PRINCIPAL WOOD: Nice coat. Where'd you get it?
SPIKE: New York.

                         Get It Done

 

    New York.

    An endless stream of moving cars, barreling trucks, bustling crowds, flapping pigeons. Roaring subways, blaring sirens, auto horns and shouting and music. Exhaust and trash and sweating bodies, coffee and pizza and spicy street vendors. Dirt and grime and grit and litter, broken bottles, broken sidewalks, broken people.

    Spike hadn’t been here in years, but he remembered. Couldn’t bloody forget no matter how he tried.

    Buffy was tired, but the city intrigued her. “They’re so much taller than LA.”

    “What?”

    “The buildings.”

    They were in a taxi, heading from Grand Central Station. Buffy had told the taxi driver the name of a hotel one of the girls had recommended, but Spike was still unsure. “Do we really want a hotel, love?” He looked out at the glittering lights of nighttime New York. “I mean, they’re expensive, and we don’t know whether that Consecrated demon is still on the move. We need the codex to track it, and what if this Crowley guy wants money for it?”

    “He’s a watcher. Or he was. He’s not going to charge a slayer for information she needs to hunt a demon.”

    “The Consecrated. An incredibly rare demon, that haunts churches, eats only the pious, and can only be tracked by a vampire,” Spike said. “Sounds like a valuable set of information to me.”

    “He isn’t demanding money. He wouldn’t have called us in if he was.”

    “He didn’t call us in. He called you in.” Spike looked back out the window. “Maybe we should have called Angel.”

    Buffy raised her eyebrows, surprised. Angel didn’t really work with them much and... it was Angel. “You’re kidding, right?”

    “No.”

    “Spike, what’s wrong?”

    Spike stared at the city. “It’s Crowley.”

    “And?”

    Spike finally looked back at her. “Bernard Crowley might have problems trusting me with anything.”

    “And I say again,” Buffy said, “he was a watcher. He knows better. We can afford a good hotel, Spike.”

    “I suppose we can,” Spike said. “But it might be easier to accept Tori’s invitation.” Tori was a member of Buffy’s slayer army, who had grown up in New York, and offered to let Spike and Buffy sleep in her mother’s basement spare room.

    “And maybe tomorrow we will,” Buffy said. “In the meantime, I want a hotel for tonight.”

    Spike shook his head. “Hotels bother me. They always have checkout at high-bloody-noon. We have to pay for two nights just to get a decent day’s sleep. Tori’s mum gets that I’m a vamp– day sleeper,” he stopped himself, glancing at the taxi driver, who wasn’t paying the least attention. “It might be better to stay in the loop, keep in contact with the army, as it were.”

    “Why don’t you want to be alone with me?” Buffy asked.

    “That’s not it. I just like slayer-folk, they can be fun,” Spike said. What he really wanted was not to be alone at all. A bustling house full of slayer-folk would ensure a full evening of cards and chatting both before and after visiting Crowley. But Buffy looked at him pointedly. “What?”

    “You’ve lost count on the trip, haven’t you.”

    “What do you mean?” Spike asked.

    Buffy smiled at him under coquettishly hooded lids. “Day fourteen.”

    Spike looked at her blankly, and then realization flickered into his face. Much better offer than cards, that was. “Right. Hotel. Definitely hotel. With bloody good walls.”

    
***

    One of the stranger things about being a serious partner to a vampire had been the integration of what Spike called blood games into their bedroom routine. A small amount of feeding, just a little touch of a bite. It was dangerous, but heady, and it was hard to stop once they’d started.

    The first time they’d done it hadn’t been very controlled. He’d been careful not to take too much, but logistics hadn’t been arranged. It hadn’t been that kind of night. A deep need had arisen instinctually in Buffy on the eve of battle, some slayer’s instinct to strengthen her best warrior, much as it had many years before, when Angel had been ill. Buffy and Spike. Slayer and vampire on the same side, and in the same bed. It had been a bond of trust between them on both sides, a sharing of strength, and it had proved deeply beneficial at the time. But that had been special circumstances. The problem was, it was hot.

    It wasn’t until they’d established a longer term regular relationship that included such things that it quickly became clear they needed to set up some serious guidelines.

    The rules were important for several reasons. The biggest reason being, Buffy loved it. It wouldn’t have been an issue if it was something that did nothing for her. Spike loved her too much to demand anything she didn’t like. He would have been perfectly content to live completely without it, or to restrict himself to kissing away any scrapes or cuts she got in the normal course of her slaying duties. If she was simply okay with it, but it didn’t do much for her, they could have done it once or twice a year on very special occasions, and never have to think about it otherwise. But she loved it. She wanted it. She all but mourned if she couldn’t get it. She got off on his hunger, his closeness, the love and trust, and yes, even the pain. Not to mention the natural anesthetic venom that demon-kind had thoughtfully integrated into a vampire’s saliva. It calmed her mind, sealed the bonds between them, let her play safely with the danger all slayers had a yen for without really risking herself, and gave her a serious rush.

    This was dangerous, and Spike had warned her exactly how dangerous it could be. He wasn’t worried on his own account. He was no fledgling. He knew how to control himself, knew how much blood to take safely, but the problems weren’t simply in knowing not to take too much. Blood junkies often died young. Buffy had already proven herself prone to addiction when it came to Spike, so her appetite for his appetite was not something they could simply indulge whenever they felt like it. Besides that, there was the risk of anemia, of scar tissue, of her overall health. She was fortunate in that she was a slayer – accelerated healing and hyper-immunity were part of the deal. So long as they didn’t indulge in the venom rush too often the physical affects of addiction should never manifest – an occasional drinker is not an alcoholic. So they did a little research, and set up some basic rules.

    Avoiding alcohol, adding supplemental iron and protein to help with skin regeneration and platelet count, and keeping up her fluids were easy prices to pay for safety in blood play. And funnily enough, treating the bite with peroxide helped prevent scarring, which made Spike’s hair seem that much more apropos.

    They did some more research into how often it was safe to indulge, and came to the conclusion that the eight-week waiting period maintained by the Red Cross was a little too conservative, particularly for a slayer. Spike tended not to take as much as a whole pint, for one. For another, Buffy healed faster than an ordinary human, and they made the assumption that, given her job-description, that would include blood-renewal. So long as she ingested the raw materials in her diet, she should be able to replenish herself more quickly.

    That, taken into account with her menstrual cycle, had resulted in an obvious rhythm, and Spike confessed she tended to taste a little sweeter, a little spicier, and smelled just a bit more appetizing when her hormones were high. This meant day fourteen, right in the center of her cycle. It became a regular date with them, and the few times they’d skipped it, due to conflicts or circumstances, they’d both missed it.

    It was precious. Once a month, twelve times a year, their bonds were renewed, their trust demonstrated, their blood and bodies merged along with their lives and their souls. It was never done hurriedly, or lightly. It was sacred, and they gave themselves privacy and ample time to savor each other.

    It was not something that could be done quietly in someone else’s basement guestroom.

***
    
    They settled into their hotel room, with Do Not Disturb firmly on the door, and the chain on for good measure. “You forgot,” Buffy said. “I can’t believe you forgot. You usually keep better count than I do.”

    “I don’t keep count at all,” Spike said. “I just pay attention.” He came up and touched her throat. “You smell different. You always smell delicious. The fourteenth day, you smell delectable.”

    “You know, that smelling thing is just so weird,” Buffy said.

    “Hey, normal men can smell that about women,” Spike said. “Just ask around.”

    “Really?”

    “Yeah. Suddenly a bird they’re around every day will just rock ‘em hard, so to speak. They don’t always know why, but it’s very there.”

    “Oh,” Buffy said. She reached out for another strawberry. They’d ordered room service before they’d specified Do Not Disturb, and Buffy was working on her fruit-plate dessert. “So why didn’t you notice?”

    Spike shrugged. “New York is distracting.”

    “Didn’t you live here for a while?”

    “Yeah, in the seventies. Punk scene.”

    “It would be.”

    “Anyway, it’s loud and busy, and there are lots of smells. I hadn’t had a moment to really appreciate you.” Spike came up and sat by her feet, pulling them into his lap. He pulled off her socks and started to massage her feet, partly therapeutically, partly sensually. He worked the ache from the day’s travel out of her muscles, while occasionally sliding up her leg or caressing her ankle. A few times Buffy shuddered when something tickled, or felt particularly nice, and she hummed contentedly when he found a sore spot, and eased it. After a bit he lifted one foot and gently bit at her ankle.

    Buffy cringed delightedly and pulled her feet back, creeping up on him along the sofa like a hunting lioness. “Do you appreciate me now?” Buffy asked, straddling his lap.

    “Always,” Spike said. “Every moment I can steal.”

    Buffy slid her hands down his torso and pulled his shirt up over his head. He helped her shrug it off his arms, and then put them around her as she sank onto his chest. Spike kissed the top of her head and sighed, more than content to just hold her for a moment. After a long while, Buffy looked up. “You okay?” she asked.

    “Why wouldn’t I be?”

    “Well, you’re clearly distracted,” Buffy said. “And you’re starting this awfully slow.”

    “I usually take it slow,” Spike said.

    Buffy raised an eyebrow.

    “When something’s bothering me,” Spike said, with rueful realization. Under ordinary circumstances, he probably would have been scratching her already. “So sue me, pet, I find you comforting.”

    “What you need comforting for?”

    He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter.”

    “Talk to me, honey. What’s worrying you? Seeing Crowley tomorrow?”

    “Wouldn’t it worry you?” Spike asked.

    Buffy held his head with one hand, caressing his jaw with her thumb. She stared into his eyes. “We’ll get through it,” Buffy said. “He called us in for a reason. He knew there were only two vampires who could come, and he knew you’re the one I work closest with. And the demon who killed Nikki Wood doesn’t even really exist anymore. He knows that, too. Robin has... if not forgiven you, accepted what happened. I’m sure Crowley always knew her death was inevitable.”

    “Doesn’t mean he’s not still holding a grudge.”

    “He’s a watcher,” Buffy said. “Watchers know their slayers don’t live forever.”

    “But they usually don’t have to be reminded of the death every single day by the face of her son. And usually, they don’t have to face her killer, and have pleasant chat over tea,” Spike said.

    “I don’t think anyone’s going to expect this meeting to be pleasant, or over tea,” Buffy said. “We’ll just get the information, collect the codex, and go. He knows what’s happened to you, what you’ve done. Or he should.”

    “Yeah. That doesn’t mean he’s not still mourning Nikki.”

    “You know... I know Nikki wasn’t your every day victim. But you usually try not to dwell on this stuff too much.”

    “When I did, I went mad,” Spike said. “No, Nikki’s not the heaviest weight on my soul. I’ve plenty of other things to feel guilt over from back then. Believe me. But as far as guilt goes, vampire and slayer is the way the game’s played. She knew what she was in for. It was a fair fight, and I nearly lost. Day to day, that’s more than enough for me.”

    “A fair fight?” Buffy said with a grin.

    “Yeah. And it didn’t have to be, you know. I could have killed Robin, and Crowley for that matter, long before I finally got to Nikki, but... wasn’t part of the game to hunt her kid behind her back.”

    “Wasn’t it.”

    “Well, I wouldn’t have felt it fair if she’d gone and dusted Drusilla before she went after me. That was the kind of trick Angel played. Screw ‘em over. Kill everyone they love, preferably slowly. Kill the soul before you kill the body. She was a slayer, I wanted a fair fight.”

    “Oh, really? And calling in the Order of Taraka on a slayer counts as a fair fight?”

    “I wasn’t talking about you,” Spike said, defensive. “You were ticking me off. And you sort of scared me, I was far too interested in you. And you had Angel on your side, and sidekicks and all. And Dru was sick, I was busy.”

    “Any other excuses?”

    Spike sighed. “Okay. I guess I should say good fight more than fair.”

    “Much better. Why good?”

    “Well, come on. A weepy miserable slayer half a step from suicide because of the death of her son would not have been any fun for me. Robin would have been so easy to kill. I had at least one chance right in front of her, even. I kind of wanted Nikki in top form. Besides. I hadn’t the patience to watch her crumble, first. By the time we got really into it I wanted a tussle so bad, I’d have....” He trailed off.

    “Killed for one?”

    “I did that,” he said ruefully. “I don’t know. I think I half wanted her to kill me. I always wonder if there wasn’t some part of the man in me who was hoping a slayer would take me out. For someone who couldn’t feel guilt, I had a lot of twisted emotion inside me.”

