the archives she’d accessed. “‘The vampire with a soul shall wear a sign of his destiny from which said
destiny will culminate. The sign’s power can only be unharnessed by the one for whom it is meant: more
than a human but souled nonetheless.’”
Angel
rubbed a hand roughly through his hair and tried to pin down a single reaction
in the eddies of emotion that warred within him.
Jealousy that had only started to rear its head when he’d learned of Spike’s soul. Disappointment that
he hadn’t been chosen for the honor, chosen for that which
he’d always considered his. Anger,
at circumstances and at himself for being so arrogant.
He knew better than to mess with powers and fate.
Finally, most puzzling of all, was relief.
Angel
had known he had no idea how to be human again.
Not the faintest.
“Spike is human.” That seemed the safest
thing to say.
“We don’t know enough about the process to say,” Wesley said.
“But there seem
to be two options. If he became
human on the spot, then he’s dead. He
would have become human just as the building came down around him.” He gave Willow a
sympathetic look as she sighed heavily. “However, it’s a strong possibility that he would be restored
somewhere else altogether.”
“We need to tell Buffy,” Willow said urgently, her eyes pleading with
Angel.
“Buffy needs peace,” Angel retorted. She’d said so herself, hadn’t she?
And how could her life be peaceful with the return of Spike, now a human
with a soul and without a monster inside?
How
could Angel’s life be
peaceful if he knew they were together, both human, both whole?
And if he was human, that meant there could be more.
There could be children.
“I’ll tell her,” he lied. “I gave her the pendant, I’ll tell her.” His conscience pricked at
him as he turned and walked away but he gave it no mind.
It
had been through much worse, anyway.
5.4 regretting and
begging
At first she thought it had to be a tiny town, backwater
beyond belief. After all, who
really waved at strangers? It took
Buffy a little less than a month to figure out that it wasn’t that the town
was tiny—it wasn’t any smaller than
Sunnydale had been—it was only that people were actually friendly, not
constantly plagued by fear, persistently dogged by shadows.
These
people felt safe.
The
best part about it was that Dawn was already adjusting wonderfully.
“There are boys,” she’d said matter-of-factly upon coming home form her
first day at her new school. “Tall boys who like to play basketball.
Basketball players!”
She let out a little squeal and then pressed on.
“And the best
part is, I don’t think any of them are demons or vampires or
werewolves. This place is so…
normal!”
Kids
are resilient, Buffy remembered her mother saying.
But she knew in her heart that it was more than that.
As much as Dawn loved Willow and Xander and Giles, they were constant
reminders of things best forgotten. Though
she would have never expected it to be the truth, Buffy knew that in order for
them all to heal, they would all have to stand on their own.
But
she didn’t want to stand on her
own. In the darkest moments just
before the sun began to lighten the sky, Buffy would reach out in her
half-sleep, touching an empty, cold pillow.
It was no matter—Spike had always left
the bed cool anyway—but it would hit her that he was gone.
She had no one to comfort her. While
she told Dawn everything would be okay, reassured the girl and smoothed back her
hair, she had no one to do those things for her.
He
would have done it long ago, she reminded herself one sleepless night.
She ached to be out patrolling, walking the town.
But she wasn’t well-known enough to freely roam the town just
yet. He would have done all that
for you long ago and you never let him.
Life
in Indiana may have been simple and just what Buffy wanted, but it was also
riddled with guilt. She needed to find something to do.
Because
Giles and Wesley were the last of a dying breed, literally, they had more say in
the Council than they could ever have been imagined.
With his newfound authority, Giles took a drop from the Council’s financial
bucket to give Buffy a leg up. It
nicely covered the down payment on a house and a full set of papers.
She had papers certifying her to teach self-defense and martial arts,
papers certifying that she was Dawn’s legal guardian, and papers creating a solid credit background.
And
after a month, she was starting to feel that was all she had.
Papers. If she burnt them,
she would have…
Ashes.
Ruthlessly
choking back the tears that wanted to form, Buffy started to formulate a plan.
It was time to act. It was
time to live.
~~~
“He’s either telling the truth or he’s a loon who
guesses very fortuitously.”
Hamilton shot a look over his shoulder at William, who sat comfortably
sprawled in a chair, both of his long legs stretched out in front of him.
All he needed was a cigarette to complete the pose of relaxation.
And
a pose it was. He’d spilled his entire story to them, from the time
Dru vamped him to the present moment, and what he wanted in return was a few
answers. But the minute he’d ended his story they’d huddled on the far
side of the room, Hamilton, Theodore, and a few other crusty-looking blokes he
hadn’t been properly introduced to.
He calculated he would wait only two more minutes, and then he would have
some answers.
“He’s telling the truth,” Theodore said,
cleaning his glasses in a gesture eerily like Giles’s.
“There are too many
details not to. Two souled
vampires, one cursed and one rewarded?”
Hamilton
sighed. “Dual Slayers, one dark and one light.
A Slayer to top all others, to outlive all others.”
“And the changing of
the Choosing,” another man spoke up. “I’d say that those three
things alone hold up. That’s, ah, not mentioning his vast knowledge about vampires in general.”
“Watch how he moves,” Hamilton said as William got up to pace the room.
“And watch his eyes.
He watches us as a hunter watches prey, and he doesn’t even know it.”
Crossing the room with surprisingly long strides, he drew a cross out of
his pocket and thrust it at William.
William
regarded the icon with nonchalance, but Spike recoiled instantly.
As a result, there was a flash of calm on his face followed by his
immediate withdrawal.
“Stop fucking with me,” he roared, throwing an arm out in front of me.
“I came to you for
help, not to be prodded like a bloody animal.”
As strong as his craving for nicotine was, his craving for Buffy was a
thousandfold. Layered over and
throughout that want, though, was another sensation: Worry.
He’d replayed the last
few moments in his mind, telling her to go, thrusting her away from him
emotionally so she’d leave him and leave the disintegrating building.
But had she made it out? Or
had she died despite his efforts?
“I left a woman I
loved,” he said, his breath coming in gusts now as he tried to hold back tears.
“I left a woman I
loved more than anything else I’ve ever encountered in
my life, and I need to know if she was real. I need to know if I was real.
And more than that, you are going to tell me how to get back to her.”
That
last statement got through the seemingly impenetrable shell of the gathered
Watchers. The façade of calm broke a bit as they began murmuring
among themselves and glancing at him warily.
“Please,” he said, the anguish clear in his voice.
“What makes you think
we would know how to get you back to her?”
Hamilton was the first to regain his composure.
Checking his cuffs, he sat down in one of the few chairs in the room and
met William’s blue eyes with unwavering intensity.
“So it’s all true?” The
hope was stark in his voice, unmasked and unrelieved.
Hamilton
glanced back at the other Watchers and nodded.
“Remarkably, yes.” He
tactfully looked away as the younger man let out a strangled half-sob,
half-laugh.
“I thought I was going
mad,” he said, shaking his head.
He raised two determined, haunted eyes to Hamilton.
That’s the vampire,
Hamilton thought, tilting his head. The
man looking at me now is not the same man whom I brought in.
“I need her.
Help me.”
“Even if the Council
could do such things, which they can’t, they wouldn’t. Such things are against
the laws of nature, the laws of magic. They
change the structure of the world as it is now and the world as it would be.
We do not assist in creating paradoxes.”
“The laws of nature?” With a feral growl, Spike leapt to his feet and wrapped a hand around
Hamilton’s neck. Unaided by the supernatural but aided by adrenaline, he lifted
the man to his toes using only one hand. His
arm, corded and defined, shook imperceptibly from the strain.
“You’d blather about the laws of nature to someone who’s seen hell on earth?”
He tossed him aside as the other Watchers advanced.
“I don’t want to hear about your bloody fuckin’ rules,” he said, his voice low and lethal.
“I want to get back to her, no matter what it takes.”
Hamilton
staggered to his feet, his breathing ragged and pained.
“You will get no
help with what you seek. You seek
impossibilities.”
“I bloody well am an
impossibility,” Spike retorted, but the man was already walking
out the doors. One by one, the
Watchers left the room, not saying a word.
When he thought he was alone, he drew his knees up to his chest and
whispered her name.
“Buffy…”
Another
voice answered him from the shadows of the deep corners of the room.
“I will help you.”
6.5 helping and
hurting
It shouldn’t surprise me, Buffy
thought, slamming a roundhouse blow into the punching bag in front of her with a
grunt. Everyone, to the last of
them, has lied to me when it came to Spike.
And he— He
was the only one in those last years who had never lied to her.
Painfully honest, up until the end.
She
swung her right leg in an arc and slammed the bag with her foot, timing her next
kick to hit the bag just as it swung into its original position.
Right, right, right; pause, left, left, left.
The kicks became faster, the grunts turned into yells, and yells turned
into sobs as she curled her arms around the bag and leaned her forehead into it.
She
missed her sparring partner. No one
had fought as he had.
“He’s gone,” she told herself angrily.
Suck it up. Glancing at the
clock on the wall, she stripped the tape from her hands and headed to the
classroom she’d been assigned.
She had tired herself out just enough that she shouldn’t be a hazard to her students.
Forcing
a cheerful smile onto her face, she entered the classroom.
She tried to console herself with the fact that there could have been
more strangers facing her, but it didn’t dull the sharp fear that needled through her as she looked at the
twenty-one pairs of eyes staring back at her.
“Hello,” she said, marveling at how young, how little, her voice sounded.
In a habitual action, she scanned the room.
Though she didn’t mean to, she was calculating the odds, pinpointing the strong ones and
all but dismissing the weak ones. It’s not a fight, for God’s sake.
It’s a class.
A
few greetings were returned to her, but most of the congregation looked just as
wary as she did. Hoping to break
the ice, she walked among them, standing as part of the group, constantly moving
so as to make eye contact with each person.
Think about leading a group, she reminded herself.
You’ve been doing it
for years.
“My name’s Buffy, and I’m pretty new
around here, so you’ll have to cut me some slack now and then.” She smiled at the scattered
laughter and pressed on. “I’ll be teaching you self-defense and also some
aerobics. They sort of go
hand-in-hand. You can defend
yourself better if you’re in good shape.”
Strength
in the young woman standing off to the edge, by herself.
Buffy sympathized with the brunette.
Sometimes isolation was just a fact of life.
Weakness
in the paunchy middle-aged woman in the back.
But determination in her eyes, and that could go a long way.
Strength
in the—for a moment,
Buffy’s heart stopped beating. Tall, lean, a shock of white-blond hair, head tilted back
proudly. But it wasn’t him. Not even close,
really, a younger man with the glow of naiveté
about him, long, nervous hands, perpetual motion. Just another all-American guy.
“All right,” she said, clasping her hands together and trying to compose herself.
“Everybody give
your name, tell me why you wanted to do this, and we’ll start with
some basic stuff.”
One
by one, people gave their answers, some laughing, some quiet and shy.
Buffy kept her ears honed when the loner spoke.
“I’m just trying to do something to burn off excess
energy,” the woman admitted quietly, shifting her hair out
of her face. Buffy made a note to
keep an eye on her. With every
potential in the world elevated to Slayer status, it would do Buffy well to keep
her eyes peeled for sisters.
The
young man was the last to go. His
face coloring a bright pink, he grinned sheepishly and kept his eyes squarely on
Buffy. “Coach told me to come in, do some aerobics.