    “You always had a strong heart,” Buffy murmured.

    “And I know you always appreciated it,” Spike said with brutal sarcasm. “But this is different. Good fight it may have been, but... I feel the consequences of the killing I used to do, the grief and pain I left behind me. I don’t usually have to look it in the face.”

    “You looked into Robin’s,” Buffy said. “And you survived.”

    “Robin tried to kill me,” Spike said. “Robin got my blood up. Robin did his bloody best to attack from an unfair advantage, on at least three levels, and make me feel justified in anything I’d ever done, evil or no. Robin wasn’t a problem. What if Crowley just... what if it’s pain, instead of rage? I know how to cope with rage. I don’t know how to... be sorry.”

    “You’re always sorry.”

    “There’s no way to say it. Not as if I’d inflict any of my guilt drenched bloody poetry on the poor guy. No one deserves that.”

    Buffy chuckled. Even she hadn’t read most of that stuff – he claimed he wrote it only for himself, and she believed it.

    “No. There’s more to it. Crowley’s a watcher. I’ve never liked watchers. They hide out of sight, well out of danger, mucking things up to their own advantage, and get paid to do it.”

    “They don’t stay out of danger,” Buffy said, with a distant grief. “My first watcher, before Giles. He died to save me.”

    “I’m sorry.” Spike caressed her face in sympathy. “Still,” he said. “I don’t know what kind of grudge this Crowley might be carrying. All I know is that, compared to Giles, he was a hard ass. Trained Nikki like every day was her last.”

    Until the day it was. Neither of them said it, but they both heard it anyway.

    “You’ve changed,” Buffy said.

    “Nikki hasn’t,” Spike said. “She’s still right where she always was, in my head. Fighting so beautifully, a magnificent dance of death. She was glorious.” He realized what he was saying, and shook his head, half in apology to Buffy.

    “You and slayers,” Buffy said.

    She meant it as a joke, but he took it seriously. “Yeah. Me and slayers. Nikki was... you know, the thing is, in my own deadly way, I loved her.”

    “You wanted to kill her.”

    “I wanted to kill everything I loved,” he said sadly. “I still want to kill you, in some distant way.” Buffy looked down. Spike knew she’d known this, but he didn’t usually bring it up. He wasn’t feeling forgiving of himself just then. “There’s a lot of other things I want to do with you more,” he said, and her expression lifted a bit. “But Nikki and I... we danced for days. I came to New York knowing there was a slayer here. I wasn’t packing out until I killed her, or she killed me. New York’s a big place – it took years to even find her. I think she knew I was hunting her.”

    “Well, I knew, when you were hunting me.”

    “I advertised, to you, love,” Spike said. “Anyway, she was hard to find. She was undercover, of course. It took ages. Drusilla hated it here. She said it was too hard, too loud, too busy. She wanted me to kill the slayer for her, but I took too long at it. She made me pay... god she was hard to live with. Blowing hot and cold, pushing me away, doing everything she could to make me pissed off, or jealous.” He shook his head. “New York was not her scene. She wanted the stars and green growing things more than easy feeding.”

    “Was it easy feeding?”

    “New York in the seventies? Dumb punks, corrupt cops, flophouse neighborhoods, huge drug scene. Sometimes it was hard to find someone who didn’t seem to have a death wish. I set up my hunting grounds, and they were just teeming with goodies.” He closed his eyes. “Victims,” he amended.

    “Still hard sorting it out?” she asked.

    “You mean how I felt then, and how I feel now?”

    “Yeah.”

    “Well, that’s the scary thing, in’t it? You said Nikki was killed by someone who doesn’t exist anymore.”

    “He doesn’t.”

    “No,” Spike said. “I’m not Angel. Maybe he can pretend it’s Angel versus Angelus, one has a soul, one doesn’t, and never the twain shall meet. I’m me. I always was me. And, you know, Buffy, you don’t even believe that yourself. If you did, you wouldn’t have held me to the standards you did back when I didn’t have a soul. When I said you treated me like a man, I meant it. You expected me to act like one, and think like one. You expected me to be a human being, and were disgusted with me when I wasn’t. Even though you knew what I was.”

    “Yeah, well.” Buffy looked a little ashamed. “I let Angel kind of... skew my mind when I was in highschool.”

    Spike smiled. “Love will do that, pet.” He shook his head. “That beast was me. That beast is still me. Everything about me was there, save the soul. I don’t feel any different, ‘cept when I think about what I’ve done. I try not to dwell in it, but I can’t just throw the guilt away, either, saying I wasn’t there. I was. I still am. I’m still a vampire. I still love violence, I still crave blood. And I was Spike then, too. I still like the Ramones. Haven’t changed my hair much since. Still a bleeding fool of a romantic. And when I look around, I still know these streets. I keep wanting to check out CB’s and order in a pizza. The only difference is, back then, I usually ate the delivery guy first.”

    “That’s a pretty big difference,” Buffy pointed out.

    “Yeah, but I still want to eat the delivery guy,” Spike said. “I just couldn’t bear to.”

    “Again,” Buffy said. “That’s a pretty big difference.”

    “Well, what’s better? Controlling the evil impulse, or not having it in the first place?”

    “You’re not evil, Spike. Not anymore.”

    He was silent for a long moment. “I’m stained by it, though. I’ll never really be free of it.”

    “But you’re not trapped by it anymore, either,” Buffy said.

    “Yeah. A soul can do that. The evil’s the one chained up now. I can choose to do evil, or not, just like I always could. But now I’ve a conscience, so I choose not.” He shook his head. “It doesn’t mean the blood lust just... went away.”

    “No, it didn’t,” Buffy said. “But it’s put to a much... better... use....” She used her nails to scratch gentle white trails down his shoulders and arms, while nuzzling his ear with her lips, not coincidentally placing her throat within reach of his teeth.

    He moaned softly, then took her up on the opportunity, grabbing her lightly with his teeth, kissing her soft skin. “You know... when I first got this soul,” he said, still kissing her, over and over again, “everything felt so different. So much more intense.”

    Buffy gasped as he touched a particularly sensitive spot. “And now?” she breathed.

    “Now....” he opened his mouth wide and kissed her hard, probably leaving a mark. “It feels like there’s hardly any difference at all,” he said when he released her.

    “I see a difference,” Buffy said when she stopped gasping.

    “Well, that’s where it lies, isn’t it, pet,” Spike said, gazing into her being. “A lover’s the one who would see it. It’s not that I couldn’t love without a soul. I could. I did. I loved you so hard. I loved you with all the hunger of a demon. I devoured you with every glance, every touch, starving for your life, if not your death. I loved you with an ache, trying to fill that hollow space inside me. You didn’t touch my soul, ‘cause I didn’t have one. But you touched the space where there should have been.”

    Buffy’s face arched in sympathy, as if she were looking at a wounded puppy, and she kissed him a dozen times, all over his face. “I know,” she said. “That was what it felt like, trying to love you. Like I’d get somewhere, close to you, and something wouldn’t be there.” She shook her head. “And I had my own problems, anyway.”

    “I’d noticed.”

    Buffy shrugged. “It was all just kind of... badness, and my life felt wrong. You were the only thing that felt right, because it felt so wrong.”

    “I tried,” Spike said.

    “You got real close,” Buffy said. “Even the wrong of it helped me through the worst of it. I might have killed myself – or at least let myself die if I hadn’t had you to pour all the pain into.”

    “Empty spaces can take a lot of pain,” Spike said.

    “I’m sorry about that.”

    He shrugged. “It was all one. Yours, mine. You just made me realize how empty I was. Made it hurt.” He pressed his forehead to hers. “There was always something empty, kept me from being close to anyone. Even... even when I wanted to.”

    “We both needed healing.”

    “Evil and grief,” Spike whispered.

    “Hey. We got through it. And in the end... where are we now?”

    Spike reached around her and pulled her shirt over her head. “Somewhere about here,” he said, nuzzling her breasts. Buffy arched her back. Spike lifted her from where they sat, and carried her to the bed. He lay her down and pulled her pants off, then quickly slid his own jeans down, kicking them away. Slowly, he kissed his way up her leg, along her knee, up her inner thigh, a single, sensual lick up her labia, followed by more kisses as he climbed up her stomach. He paused a moment to address each breast in turn, kissing and sucking upon first one, then the other, and back again, until she groaned with it. Finally, as her back arched with pleasure, he crept up to her neck and face, his lips hot with kisses. By the time he got there, Buffy was quivering. He hovered over her like a panther with his kill, and gazed down at her. She was wildly excited, and she smelled amazing.

    Spike had to close his eyes for a moment and calm himself. The anticipation was electric. They made love regularly, of course, often daily. But these nights were different. These nights, these moments when she made love to the demon as well as the man, these were sacred. It could turn sordid if he did it wrong. He knew it could. He didn’t want that to happen.

    Spike nuzzled her softly, licking at her flesh as little shivers of delight ran all through her. “Do you want it to hurt tonight, love?” he asked in her ear, his tone caressing the words.

    Buffy hummed contentedly as the options chimed in her. “Maybe at first,” she promised. “But I want to fall into you.”

    Spike grinned down at her. “How far do you want to go?”

    Buffy writhed her torso against him, letting her warm breasts caress his cool flesh. “Down the rabbit hole,” she said.

    “You are such a blood junkie,” he said fondly.

    “Only for you,” she sighed.

    “Good thing,” Spike said. “You fall so deep, anyone soulless would kill you in a minute. Wouldn’t be able to resist.” He thrust his body over her, letting her feel the strength of it. “What do you say you let me down the rabbit hole,” he whispered, “and then I pull you down with me?”

    Buffy only hummed in response, but her legs opened, and she wrapped them around his thighs. He let his cock tickle at her clit for a few minutes before he found her hot core, and slid easily inside. “Welcome home,” she said, and he growled his contentment.

    “I love you,” he told her.

    “Love you, too,” Buffy said. He moved over and above her, occasionally pushing her down with his vampire strength, letting her push back, wrestling their demonic power in an act as important to both of them as their love-making. He knew she could break him. He could keep up with her, but only barely, and only because of his age and skill level. She was made to kill thousands of vampires. He was only made to kill ordinary humans, and had worked hard for over a century to make himself the demon fighter he’d become.

    They thrust and writhed and moved with each other as the passion built between them. He squeezed her hard enough to break the ribs of a normal human being. She held him back, hard enough to bruise his vampire flesh. The pain and show of strength only fired both of them, and they pushed harder together, thrusting and bucking and tensing against each other in pleasure. The hotel bed groaned.

    He waited until she came before he bit her, piercing her barely scarred flesh again, so her cries of pleasure were mixed with gasps of pain. It had taken him some time to accept that he still liked to hurt her, and he was glad that she occasionally liked to hurt. The pain drew out her orgasm, and she lost control of her limbs, both flailing and clenching, writhing beneath him as the blood flowed into his mouth. The blood sang in him, made him glow with heat, and he came inside her as the blood came inside him. It made him bite down harder, and Buffy made a noise between a grunt and a scream. She began to whimper as he held her down.

    He let himself take the blood... the blood... her blood... Buffy. Buffy’s life, Buffy’s essence, the sweetest thing in the world, the life he lived for, the blood his very soul hungered for. It had no interest in anyone else, not any longer, but Buffy... Buffy had penetrated him to his core. There was no part of him, heart, soul, mind, body, skin, tongue, teeth, no part of him that did not hunger for her, relish her, cherish her, need to nurture her, as much as he longed to devour her.

    He let the pain linger for a few moments, until her sounds had made the transition from enjoyable to endurable. After all the times they’d made love, he knew the difference by now. She’d stop him if he went too far, but he didn’t want to cause actual harm to her, neither physically nor emotionally. His job was to stop before she had to ask. Without a jolt in transition, he changed his bite to a kiss, and licked at the wound, softening the pain away as his saliva entered her bloodstream, effectively anesthetizing her.

    She sighed as the pain faded. Then she wrapped her arms around him, waiting for the rest of it. As always, it took a minute, as the anesthetic had to go through her heart and into her brain before she could get the full effect. He knew when it started to work in her. She moaned with pleasure, going soft beneath him. “Oh, god, yeah,” she breathed.