Hopefully work on my coordination. I’m good with a ball,
but…” he shrugged his shoulders.
“I sorta suck at
maneuvering.”
“I hear ballet’s good for that,” the brunette said in
an undertone. When the young man
glanced at her, her face turned bright red and she lowered her head again.
Uh-oh,
Buffy thought, hiding a smile. Looks
like we might have a bit of blooming romance here.
So
thinking, Buffy completely missed the look the guy was giving her.
~~~
Ramie,
as he was called, certainly had a flair for the dramatic.
He demanded French coffee rather than the standard British tea, broke
more rules than he kept, and had the reputation for being the best Watcher in
the Council. His last Slayer had
died a few months before, and that was all he would say about her.
Spike
had imagined, uncountable times, how things would go down if the Slayer-- his
Slayer, his Buffy—had died.
And just as those times were uncountable, the results were unimaginable.
He knew he could not go on living, even a dead life, without her.
He
wondered if she felt the same.
“If the bloody Council
can’t help me, then how in the hell can you?” he asked the dark Watcher, watching with some fascination as he drank
coffee with flecks of coffee bean floating in it.
“I know people.” Dipping into the sugar bowl
to take a few lumps, Ramie dropped one into his coffee and popped the other into
his mouth. “Or…
unpeople, if you will. Sometimes
there is little difference.”
“Unpeople.” Spike watched Laramie
indulge in his vice and wished for one of his own.
If he couldn’t have Buffy, then he’d damn well find
something to smoke.
“There’s a man at the counter who sells cigarillos,” Ramie said
quietly. “I warrant it’s not quite what you’re used to, but-” he let his sentence trail off with an eloquent shrug.
Spike
nodded, standing up and looking down at the man who held all his hopes.
“Hang on a moment.”
Hang
on? Laramie puzzled over the idiom while Spike bought the small cigars.
When Spike sat back down, already lighting one, Ramie leaned forward, his
cat’s eyes glistening in the muted light of the café.
“I have to warn you, sir, what we’re proposing to
do here… it will take much time, and you will give up much.”
“Much?” Spike snorted derisively
through a cloud of smoke. “Listen, friend, I would give up all.”
He took another draw and closed his eyes, calling up memories of pain and
terror. “I already went through hell for her.”
Ramie
templed his fingers and sighed. “Mon ami, that could
precisely what you will have to do again.”
“Bring it on, Watcher.” Spike’s voice carried
confidently through the cloud of smoke he’d made, but
there was another who cringed inwardly.
William
was afraid.
~~~
“You lied.” He was lucky her eyes were
clear and not blackened, her magic in reign and not loosed in the rage she felt.
She had respected him, their host, respected his wishes, respected his
moods. She had not offered her advice unless it was asked, and she
had always given him the benefit of the doubt because Buffy had loved him, then
in one way, and now in another.
But
he had betrayed her love, the past love and the friendship he had shown to her,
by withholding the truth. So now
Willow abandoned the respect she’d once offered and prayed for the strength to keep her hurt at bay.
“Beggin’ your pardon?”
He was tired, had been on his feet all night long on another case, and
the Irish slid through his voice unchecked.
“You lied to us.
You didn’t tell her about
Spike.” A
fresh wave of hurt hit Willow. She’d never quiet listened to Buffy about Spike, had never understood the
connection they had. But he had
stood by her even when Willow didn’t.
Now she was paying for it. Fleetingly,
she wondered if she was feeling sympathetic heartbreak.
Her
quiet statement slapped away some of the weariness.
His eyes sharpened and he sat up a little straighter.
“Do you think that’s what she needs right
now, Willow? On top of everything
else, to be told that maybe Spike’s human, maybe he’s not dead, but maybe he is? Hey,
Buffy, we don’t know what’s going on, but let me lay out the options for you.” He was gathering steam,
ready to plow into more justifications, when he felt a sharp burning pain in his
hands.
Willow
was completely calm, completely cool, but she kept the heat focused on the backs
of each of his hands, watching detachedly as smoke rose from his pale skin.
“What are you doing?” he asked, clenching his jaw and keeping his big hands in place.
“Making you shut up,” she said through
clenched teeth. “I told her because you weren’t man enough to do it.
But then again, we already knew you weren’t a man, didn’t we?” Tossing her head, she broke
the spell and slammed out the door, leaving him with all his pain.
8.7 finding and
seeking
“You mean it? You’re not just messing around with me?” Dawn widened her eyes
dramatically and prepared to jump and down.
“I can really go?”
In the month and a half they’d been in central Indiana, Buffy hadn’t allowed Dawn
to go anywhere other than school. But
it was time, Buffy thought, to let her little sister go.
She’d been through so much
on the Hellmouth; it was time for her to lead at least a semi-normal life.
“You can really go,” Buffy said, crossing her arms over her chest and trying to keep her
voice stern. What she really wanted
to do was laugh, to show how happy it made her to see her sister overjoyed.
No matter what had happened, how she’d came or where they’d been together, there
was no one Buffy had left whom she loved as much as Dawn.
“But…”
Dawn
groaned. “The words of doom,” she said, flopping
onto the couch. “But what?”
“But I have to meet him
first. And he has to pick you up
while it’s still daylight outside.
And you have to take the cell phone.” Buffy pressed her lips
together, trying to stem the flow of rules that wanted to pour from her mouth.
“Anything
happens, you call me.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Dawn said, sketching a mock salute and hopping
from one leg to another. It would
be her first real date with a guy who wasn’t—well, she hoped—any sort of prowling “beastie”. Rubbing
a hand absently at the ache in her chest, Dawn’s Cupid-bow
mouth turned into a frown.
She
missed Spike.
It
wasn’t something she talked
to Buffy about, because she’d heard her sister
crying at night, weeping herself to sleep in the wee hours of the morning.
When the Slayer finally got to sleep, she called out for him.
So Dawn kept her mouth shut, knowing whatever she felt was fractional
compared to her sister’s suffering.
“Well, what’re you waiting for?” Buffy asked, shooing
at her sister. “Go get dressed
so I can get ready for work.”
As her sister scampered away, Buffy concentrated on her work for the
evening.
The
class had grown from twenty to thirty people, and each class brought new
questions, new challenges, and new tests of Buffy’s self-control. She tried to
avoid sparring with her pupils, but it wasn’t always
avoidable.
After
seeing Dawn and her lanky, basketball-playing date off with a smile, Buffy
started the walk to the fitness center, pausing occasionally to stretch.
She was stopped, one leg stretched lithely over a fire hydrant, when she
heard steps behind her. More out of
instinct than actual fear of harm, she whirled to face whomever was approaching
her, hands in the ready position, feet splayed for balance.
“Miss Summers!” The girl stepped back, also
falling into a ready position. “Buffy.”
“Kelly!” Buffy
straightened, brushing at the skirt she’d thrown over
her leotard as she looked at the loner from her evening class.
She wondered if there was any way to make her movements seem like
something more casual, but worried about it less when she saw Kelly making the
same struggle.
“Sorry,” the girl mumbled, pushing her dark, curly hair out of her face.
“It’s just—”
“Instinct,” Buffy finished for her. Curling
her fists until her fingernails bit into her palms, Buffy went out on a limb.
“Have they given
you a Watcher yet?” More
to the point, genius, are there even enough Watchers alive to deal with all the
Slayers now? But she was too busy
watching the girl’s reaction to worry about logistics.
Kelly’s eyes flew to hers,
large and dark and painfully easy to read.
Eyes of a girl who didn’t understand what was
happening to her, eyes of a girl who was afraid she’d always be
alone. “You’re really her, then. You’re really the Slayer.”
“No,” Buffy said, walking so the girl would follow her.
“I’m really a Slayer, and I’m guessing you are,
too.”
“But…” Seeing her teacher’s look of discomfort, Kelly bit her tongue and kept it simple.
“I guess I am.
I got this letter, you know? Instead
of a Watcher, because—”
“They’re still rebuilding the Council. I
figured.” She
wondered how long it would be before Giles would be called back, and Wesley, to
recoup and plan. The slice she felt
in her gut wasn’t sadness, though, as much as it was regret.
It was almost as though they, especially Giles, were already gone to her.
Kelly
wanted to say more, but couldn’t. She’d spent weeks
and weeks alone, breaking things on accident, wanting to pick a fight for the
sake of fighting, just to get that horrible feeling out of her system.
And then finally, like a true Gen-X-er, she’d started surfing, ducking in and out of chatrooms and finally settling
in with an ultra-exclusive mailing list of girls who had the same problem.
Girls
who were Slayers.
And
eventually, the rumors starting seeping through about girls in California, led
by a Slayer who made the rest of them look like babies carrying candy.
A Slayer who had lived longer than any other before her and who had a
band of people so loyal they could not be broken.
Rumor even had it she had a pet vampire of sorts.
But
this woman, the aerobics instructor—this woman was a loner who had no one other than her little sister, so
Kelly had shoved the suspicions out of her mind even as she watched her
self-defense teacher do things that were impossible when she thought no one was
looking.
“I have so many things
I want to ask you,” Kelly finally confessed as they neared the fitness
center. She put a hand to her
forehead and groaned. “That sounds so
bad. You know, I’m just so confused.”
Shocked at the tremble in her voice, she shook her head.
“Never mind.”
Buffy
put a hand to the girl’s arm and
thought of her introduction to Sunnydale, the strange flip from popular girl to
troublemaker, the feelings of solitude even when she was surrounded by people.
“My sister’s out on a date tonight. If
you want to come back with me, have a cup of—” Did she even
have anything in the house? “A cup of anything, you’re more than welcome.”
Kelly
nodded enthusiastically then halted just outside the classroom door.
“Doesn’t your sister know?” she whispered.
Buffy
felt a genuine grin spread over her face as she pushed open the door.
“Boy, does she ever.”
~~~
“I don’t understand why you’re making me do this,” Spike groused, flipping through a book. “I know most of this shite already.”
“True though that may
be, I need you to know your stuff,” Laramie said, pacing
the room. He hadn’t yet told his new friend the details as to what was going to happen, the
only way to accomplish what he was asking.
He figured they’d take care of the
small details first and let the big ones…
sort themselves out. “I’m training you.
Don’t you want to be able to find her as soon as you
make it back?”
“Bloody hell, you
sodding fruit!” Spike
pushed the large book away from him, drained and angry.
He spent mornings and nights convincing his mother he was okay, he was
only William and spent his days convincing Laramie that he knew just as much if
not more than the dark Watcher. He
was getting fed up. He was feening
for the Slayer. “Of fucking course I
want to find her as soon as I get back, Ramie.
I want to find her now. I
want to find her yesterday. In
point of fact, I’d like never to have left her at all!” Shaking, he sat back in the
chair and let out a shaky breath.
“Do you think I don’t know what it’s like?” Ramie sat down across from
him, his black hair flowing around his shoulders.
“William—”
“Don’t call me that.”
It made things too hard. Had
she ever called him by his name? Why
couldn’t he remember?
“Spike,” Ramie corrected, also understanding that particular pain.
“I want you to listen
to me, because I will only tell you this once.
We do not have much time.”
He had explained to Spike as best he could that time was variable between
realities. Between the reality
where William lived on and the one where he wreaked bloody havoc, time was
completely unpredictable. So, ten minutes could have passed for Buffy.
Or ten years.
It
didn’t matter to Spike.
If he found her when she was 75 and doddering, he would take care of her.
She would still shine, and he would still die for her.
A million times over, even if she only had minutes left to live.
“I understand you.
I know how you feel. I know
how you hunger to be next to her, and hunger to avenge every wrong that has been
done to her. That you ache to
protect her, I know. It kills you
not to know. It kills you to think
she’s moved on.” Spike
started to lunge across the table and Ramie stopped him with an upraised hand.
“Because to love
a Slayer is unlike anything else.”
Spike’s anger and hurt
dimmed in comparison to his confusion. “You?”
Ramie
rubbed his eyes and tried to push the pictures away, push the sounds and
feelings away. But he would share
to help this man do what he could not. “Yes.
I was young, William, and callow. I
thought I could love my Watch and protect her, guide her at the same time.
“I could not, and
because I could not, I watched her die. I
watched her light extinguished by one such as you were.”
“I’m sorry,” Spike rasped, tasting smooth skin under his lips
and wincing. “I’m sorry, Laramie.”
“I would forgive you
did I not understand you, sympathize with you.
For loving a Slayer means everything, wanting to consume her, belong to
her, make her belong to you. And
even a vampire can see that light, be consumed by that strength.
A Slayer is like no other.” He took a drink of his
ever-present coffee and vowed to finish his tale. “And I did everything I could to overcome my grief.
I became the rogue Watcher, the dark one who breaks all the rules.
I was not always Laramie, Spike.”
Understanding
dawned on Spike and he nodded. “Laramie…
he who weeps for love.”
“It seemed a fitting
name to choose. The man I was
before Laramie is dead. And so not
only do I understand your impatience with me, I understand both of you, Spike
and William.”
As
he turned his back to an amazed Spike, he added, “I agreed to help you both.”
9.8 evading and
evaluating
. They all went their
separate ways, and he hadn’t expected anything else.
After all, what had he done to deserve their loyalty?
And they all had good reasons to go, to leave him with his self-contempt
and guilt.
Giles
and Wesley were headed back to England to rebuild the Council, to regroup and
gather their sources. They had a lot of Watchers to find and a lot of girls to
help.
Willow,
Kennedy, and Xander moved into an apartment not far from Angel’s offices. Though
the distance was short, it may as well have been a million miles away.
He had earned their mistrust in the beginning, and had reminded them of
that with his constant edginess, his lying, his selfishness.
One
by one, they all trickled away until the only members of the Sunnydale crew left
were Faith and Robin. Angel refused
to lie to himself. He understood
that Faith stayed because she felt she owed him and Robin stayed because he
hated Spike. He understood Angel’s bitterness,
Angel’s shielding of Buffy. Besides, where Faith went, the thoroughly whipped Slayer’s son went.
Angel
found himself with a decision to make. The
worst part of it was, he’d have to make it on his own. With
a heavy sigh, he picked up the telephone. With each call he made, the introductory message was terse,
quiet, and identical.
“It’s me. I need you to keep
your ear to the ground.”
~~~
“Forget trying to get
my face clear, we’re not boxing here,” Buffy panted,
spinning around and clipping Kelly’s ear with a foot.
“Make me uncover
my chest.”
“I’ll just ask Paul to do that,” Kelly grunted,
swinging her sweaty hair out of her face.
The
comment caught Buffy off-guard and she did, indeed, lose her strong defensive
stance. “What?”
Kelly
stopped circling and sighed. It was
hard to stop all that rushing adrenaline. “Oh, come on.
Like you haven’t seen the way he looks at you. He
sits in the back of the class and gawks like a fool.” <And you’re so jealous it colors the room green,> she added mentally.
The big college basketball player was cute, and frighteningly enough,
smart.
Buffy
shook her head, not only indicating that she hadn’t seen anything, but also to deny the fact. She didn’t want anyone to be
interested in her. Not now.
Maybe not ever again. Not
when there was some hope-“I think you’re hallucinating, Kel. But it’s okay, we’ve all been
there.”
Attempting
to tamp down the lump that had lodged in her throat, Kelly pushed on.
“Why not? He’s cute, he’s available, he’s interested in
you. You’re cute, you’re available…” she trailed off,
raising her eyebrows.
“I’m not interested,” Buffy snapped,
unwrapping her hands with jerky motions. “I’m not even really
available.” She
gasped, covering her mouth with her hand. She
hadn’t meant to say it out loud.
It made it too real, and making it real, made her sound crazy.
She
was waiting for a dead man in more ways than one.
“So it’s true.” Kelly
usually kept the rumors and half-truths to herself, preferring to be friends
with Buffy rather than interrogate her. But
this particular rumor had smacked of the truth, and Little Sis had mentioned
Spike enough to make Kelly sure of the validity.
“There was someone at
the very end. The vampire.”
Buffy
swung out without warning, less out of anger than out of self-preservation.
She couldn’t listen to much more of this. Kelly
jerked back quickly and was on the move again as Buffy spoke.
“Was I really dumb
enough to think you were shy?” she said, blocking
Kelly’s return blow.
“Because I gotta say, you’re just mostly
nosy.” She
laughed through the pain shooting through her, from head to toe and back again.
Don’t make me tell
you it’s my fault he’s dead, a tiny,
cowardly voice inside her begged. Please,
don’t. She
stopped moving again and sat on the floor to call it quits.
“Kelly, for real, have
you ever even seen a vampire?”
Kelly
scuffed a foot along the ground and mumbled something.
Nonplussed, Buffy stared at her. “What was that,
Kelly?”
“No, I have not,” she enunciated, sitting across from the older girl.
“I’m sorry I prodded,” she softened her
voice. “Forget I asked.”
If
she’d meant to guilt Buffy
into revelation, it wouldn’t work.
“Forgotten,” Buffy said promptly, taking the out as it was offered.
“You want something to
drink?”
Kelly
bit back a sigh and followed Buffy into the kitchen.
“I’d love something.”
Later,
when Kelly had gone home and Buffy was left with a silent house and a sleeping
Dawn, she had too much time to think. Too
much time to wonder.
She’d came a long way, if
she said so herself. Xander,
Willow, and Kennedy had came for a visit, and apparently she’d been normal
enough. They had, after all, went
back to L.A. without much complaint or insistence that she come back.
Maybe
they just didn’t care.
But
she was settling into her life, such as it was, and Kelly’s arrival and random comments staved off the
boredom.
Buffy
couldn’t decide whether that
was a bad thing or a good thing. For
now, however, it had her stirred up, thinking about Spike.
She curled up under a thin sheet on her bed, the whirling fan a
concession to the Midwest humidity that plagued them all, and closed her eyes.
It
was easy, too damned easy even after three months, even after 97 days and four
hours, to call up his touch. Things
had been…
so bad for them, so strange and dark and bad in the beginning, but even in the
moments where they were bound together like animals and little more, she’d known.
She’d known it was unique
from the first moment. That night
in the demolished house had nearly destroyed her, as well, in more ways than
one.
Knocking
down some walls was easy. Knocking
down your own was hard.
Thinking
of him, of him moving inside her and her response, Buffy guided her hand down to
brush at her body, to move down her thighs.
Had it been so long ago that she’d felt this desperate need to feel something?
Finding
no solace in the route she was taking, she curled her fingers into the sheets
and cried herself to sleep for the first time in a week and a half.
Maybe
next time I’ll make it a
little longer, she thought just before slipping into dreams.
~~~
“What if I told you I
didn’t want you to do this?”
Laramie swept back his hair, pacing in the Bryce foyer.
“That I didn’t want to tell you what you had to do?”
Spike
glanced at the looking glass in the vanity across from him and found himself
momentarily transfixed. It was a hard thing to get used to, a reflection.
Hard to get used to being without, and hard to get used to having.
When did life get so bloody weird?
“I’d make you tell me,” he told his only
friend wearily. “I’d kill you if I had to, Ramie.
For her, I would even do that.”
“I know you would.” It didn’t bother him at
all. He was bothered more by the
attachment he had formed and the doubts that came along with it.
Could he let this man do what had to be done?
Could he stick to the conviction that had prompted him to help in the
first place?
“For fuck’s sake,” Spike burst out, “Just tell me what I have to do, will you?”
He’d considered just
going out and getting himself vamped and then waiting for Buffy to be born,
waiting for her to come around. But
it wouldn’t work. The
realities were too different, it was too chancy.
He would not take risks when it came to her.
Not now.
“How important is your
soul, William?” Ramie
used his given name intentionally, knowing what sort of reaction it elicited,
and knowing just what part of the man he would reach. “How much is it worth to you?”
Spike
was stricken uncharacteristically speechless.
Was it to come down to this, after all?
Getting vamped and taking his chances?
“It’s worth a lot to me,” he said
quietly. “But it’s not as worth as much as her.”
He’d only regained it for
her, anyway. He’d lived quite merrily for many years without it, until she came along.
“All right, then.” Ramie’s shoulders
sagged visibly and previously unseen lines carved themselves into his mouth and
around his eyes. “No more waiting, mon ami. Before
we go, I have something to give you.”
With no explanation, he handed Spike a letter sealed with thick, blood
red wax. “Open it some other time. For now, let us go.”
Torn between excitement and fear, William took one last, longing look at
his home.
10.9 running and
hiding
Hands seeking her in the dark, warm and alive, gentle and
tender. Two men, heads bent
together, close in conversation, conspiring in things best left unseen.
Sweet-smelling cigar smoke drifting around them.
One looks up, eyes shockingly blue in the midst of the haze, sweetly blue
with his sandy hair. She realizes
what he means to do and calls out to him-
“Spike, no!” Buffy sat up in bed, her
sheet clutched to her chest, head clouded with sleep and confusion.
What had made her call out his name?
She’d been dreaming of-
Two
men, that’s all she knew, and
neither of them were Spike. But it
seemed as though they were all Spike these days. Rather than dulling with time, everything seemed to be
sharpening to a point so fine as to impale her without resistance.
Running her hands through her hair, she looked at the clock.
2 A.M. Still dark outside.
She needed no more invitation than that.
Slipping into jeans and throwing a denim jacket over her camisole, she
headed out of the house, stopping only to check on Dawn.
“Be back soon, baby,” she promised her sleeping sister in a whisper.
The
town was tomb-silent, the dark only occasionally interrupted by the blinding
slash of headlights, the silence occasionally split in two by the far-off
thumping of someone’s car speakers.
There were no screams, no cries for help, but Buffy pressed on.
Did it make her a bad person to hope for trouble?
She
kept her steps slow and measured, her eyes roaming about for any sign of… anything.
One block passed by without note, and her steps quickened.
Two blocks, and the only signs of life she’d seen were a cop and
a man arguing heatedly over a cell phone by his car.
By
the third block she was running, running as she hadn’t in months, letting her hair stream behind her and her lungs fill with
humid night air. Her legs carried
her as though someone were chasing her, her feet beating an even tattoo on the
pavement below her. She didn’t stop until she reached the riverfront, water stretching out on both
sides, sparkling with rippling moonlight.
She
let her eyes skip to the sky, her head tilted back, her mouth hanging just the
tiniest bit open.
She
hadn’t taken much time to
look up in her life. If she looked
up, she was liable to trip and fall. If
she looked up, it left her throat open for the kill. When did life get so bloody weird? she wondered, hugging
herself for contact more than for warmth.
Setting
her sights on a star, she began to chant under her breath.