    Spike laughed into her throat and kissed her more deeply, giving as much as he took. He made her awareness of the outside world fade even further, until the only thing that existed was him. The weight of him, the scent of him, the pleasure of his mouth against her throat, his deadly kiss, which he kept gentle just for her. She moaned as she sank into the mattress, her eyes closing in soft ecstasy. He knew there was nothing she wanted more than just to be close to him. Close to him... forever. Which was what the anesthetic was supposed to do, of course. Make her feel it was okay to die in his arms.

    Spike had told her she could fight the impulse off, but she’d never tried. She said she didn’t want to. She trusted him. She loved him. She didn’t want to push him off. She wanted to be inside him, to be part of him, as he had just been inside of her. Hers was the only human blood he ever tasted any longer. It made him belong to her, in the way he constantly told her he did. His soul was hers. His heart. His flesh. She shared her blood, and he shared his captivating kiss, always, always, making himself let her go. He still had the impulse to kill her, and knew he always would, but it was so small, drowned out by so much love and devotion he could almost pretend it wasn’t there at all.

    She was sinking when he finally stopped swallowing, and he held the wound with his thumb as he usually did. The anesthetic had two other effects apart from the local numbing of the wound, and the general euphoria and need for closeness that affected her mind. The first was heart rate, which tended to increase – it helped the feeding go faster – and the other was an anti-coagulant, which kept the wound from clotting and closing, prematurely ending said feeding. Buffy was a slayer, and seemed to be immune to the anti-coagulant, but her heart was racing, and he always made sure to hold the wound tight for several minutes after.

    “Oh, god, hold me,” Buffy whimpered when he stopped drinking. “Don’t let go.”

    “Do I ever?” Spike whispered. He pulled her close and kissed her forehead, keeping his body in contact with her as much as possible. “I’m all yours, Buffy. I’m here for you. Only for you.”

    “I love you,” she whispered. “Love you, love you.” She squeezed him tightly and almost moaned. “God, this sucks.”

    “Beautifully,” Spike agreed.

    Buffy chuckled. “I mean when it ends,” she said. “I know we have to be careful – and I know why – but sometimes I just wish we could... I don’t know. Break loose. Like we can with the violence.”

    “A suck is more dangerous than a blow, love.”

    “I know,” Buffy said. “I just... I keep wishing this could go on forever.”

    “Under ordinary circumstances, it would,” Spike said. “You’d never have to feel me stop.”

    Buffy sighed against his chest. “Is this better? With me alive at the end?”

    “Actually... yeah. I mean, the rush of the death is... I miss it, sometimes. It’s the sacrifice the demon demands, and that was something seriously addictive. But I couldn’t stomach the consequences of that anymore, and never, ever with you.” He nuzzled her. Buffy was wonderful – she could ease anything, any guilt, any painful memory, and she wouldn’t let him get away with being a wanker. “I need you alive. If you didn’t really love me, I’d hate the lies the venom would pull from you, but as it is....” He checked to make sure the bleeding had stopped, and then hugged her properly. “You’re so willing. Willing was always better.”

    “I thought you... the demon liked to... it rough,” she said instead.

    He knew what word she’d just avoided. “Rough and willing are not exclusive, love, as you well know,” Spike said. “But I had my own reasons for the ways I sometimes hunted. Rape isn’t about sex, it’s about power. God, you know that, more than anyone. There were certain kinds of power I felt I needed, and at the time I felt I had a right to it. Rape sometimes made a victim willing for other things. On the whole, if I could have asked... I would have preferred everyone I killed to want it.” He caressed her hair. “In my own way, I was always looking for that. Those who wanted me to kill them. Probably one of the reasons I became so fixated on slayers.”

    “I don’t have a death wish,” Buffy said.

    “Not right now,” Spike said. “But you’re willing.” He kissed her fondly. “And i’nt that neat?” he said with an amused grin.
 

 

SPIKE: What can I say? Girl just needs a little monster in her man.
                As You Were


    “Ms. Summers,” said Bernard Crowley. “I’ve heard much of you.” He took Buffy’s hand and gave her a little nod of respect. The man was grey, haggard, with eyes a watery and bloodshot brown. He was well dressed, precise, much like Robin’s clean-cut figure. Buffy could see the influence the watcher had had in her old associate’s taste.  “You are indeed one of the most accomplished slayers in the annals of our history as watchers,” Crowley continued. “Indeed, you have outlived the legacy of the watchers, and changed the course of destiny. It is... an honor to look upon you.”

    “I’m just a girl,” Buffy said. She wasn’t sure she liked his tone.

    “I have been looking forward to your visit.” He paused. “And your companion?”

    “Waiting outside,” Buffy said. “He wasn’t sure you really wanted to meet him.”

    “I most assuredly do,” the watcher said with grim certainty. “Indeed, I wouldn’t begin to scorn a visit from your...” He stopped, swallowing. “I would very much like to look into the face of this William the Bloody,” he said instead.

    “I usually go by Spike,” Spike said, coming around the corner. He nodded a greeting. “Mr. Crowley.”

    Crowley looked Spike up and down with a cold appraisal. “So you are the creature who snapped Nikki’s neck.”

    Buffy blinked. That was direct.

    “Part of me is,” Spike said. He left it at that.

    There was a long and grim pause. “Well. I thank you for not trying to confuse matters by claiming to apologize.”

    “I thank you for realizing it would only be a confusion,” Spike said. “The past is what it is. There is no changing it.”

    “Indeed,” Crowley said. “Most true. There is no changing it at all. I suppose I need invite you to enter?”

    “If you wish,” Spike said. “I’m content enough to wait in the threshold, if that makes you more comfortable.” Buffy glanced at him. He was speaking as if he were on a job interview. She supposed at some level he was.

    “Oh, no, come in, come in,” Crowley said, wandering back into his apartment. “I don’t suppose you drink tea, either of you?”

    “That’s all right,” Spike said, entering with Buffy. “We’ll be on our way, shortly.”

    “No,” Crowley said, turning back to them. “There’s no need to hurry away. I have always wanted to look upon Nikki’s killer.” Spike was very stiff and still beside Buffy. She wanted to take his hand, but feared showing affection before Crowley would be adding insult to injury. Crowley already seemed weirded out by she and Spike working together. Make it clear it was more than that, and...

    Crowley frowned at Spike. “That coat...” he said.

    Spike’s head tilted. “It’s a replica, actually. But yeah. I do keep it in honor of Nikki.”

    “It’s your trophy,” Crowley accused.

    Spike frowned. “My mark,” he said instead. “I carry a mark from every slayer I’ve battled, whether I won or lost.” He indicated the scar above his eyebrow. “Xin Rong.” He touched the lapel of his coat. “Nikki.” He held up his arms and pulled up the sleeves of his coat to reveal the thin white scars that graced his forearms, testament to a battle he had lost dramatically. “Dana.”

    “And Ms. Summers?” Crowley asked.

    Spike almost smiled. “That one’s deep. A little harder to see,” he said.

    “Spike has a soul,” Buffy said, not feeling the need to be cryptic about it. “He’s used it to close the Hellmouth, and defeat the First Evil.”

    “I’ve, ah, read the reports of Mr. Giles,” Crowley said. “And heard Robin’s testimony.”

    “How is Robin?”

    “Well enough,” he said. “I understand he’s still the companion of your fellow slayer... Faith, was it? That they work together.”

    “Among other things,” Buffy laughed.

    Crowley did not look amused. “Yes. It does make sense. There has always been a certain... fascination with violence among the slayers.”

    Buffy blinked. “What is that supposed to mean?”

    “Robin took after his mother,” Crowley said. “Faith must find him most alluring. I could not deflect him from his interest in death.”

    “Were you trying to?” Buffy asked. “He said you trained him.”

    “He was going to get himself into trouble if I did not,” Crowley said, glancing at Spike. “He had a... fixation. On his mother’s killer.” Spike was dead faced,  pointedly ignoring this exchange. “I had to channel his impulses toward something healthy. I believe I succeeded. But it is not surprising that he and this Faith character have managed to forge a bond. Her instinctual need for a violent partner is likely fulfilled by him.”

    “You seem to have a lot of contempt for a slayer’s instincts,” Buffy said.

    Crowley raised his eyebrows at her. “On the contrary. I loved my Nikki. I understood her. I have great respect for a slayer’s inherent needs and desires. They can’t help themselves.”

    “Excuse me?” Buffy said, but Crowley wasn’t hearing her.

    “Robin’s father was himself... a bit unsavory,” he continued. “Violence calls to violence. I’m sure you understand it, Ms. Summers.” He glanced at Spike. “Most certain, in fact.”

    Buffy wanted to tell him flat out that was disgusting. So he wasn’t weirded out by her and Spike. He just thought she was... what? Unable to control herself? At the complete mercy of her instinctual whims? It seemed contemptuous to her. “I’ve had perfectly human partners,” she said flatly. She didn’t mention that even Riley had been a soldier, though.

    “Come, though. A slayer is no more human than your companion here.”

    “Buffy is human,” Spike said quickly.

    “She has a soul,” Crowley conceded. “Much like you... do. But they are inherent killers, and they are drawn to violence. Didn’t Robin’s Faith become a killer of men, as well as demons? All slayers are essentially the same kind of creature. I know the history of the slayers. I was the keeper of the slayer’s shadow box. She is as demonic, in her way, as you are.” He smiled then. Buffy did not like this smile. “As demonic as the creature you are seeking,” he added. “I believe this is the manuscript you were looking for,” Crowley said, handing Buffy a thick collection of ancient loose-leaf vellum in a modern leather folder. He turned back to Spike. “It should tell you... or rather you, Mr... Spike... how to track the Consecrated. Only a vampire can do it, you know.”

    “Yeah. So I heard.”

    “Do not think I do not approve of the concept of trophies,” he add to Spike, seemingly unconnected. “Nikki herself kept several from many of her kills. Would you like to see them?”

    “No, that’s okay,” Buffy said, beginning to be kind of weirded out herself.

    “Come, Ms. Summers. Have you never carried home a weapon from one of your demon foes? Or claimed a fallen amulet as your own? Or sliced off a horn or a head or a hoof, and displayed it proudly on your mantle?”

    “Can’t say I’ve done much of the last one,” Buffy said with distaste.

    “Well, I’m sure your companion will appreciate such keepsakes. Come. Please, I insist.”

    Buffy wanted to get out of there, but couldn’t figure out how to say so politely. Something about Crowley’s behavior seemed off, and her oh so vaunted instincts were actually telling her Get the hell out.

    She was about to say as much to Spike, but he had left her side, following Crowley to the room he had opened. It was done up as a study, but one wall held a great number of weapons and amulets, and yes, a certain number of gruesome mummified demon heads. Buffy trotted to catch him up, tell him what her instincts were saying, when she realized this was important to him. Nikki was important to him, and always had been.

    Spike regarded the wall of the fallen with silence, his head cocked thoughtfully, his eyes very distant. Buffy wasn’t sure whether to be proud or ashamed at what she was looking at. She’d never kept trophies like this. Never kept score, never gloried in the more gruesome aspects of the kills she’d made. She recognized many of the demons as creatures she had fought and destroyed at one time or another, but to keep the actual body parts, and display them at home disturbed her. One particular demon head bothered her a great deal. It looked like Clem. And at least two of those amulets were from vengeance demons, such as Anya had been.

    “Have you ever kept such a trophy room?” Crowley asked Spike with a smile. “I’ve heard serial killers often do.”

    “Not a serial killer. Vampire. For the most part, my victims became part of me,” Spike said. “Never needed trophies.”

    “And yet you keep this coat.”

    “Mark of respect,” Spike said again, looking at him very seriously. “A slayer’s not just a victim. It was an honor to fight Nikki. It would have been an honor to lose to her. I doubt most of these...” he indicated the various trophies with his hand, “recognized that about her, but I knew better.”

    “Quite,” Crowley said with a small smile. “Nikki actually knew that about you. I presume you’d told her as much, in one of your early battles. You see here?” He opened a glass case and pulled out a wooden stake, which had been resting in place of pride on a velvet pillow. “Do you recognize it?”

    “Should I?”

    “Yes. You should,” Crowley said. “It is stained with your very blood. The very first of your battles – one you nearly lost. Do you recall it now?”

    “Yeah,” Spike said. “She aimed for my heart, and I deflected. Got my left arm instead. I booked it, to recuperate.”

    “She was most impressed by you,” Crowley said. “She had heard of you, of course. We knew you were in New York long before you knew our whereabouts. Nikki had read of Xin Rong, and knew better than to take your presence lightly. Here,” he came closer to Spike with the stake, and both Spike and Buffy were suddenly on guard, lest he suddenly attack Spike with it. But at the last moment he turned it, holding it out to the vampire butt first. “You kept her coat in honor of her. She kept this in honor of you.”

    “Was it honor, or fear?” Buffy asked.

    “Caution, perhaps,” Crowley said, still looking at Spike. “With Nikki, as you well know, William the Bloody... it was never fear.” He pushed the stake toward Spike again, pressing it into his hands.

    Spike’s eyes were heavy, but he took the stake rather than let it fall to the ground.

    The moment that Spike touched the stained wood, something strange happened. Buffy, standing beside him, saw Spike’s eyes close and his head reel back as he staggered. Buffy jumped forward, ready to fight Crowley, but Crowley was standing back, watching. Simply watching. The quintessential watcher.

    A form slowly pulled itself out of Spike’s fallen body, a panicked image of a living Spike, all but transparent, superimposed on the backdrop of the study. Buffy heard him scream. Terrified that Spike had just been desouled, Buffy leaped to catch him, and seemed to. An angry pull, a kind of psychic vacuum, was dragging Spike’s soul away from his unconscious body, and Buffy dragged it back from wherever it was being carried.

    It was heavy, and it pulled her own soul half out of her skin. She could feel her body collapsing as she clutched the incorporeal form, and everything stopped feeling tangible. She’d lived like this before, though. Weightless, timeless, she had basked in heaven without the weight of her body to drag around, and she instinctively knew how to do it again. Like a fish back in water, she swam out of her body, taking a firm hold of the Spike image. She knew it – she recognized it. She’d felt it at the hellmouth, caressing her being before he’d made her leave him. Twisting herself through the ether, she swung the soul back toward Spike’s fallen body, slammed it against him, and made it catch.

    It caught, fusing back to the body where it belonged, and Spike opened his eyes to Buffy’s transparent image just a few inches from his face. But as Buffy had released Spike, she found she had nothing left to hold onto. Her own body abandoned, and Spike’s soul restored, she found herself caught in the same vacuum that had caught him. Her intangible eyes wide, her spirit opened its mouth, reaching out to catch hold of him again...

    Only to be sucked into oblivion before his eyes.
 

***    

    It was only an extreme amount of self control that kept Spike from killing Bernard Crowley where he stood. Crowley even accused him of being about to. “I knew it. I knew you’d kill me. I did what I had to do.”

    “What do you mean, you knew I’d kill you?” Spike growled, his hand around Crowley’s throat. “What the hell have you done?”

    “It’s nothing I’ve done,” Crowley insisted. “I merely played the part destiny laid out for me. You said it yourself. The past is what it is. There is no changing it. I am merely its instrument.”

    “Instrument?” Spike snapped. “Instrument for what? What was that stake, what was that spell? Was that some bloody lame attempt of yours to cast vengeance on me?”

    “Not of mine,” Crowley gasped. “Of Robin’s.”

    Spike let go the watcher’s throat and let him sink heavily into a chair. “You’d better start spilling right quick, watcher, or some vampire is going to rend you limb from sodding limb, soul or not.”

    Crowley took a deep breath and swallowed, nervous, but glad to be released. He looked down at the unconscious form of Buffy on the floor, and smiled at the famous slayer. “She really is a most fetching creature,” Crowley said. “Lovely hair, very slender. I always thought so.”

    “What do you mean, you always thought so?” Spike said. “Start bloody singing.”

    Crowley looked up at Spike. “I’ve seen your slayer before,” he said. “More than thirty years ago, in fact.”

    “More than thirty years ago, she wasn’t even a twinkle in her daddy’s eye,” Spike snapped. “Start making sense, or I start making crunching noises.”

    “The spell that Robin cast,” Crowley said. “When Robin was twenty or so, he returned home from college with a most esoteric book. I think I have a copy around somewhere... or maybe I gave it to the watcher’s council. It matters little – it’s of no use to us now. He believed that he could summon the vampire that killed his mother by using the essence of his blood, on that stake I gave you to hold.”

    Spike looked down at the stake on the floor. His body had dropped it when his spirit had been ripped away. He could still feel the hollow emptiness of it, like the memory of the few months he spent as a ghost, bound to L.A. and the Wolfram and Hart building. “So, kid tried to summon me. What of it?”

    “Well, the spell failed, of course,” Crowley said. “I suspect he read some of it backwards, or twisted a sigil from future to past. In any case, Robin’s own spirit was summoned to the demon, instead. From what he tells me, he had a very precise image of you, and his mother, grappling against the wall of a building, the very moment when her strike slipped, and your arm was injured by that stake. His spirit had been drawn to the blood you shed. Fortunately, he had consulted me before he’d attempted this summoning. I’d told him it was risky, and I’d attached a spiritual tether to his bodily form. When Robin’s spirit vanished, I pulled him back to this time, and his corporeal form.”

    “Lovely story. So what the bloody hell happened to Buffy!”

    “Well, I must confess, as I say, that I recognized your slayer. I knew that something of this kind had to come to pass. When I heard from Robin that the... companion of the slayer Buffy Summers was the vampire that had slaughtered Nikki, I knew the time had come. The spell that Robin had cast was bound to your blood – I knew that once your demonic form touched the residue on this stake that the spell would be activated again. I spun out a false trail of demon sightings, using the legend of the Consecrated. I knew the only recourse was to use a vampire to hunt such a demon. Since you were the only vampire I knew who would be likely to cooperate, I knew that you and Ms. Summers would most likely come in person to hunt it. I must confess, the Codex of the Consecrated is a complete fabrication, as are the incantations enclosed therein. But seen in a positive light, at least there is no demon to stalk, either.”

    “You set us up,” Spike said. “You bloody set us up for this.”

    “I only brought you here,” Crowley said. “The spell was not mine. The circumstances were not mine. After all, you’re the monster exploiting that poor child’s needs for your own sordid ends. I only did what I had to do to protect the timeline as I knew it.”

    “Buffy’s no child, and that’s rubbish. She doesn’t need me for anything. We work together.”

    “I’m not such a fool as that,” Crowley said. “Nor is Robin. He knew, the moment he saw the two of you together. He was disgusted. He still is, though he covers it well.”

    “So the two of you cooked up this as vengeance against me? What did Buffy ever do to either of you! Nikki’s never coming back, do you get that? I could torture myself, cut off my limbs, walk into the sun, it still won’t bring her back for you!”

    “Robin did nothing but pour the power of his grief into a failed spell a dozen years ago. I called you here. And I know that Nikki is dead,” Crowley said. “I know that all the vengeance in the world won’t rectify that. But when I heard you were in love with the slayer, I also knew that the circumstances I had witnessed were indeed poetic.”

    Spike narrowed his eyes. “And what is so poetic about rending the soul from a good and powerful slayer?”

    “You took the slayer I loved as a daughter from me, and from her son. Circumstances as I had seen meant that the slayer you loved had been taken from you.” He smiled. “All I needed to do was bring you here. The lines of destiny had already been set. Ms. Summer’s spirit has been drawn to the moment of your injury. And there her spirit will remain, until it dissipates, like smoke in the wind. She will witness the full horror of your vampire existence, all the blood and death and depravity, without any soulful lies to temper it. She will grieve, and she will fade, and she will never be heard from again.” Crowley laughed, confirming the man’s madness in Spike’s mind, at least. “I’ve done it, Nikki!” he said, mostly to himself.  “It’s done.”

    Spike’s fist plunged furiously toward the watcher’s half mad face. It took all his self control to shift the blow at the last second, and simply punch a hole through his chair.

SPIKE: She was cunning, resourceful... oh, and did I mention? Hot. I could have danced all night with that one.  
    Fool For Love
    

    Buffy’s spirit poured through time like water down a plug hole. She found herself, loose and untethered, before a distinct and strangely familiar tableau. Two figures, in a dark, only semi-lit alleyway, locked in mortal combat, a stake between them. One, she saw only from behind – a black t-shirt with the sleeves torn off, with a spiked blond head, and a bleeding arm. Buffy knew Spike’s build well enough that there was no doubt it was him. The other, Buffy only recognized through photograph. Robin had shown Buffy a picture of his mom once. Hair in a strong round afro, her face clear and determined. Her eyes opened wide in surprise as Buffy’s incorporeal figure swirled into existence behind the deadly vampire. She pulled the stake back from Spike’s arm, kicked him hard in the stomach, and held the weapon afresh, her face suddenly wary at what she could only assume was a new assailant.

    Spike didn’t see Buffy. “Looks like you’ve landed first blood, love,” Spike’s voice said, as he clutched his belly. “We’ll see how potent it is next time, eh? Better part of valor and all that.” He began sidling away. “I’ve all the time in the world to find you again.”

    “You’re not gonna fake me out, vamp!” Nikki snapped back at him, but Spike was already on the move. He leapt up onto a fire escape and all but danced onto the roof of the building next to them. Nikki glanced after him, as if she’d half a mind to follow, but there was a semi-manifest spirit that had appeared, apparently in league with the vampire, and she could deal with only one beastie at a time. She whirled, the blooded stake in her hand. She twisted with a twirl of her coat, and tried to stake Buffy, too.

    Her arm went right through Buffy, though it wasn’t as if Buffy didn’t feel it. Heat and solidity seemed to electrify her, and her incorporeal body felt displaced where Nikki had passed through, as if it were water. It kind of hurt. “Wait! Stop!” Buffy called out.

    “It’s not my job to stop!” Nikki snapped. “I kill demons and nasties and vampires, and I’m not about to let a... a thing like you get away!”

    “I’m not trying to hurt you!”

    “Right. Like you’re not working with that vamp?”

    “No,” Buffy said. “I was just dragged here, I’m not after anything.”

    Nikki crouched, her eyes suspicious, and she frowned at Buffy. “You a ghost?”

    “I wasn’t a minute ago,” Buffy said. “Just give me two minutes. You’re Nikki Wood, right? You’re the slayer.”

    Nikki backed up and looked Buffy over. “And who the hell are you, ghostie?”

    “Um. Well. I’m the slayer,” Buffy said. “Or I will be.”
 

***    

    “So you’re saying,” said a much younger Bernard Crowley than the one Buffy had met, “that you were a murdered slayer, and you’ve manifested yourself to Nikki as some kind of ghost?”

    “No, I wasn’t murdered,” Buffy said, not trusting Crowley at all. This Crowley was not, of course, the older Crowley who might, or might not, have had anything to do with her being dragged back in time, but she was still suspicious of him. “I’m not even dead, as far as I know. And I’m not a slayer from the past. I’m from the future.” She laughed suddenly and looked at Nikki. “And now I’m expecting him to shout Great scott! And tell me it’s time to go back... back to the fu–”

    “So you’re here as... what?” Crowley said, failing to play into her Back To The Future fantasy. Buffy put her soaring hand back down. “A... guide of some sort?”

    “No,” Buffy said. “I’m quite sure this was an accident.”

    “Hang on, Bernie, I got the skinny,” Nikki said. She’d heard this at least three times before she’d finally agreed to take Buffy to her watcher. “She was sucked here through some kind of vortex, after touching a spirit that had been linked through the blood of that vampire I just nicked. Did I get that right?” she asked.

    “Yes,” Buffy said. “Or, my spirit was. My body is probably still back where I left it.”

    “Where’d you leave it?”

    “New York, after the turn of the century,” Buffy said. She didn’t want to get too precise. “It happened after we got hold of that stake.”

    “So why’d you have my stake?”

    “It’s complicated,” Buffy said, glaring at Crowley. “But I think the spirit sucking may have been some sort of spell.”

    “That is possible,” Crowley said. He went to some books on his shelves and pulled out an older looking volume. “The blood of a vampire does have certain qualities which enable for strong summoning spells, and some of those can pierce across time. But they’re all extremely dangerous. Summoning a demon is, of course, relatively easy, but vampires are partly human, and thus corporeal. To summon a corporeal demon, a link to that demon is required, and the blood carries that link. Here.” He set the book down and pointed at a section.

    Buffy read the page through, not really understanding all of it.

    “Yeah, well, I’m not a demon, or a vampire. I’m a slayer,” Buffy said.

    “Then I don’t understand how your spirit could have been captured by the summoning spell.”