“Star light, star
bright, first star I see tonight, I wish I may, I wish I might, have this wish I
wish tonight.”
Dropping
her head and letting a single tear fall, she called herself an idiot for wishing
for the impossible.
As
she turned to go home, she regretted that no one was following her.
~~~
The
two men walked in silence, each intent on their own thoughts.
William
hadn’t left any word for
his mother. What was he supposed to
say? “Sorry, Mum, but
there’s this thing with this girl and being a vampire…
have a nice life!”
So he’d leave her to
make explanations, and hopefully, to socially cash in on the intrigue of having
a missing son. He figured he’d be more admired if he were gone, anyway. He didn’t know what was about
to happen, how was he supposed to tell anyone else?
A
large part of William felt it would be best at all costs to just leave his
mother. The last time-the other
time-he had left, he tried to bring her along and consequently was forced to
kill her.
Laramie
thought of his own Slayer, the only Slayer he had been assigned to.
He knew he would be assigned no other, but rather allowed to stay in the
Council to hunt the “others.” Those others who crept in
the night and hid in the shadows. The
Council used his rage and allowed him to take out his vengeance because it
served them well. His Watching days
were officially over.
But
he still watched his Slayer.
“Stop,” he told Spike, holding out an arm to halt his friend’s long gait. “Someone-something- is here.”
Spike
tensed, suddenly alert, wondering why he hadn’t noticed it. The street was
quiet, the many alleyways branching off of it bathed in dark and swimming with
shadows. It was a perfect place to
hunt.
Ramie heard
her before he saw her, the low, feline growl that was more playful than
predatory. She slipped out of the
shadows, not yet in game face but growling nonetheless.
The demon suited her so well that it didn’t even need to change
its face to make an appearance. Her
dark red hair was arranged into innumerable complex twists on her head and her
dark eyes were large, absorbing the gloom.
“Ekaterina.” Laramie said no more than
her name, his large, wide-palmed hand reaching out toward her, then fluttering
to his side. “Katya…” the nickname fell from his lips, dampened to silence by the mist in the
air.
Oh,
bugger, Spike thought, seeing the look on the Frenchman’s face. Anything
but this, you bloody fool.
“Hello, Human.
I did not realize it was you, or-” the beauty shrugged eloquently as her husky, Russian voice faded off.
“I much like your
friend here,” she added, tilting her head and approaching Spike.
“Ramie,” Spike rasped, shaking his head. “Say this isn’t her.” But it had to be.
She was young, no more than eighteen, and her way of moving was that of a
Slayer. She prowled instead of
walked, targeted rather than stared. All
the while, her tongue darted out with tiny, catlike strokes at her lips and her
body was held combatively rather than seductively.
“Mon ami,” Ramie shook his head, fighting back tears. “I am sorry that I did not tell you.”
“Perhaps you did, I
just wasn’t listening.”
Spike stepped forward, feeling no fear as he stared down at his friend’s former love, the
Slayer who had been turned into what she hunted. He had no doubt she was a threat, an enormous one.
A vampire with knowledge of a Slayer’s life was fatal, and Laramie had let her live.
Spike
could no longer doubt that Ramie understood love eternal and the pain that
accompanied it.
“Well, love,” he said softly, watching the girl’s eyes flicker
chartreuse. “You waitin’ for somethin’ or do you like to toy with your food first?”
He
didn’t know what he
expected. He wanted to test her, to
push her, for his friend’s sake.
He had a feeling she wouldn’t feed in front of Laramie. No
matter what her demon might have been, she had been steeped in her love for
Laramie before her death. Spike had
good reason to know that many human attributes could survive the turning.
Her
eyes narrowing, Ekaterina pushed Spike. She
did not do it out of violence, however. If
she had, he would have been thrown into the wall behind him.
Instead she pushed him with her fingertips, small teasing shoves.
She lowered her head slowly, her eyes never leaving his and never letting
the demon to light. As she neared his skin, her nostrils flared and she stumbled
back.
“Ty zalupnul!” she hissed, wiping a hand over her mouth. “You cheater! What
kind of thing is this that looks like a human and smells like a vampire?” She
dug her fingers into his arm as if to test the flesh there and hissed again.
“You are some sort of…” she threw her hands in the air, at a loss for words.
“Freak,” she spat.
“Oh, and that’s not the pot callin’ the kettle black,
love.” He
wanted to alleviate the situation, but he saw Ramie’s face was
growing paler by the second. “This is a good dance, cutie, but I’m afraid I’ll have to bow out.”
So saying, he grabbed Laramie’s arm and dragged him down the street, not knowing or caring where they
were going.
She
did not follow them, but a name whispered along the breeze after them.
“Alain…”
Laramie
winced at his given name and kept his head down.
“We’re going left up here,” he told Spike,
dragging his feet as a man wounded. When
Spike said nothing, the Watcher stopped and spoke quietly.
“You must think
terribly of me,” he said, leaning his head against a wall, the hazy
moonlight and streetlights reflecting off the tears running down his face.
“How could I?
I couldn’t have killed
her, had I been you.” Flicking
his barely-smoked cigarillo to the side, he blew a plume of smoke into the air.
“Not even if she
asked me to,” he added. Seeing
the cringe that brought forth from Ramie, he nodded.
“Well,” Laramie said, straightening and shaking his shoulders.
“That fulfills my
weekly encounter with my Katya. I
am sorry you had to meet her.”
“I’m sorry you had to give her up,” Spike returned.
He shifted his weight from foot to foot, torn between comforting the man
who had comforted him and pressing onward.
As
though attuned to Spike’s thoughts,
Laramie turned and slammed a clenched fist to the seemingly blank wall.
“Tenfold times three,
threefold times ten, the Hub is where it begins and where it all ends.
If I wish to speak, to entreat, to see, I shall tell the Hub who I may
be,” he chanted.
Inside the wall, a voice spoke.
“Who’s standin’ out there?”
It took Spike only a moment to identify the accent as Brooklyn, as thick
and attitude-laden as any New Yorker he’d meant in his stint there. Puzzled,
he shot Ramie a look.
Lowering
his voice, Laramie rolled his light eyes. “He’s different every week, in looks, voice, mannerisms.
He has the whole world to draw from, so he tends to have a short
attention span.”
Raising his voice again, he leaned his head to the brick.
“It is Laramie…
Alain Lewiston.”
In
one moment the wall was solid and clear, and in the next Ramie and Spike stood
in a large room bustling with music and activity.
A young woman dressed in clothing that would not even be dreamed of for
another few decades danced onstage, winking at customers.
Directly in front of them sat a corpulent man, resplendent in a well-cut
white suit and gleaming silver cufflinks.
Spike’s head was reeling.
How easy it must be for Ramie, he
thought, who can regard these things merely as wild and weird.
But for me… He
was looking into a 1920s nightclub, complete with bootleg liquor and flappers.
He once more felt, acutely, the two halves of himself regarding one
another, and then the fat man sitting before them broke his thoughts.
“How can I help you
boys?”
11.10 wacthing and
waiting
It had been a hellishly long day,
and he knew from experience what was “hellish” and what wasn’t.
He’d gotten no rest in
the past few days, spending night hours doing precious footwork and daylight
hours either underground or on the telephone.
He was still trying to figure out how, precisely, it was possible for a
dead man to have a headache when the phone rang for the hundredth time.
“Angel Investigations,” he answered, thinking Someone please come and help the helpless right
here. He stifled a yawn and
listened to the voice on the other end.
“Someone’s summoned the Hub. You told
me to let ya know if anything different was goin’ on and—” There was a pause on the
other end, as though the caller was looking around.
“I definitely consider that different.
No one ever calls the Hub, man, the price is too high!”
“I know,” Angel murmured. “That’s definitely different. Where did the Hub get called to?”
“London.
Isn’t it like, the middle
of the night there or somethin’?”
“Or something.
Thanks for letting me know, Ylgev.”
He listened to the young demon talk on for a few more minutes, then
excused himself as politely as he could.
Sometimes
he missed the days of being completely and inexcusably mannerless.
He
picked up the phone again and made one more call, what he hoped was the last of
the day. A cup of blood and a nice,
long nap were all he wanted at the moment.
But after he ended the connection with Giles, he knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep a
wink.
The
Hub meant that someone out there was serious about changing something.
But to find out who and what, all that was left to do was wait.
~~~
“Nice day, what?” Wesley took a deep breath
and looked around the dank alleyway and shifted his weight uneasily.
“Don’t you agree?” he persisted when it seemed as though Giles hadn’t heard him.
They’d told him the younger
Watcher had made leaps and bounds of progress beyond the hapless milksop he had
been, but Giles was starting to have his doubts.
Removing his glasses and cleaning them wearily, he closed his eyes.
“I heard you, Wesley, I just have no urge to indulge in small talk at the
present moment.”
Wesley’s face flushed and he cleared his throat, cursing himself.
He hadn’t acted like
such a blathering fool since… well, since
Sunnydale. He was starting to think
it was just Rupert that made him so nervous.
Rupert and his damnably huge reputation and terribly condescending
stares. He made a perfectly
intelligent Watcher feel like a complete, babbling moron.
And now he was even babbling internally. “Bugger it all,” he muttered under his breath, cheering himself up with the epithet.
Predictably,
Giles ignored him. He forced
himself not to check his watch. It
was no matter how long ago someone had summoned the Hub. Time was too flexible, and the summoner could come out
anywhere, anywhen, anyhow he or she pleased, provided they could pay up.
If
it were William, Giles surmised, he’d definitely pay up.
“We’ll wait another hour,” he told Wesley
quietly. “No matter what
the time difference, I can’t see he’d allow the Hub to waste any time.”
Wesley
raised an eyebrow and turned his attention back to the wall.
“I can’t see he’s in any position to order the Hub to do anything.” Together, they stood in
silence and watched a blank wall.
~~~
“It’s about a girl,” Ramie cut straight to
the point. “He was with her,
now he’s not. He
needs your help.”
Spike
raised an unscarred eyebrow at Laramie’s painfully obvious message. Let
me do the talking, he may as well have said.
“A girl, a girl,” the big man said, steepling his fingers. “Always about a girl. Suppose I’m not connected to a
place where she’ll have him?”
“You’re connected to everything,” Ramie said, slapping
his hands down on the polished table the man sat at.
He inhaled
off a thin, hand-rolled cigarette that Spike longed to swipe from his chubby
fingers. “Too true,” he said dismissively. “Let me rephrase, cat, suppose there is no such place?”
“It isn’t as though she bloody well jilted me, you fat git,” Spike snapped. “I died to save the bleedin’ world, although with
people like you, I can’t see why I did—”
It
had taken Ramie a few moments to get past the “cat” that had slipped into the Hub’s language. Apparently a
moment was all Spike had needed to insult the one being who could help him.
“I beg your pardon,
sir,” he said quickly, hip-checking Spike out of the
way. “My companion is
distraught and wishes to earn his way back to the woman he loves.”
“I seem to recall you
tried to do that a few months ago, Alain Lewiston.”
The Hub took a swig from the silver flask on the table and ran his tongue
over his teeth. “No matter. Let’s start negotiations.”
“All right,” Spike said excitedly, hunkering down at the man’s table.
“Now we’re talking.”
A
slow, malevolent grin spread over the man’s broad face and he nodded slowly. “Oh, I certainly hope so.”