    “It was a mistake,” Buffy said. “I was trying to save–” she cut herself off, glancing up at Nikki. “Someone else,” she said then. Crowley’s face darkened, and Buffy was sure he suspected something like the truth. “Anyway, now that I’m here, time for you to save me. How do we get me back?”

    “I’m fairly certain we don’t,” Crowley said with a much lighter expression than Buffy would have had if she’d had to pronounce that kind of sentence.

    “Excuse me?”

    “Well, I’m sorry to say that if what you say is true... there is little we can be expected to do for you.”

    Buffy hadn’t anticipated this. “What do you mean? You’re the slayer. You’re her watcher. This is your job.” She didn’t say it was probably Crowley’s damn fault she was here in the first place, but her blood was up.

    “No,” Crowley said. “Our job is to rid the world of demons, specifically vampires. If a life is saved in the process, that is all to the good, but that is not, in fact, our mission.”

    Buffy blinked. She’d always put the lives of innocents at a premium, and made the slaying a means toward that end, not the goal in and of itself. That was why she hadn’t killed Spike or Anya when they had been rendered relatively harmless. Crowley’s vision of a slayer’s duty was much darker than Giles’s had ever been. Crowley continued, oblivious to her disgust. “Since your spirit was captured and dragged back through time, you are in a bit of trouble. You are not meant to exist within this time.”

    “So?”

    “So,” Crowley went on. “Only one slayer can exist in the world at once.”

    “There are ways around that,” Buffy said.“Besides, I’m not a slayer now, am I? Just a spirit of a slayer.”

    “Yes, but you haven’t been born yet, and your spirit pattern cannot hold within this time,” the watcher said. “Your existence within this time period might even put Nikki herself in danger.”

    Buffy scoffed. She was losing her patience with this jerk. “That’s bull, and you know it.”

    “Time paradoxes are perfectly real,” Crowley said. “You should know that if you are, in fact, a slayer as you claim.”

    “Wait, wait, claim?” Buffy snapped.

    “I’m afraid this must be the end of your period as slayer,” Crowley continued blithely. “Within about twenty-four hours, your spirit will begin to disintegrate. I am sorry.” He didn’t sound it. He looked Buffy over. “Still, you seem quite old for a slayer. You’ve had a strong several years as protector of the world. You should be proud to go out saving another,” he said. “Would you like us to write you any letters to family or friends? Your watcher, perhaps? We can have said missives kept in the watcher archives, and delivered to your loved ones at the proper time, after your demise.”

    Buffy glared at Crowley. “No,” she said bluntly. “No, because by the time of my demise just about every single active watcher has been cut to pieces or blown to smithereens by the kind of evil you cannot even imagine!” Crowley and Nikki both looked surprised. “One I managed to defeat, without forgetting about saving innocent lives, but hell, you just follow your ‘mission’. I wasn’t going to risk ‘ruining the timeline’ or any crap like that, but if these are really my last hours, let me tell you, you and your wretched rules and counsels don’t matter a whit. If I really have to leave any messages for my sister or anyone else, then you’d better leave them with Robin.” She pointed at the little boy in the corner. “Not with any god damned watcher.”

     The watcher and the slayer both turned to the little boy, who was playing with some of Crowley’s rune stones. Robin glanced up and smiled at his mom before turning back to his stones.

    “You know Robin?” Nikki asked.

    “That is enough,” Crowley said. “Spelling out the future could be catastrophic. Clearly you do not understand the significance of the things you say. Nikki. I forbid you to listen to any more of this spirit’s ravings. We still have no idea of it is even telling the truth.”

    “You mean Robin’s still alive in your time?” Nikki asked.

    “Nikki!”

    “You know what?” Buffy said. “I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t help me even if you could, Mr. Crowley. So allow me to tell you in advance: Go to hell.”

    Crowley looked startled.

    Buffy strode out through the wall of the apartment. “Buffy, wait!” Nikki called out through the door.

    “No!”

    Nikki stepped through the door, a desperate look on her face. She gestured Buffy to her quickly, silently. “Go to my apartment,” she whispered when Buffy came up to her, and she whispered her an address, saying it was only a few blocks away. “Well fine!” she shouted then, though Buffy hadn’t said anything else. “Be like that!”

    Buffy nodded her understanding as Nikki headed back in to her watcher. The door slammed. Buffy drifted down the stairs and back out into the night.

***

    Nikki opened the door of her apartment and smiled when she saw Buffy haunting the kitchen. Robin was at Nikki’s side, looking exhausted, but still used to the late nights. “Oh, thank god. I wanted to chat without Bernie spreading his crumpets and tea over everything.”

    Buffy chuckled.

    “Let me just get Robin in to bed, and we can talk.”

    “I’d like that,” Buffy said.

    She looked around Nikki’s apartment while she waited. Nikki did keep a lot of trophies, most of them weapons. Unlike in Crowley’s apartment, however, there were no demon heads in places of prominence. When Nikki came out from her son’s room she went up to Buffy, who was examining a troll hammer. “Got that from a troll who had decided to take over Brooklyn Bridge,” she said. “Broke my arm, that one.”

    “Really bruised me, the troll I fought,” Buffy said. “And took out my watcher’s magic shop.” Nikki laughed. “Do you, ah... keep... other kinds of trophies?”

    “Trophies?” Nikki said. “Oh, you mean the weapons. Well, yeah, I keep everything. Sometimes they’re useful later.”

    “I mean like... demon heads or anything.”

    “No, not me. Bernie does. He mummifies and catalogs the demons I slay, for the watcher’s council. The ones that don’t dust or melt or fade into the ether,” Nikki said.

    Things made more sense. Crowley was the one with the macabre sense of honor.

    “So what was the bad vibe you and Bernie were dancing around back there?” Nikki asked. “Something about someone else’s spirit?”

    Buffy opened her mouth, wondering how much she should tell Nikki. She knew not to tell her who killed her. That would be cruel, and painful to both of them.

    “Something about the blood on this stake,” Nikki said, pulling it out of her pocket. The blood had dried now, and stained the wood more than halfway along its length with dull red. “This vampire... this is a vampire you know, isn’t it.”

    Buffy opened her mouth, and then closed it again.

    “It’s cool,” Nikki said. “I know some vamps myself. Some even to talk to, from a distance. There’s a couple of suck houses around here, vampires who only take willing victims. Blood-junkies, who get off on the rush of being bitten, or druggies who need a new thrill. The suckers aren’t really respected by the other vamps, but they’re safe enough if you treat them with care. They can keep you abreast of the demon underground.”

    “You’re friends with vamps?”

    “Not friends. But I can usually pick out a reliable adversary, and informants are important. This one...” She looked at the blooded stake. “This vampire and I have been dancing around each other for a while. The suckers are all terrified of him.”

    “You know him?”

    “I know of him,” Nikki said. “Only really met him tonight. William the Bloody, currently going by Spike. Used to torture his victims with railroad spikes. He’s a nasty one, nearly a hundred years old, and he’s already killed one slayer. And he’s useful, or I’d have tried to slay him months ago.”

    “What?”

    Nikki went over to a map on the wall, which Buffy had noticed but not been able to interpret. It was covered in marks and circles, strings tied to thumbtacks, push pins, scribbles, and shorthand notes. “This is my territory,” Nikki said. It was the whole of New York, all five Burroughs, and the surrounding area. Buffy was stunned. Sunnydale was tiny, and she’d had difficulty patrolling all of it. The vampire activity in L.A. had mostly been centered around her highschool. Nikki had a hundred times more territory to cover than Buffy had ever done. And from the marks on the map, it was busy.

    “These marks are known vampire activity, and these are suspected nesting areas. These pins are clear vampire victims,” Nikki said. The map had so many push pins and notes and circles and grave sites that Buffy gulped. She was so glad she hadn’t been called to be a slayer in New York. “And this area here in the Bowery,” she pointed between Canal and Broadway-Lafayette streets to a somewhat clear spot with a broad circle around it, “is around the CBGB club.”

    “Why’s it so clear?”

    “Because of that guy,” she said, pointing to the blooded stake on her desk. “We know that’s his hunting ground. He’s either careful about how he kills, or he takes those who no one notices. In the Bowery, that’s not that hard to do. Bit of a skid row. But more importantly, you notice the lack of other vampire nests?”

    Buffy had noticed the lack of black thumbtacks in the area.

    “He’s doing my job for me,” Nikki said. “He keeps other vampires out of the area, dusting any of the ones who don’t play by his rules. His rules seem to be pretty strict, too, and every once in a while he seems to get bored and takes out another vamp nest outside his territory just for the fun of it.”

    “Yeah, that sounds like Spike,” Buffy muttered. Spike had always gotten bored with battles he knew he could win.

    “Yeah, well, he showed up about a year and a half ago, and frankly, I love ‘im. Don’t tell Bernie, but I’ve been leaving him there. Yeah, he’s a full-on nasty, and I’ll probably have to slay him one day. But until I do, he’s making my job so much easier. I worked out percentages, just after I realized what he was doing, and tried to figure out the lesser of the evils. His nest takes out maybe five to ten victims a week, at most.”

    “That sounds like a lot.”

    “In New York? They don’t all show up as murders, hon. Drug O.D.s, animal attacks, accidents. A lot just go missing. It’s not much, believe me. And the nests he’s taken out? They were hunting hundreds. By going all dust happy on other vamps, he’s saved more people than I can count. He’s taken out as many vamps as I have in the last year, from what I can judge. Probably saved my life. I was overwhelmed before he showed up. I barely slept. Now I have time to breathe. It’s so...” she shook her head and stared at the ceiling for a moment. “You have no idea how nice it is to have someone else exterminating some of the rats.”

    “Actually, yes I do,” Buffy said.

    “It’s him, isn’t it,” Nikki said. “You were working with him.”

    “You know I can’t tell you that,” Buffy said.

    Nikki laughed. “If the answer was no, you’d just say it.”

    Buffy looked down.

    “No, really, I get it. The clever ones. They draw you sometimes. I met Dracula once – that guy was fine.”

    Buffy looked back up. “You too?”

    Nikki laughed. “He bite you?”

    “I thought I was dreaming.”

    “‘Nough to make you go blood-junkie.”

    “Almost.”

    “Hard to kill, though. He kept going all misty, then he took off. Anyway, I’ve studied this Spike guy,” Nikki said. “He’s worked with humans before, and he interacts with other demons, not just vampires. He’s impulsive, but he’s social, and he’s clever. It wouldn’t blow my mind if he hacked out a deal with a slayer if he thought could get something he wanted out of it. He thinks outside the box, that one.”

    Buffy shook her head. “What’s it even matter?” she asked. “I’ll never get back to my own time. I’ll be a dissipated spirit before the sun sets tomorrow.”

    Nikki shook her head. “Not necessarily,” she said. “Bernie let slip some stuff after you left. If you were brought to the past by this vampire’s blood, than this vampire’s blood can probably send you back.”

    Buffy stared at her. “Really?”

    Nikki nodded with a bit of a wicked grin.

    “How?”

    “Well, that’s a bit more complex,” Nikki said, “‘cause the blood would have to be separate from his mortal flesh, and would have to surround your spirit, at least in a circle. So, you couldn’t just try to possess him as a spirit, or hope he’d grab you and that that would do it. You’d need me to catch him, bleed him–”

    “No!” Buffy said vehemently.

    “What, no. I thought you wanted my help.”

    “I do. But if anyone is going to confront Spike, it’s going to be me.”

    “I’m not afraid.” Nikki held her head a little higher. “The mission is what matters.”

    “And this is my mission. Not yours.”

    “Buffy, you were right. Bernie’s kind of a hard ass about this, but I save lives. That may not be what he does, but that’s what I do. And you’re a fellow slayer. This is my job.”

    “And we need you to keep doing it,” Buffy said. “Look at this city. All of these push pins and circles and thumb tacks. That’s all you. I’m one spirit, and I shouldn’t even be here. I’m not letting anyone risk their lives for this, least of all you.” If and when Spike killed Nikki, Buffy didn’t want it to be anything to do with her. She sighed. Boy, she was going to have to spin him a tale... for his blood.

    Blood was life to Spike. Without knowing her, caring about her, still addicted to eating humans, without a soul feeding his altruism, he wasn’t going to give it up easily. Particularly not to a ghost. He might even think the whole thing funny. And she had less than twenty-four hours to persuade him.... “I guess I’ll head down to the CBGB now,” she said. “I don’t have much time.”