~~~
“He’s not coming.” Giles
stood away from the wall and rubbed the back of his hand over his forehead.
“I doubt it was
him, anyway.”
It
was the most Giles had spoken to Wesley in the hour and a half they’d been waiting.
After the first twenty minutes, Wesley had begun wishing he were part of
the wall. At least that way he
wouldn’t be able to see Giles’s measuring looks.
“Well, the odds
were overwhelmingly against it,” he said, looking
forward to… anything away from Giles. “However, it doesn’t change the fact that someone has taken that measure.” He looked around at the sky
and shuddered.
“No, it doesn’t.” Giles
closed his eyes momentarily and thought of Buffy, and how her life would have
been had it actually been Spike coming through the Hub.
“It’s best this way. But we
should keep whomever is using the Hub in our thoughts.”
“They could be
dangerous,” Wesley noted by way of agreement.
Giles
walked down the sidewalk without looking back at his fellow Watcher.
“No,” he corrected quietly. “They could be damned.”
~~~
“Miss Summers?” He nearly tripped over his
own damned feet as he crossed the distance from the back of the classroom to the
front where she stood with the cute brunette who kept to herself.
Great, he thought. Fall on her, that’s sure to make a good
impression.
“Paul, hi,” Buffy looked up at him and smiled, wanting to pat his head.
Only…
she couldn’t reach it. It
had taken her a few moments to remember his name.
“What can I do for ya?”
Kelly
looked swiftly down at the floor as she saw the college student glance her way.
Smooth, Kelly, let him catch you gawking at him while he’s asking out the
teacher. She wanted to kick
herself. If she didn’t know she’d break his shin, she’d kick him.
“Well, I was just
wonderin’, since class got out early tonight, if you’d like to grab a cup of coffee somewhere. I don’t have class until the afternoon tomorrow, but—” he trailed off, his Adam’s apple bobbing
manically as he swallowed. “Yeah,” he finished lamely, his face flushing.
Warning
bells went off in Buffy’s head and she
suppressed a groan. Damn it.
It was a good thing she hadn’t made a bet with Kelly about it or anything. She’d have straight up lost. “You know, that’s really nice of
you, Paul, but we’re not really allowed to date students.” Smiling kindly, she
shrugged her shoulders in a ‘what can you do’ mannerism.
“Oh.” He stood where he was for a
moment while she gathered her things, then tried again.
“I’ll quit the class,” he said, thinking
quickly. “I don’t really think I’m making any progress,
anyway.” Not
entirely the truth, but come on… some
sacrifices had to be made. But
before he could gloat over the loophole he’d found, he saw
something that made him go completely still and his brain scramble entirely.
She
was crying.
She
was holding her head down and the tears weren’t falling, but he could see the brightness in her eyes and the way she
was blinking rapidly to stem their flow. The
brunette laid a hand on Buffy’s arm and shot
him a glare.
What
the hell did I do?! “I won’t quit, never mind,
forget I said that, it was a bad idea. Oh,
man,” he said nervously, switching his bag from one arm
to the other and bending over, way over, to try and meet her eye.
“Hey, Miss Summers,
just forget I said anything, all right? I
didn’t mean to make you cry.”
Buffy
longed to bury her head in his big chest and just cry it out then send him on
his way. But to cry it all out,
every bit of it, she’d be there for a
long while. Days, weeks.
Probably years. “You didn’t make me cry, Paul,” she said, willing back the tears with the skill of long practice and
training in self-discipline. “Look, I’ll just be cliché
and say I’m just coming out of a relationship.
I’m way too screwed up
for you.” She
smiled a shaky, sad smile and shook her head.
“I’ll see you next week,” she managed before running outside.
“Oh, man,” Paul said again, smacking himself in the forehead.
“Now I feel like a
heel.”
Kelly
glanced up at him. “It’s not your fault.” She looked at the door
Buffy had just exited out of and sighed. “I’ll tell her you’re sorry.”
“Yeah,” Paul said absently, his gaze also fixed on the door.
How
come all the cute girls came with mucho baggage?
12.11 teaching and
learning
“What do you have to offer me, William, William the
Bloody, Spike?” He
said the names in quick succession, nearly blurring them into one long word.
“I’m afraid you’re going to have to explain the process to me.
In all my years, here and there, I don’t know as I ever heard of the likes of you.” Spike kept his eyes on the
man’s, but it hurt to do so. They
were constantly, subtly, changing shape, color, and expression.
“Hub, eh?
Like on an auto?”
“Somewhat,” he said, letting his kaleidoscope eyes flit from Spike to Laramie and
back again. He sighed heavily and
shook his head sorrowfully. “I see that the frog here hasn’t told you anything
about me.” He
pulled his mouth into a pout, his face growing structurally a little longer, his
eyes a little bigger. It was a
caricature of the previous face, an overdramatically sad rendition. “I’m disappointed.
My ego is wounded.”
Abruptly, the face snapped back. “Just as well, Watcher.
You Council bastards never tell my story right anyway.
“I am the Hub.
As there are many spokes in a wheel, so there are many dimensions in the
world. To say I am actually the Hub
is a bit of an overstatement, though I’m quite deserving—” he paused to buff his
fingernails on the front of his shirt, his eyes gleaming with glee as he saw
Spike’s impatience.
“But you could rather say that I am in control of
the hub, in control of the comings and goings between dimensions.”
“How in the bloody hell
did that happen?” Spike asked, more out
of curiosity than designed insolence. It
was ludicrous for an ex-vampire to profess belief in God, but Spike did, and it
made him wonder how such a being, a shifty, shiftless, mercenary being, could
come into such control.
“Life is but a cosmic
accident,” the Hub said loftily, effectively brushing off
Spike’s question. In
reality, the Hub didn’t even know how it had
happened. But the bratty, poetic
failure of a vampire didn’t need to know that.
“I control the
dimensions like a toll road.”
“So you’re kind of like a Key,” Spike mused aloud,
thinking of Dawn. “Only a thieving skeleton key.”
“You know a Key?” The Hub clucked his tongue
and shook his head. “Well, then, that’s a buzz kill.
I was going to explain that, as well.
Moving on,” he shouted,
making both men wince. “Toll road. So what I’m telling you is that even if you lived in this world a hundred and fifty
years, two hundred years, three thousand years, you would never reconvene with
your Slayer.” He
mimed wiping a tear away and laughed when Spike growled low in his throat.
“Because this is the
dimension where you didn’t get vamped.
Because you didn’t get vamped,
you didn’t have your Slayer fetish and murder indulgence,
and so—” He spread his hands in a fait accompli gesture.
“Here you are.
Pity for you, really, blondes haves much more fun.” And
without any effort, the dark hair styled impeccably atop his large head faded
into an ashy blond.
“And so now all I have
to do is pay my toll,” Spike finished.
He ignored Laramie’s heavy sigh
behind him. “Well, then, that
doesn’t sound so bad.
What do you want from me?”
“Your soul, Willy my
boy. Is that so much to ask?”
~~~
“I can’t do it.” Willow
looked apologetically up at Wesley and spread her hands.
“I can’t do a locator spell when there are so many variables.
Maybe he’s not alive,
maybe he’s a vampire, maybe he’s not.
If I don’t even know what
kind of being he is, how can I find him, and if I can’t find him, how is Buffy ever going to know? You know, it’s just all this big
mess, and I don’t think I can handle letting her down.
Every time I talk to her on the phone, it’s like—”
“Hey.” Kennedy placed a hand over
Willow’s and looked up at Wesley imploringly.
“It’s okay, Red, take it easy.”
“I always want to fix everything,” she said
miserably. “And I can’t ever do it.”
“I dunno,” Xander said, coming in from the kitchen of the apartment.
“I’d say you did a bang-up job with the whole ‘Boom, thousands
of Slayers’ thing.”
He bit into a sandwich and grinned around it.
“You can’t argue that,” Wesley said.
“Don’t worry about the
location. I just wanted you to know
we looked. We tried to wait around
and see, but nothing came about.”
“She’s so miserable, Wesley, but she doesn’t seem to know
it. It’s like…” Willow struggled for the words and sighed. “It’s like she has all
these happy parts and then one big sad part.
It’s sorta makin’ all the happy
parts… sad.”
“Hopefully we’ll figure something out soon,” Wesley said, patting
her on the back awkwardly. “I should be going.”
Once the Watcher had left, Willow turned to her girlfriend and best
friend.
“He was the only one
who stood by her,” she said insistently.
“Wesley?” Xander asked, tossing his paper plate onto the table and earning a glare
from Kennedy.
“No,” Kennedy said, rolling her eyes. “Spike.”
She turned to Willow for affirmation.
“He was the only one
who stood by Buffy. But when do you
mean?”
It
was Willow’s turn to roll her
eyes, but she kept the gesture in check. No
matter how much she cared about Kennedy, she was still naïve. She was like a
bulldozer, doing things and never realizing what she was doing. “We kicked her out of the house when we knew it wasn’t safe. We
shunted her from the group when we were practicing safety in numbers.
We told her she was wrong, and for the millionth time, she was right.
And the only person who didn’t do that was—”
“The pussy-whipped vampire,” Kennedy finished with
a sneer. “I still say we
were right. Just because he was
trying to get on her good side even more, he—”
“Shut up, Kennedy.” Willow had been prepared to
say it herself, as much as she hated to, but it was Xander who had spoken
against the girl. “You wanna learn
a lesson about being a leader? About
being Chosen? First lesson, have
some humility.” He
stood up and crumpled the paper plate into a ball.
“Spike saved my ass, sure, but he saved yours, too.
I don’t care what you
thought of him before that, but now, shut your damned mouth.
Admit when you’re wrong.” He took a few steps away,
then turned to look at her, aiming the barb he knew would strike truest, hurt
most.
“Buffy would have known better.”
~~~
“Wow, was that ever
stupid.” Buffy
mopped her eyes with a paper towel from the roll hanging beside the sink and
looked at Kelly. “I hope you came up with a really good excuse for me.
Like… ‘She has multiple personalities. It
looks like one of them is sad today.’”
Kelly
laughed despite herself. She wanted
to suggest Buffy get help, but what kind of help could she get?
She couldn’t very well go to a psychologist and tell them the
true story. For the truth, she’d easily be committed as insane.
“I’m sorry,” Buffy finally said, sweeping her hair out of her
face with one hand and tilting her head thoughtfully. “You know, I made it almost two weeks this time.”
“What?”
“It’s been almost two weeks since I did that. Cried at random.”
Though she was smiling about it, Kelly’s heart ached for her. She
looked as though she had more to say, so Kelly sat back and prepared to listen.
“I was okay…
but I had this dream last night.”
She described, as best she could, the two men in the darkness, the plans
they were making, things she didn’t understand. “And then one looked up… and it was
though he was staring straight at me.”
Buffy shivered as the hair on the back of her neck stood on end.
“And his eyes…”
She heard her voice tremble and laughed.
“There I almost
went again.”
“What about his eyes?” Kelly prompted gently. She
might not be a psychologist, but the least she could do it help Buffy get it out
of her system.
“They were Spike’s.” She
rubbed a hand over her face, exhausted and embarrassed.
“I’m just stressed.”
Kelly
thought not. She’d been reading, doing research, and she had figured
out a long time ago that none of her dreams were just dreams.
They always meant something, indicated something.
More often than not, they indicated something wrong.
But she would do a little more research, ask around, see what she came up
with.