    “We can buy you more time,” Nikki said.

    “What? How?”

    Nikki sat down and looked at her. “You said you knew Robin.”

    “Yeah,” Buffy said. “Yeah, I know him.”

    “Tell me about him.”

    Buffy shook her head. “You know I shouldn’t, Nikki. You know I shouldn’t tell you your future.”

    “Okay. Let me tell you my future,” Nikki said. “I’m dead. Robin’s alone. I never saw him grow up. Tell me how much of that’s on point.” Buffy didn’t have to. They both knew. “Slayers don’t live long, I’m wise. And I’m gonna bet, when it comes to me, that you know that full well. Possibly with more detail than I’d like. Now, I’m not going to ask when that is...”

    Buffy shook her head. “I was told the day and time of my death once,” Buffy said. “And when I found out, I realized I didn’t really want to know. Also, it wasn’t strictly speaking true, so...” She shrugged. “But in your case, I can honestly say, I don’t know. I never asked the date, or how old you were, or anything. When... when is as much a mystery to me, as it is to you.” How...  Well, how Nikki was going to die was another matter.

    “But not long enough to meet my grandchildren, I’ll bet,” Nikki said.

    Buffy shook her head, no.

    “So tell me about Robin,” she said, her voice very soft. Pleading.

    “Nikki...”

    “If you tell me about Robin,” Nikki said, “I’ll help you get enough time to catch this vampire before you fade away completely.”

    Buffy frowned. “Is there a way?”

    “Yes,” Nikki said. “Bernie was telling me about it. He told me not to tell you.”

    “Why?”

    “Because Bernie wants you gone. He’s terrified you’re going to muck with the timeline, go saving lives or killing people, when you’re not supposed to exist. You’re a slayer – it’s your instinct to slay monsters and save the innocent. But if you kill or even save the wrong person, you could destroy the whole planet.”

    Buffy blinked. “Oh.”

    “Also, he’s afraid you’re going sell us out to this Spike.”

    Buffy was insulted. “I’m a slayer.”

    “He’s no proof of that. And you’re working with a vamp.”

    “So why aren’t you scared of that?”

    “Because I’m never afraid,” Nikki said. “You already told me Robin’s going to be all right, just by the fact that you know him. He’s the only thing I’ve ever been afraid for. My own death... I don’t care. I accepted it when I was sixteen and woke up one day with the power I’d been trained for. But Robin... Robin’s my heart. I’m the slayer, I’ll always be the slayer, but... the only reason I’m still around is because of Robin. I’d have died years ago, if I didn’t have him to live for.”

    Buffy smiled. “I know the feeling.”

    “I know how you can live long enough to find this vampire,” Nikki said. “I can’t promise you’ll get what you want. I think he’ll kill you, but... it’s a chance, right?” She looked at Buffy with a pleading expression. “Do me this solid, I’ll pay it in kind. Please. Tell me about my son.”

    Buffy nodded, all right. “I met Robin Wood when he was acting as the principal of my town’s highschool. It was centered over a hellmouth. And Nikki... he’s amazing,” she began.
 

***

    “Are you sure this will work?” Buffy asked.

    “This glass is supposed to show soul activity,” Nikki said. “I got it off a tzar demon I killed. It’s worked so far on everyone I’ve looked at. For example,” she held the stemmed crystal goblet up and peered through the square glass panes at Buffy. “All I can see when I look through this is you. Just the spirit, or soul, or whatever it is.”

    “I think I’m both soul and consciousness,” Buffy said. “I... I know you can have consciousness without the soul. Vampires do.”

    “Yeah. Well. You got soul, sister. If we look around here long enough, we might be able to find someone who doesn’t.”

    Crowley had told Nikki that the only way Buffy’s spirit could be kept from dissipating pretty much overnight was to have it bound to a living human body. And any human body that Buffy possessed in this way would be diminished, if not basically killed, their own spirit subsumed in the more powerful energies of the slayer. Crowley had insisted that Buffy hadn’t the right to kill another to buy herself a week or two of life. If he’d bothered to tell Buffy this, she would have agreed with him. Nikki, however, had other ideas.

    “There are people out there, bodies, whose souls have already fled,” she said. “The brain damaged, the dying. I know. I’ve seen them. If I can locate one of these, you can possess their body without killing anyone who’s still here. I mean, it’s a little morally iffy, but not any weirder than organ donation.” And they were both slayers. Morally iffy was something they had to do on a regular basis.

    “But if I possess a body that’s brain damaged or dying,” Buffy said, “won’t I just lie there in a coma like they are?”

    Nikki shrugged. “I didn’t say it wasn’t a risk,” she said. “But I slew a ghost once who had possessed a vacant body like that, and they were able to move around. I think Crowley said the metaphysical mandates over the physical, in cases of possession. I mean... vampires are dead. They should be still as stone, and they move around.”

    “I’m a spirit, not a demon.”

    “Still. Figure it’s worth a try, yeah?”

    They’d gone around the hospital for hours. They’d found a few bodies whose souls had already fled, but for the most part they were too elderly or frail to be of any use, and one of them actually finished dying while they’d watched. Buffy was beginning to fade by this time. As far as she was concerned, everything looked misty and vague, and Nikki’s voice was hard to hear. “I don’t think I’m going to make it!” Buffy shouted, to get her voice through the fog surrounding her.

    “Don’t give up yet, girl!” Nikki said to her. Buffy couldn’t hear her distinctly, but she thought that was what she said. “I should have thought. We’ll check the drug ward.”

    And that was where they found her. Her name was Sarah MacArthur. She’d been dropped off in the emergency room antechamber by someone – probably her ‘friends’ – having overdosed on heroin. She was eighteen, and her parents were being contacted, but there didn’t seem to be anyone available at the number they had on record. She’d been listed as a runaway two and a half years before. And she was officially diagnosed as brain dead.

    Just what they were looking for. A derelict from a tortured life, who had checked out early.

    Her skin wasn’t perfect, and she was rather small for her age, but her hair was a rich dark brown, full and lustrous on the hospital pillow, even though unwashed and uncombed. Given her age, the hospital didn’t have permission to take her off the IVs and such and let her die until her parents gave the okay, so until they found them, or until she died on her own, her body was stuck in that bed, slowly deteriorating. “She’s perfect,” Buffy said, unwilling to look any further. She wasn’t sure she had time to find anyone else.

    Spike had once told her how he’d managed to possess someone when he was stuck as a ghost. That had involved a wizard who was actively drawing him in, but he described it as being the water in a sponge. Buffy looked at Nikki, and told her goodbye, though she wasn’t sure she could hear her anymore. She was a cell-phone with terrible reception by then. “Good luck, sister,” Nikki told her, and Buffy lay down on the bed along with Sarah.

    The water in a sponge, she told herself. Become the water in a sponge.

    It was much easier than she’d thought it would be. Sarah’s body was a hollow wasteland, desperate for a spirit to inhabit it. It was actively trying to die, all alone like that, and when Buffy’s spirit touched it, it caught onto her like static electricity. It drew her spirit limbs into Sarah’s empty ones, pulled her along into Sarah’s body, and finally enveloped her head, holding her spirit fast as a lover. For a moment, Buffy was frozen, afraid that she had been correct, and she would simply lie there in a brain dead, drug damaged coma, from which her spirit would never return. But then she found what seemed to be the on switch, and the body was hers.

    She opened her eyes, looked around, and saw Nikki grinning at her, her full cheeks round as a chipmunk. “Right on, sister! Now we’re cookin’ with gas.”
    

***

    “Are you sure this won’t stand out?” Buffy asked, looking down at Sarah’s newly clad form. Sarah had cleaned up much nicer than Buffy had thought she would. With a little moisturizer and make up to hide the heroin damaged skin, her hair washed and styled, little Sarah no longer looked like a wastrel from the slums. In fact, she looked like a lost, scared little girl. Buffy wondered how much of that was Sarah’s natural face, and how much was Buffy’s own expression, trapped in the wrong body, in the wrong time, about to do a very, very wrong thing.  

    “If you’re going to CBGB, you’ll blend in right quick in these threads. Lot of punks down there.”

    “If you say so,” Buffy said. She’d known Spike for years, and really knew very little about the punk scene. She felt she was over the top. Ripped fishnets, for one, were something she’d only ever seen people wear at Rocky Horror, or strip clubs. The tight black skirt with the chains on it felt too obvious, and the t-shirt with the rude word scrawled in white crayon far too casual. It was the army boots that really did it, though. “Army boots with fishnets?” she asked.

    “Trust me,” Nikki said. “Now, let’s do something with your hair... if I was really going to have you blend in, I’d shave some of it off.”

    “No. Keep the hair,” Buffy said. “He likes hair.”

    Nikki brushed it out anyway, and teased it up as much as she could. “You do know he’s probably gonna kill you.” she said.

    “I’m a slayer,” Buffy said. “Or I was.”

    “Or you’re gonna be,” Nikki said with a bit of a smile.

    “I always knew a vampire might get me. I’d rather die like that than fade away as a ghost.”

    “I hear that. You realize this is only a temporary fix, right?” Nikki said. “You won’t be able to hold on to Sarah’s body for more than about ten or twelve days before you fade away anyway.”

    “I know that, too. But if I can get to Spike.... If I can get to Spike....” She covered her eyes with her hand for a moment, and then shrugged. What the hell was she doing? “What the hell,” she said, mostly to herself. “If he breaks my neck in the first ten minutes, I’ve lost nothing.”

    Nikki stood back and looked Buffy over. “Well, you’ll do for CB’s. I have no idea if you’ll do for this vamp.”

    “I’ve got to try.”

    “Are you sure ‘bout this plan? Sounds a bit out to lunch, in my opinion.”

    “You’re the one who said I knew him.”

    “Yeah, but it’s kind of creepy. If you weren’t a slayer, I’d say you were flat nuts. And really... I mean... torture much.”

    “I’ll be fine.”

    “Why are you so sure of that?”

    Buffy couldn’t answer. She couldn’t say he had a soul, because he didn’t. She couldn’t say he loved her, because he didn’t. She couldn’t even say she trusted him, because she didn’t, not in the least. But this was the plan she was drawn to. Nikki was right. She was nuts. But the only other options might kill him... or Nikki. And she didn’t really want either to happen. “What choice have I got?” she asked.

    “Plenty,” Nikki said. “Are you sure you don’t want me to just trap him?”

    Buffy shook her head. “Please, Nikki.”

    “You really want me to stay out of this, don’t you.”

    Buffy sighed and looked away.

    “I’ve already sussed it out,” Nikki said. “I’m no fool. If you know him in the future, I don’t kill him in the now.”

    She was getting dangerously close to guessing her fate. “If you ever meet him, you do your damnedest to try!” Buffy said.

    Nikki looked at her seriously. “What happens if somehow I do?” she asked. “Will it muck up the timeline?” She swallowed. “Could it put Robin at risk?”

    “No,” Buffy said. “Listen to me, Nikki. If you do kill Spike, it’s nothing to do with me. I’m not important here. Not here, not now. I’m just a phantom. You remember what I said about being told the time of my death once?”

    “Yeah.”

    “It wasn’t true. I was brought back. Destiny isn’t written. Now I’m going to try like hell to stay out of the way of history, because I’m really not supposed to be here. But you are. Don’t second guess anything. Just be you.”

    Nikki stared at her. “Were you scared?”

    “Terrified. The first time. The second time, not so much.”

    “The second time?”

    “Complicated. Are you scared?”

    Nikki thought about it. “No,” she said slowly. Then she laughed. “Weird. I thought I would be....”

    “Death is our gift,” Buffy whispered. “The first slayer said that to me, in a vision once. Death is your gift.”

    “Dealing death?”

    “Or receiving it,” Buffy said. “We slayers, we deal with the hordes of hell every day. But there’s more to death than that. It’s our calling to destroy evil. Do you think karma forgets that?” She hesitated. “I went to heaven, once,” she confessed. “I didn’t want to come back.”

    Nikki regarded her. “Was it worth it?”

    “It was heaven,” Buffy said, her voice quiet. She still felt grief when she thought of it, though she was willing to wait to find it again. “There’s nothing else to say.”

    “Robin....” Nikki trailed off.

    “He really will be all right, Nikki. I swear to you. Crowley takes care of him.”

    Nikki laughed. “Yeah, he would. Poor kid. He’s gonna grow up serious, isn’t he.”

    “He finds a woman who knows how to have fun,” Buffy told her.

    “Really?”

    Buffy grinned. “Oh yeah. She’s... well, a bit like you, in a lot of ways.”

    Nikki came up to Buffy. “And you’re not going to give me up, right?”

    “I swear,” Buffy said. “I don’t know you, I’ve never heard of you, and I’ll die before I say anything about you. Again,” she added.

    Nikki searched her eyes, and then nodded. “Right on, sister.” She hugged her. “You know, I never thought I’d ever get to meet another slayer.” She looked into Buffy’s eyes. “There’s something kindred in it. Like... not even family. But like we’re the same.”

    “We are,” Buffy said. “In a way.”

    Nikki smiled. “She alone will have the power. It’s nice not to be alone, even if it’s only for bit. And thank you,” she touched Buffy’s arm and held it seriously, “thank you for telling me about Robin. I owe you.”

    “You’ve already paid off,” Buffy said, gesturing down at her new form. “Now we just get to see how likely any of this is to work.”

SPIKE
Death is on your heels, baby, and sooner or later it's gonna catch you. And part of you wants it... not only to stop the fear and uncertainty, but because you're just a little bit in love with it.
                    Fool For Love

    The Bowery in 1977 was, according to Nikki, skid row. As Buffy made her way through the streets, she saw Nikki wasn’t just being over dramatic. Drunken winos shuffled through the streets, and broken bottles lined the gutters. People were stepping over inebriated and even expired bodies which she knew weren’t victims of vampires, but of poverty, addiction, despair, and basic crime. She saw two muggings just as she walked to the club Nikki had told her was Spike’s primary hunting ground, a punk and new-wave music club set in the midst of the Bowery because no other place wanted to deal with the rockers.

    The weather was cool, and Buffy was grateful for the leather bolero jacket Nikki had given her. Nikki was quite a bit larger and more muscular than Sarah was, so the sleeves touched Buffy’s knuckles as she walked. She was grateful for the free movement, at the same time telling herself she wasn’t supposed to fight. Sarah’s body – Buffy could tell – had been on its last legs before the girl had finally burned out her mind and let her soul flee. And now it was recovering from bed rest. It was not up to fighting, barely up to running, and even the walk from the subway was making Buffy a little weary. For a girl used to preternatural strength, agility, and stamina, being only human – and a somewhat fragile human at that – was going to be a test of endurance.

    Nikki had said to be on her guard as she walked there, but that apart from the vampire himself, CBGB was relatively safe. Most of the muggers were used to picking on their usual prey of the winos and indigents, who never fought back, and the police never protected. The punks and rockers who didn’t live in the area tended to be ignored.

    There was a line outside CBGB when she arrived, and Buffy joined it. The awning above the club read “CBGB” followed by “OMFUG” in slightly smaller letters. She had no idea what either of them meant. “What the hell?” she asked the guy she had to pay the cover to. “What’s an omfug?”

    “Other music for uplifting gormandizers,” he laughed. “Hilly’s got some weird ideas.”

    “Who?”

    “Owner,” he said. “CBGB is country, bluegrass, and blues.”

    “And punk, apparently,” Buffy said.

    “Hey, Hilly’s up for anything. Band gets the cover, we keep the bar. The punkers are popular. Not what Hilly meant to draw in, but hell. He meant for poetry readings, too.” He said it with a slight air of scorn.

    Buffy knew exactly why Spike had been drawn here.

    “What’s playing tonight?” she asked as the line pushed her past.

    “Dead Boys!” the guy shouted over his shoulder.

    “How fitting,” Buffy muttered.

    More fitting than she’d expected, as she slid into the club, amongst the breathing throng of people. The singer on the stage was screaming into his microphone, “Would ya feel right if I did you tonight, and put the bite on?”

    CBGB was not the Bronze. The Bronze had been large and clear and open, with pool tables and places to sit, two levels, a respectable bar, some decent “pub grub” as Spike called it, and an obvious dance floor. CBGB was, in Buffy’s opinion, a hole. It was long and narrow, a corridor more than a club. The walls were graffitied and dingy, with posters stuck all anyhow. The floor was made from crudely planed wooden planks. The house lights were pretty much non-existent, at least while the music was playing. The stage was low, abutted right up to the audience, who thronged without a space between them, a tight sweaty knot of people, singing along and dancing where they stood, each of them enthralled by the band, rather than using the music as a background for a night out. There were bundles of chairs and tables along one side of the long narrow club, across from the bar, but they were crowded so close together people all but had to crawl over each other to get to any of them. The place stank of sweat and stale cigarettes and spilled beer. Buffy was afraid of what she’d find if she asked where the bathroom was.

    The Dead Boys were screaming their own name, now. “You know I’m just a dead boy! I wanna be a dead boy! I’ll die for you, if you want me to!”

    And Buffy had thought “Dingos Ate My Baby” was a kind of macabre band. She could see why Spike had been drawn to this type of music. It sounded like a brawl was about to break out any second. In fact, it sounded a bit like one had already broken out on the stage. Every pound of the drums and strike on the guitars sounded as if half the band had just been thrown down a flight of stairs, it was so violent.

    She pushed her way through the crowd, avoiding or ignoring the occasional grope on her tits or ass, which, given the size and unruliness of the crowd, might or might not have been intentional on anyone’s part. Her jacket quickly became too warm to wear, but she didn’t dare take it off. There was nowhere to put it, and it would have vanished in a minute if she’d tried to carry it. The music was loud. Damn, was it loud, hurting her ears, pounding into her head, making her heart vibrate in her chest. She endured half a dozen songs looking around the crowded hall for a bleached haired vampire in a punk club. She couldn’t believe she was doing this. And Sarah’s shoulders were already aching, just from standing and walking. Stupid human body. You had better be bloody worth it, Spike, she thought to his as-yet-disembodied soul. I could just go on back up to heaven, and leave you and everyone else to your fate. Perfect opportunity here!

    Yet... the tenderness in his embrace... the soulful devotion in his eyes... the power in his love.... No. She didn’t really want to die yet. And Spike’s was the one soul she cared about (apart from Angel)  which might not get the chance to join her in heaven upon his own death. He was never sure he’d done enough good to balance out his century of evil. And she loved him so hard. She didn’t want to take away his strongest reason to try....

    But god, she hated this music. She’d grown used to it, as Spike still listened to this kind of stuff on occasion, but usually she tuned it out, and he pretty much respected that it wasn’t her cup of tea. Half the lyrics were unintelligible, blurred and screamed out of all recognition.

    One line was so loud she couldn’t miss it, though. “I don’t need no cook, girl. I need LUNCH.”

    And how fitting that was the moment she actually found him.

    There he was. Spike. She couldn’t miss him. He hadn’t changed that much. Lurking just at the edge of the audience, where the crowd thinned out barely enough to dance, in a disorganized manner; there he was with his hands on the hips of some girl, moving with her to the music. Probably, Buffy realized, his own lunch.

    Spike had on one of his customary black t-shirts, but it was ripped in several places, missing sleeves, and held together with safety pins.  His bleached hair was spiked up in this time, and rather than his neat black jeans, the pair he wore were baggy, acid washed, ripped, and stained. His belt had metal studs on it. The boots were the same style she knew, though. His left arm had a studded leather strap wrapped around the wound Nikki had inflicted on him, probably concealing a bandage.

    His face was hard. Even playing a seduction game on this girl – this victim, Buffy knew it instantly – his face was much harder than she was used to seeing it. She cast her mind back to when she’d first known him, and couldn’t remember if he was this hard at the first. It was difficult to tell – usually he had been completely vamped up when he was fighting her in the beginning.

    The Dead Boys reached the crescendo on their song, the lead singer shouting out “FEED ME!” at the top of his voice, and Buffy’s head rang. Her eyes were drawn to the screaming singer, who arched himself backwards on the stage in a desperate attempt to seem outrageous. This punk music was mad, violent, brutal. The songs were short and kind of murky, without the crisp clarity she’d grown used to from the Indy bands at the Bronze. Also, the seventies acoustics were nowhere near as clean, and feedback punctuated song after song. The singer was now dangling his microphone between his legs in an unsubtle crassness she was unimpressed by. She closed her eyes, cringing as her ears rang with it, and turned back. She’d lost track of Spike. Damn!

    Buffy pushed through to where she’d seen him last as the band switched to another song – they all sounded pretty much alike to her, just a white noise of drums and guitar. This time the singer was complaining he had nothing to do. She was half tempted to tell him to get a job, if he was that bored. Anything other than scream this stuff he dared to try and call music. Ugh. Suddenly, she felt like Giles. When did she grow up? And where the hell was Spike?

    For half a song, she couldn’t find him anywhere. Then she spotted him through the crowd. He was against the wall, with the girl he’d been dancing with before. She sank beneath him, her face clear with vapid ecstacy, as he appeared to kiss her throat in a firm but sensuous dance to the music. Buffy knew he was feeding, and she was too late to even think about saving this girl. She shouldn’t do that anyway, she knew. She was risking the timeline enough as it was. Life... death... those were not her choices to make. Not in this decade. “I just wanna get out on the street fights,” the singer announced.

    The feeding took a long time. Buffy had never just sat back and watched someone be eaten before. A vampire could kill someone with a single bite, but she knew – Spike had told her – that that was a terrible waste of a beating heart. The best way to feed was to take your time. Either painfully or not, enjoying their screams or making them melt in your arms, it was best to let the victim’s heart pulse the blood into you, keeping them alive until all the blood was spent. You got more that way, the blood stayed heated, didn’t clot, and you didn’t have to suck so hard to draw it from the vein. Let their own life kill them for you.

    The drums beat louder than her own heart, but she could feel it pulsing in her chest as she watched, horrified by the sight, but unable to look away, lest she lose track of him again. She wanted to throw up. She wished she could fight. She wished she had the strength for it. But she was not the slayer, now. She was a half-dead junkie called Sarah MacArthur, fit only to wait for her own demise. And Spike... Spike was alone in this. Evil and empty, there was nothing she could do to save his soul. Not for decades. That poor girl... Buffy had to keep telling herself this wasn’t her time, or she’d have jumped forward and dragged Spike off her.

    Or tried to. And had her neck broken for her pains.

    It must have taken a quarter of an hour for Spike to finish his meal. The Dead Boys had squealed neatly into their finale, fast paced and terrible. “Ain’t got time to make no apology. Soul radiation in the dead of night. Love in the middle of a fire fight.” Spike picked the girl up with one arm, as if she were merely drunk, and led her – carried her corpse – through the crowd. “Honey gotta strike me blind. Somebody gotta save my soul, Baby penetrate my mind.”

    Buffy followed him out of the club, trying to lurk in the corner of the doorway. He carried the body nonchalantly to the sidewalk and hailed a taxi. A specific taxi, Buffy noted, dented, and driven by a yellow eyed driver – a minion, too young or stupid to feel comfortable in human form. Spike set the corpse gently in the back seat and gave his minion some instructions on where to dump her. “If you’re peckish, grab someone else while you’re there, but someone off the radar, yeah?” he said, pulling a motorcycle jacket out of the front seat of the taxi, clearly stashed there before. “Hooker, homeless, someone no one’ll miss. We don’t want too much attention.”

    “Right, boss.”

    He shrugged the jacket on. “See you back at the lair. No junkies! Not on anything, anyway. You come back high, I’ll stake you bloody quick.”

    “Right, boss.”

    The taxi pulled off down the street, and Spike glanced around him, seemingly enjoying the fetid city air. He stretched and started to saunter down the sidewalk alone, ready to call it a night.

    “I’m the world’s forgotten boy,” the Dead Boys sang through the door behind her. “The one who’s searchin’, searchin’ to destroy.”

    Buffy followed at a discrete distance. She wanted to know where his lair was before she tried to contact him.

    She had no trouble tailing Spike. His silhouette was a little off with the motorcycle jacket instead of his – Nikki’s– long black coat, but it was still Spike’s walk. As if every step declared his ownership of the territory. Spike walked like a king, his blond hair spiked up like a crown at the moment, instead of slicked back and neat. He strolled, and sauntered, looking up at the halo of the streetlights in the drizzle, glancing about him in proprietary disdain, not wariness.