Kelly
also thought it was high time she found some of the other people who had been
through the Sunnydale battle.
If
Buffy was going to be helped, it had to be a two-front war.
~~~
Spike
sucked in a breath, his cheekbones standing starkly from his face.
“My soul, eh? Awfully dear
for a toll road, don’t you think?”
The
Hub shrugged negligently and took another pull from his flask as though it made
no difference to him. But he was hungry for this one, even if—
“What do you do with
them? What do you want with my
soul?” But the gears in Spike’s head were already
turning. The soul didn’t matter as much as it could have. Sure,
he’d fought to get it back, but he’d proven he could love without it, and love quite well.
He could love without a soul and with a demon.
And his soul belonged to her. No
matter what this twisted highway robber did with it, it would always belong to
her.
“Where do you think I
get all my pretty masks?” the Hub said
petulantly, sounding like a child. Sounding,
Spike thought with a shudder, like Dru. “And oh, what fun I’ll have with your pretty face.”
He morphed into a woman with a cloud of strawberry blond hair and
piercing green eyes. “The ladies love men who look like you.
Haunted eyes and all that hair.” She tipped a wink even as
she turned back into the Brooklyn rum-runner.
“Fine,” Spike said. “I’m sick of nattering about it, just get the matter
over with.”
Laramie’s breath was taken
away by the rashness, by the sheer determination of the man.
He had tried to use the Hub when Katya was turned, but couldn’t bring himself to do it.
He was too used to his soul, but moreover…
moreover, if he were taken from this dimension, someone might kill her.
The
Hub rubbed his hands together and stopped with a sharp clap.
“Let’s rock and roll,” he said gleefully,
manufacturing a piece of paper out of thin air. “Sign on the dotted line, my friend.”
The
minute Spike picked up the pen to sign, he vanished completely.
So
did Ramie.
13.12
caring and uncaring
“Rupert, wake up.”
Wesley poked at the older man’s shoulder gingerly, wondering what, precisely, he had done to deserve
wake-up duty. The two men had
red-eyed it back from London, pleading Sunnydale cleanup as their cause to leave
again. It wasn’t entirely
untrue. Weren’t Buffy’s mental state and a possibly reconstituted vampire all part of the
Sunnydale fallout?
When
Giles merely grunted and mumbled a few unimaginable Cockney curses under his
breath, Wesley lost his patience.
“Hello, Ripper,” he said in a sliding, gravelly voice completely unlike his own.
“I’ve come to take you apart, limb by limb and organ by—”
He
got no further before Giles sat straight up in bed, eyes wild.
He clamped a hand around Wesley’s throat before his eyes had even focused, but
Wesley was prepared for such an eventuality.
He slammed the heel of his hand into the crook of Giles’s elbow, forcing Giles’s arm to bend and
bringing their faces closer together. As
Giles’s eyes cleared with recognition, Wesley whipped a
hand around and gripped the nape of his elder’s neck, bringing
tears to Giles’s eyes.
“Well, now,” Giles said quietly, his free hand groping blindly for his glasses.
“I see you’ve much improved, Wesley.”
Unable
to pass up the opportunity, Wesley released Giles’s neck and
slapped the hand away from his throat. “You haven’t,” he said flatly.
“Come on.
There’s a girl on the
phone at Angel’s, a Slayer in Indiana. She’s calling about Buffy.”
He knew the less he said, the faster Giles would move, so he said no
more. The second they walked into
Angel’s office, they were
accosted by Willow.
“I told you she was
miserable!” she said accusingly to Wesley.
It was the best she could do, considering she couldn’t bring herself to look at Angel.
Angel
rubbed his eyes as he listened to the young woman’s voice pouring over the speaker phone.
Together again, he thought, looking around him.
It was as though Buffy was the tie that bound, that pulled its weight so
far as London to have them all together again.
He wondered fleetingly if there was a limit to the number of directions a
man, a vampire, could be pulled in.
He
was Angel from Sunnydale.
He
was Angel of L.A.
It
was becoming increasingly more difficult for him to keep it all separate, to
keep all of it straight. Sunnydale was taking over again.
Buffy was consuming him in her love for Spike.
~~~
Laramie
was already shouting when the brick wall materialized in front of them.
It was precisely the same wall they’d started from, only
now the sounds of automobiles and radios pounded around them, making Ramie’s head ache.
“Tenfold times three!
Threefold times ten! The
bloody Hub is where it begins and where it all ends!
If I wish to speak, to entreat, to see, I shall tell the God damned Hub
who I may be!” he shouted, whirling around to look for the Hub.
“It’s Laramie, vous foutu batard, you bloody bastard!”
“Now, now,” the Hub’s new voice, thin and
reedy, purely British, reached Ramie’s ears as a painfully
thin young man with a green mohawk and a shard of black glass dangling from his
left ear came striding down the sidewalk. The
safety pins and buckles that adorned him from head to toe jingled slightly as he
sidled to a halt. “Patience. I can’t be all places at once, Alain.”
Though it basically a lie, it was entertaining.
“Why am I here?
Mon dieu, you brought me along with—” For the first time since
they’d traveled, Ramie thought of Spike.
“Oh, dear God.”
Ignoring the Hub, he knelt on the dirty stones of the alleyway and
touched a gentle hand to Spike’s pallid cheek. Bruises had
purpled beneath his eyes and his trembling lips were nearly white.
“What has happened?” Ramie turned to the Hub, his mossy eyes bright with rage and worry.
“What in the hell
have you done?”
The
Hub tilted his head and stroked his hairless chin.
“I have sent a
traveler on his way. I never said
the trip would be easy or the payment easily given.”
Laramie
stood, towering over the punk the Hub had presented himself as.
Though such attire should have been bizarre to a man from more than a
century ago, Ramie immediately associated him with various demons and ignored
the anomaly of dress and appearance. “And me? Why am I here?” Even as he asked the
question, though, he felt a fierce sense of gladness that he was there.
Not only for William, but also because his obligation to Ekaterina had
been taken away from him by someone else. It
was harder to feel guilty if it was an accident.
Or it was at least easier to dismiss the guilt.
The
Hub feigned shock. “My dear Alain, surely you don’t think I would leave a soulless wretch—”
He nudged Spike with his toe—“To wander the earth alone.”
Ramie
bared his straight, white teeth in a low growl.
“Don’t pretend you are tender of heart, greed-demon.
You gave me a free ride, you have to have a reason.”
The
Hub reached out with a corded, tattooed arm and grasped the lapel of Ramie’s now antique wool
coat. “You have too
many questions, Watcher. Usually I
would answer you just for the pleasure of demonstrating that I know more than
you idiot humans. But this is
bigger than me.” Letting
Ramie go with a jerk, he sneered. “Your traveler here apparently requires guidelines and a companion.
Lucky you.”
The rules forced upon him had made him angry, indeed.
He’d never been sanctioned before, never been restrained.
Something
bigger than the Hub? Before Ramie
could process that bit of information, the punk-rocking Hub was gone and Spike
was waking.
~~~
“This is very bad.” Buffy looked at the paper
in front of her and back at Dawn. “I can’t believe this.”
“Oh, come on,” Dawn said, rolling her eyes. She
hadn’t even wanted to give Buffy the teacher’s note. It wasn’t like they were hard to hide, or anything. She’d hidden teacher’s notes all the
time back in Sunnydale, forged Buffy’s signature, faked all
sorts of things like that.
“When did you become a
brainiac?” Buffy demanded, waving the paper and trying to
keep her glee from leaping out of her in a shout. If she showed her sister how completely and totally great it
was that she was a freakin’ genius, then Dawn
would surely back away from it.
“Umm…
somewhere between Key and Ubervamp.”
Dawn smiled sheepishly.
“They want you to take
college courses. Two years ahead of
time. That’s just…
wow.”
Buffy looked up at Dawn and nodded thoughtfully.
“Think we ought
to frame this?”
“Buffy, no!” Mortified, Dawn tried to snatch the paper back from Buffy.
“I shouldn’t have even brought it home. I’m not planning on doing it.”
Now
was the time for brawn over brains, Buffy thought, planting her hands on her
hips. “Ohhh, no you don’t.
I don’t care if you’re not planning on doing it. You’ll do it anyway.”
At Dawn’s petulant look,
she added, “I can turn you over my knee.”
After
hugging her younger sister hard enough to make her back pop, Buffy rushed to the
telephone and starting trying to call anyone and everyone to relay the good
news.
But
everywhere she called, no one picked up their phones.
Xander and Will’s apartment got no answer, as did Giles’s place in
London. Though she hated to call,
she got a busy signal at Angel’s.
Lastly, she got a busy signal at Kelly’s, too.
“Huh,” Buffy said, staring at the phone. “That’s weird.” With a shrug, she hung it
up.
~~~
His
first thought was that he hurt like a motherfucker and that someone was going to
pay. He opened first one eye,
wincing at the pain that pulsed with each heartbeat he had.
The light seemed to be attacking his eye in waves, so he opened the other
one to distribute some of the shock.
All that did was double it.
“Bloody fuckin’ hell,” he said, trying to sit up.
He was hotter than a bitch in heat, and the jacket he was wearing itched
like a—
“Spike?”
Spike
jerked, smacking his head against the brick wall behind him and cursing
colorfully. As he narrowed his eyes
at the man standing in front of him, he discovered the added benefit that
squinting just so blocked out a good portion of the light.
“Peachy,” he muttered, studying Laramie. “You’re Ramie,” he said
matter-of-factly.
Good,
Laramie thought. At least he hasn’t forgotten me. “Right so far,” he said, hunkering down and looking at Spike. “We made it. The
Hub sent us over.”
“You mean the fuckin’ Godfather?” Spike asked, struggling to his feet.
Laramie
was trying to hide his excitement. Though
he didn’t understand
Spike’s last remark, the soullessness didn’t seem to be making much of a difference, and as odd as that was, it
simplified things greatly. “So you know where… when we are?
And why?”
Spike
touched a hand to his head and felt a great, gaping hole re-open inside of him.
It was like dying, only greater, like losing Buffy, only deeper.
It was like…
regaining his soul only to lose it again.
“I came to find Buffy,” he said wonderingly. “Only now…” He
struggled to find the words, tilting his empty eyes to Ramie’s. “Only now it’s like I can’t find it in me to care.”
14.13
asking and anwsering
Her head felt like it
was going to explode.
How
in the world was she supposed to remember everything they’d told her? Kelly
supposed, in a way, it was all her fault. After
all, she had wanted to know the whole story in order to help her friend.
It wasn’t anyone’s fault that the “whole story” turned out to be hopelessly complicated and
completely bizarre, even for a Slayer.
She’d had to take notes to
remember it all.
Now
she looked at the page she’d scribbled
about Spike, whom Kelly deemed the most important part of the whole story.
He was the knight, the champion, the man who had saved the world.
He had fought to gain a soul so he could better love Buffy, and he had
died in the nobility which that soul had given him.
That was, at least, the impression that Kelly had gleaned from the myriad
people who had spoken to her. But
she thought perhaps they didn’t have a good grasp on things, as an outsider
would.
It
seemed to her that Spike’s nobility had
come before the soul, not the other way around.
And
the worst part of it was, Buffy had more or less watched him die.
“She didn’t actually love him,” the girl called
Kennedy had conjectured brashly. “She just felt obligated.”
There had been murmurs then, of dissent, but a few of agreement.
The man named Robin—Robin Wood, the thought still made Kelly giggle—had agreed.
And shockingly enough, the other vampire with a soul had went right along
with them.
But
Kelly, newcomer though she was, had more to say about that.
“That’s where you’re wrong,” she said softly,
shocked at how the commotion on the other end died down.
“You don’t cry yourself to sleep every night over a man you felt obligated to.” Forgive me for telling on
you, Buffy, she had thought as she said it.
And
there was a chance that he was alive, and human.
The thought made Kelly’s heart quicken in her chest, with both hope and fear for her friend.
No wonder things had been worse for her lately.
Kelly
was more mixed up than she had been when she called, but now, at least, she
could help. She was another ear
kept to the ground, another set of eyes watching for the return of the man whom
Buffy mourned for.
~~~
“I don’t know that I can call these better,” Laramie plucked
at the white tee-shirt and dark jeans he was wearing.
“They’re not precisely comfortable, are they?”
Spike
rolled a cigarette between his fingers, looking at it as though confused.
Finally, he looked up at Laramie. “You look like a model. You
should suck in your cheeks like a nancy.”
He demonstrated but didn’t respond when Laramie followed suit.
This
was not, Laramie thought, what he would have thought soullessness was like.
The man wasn’t violent, he wasn’t mean, he was
just… blank. He
had the same knowledge, the same conversational quirks, the same thoughts, but…
there was no pleasure in them or reason behind them.
If
Laramie had known of such things, he would have said that conversing with Spike
was like conversing with a robot. Tired
of trying out small talk on his passionless friend, he changed tactics.
“Why don’t you care if you find
Buffy or not?”
Spike
shrugged and felt that great, yawning pit inside him stretch its walls a little
more. “Does it matter? It doesn’t. She’s somewhere,
doing something, probably with
someone else. It’s just another
day, you know.”
The
Hub didn’t take your bloody
soul, Laramie thought. He just took
part of it… your hope. Your
pleasure. He took what you call
your heart. The thought made his
eyes water and his stomach churn. Something
had to be done, but the Hub was unbeatable.
Only…
Only the Hub had admitted something bigger was out there, and that Spike
was involved in it. <And he
needed a companion,> Laramie thought. So
a companion he would be. “Well, it is too
bad you feel that way, mon ami. For
you and I, we are finding your Buffy no matter what you say.” He looked for something,
anything to change in the formerly bright eyes of his friend, but nothing
shifted, nothing changed.
“I don’t want to do anything, and you bloody well can’t make me.” Spike glared at Laramie,
his brows drawn into a stark frown.
Ramie
bit the inside of his cheek to keep from smiling.
Anger, at least, was something apparently not rooted completely in the
soul. And if anger would fuel him,
then so be it. “I do not know as that’s the truth,
William, but we will see.”
He was tempted to call the Hub again, force him to tell them where Buffy
was. But he knew the Hub would give
him only evasions, so he did the only thing he knew to do.
He
headed for the Council.
~~~
For
the first night since the averted Apocalypse, Buffy went patrolling.
She and Kelly strolled side-by-side, each with a stake in their pockets
and a not-so-secret yearning for a fight in their hearts.
“You know,” Buffy said, fingering the smooth wood of the stake she clasped loosely, “For the first time in my life, I say I wish we were near a Hellmouth.”
“Spoken like a true
psycho,” Kelly judged, looking around.
“Or a true native of
the Hellmouth.”
“Not a native,” Buffy insisted petulantly. “Just a very bored Slayer looking for something to turn into a pile of
dust.”
“It’s Indiana. People die in
hunting and boating accidents around here,” Kelly laughed.
“No one gets vamped.”
“It’d be a hell of a lot easier to get you all trained up if they did,” Buffy muttered. “C’mon. Graveyard.” When
they made it to the town’s sprawling cemetery, however, it seemed as though
some of the fight had been taken out of Buffy.
She approached a huge, marble crypt, running her finger over the
engravings in the door.
“You don’t ever talk to me about him,” Kelly said quietly,
standing beside her. “Maybe if you talked, it would be easier…”
“I don’t want it to be easier,” Buffy said, the words
surprising her. Going with the
train of thought that had started, she added, “If it’s easier, I might forget. I
don’t want to forget him, ever.”
Nothing
seemed appropriate to say after that, and so the two Slayers, two of many,
walked in silence in the humid Indiana air.
~~~
“Something’s wrong.” Willow
sat up in the middle of the night, the orbs of her eyes briefly flashing black.
“Things are
shifting.” She
pressed a hand to the pit of her stomach and raised her eyebrows at the
butterflies she felt there.
Kennedy
had already been awake. It seemed
harder and harder to get to sleep these days.
She went out with Angel and his crew now and then, fighting when they
needed fighters and…
well, not much more than that. They
treated her as superfluous, though she’d never admit she was. But
when she was with Willow, or any of the people left over from Sunnydale, she may
as well have been invisible. Days
and nights were consumed by Buffy, and Kennedy was starting to wonder if maybe
it had always been that way. Maybe
she’d just been too hardheaded to see it.
Keep on pushing, a tiny, niggling voice was telling her, keeping her
awake. Keep on pushing, and they’ll hate you before long.
She
knew when she was wrong. It was just easier to twist things around until she was right
than to apologize for her flaws. Now,
however, her lover was her prime concern.
“What’s the matter, Red?”
She put a bracing arm around the witch’s shoulders.
“I haven’t felt like this since the stirrings of the First,” Willow said. “Only… I don’t think this is bad.” She rubbed her stomach
again and shot a shaky smile at Kennedy. “It’s just…
powers are shifting, things are happening.
It makes me wonder what’s going on.”
“Hopefully nothing that
involves us,” Kennedy said, pulling Willow down to her and
stroking a hand through her hair. “But I’ve been having dreams. Just flashes, really, nothing I can put my finger on.”
“Well,” Willow said, somehow comforted by the fact that she wasn’t the only one feeling things, “At least we won’t ever be bored.”
Kennedy
grinned and slid her hand down Willow’s body in the dark. “Honey, you’ll never be bored with me.”
15.14
coming and goings
“Sum corpus,” Ramie said when
they reached what he thought had been the Council in his time.
It was hard to tell, with the new storefronts and painted walls, added
buildings and large glass windows. A
small slot slid open in the door and a very shocked pair of brown eyes looked
back at him.
“Wh-who are you?
How did you know we were here?” The eyes skittered back and
forth, accompanying the nervousness of the man’s voice.
Ramie’s brow furrowed as he
leaned a bit closer to the door. It
didn’t slip by his notice that the man on the other side
jerked back as though bitten. “This is where the Council always was—at least a long
time ago.” How
in the hell was he supposed to explain this?
And of course, Spike wasn’t helping at all, but
rather smoking those nasty little white tubes, one after the other, and throwing
the remnants all over the street.
“Listen,” Ramie said, planting one large hand next to the watchman’s slot. “I refuse to
stand on the street like a commoner while I shout into you.
I will tell you as much as I want to, and you will let me in.
Understood?” When the man nodded
convulsively, Ramie plowed ahead. “Have you any knowledge of someone or something referred to as the Hub?”
The
man’s eyes grew impossibly
wide and the sounds of a key turning in a lock were audible through the thick
door. “You! It is you who summoned
the Hub.” He
threw open the door, a thick-bodied man who looked more like a blacksmith than
someone who would be working for the Council.
“We have had word of you.”
Word?
Ramie frowned in thought. Who
would give word to the Council about the Hub?
The
guard glanced at Spike, a mixture of awe and horror on his face.
“This is ‘im, then? The one who paid
with ‘is—”
“Yes,” Ramie interrupted the man, not caring to hear how he would finish his
sentence. Spike still stood on the
street, regarding the two other men as calmly as he might have regarded paint
drying. Flicking yet another
cigarette butt away, he drew out another whole one.
Ramie
had had enough. He slapped the
cigarette out of Spike’s hand, watching
Spike’s eyes narrow in anger. “I refuse to watch you smoke another one of those
horrid things with their eye-watering stench.
They are not good for you. Try
and remember you have the body of a human now.”
Though he had worked hard to avoid it, he was still speaking in a tone of
voice appropriate for a child. No
matter what the incongruence, though, it seemed to work.
Spike
shifted his weight from one foot to the other and leaned forward, his face close
to Ramie’s.
It was odd, Ramie thought, to see the gentle-looking man with his long
poet’s face and his curly,
boyish locks, and then to look in his eyes, an ever-changing blue that should
have been charming but was instead bored and vacant. For a small moment, Ramie thought Spike would try and hit
him, or attack him in some other way, but all he did was open his mouth and let
a single puff of lingering smoke waft into Ramie’s face.
“Charming,” Ramie sneered, snatching the pack of cigarettes away from Spike and
dragging him into the Council building.
“This isn’t our regular building,” the guard said
hastily, leading them through corridors Ramie still found familiar.
“The other one got
bombed.”
“Bombed?” Ramie repeated
incredulously.
“Eh, I remember that.” Spike put in flatly, still
glaring at the back of Laramie’s head.
Bloody ponce had lifted his smokes.
“In this room, please.” The guard gestured to a
room, ushered them in, and then made a quick exit.
“Well, well.” A tall, thin man stood up
from the table, stopping in mid-conversation with two young Watchers.
“So you’re the ones who summoned the Hub, and now you’ve managed to
get into our… offices ad temporum.
Care to tell me who you are?”
His cultured voice held nearly no accent, the mark of a much-traveled
man. Before Ramie could answer,
Spike had withdrawn the sealed papers Ramie had given him and tossed them on the
table.
“That is all you need
to know,” he said carelessly, shrugging a shoulder and
turning to Ramie. “Now can we leave? This place
makes my fucking skin itch.”
The
tall, silver-haired man took the papers but kept his eyes on Spike.
“And here is the soulless wonder.”
He gestured subtly to the two men he’d been conversing with, watching expressionlessly as they jumped up from
the table and grabbed Spike.
“You’re absolutely right,” he said in a quiet,
pleasant tone of voice, keeping his eyes on Spike. “That’s all we need to know.
Take him away.”
~~~
“Buffy!” Dawn
burst into the house, a rush of spangled tank-top and long, smooth hair.
“Buffy?” Her voice was reaching the
upper octaves, so Buffy knew something was either seriously wrong or seriously
right.
She
stopped in mid-kick with Kelly and rolled her eyes.
“Sorry.
Sibling emergency.”
Throwing open the door to the extra bedroom, which was the makeshift
training room, she looked at Dawn. Seeing
the panicked look in her sister’s eyes, she stepped forward and grabbed her arms.
“Dawnie, tell me what’s wrong.”
“Vampires, at the
college,” Dawn gasped, pressing a hand to her chest.
She was on her second week of advanced courses at the local college, and
it had been on the campus that she’d seen them. “They aren’t all lumpy or anything, but I could tell…
there were two of them, they were strange.
I knew…”
“All right,” Buffy said calmly, glancing at Kelly, whose face had gone ashen.
“Hmm…
strange looking college gang. Are
you sure they weren’t just philosophy
majors?” She
felt a cool tide of relief wash over her at her sister’s small smile.
“Positive.
Please, you need to go now.”
Buffy
didn’t need to be told
again. Tucking a stake into her
sleeve, she headed out of the house at a trot.
“Stay in the house,” she called over her
shoulder, gesturing impatiently to Kelly. The
younger Slayer wanted a fight, she would have one.
She
was in a full-out run by the time they reached the campus.
“None too soon,” Buffy muttered, hearing a woman’s scream.
The
two vampires never expected interference until they were flung away from their
prey in mid-bite. “Hey!” one of them said
loudly.
“Awww,” Buffy said sympathetically, prowling around the vampire as she twirled
her stake. “Yeah, I hate it
when people interrupt my meals, too.”
Not waiting to finish her sentence, she kicked the vampire square in the
chest, sending him stumbling back.
Kelly
couldn’t think of a single
thing to say, or a single reason to make conversation with the lumpy-looking,
yellow-eyed creature in front of her. She
just wanted it gone, and preferably by someone else’s hand. But she was a
Slayer, and Slayers did not delegate. She
launched herself in the air, raising her left knee. The vampire ducked to her right as she predicted, so she
pistoned her left leg back to the ground and kicked hard with her right.
She contacted squarely with his chin, sending his head snapping back.
She staked him while he was still trying to gain his bearings, wincing at
the cloud of dust that settled on her. As
soon as her adrenaline-sharpened senses settled into some semblance of
normality, she heard the most incredible thing on earth.
Buffy…
was lecturing… the vampire.
“I’m really amazed—” KICK “That you would have the nerve to come to a town—” PUNCH, ROLL “In which two Slayers live.”
SPIN, KICK “You know, you must not have that whole vampire
networking thing going on.”
So saying, she sped the stake toward his chest, stabbing and withdrawing
without looking. As the dust rained around her, she turned back to Kelly.
Kelly’s mouth hung open in
an ungainly gape. “Do you… is it… are you always
like that?”
Buffy
stared at her blankly, then scowled in annoyance at the dusty smudge left on her
black pants. “Darn it! These
are dry-clean only.”
Brushing at them, she kept her eyes on Kelly.
“I’m sorry… what were you saying?”
“It was like…
it was fun for you. You were having
fun with that… thing.
You were playing with it.”
Buffy
shrugged and smiled as though it was the simplest thing in the world.
“Hey, I figure the more I change it up, the less likely I am to burn out.
You didn’t do so bad
yourself.”
“Um…
yeah,” Kelly said, and
promptly turned to throw up on the ground.
~~~
“Grab a bag, we’re leaving.” Giles
slammed into Wesley’s room without pausing, his car keys in his hand.
“If you don’t grab your bag, you’ll just have to go
naked, I’m afraid.”
“I don’t suppose you would mind telling me what we’re in such a mad
rush for?” Wesley said pleasantly, though he was already
gathering his things.
“I don’t suppose I would, Wesley, if you’d just hurry as
I do so. I was just contacted by
the Council. Two men have entered
the Council, one of them claiming to be a Watcher from two centuries ago, the
other belligerent but saying nothing useful.
The one who claims to be a Watcher says they came by Hub.
Now, if you’re quite up to
speed—”
“What are we waiting
for?” Wesley asked, walking out the door ahead of Giles.
16.15
hoping and dreaming
“What?”
Laramie started forward, only to be stopped by the older gentleman’s hand on his arm.
“Laramie?” Spike looked up, his eyes
wide, confused, and very, very William.
Without
thinking, Laramie plowed his fist into the Councilman’s face, ducking under his arm and reaching Spike’s captors, one of whom Spike was already fighting with a mechanical
determination that sent a chill down Laramie’s spine.
The nineteenth-century Watcher brought the side of his hand down on one
young man’s wrist, making the
young Council member howl in pain and release his quarry.
Spike
bared his teeth in a growl, slamming his hand into the other Watcher’s nose and feeling a
sick sort of satisfaction when he felt bones crunch. He reared his fist back, lips peeled away from his teeth as
he breathed heavily through his mouth. He
was going to hit the guy again, and again; if he just kept hitting him, there
would be something, right? Some
kind of—
He
was yanked off the man, thrown aside. Laramie
swept his dark, long hair out of his face, and his eyes signaled rage, clear and
deadly. “What are you doing? You wish to stay here forever, you simpleton?
Or perhaps you wish to become a murderer again.” He
turned, leaping over the unconscious men lying on the floor, and exited the
room, leaving Spike to follow him.
Stupid,
he cursed himself. Stupid for bringing him here, to the Council.
They would have killed him if given the chance, because it was in the
rules. It was in the rules that
anyone without a soul was considered an “other.” An
enemy.
“They didn’t know we were coming.”
Spike caught up with Ramie outside the building.
“Seems like they
would have known you’d go there first, brainy ponces that they are.” He was cruising on the
adrenaline of the moment, relishing the burst of energy it had given him.
“The Council…
the Council in my time… they would not have made
note of you, of your plea. And once
I disappeared, they would have erased every record of me in case I had taken the
Hub. Though this is a different
time, they would not take the risk.”
He rubbed his eyes and slowed his pace a bit.
“They told you,
William, they would not aid you in creating paradoxes.
They would not tolerate their own, either.”
“And they wouldn’t tolerate me, eh? As a
soulless human, I s’pose I’m the biggest paradox
they’ve seen.”
Spike grinned joylessly, and the thin tether Ramie had placed on himself
snapped.
“Are you in there
somewhere? Anywhere?” He grabbed Spike by the
shoulders and shook as hard as he could, sending the floppy curls into disarray,
shaking the sneering grin off his face. “Or am I cursed to be the bloody handmaid of an
empty husk for the rest of my life?” Frustrated,
he tossed Spike aside and muttered, “I’ll let your precious
buggerin’ Slayer take care of you.”
“I don’t like it any more than you do,” Spike called after
him, causing the Watcher to stop. “I still remember her, Ramie. But
now all I remember… all I remember and feel from
her are the bad things. The things
that were wrong between us.”
“What things?” Ramie kept his back to
Spike, listening intently.
“The fighting.
The bloody declarations of hatred.” His voice dropped to a
rasp, but his next words were audible. “The time I almost raped her even as I claimed I loved her.” Silence ticked by, and he
added, “And now that’s what I am
again.”
And
that’s why you need me,
Laramie thought silently, turning back to Spike. “So do you want to find her?”
Spike
laughed, a bitter, humorless sound, but when he spoke next, it was William who
supplied the words, as it had always been.
Spike’s moments of
eloquence had always, always been holdovers from an educated, rejected young man
who had been too close to his mother.
“Even the bad moments
with her were better than my best moments without her.
I can’t feel it now,
but I know what it felt like, Watcher. I
don’t need my soul to know I needed her.
I never needed my soul to tell me I needed to feed, did I?
And now, I still know what she is to me, and it’s just…
a fact, a barren fact. But I’ll find her, even if, even though I don’t have it in me to care, just as you eat when you are not hungry, or talk
when you’ve nothing to say.”
He clutched a hand into his curls, and the uncertain, needy voice of
William poured out.
“I-I have lost
something, and I am not at all certain how to get it back.” His eyes met Laramie’s, the pain evident in them, and he tilted his head.
“You promised you would
help me, did you not? That was you?”
Laramie
dropped a trembling hand to his friend’s shoulder and prayed for the strength to keep his promises.
“That was me.”
~~~
“Well, this is a
completely unpleasant and not altogether surprising situation I find you all in.” Giles
looked at the trio of bruised and broken men gathered in the small room of the
Council’s makeshift offices and shook his head.
His voice hardened in a rare show of temper.
“Why do you think
so many of us defied the Council, left you when we had to, why do you think my
Slayer disobeyed you time and time again?”
When he was given no answer, his voice raised to a roar.
“You’re too bloody stubborn. There is no black and white, gentlemen, there are shades in
between, and you lack the finesse and the imagination to comprehend as such.”
Wesley
felt like applauding but kept it to himself.
Instead he stood in the doorway, arms crossed, an expression of cool
distaste etched on his features.
“I am ashamed of you.
I am ashamed of the fact that there are idiots like you protecting
mankind.”
He took off his glasses and rubbed a hand over his tired eyes.
He felt travel-worn, his eyes grainy and his skin too tight. “I am ashamed to be associated with you.”
“We told you there
might be someone,” Wesley said.
“There were two men.” The older gentleman, Ian,
finally spoke up, touching long, elegant fingers to his split lip.
“You said there would
be one man.”
“We promised nothing,” Wesley said casually, crossing the room to look down at Ian.
“You say one of them
was a Watcher and the other was lacking his soul. They came to you for help and you attacked them.”
Neither
Ian nor his two helpers had any response for that.
“We’re wasting time,” Giles said quietly.
“We need to look
for them.”
“This will come to no
good,” Ian cried out, standing up.
“You have no rules, you
have no standards. Being a rogue
never got anyone into anything but trouble.”
“It’s gotten us out of more than one Apocalypse,” Giles said
quietly. “During which you
undoubtedly stood around wondering how on earth you were going to help without
getting your skirts dirty.”
It
would have been a perfect exit if Wesley hadn’t laughed.
~~~
“All right, everyone, I’ve got some news.”
At the scattered moans that went through the group, Buffy rolled her
eyes. “It’s good news, and it will only take a minute.
The class has gotten so large—” A cheer went through the group at this. “That I’m going to have to
split it up. Those of you switched
to the earlier class will have a different instructor.”
Protests started at a low roar and increased in volume.
Though it dismayed her to think she’d disappoint the people she had come to care about,
it gave Buffy a little thrill to know they were so attached to her.
She’d never had so many
people attached to her, ever. And
if she died, she knew there wouldn’t just be someone else
called to replace her immediately.
“Hey,” she raised her voice so they could hear her. “It’s not so bad.
It’s someone you know.” Gesturing to Kelly, she
grinned. “See?
It’s Kelly!
Now all the guys can check out her butt easier, she’ll be in the front of a class.”
“Buffy,” Kelly hissed, barely resisting the urge to put her hands over the
mentioned part.
“We have sign-up sheets
outside the class,” Buffy added.
“Now go home!”
As
the people filed out of the classroom, Kelly sighed miserably.
“No one’s going to sign up for my class,” she said.
“They all love you too
much.”
“Nah.” Buffy smiled at Kelly and
added, “Trust me, plenty of people have found it easy
enough to leave me.”
Kelly
said nothing, but thought of the people in Los Angeles who were working their
butts off to help the legendary Slayer. No,
she doubted it was easy for anyone at all to let go of Buffy.
She
hoped, for Buffy’s sake, that
would hold true for one person in particular.
She’d been having dreams, every other night like
clockwork, that showed her two men in various places, with various people.
One
of them couldn’t be described
as anything but beautiful, his skin a dusky gold color, his eyes too pale for
her to pin down a color, and his hair inky black and spilling around his
shoulders. He looked angry, he
looked sad, he looked hopeful.
The
other was a man with a chiseled face and cheekbones Kelly herself would have
killed for. More often than not,
his mouth was in a pouty smirk and his sandy hair was in complete chaos.
There was little to him, though, little action, little passion, and when
he turned, she could see that his eyes were a bright, shocking blue.
“His eyes,” Buffy had said insistently when she’d spoken of her
own dream, and Kelly could see now why she had.
There
were ghosts in those eyes, ghosts and demons and pain and… suffering that needed to be eased.
Kelly
was fairly certain her dreams held the one person who didn’t find it easy to leave Buffy.
finished
AUTHER :WHERE IS THE TRUE