    Buffy hadn’t seen him moving quite like this since she’d first met him, not unless they were on an active hunt. There was more of the predator in his movements, less of the man. Before he’d gotten his soul, even before the microchip in his head had forced him into a form of submission, Spike had been a powerful figure. Then Buffy had, as he put it, epically kicked his ass in the incident at the church. Spike’s natural hubris had been severely curtailed when he was injured by fire and a falling church organ. He’d been confined to a wheelchair for several months, and in the meantime found himself again under the thrall of his grandsire Angel – a dominant vampire which at this point in his life, he hadn’t had to deal with for seventy years. He had been lord and master ever since Angel had been ensouled, and took to the role of Biggest Bad in the pack like a natural.

    He looked dangerous, and he knew he did.

    He was dangerous. And Buffy knew he was.

    He turned a corner, and Buffy came up slowly, so as not to appear to be obviously following him. They’d gone several blocks from CBGB, and she’d stopped blending in with the punk scene, instead standing out like a sore thumb among the mostly male derelicts and winos. When she finally got to the corner, Spike was nowhere to be seen. Damn! Still, there hadn’t been time for him to get to the next street, not unless he was running – and he’d had no reason to suddenly run. There didn’t appear to be any alleys or escape routes, so Spike’s lair was probably somewhere on this street. She looked up and down the old spray-painted wrecks of buildings. She’d have to make a systematic search to figure out which ones were mere flophouses, and which one was a vampire’s lair.

    “Now if this were a horror flick...,” Buffy said, but she couldn’t see any shadows where a vampire might be lurking, and she had no sense of being stalked. She turned the corner. Suddenly hard, cold arms dragged her backwards against a firm body. At the same instant, she remembered she didn’t have slayer spidey senses anymore, and that Spike could climb. He’d probably been on the wall of the building right above her stupid human head, clinging to a window ledge or something.

    Terror bolted through Sarah’s body, freezing Buffy like a rabbit, and she couldn’t even try to struggle. "Following me was not your brightest move, pet,” Spike murmured against her ear in his accented English. Buffy already felt herself lucky he hadn’t just snapped her neck right then. “Thought I'd have a purse you could pick? If you thought all the chains and spikes were just for show," Spike said, "then you were sadly mistaken, platelet. You just found the truth about what lurks in dark alleys."

    She could already feel his breath on her throat, his fangs as he opened to bite her... "Spike!" she shrieked in a panic.

    Spike froze, his hand still on her throat. Buffy turned her head to look at him. He was vamped, his eyes yellow in the street lights, and he looked at her with his fangs still bared. "You think you know me?"

    She hadn’t meant to go this route, but it was too late now. She quickly reworked her plan in her head. She’d planned something more subtle, more secretive, but she’d let on she knew him now. She hadn’t been able to help it – he really had been about to kill her. Now she’d just have to go with it. It would probably even be easier this way, though it might make things complicated down the line. "Spike," she said. "Don't... don't kill me. Not yet, I need to talk to you."

    “Don’t kill you,” he said. “That’s what I do.” Spike’s head tilted to the side, his look of wonder and confusion, and he shifted his grip to turn her, so he could look at her properly. "How do you know my name? I don’t know you.”

    “No. No, it’s–”

    "Then how the hell do you know me?" he snarled.

    Buffy stared at him. Any lie she came up with sounded ridiculous in her head. Spike didn’t have a reputation for being a long thinker, but he was intuitive and inventive, and lies did not impress him. He’d always been able to read through her lies, anyway – at least, he had when she was Buffy. Even the ones she had told herself. If she had still been a slayer, she’d have had the strength to overpower him and take what she wanted. As she was, Buffy had already decided there was only one way she might get what she needed from Spike, and it was going to take time. She’d planned on just being helpless and available. Now she was helpless, available, and a serious mystery. It was going to make it more dangerous, but it would make things faster, and that was probably good. This was going to be difficult to pull off, whatever she did.  "I need your help."

    Spike raised his eyebrow. "My help,” he said. “A Sunday joint just came to me for help.” He laughed through his fangs. “That's a first.”
 

***

    There was no way he was going to listen to her. Not as he was. Not as she was. Buffy had realized that. Her spirit fading, her chances limited, no slayer strength or allies beyond Nikki – whom she had to keep away from Spike as long as possible – Buffy realized there was only one way to get close enough to Spike to get his blood. He was too strong. She couldn’t take it by force. But there was a chance, a slim chance, that he might give it to her.

    If he liked her enough.

    Buffy remembered an early conversation they’d had, just after they’d started regulating their blood games into something controlled. Buffy had remembered Spike’s scorn of Riley, and the vampires who had granted him those “suck jobs” and she made some comment to that effect. "You know, for a guy who claims he hates blood junkies, you sure enjoy me."

    "I do hate blood junkies."

    "Yeah, but I mean, you're good at it. You never take too much."

    "I've messed up. Just not in like fifty years. I got pretty good at it after a while."

    Buffy looked up at him, confused. "Whoa, wait, what? I thought you didn't like leaving victims alive. I mean, beyond a single night, anyway."

    "Well, I didn't, but you're not my victim, for one. And neither were they, exactly. At least, not right then.”

    “You... are you telling me you were a sucker?"

    “Not for money!” he said, insulted. “It’s...” Spike looked down at her. "Are you really in the mood for more disturbing Spike history?" he asked. Sometimes, neither of them wanted to think about it. Sometimes, however, Buffy felt it was important to hear it. She had to accept him both as he was, and as he had been, and he had to trust that she could. If both of those things didn't hold up, their relationship was doomed.

    "Yeah," Buffy said.

    "Dru had this... hobby. She would pick up long-term victims to torture, sometimes. Little dollies, she'd call them. Blood dolls. And she’d.... well.”

    “Play blood games?”

    “Among other things,” Spike said. “Actually, she'd do all kinds of things to them, usually claiming she'd change them, gift them with eternal life if they played her slaves."

    "Did she?"

    "Sometimes. But they all died, and usually I dusted them if she did change them. They were usually pretty nasty characters to start with – only bastards want a free licence to kill. They made terrible minions, on the whole, and once she was through with them, she didn't care. They weren’t... well, like me. She’d made me for a reason. They were just toys."

    "But you?"

    Spike shrugged. "I'd get jealous. I'd pick up some girl, keep her as a pet. We'd play with them for a week or two, and then get rid of them."

    "I thought you two were... kind of exclusive. I mean, you were so hurt when you found her with that chaos demon."

    "She wasn’t as exclusive as I would have liked. Ever,” Spike said. “Besides, humans didn't count.”

    "Didn't they?"

    Spike shrugged. "There was no way to keep her from doing it. It was easier to just say humans didn't count, and leave it at that. I mean, we'd feed from them. Not something you usually do with another demon." He stroked Buffy's hair. "I mean, sometimes feeding is... very sexual in its way, and..." He seemed to be having trouble.

    "You mean sometimes feeding involves rape," Buffy said. "I've noticed."

    "Yeah. Well, it was like that, and we both knew that didn't count. These dolls, these pets... they were only meant to be playthings. It was just a really prolonged feeding. I didn't like her doing it, but I loved her. And for the most part, the pets took the edge off the pain of that.”

    “Was she trying to hurt you with them?”

    “Sometimes, I think so. I was a doll to her too, in my way. Some part of me always sort of knew that. A very special doll, one she loved, family, but still a doll. But I couldn't leave her. She needed me, and...." His voice sounded sad, and wistful. "I loved her. Without her, I was nothing."

    "I'm sorry."

    Spike shrugged. "It was what it was. She was very damaged. She loved me in her way. I loved her in mine."

    "So these pets of yours...?"

    "Human victims. Blood junkies, I guess, but they paid for it with their lives, eventually. I mean, they never walked away. They belonged to me."

    "Were they willing?"

    "Many of them were, to various extents. Coerced, maybe. Felt they had no choice. Anyone who wasn’t willing tended not to be a ‘pet’, just a plaything or a toy. Dru often picked up the sadistic. She liked to feed on joy, and who would take joy in death but the sadistic? I was always more fond of power. I took those who made me feel powerful. My pets were... usually broken to start with. I'd pick up the helpless, the homeless. The ones who didn't care what I did to them, so long as I fed them and didn't make them scream too loud." He shook his head. "Some of them had been with humans who treated them even worse." He smiled grimly. "A few of them agreed to anything I wanted so long as I killed their exes for them."

    "You'd kill their ex boyfriends?"

    "Their ex-boyfriends, their step fathers, their abusive uncles. It was kind of fun, actually. Not that taking vengeance really helped them any, but my pet's horrified satisfaction tended to taste good afterwards."

    Buffy stared into the darkness, silent.

    “Too much for you?” he asked.

    “No. I was just... considering. I mean.... that's kind of... sadistically sweet."

    “Taking vengeance for them?”

    “Yeah.” She looked up at him. “Did you care about them?”

    He shook his head. “I can’t have, really. I mean, I guess I did in the way you can care for a pet pig you intend to put on the table. But no matter how much fun they were to play with, I was slowly killing them, wasn’t I.” He shrugged. “No matter how sweet the game was, it was a game of death. I ate them, after all.”

    "All of them?"

    "Yeah," Spike said. "Though I usually did it gentle."

    Buffy had found the whole thing very sad, when he’d mentioned it. So had he. He’d curled up with his head on her stomach and let her caress his hair until they’d both fallen asleep, and they could think about less traumatic things. Now, it was the only hope she had. A way into his lair, close enough to him to catch his blood. A sweet game, and a slow death – if a gentle one.

    She didn’t have time to come up with a less dangerous plan.

_______

Chapter End Notes:

Chapter notes:
If anyone deeply loves CBGB, or punk rock in general, please be aware all statements are BUFFY’S opinion of both, not my own. I couldn’t study something in this much detail without holding respect for it at some level.
Again, here’s the link to the Dead Boy’s concert. This might not be the one from April the 29th, but it is from 1977, and honestly, I really had been getting WAY too invested in making a silly vampire fanfiction historically accurate.

The songs mentioned are Sonic Reducer, I Need Lunch, Ain’t Nothin’ to Do, and Search and Destroy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOHOM1hVM-M

Spike:  You've got a real death wish. It's almost interesting.
        Lie To Me  

 

  "Dru!"

    Spike started shouting even before he'd made it to his own apartment. It was a small apartment building, derelict if not condemned. The electricity was still on, but most of the windows were boarded up, and there was spray paint over everything. A small handful of yellow eyed vamps, nesting in indifferent squalor, looked up at Spike nervously as he passed. Mostly male, a couple female, all tough looking. Minions, Buffy realized. Spike was keeping quite a small number of minions. He dragged Buffy past them without looking at any of them and wrenched open a door with more spray paint scrawls on it.

    When he got into his apartment, Spike tossed Buffy on the ground like a duffle bag full of dirty laundry. The room was spartan, but mostly human – a kitchenette, mostly unused, a few carpets, a TV, some vague sixties style furniture. Nothing "posh" as Spike would have called it, but nothing like the squalor of the vamps in the hallway. "Dru!" There was no direct response – just some grunting and noises from behind a closed door. "Drusilla!" Spike shouted, louder. "Would you quit playing with your dolls and take a look at this?"

    There was a muffled groan, followed by a masculine scream, and Spike pinched his forehead between his thumb and middle finger, looking almost embarrassed. He waited, his jaw tense, and finally shouted one more time. "Dru!" A few moments later the door opened on a room swathed in lace, a hundred times more opulent than the living room. A second later, there was Drusilla.

    Drusilla's hair was a near rat's nest of tangles, and she wore little but a badly twisted black corset and a ragged skirt. A dark stain on the skirt indicated blood, or some other liquid. "What have you brought us, Spiky?" she asked. "Another little liar for the pyre?"

    "Is she a liar?" Spike asked.

    Drusilla looked up at him, her long neck twisted like a serpent. "What makes you curiouser and curiouser, my pet? You bring home a tangle of a twisted sister, and go asking me what I think of her?"

    "She followed me home," Spike said, sounding annoyed. "Or she tried to. She claims she knows me."

    "My sweet man's fame has spread to all corners," Drusilla said with a vicious smile. She reached up to pet him. Spike fell into her touch, and angled his body closer to her. Buffy tried to sit up. "And what does the false spirit want with him?" Drusilla asked, shifting her attention to Buffy.

    Spike's anger had pretty much dissipated at Dru's touch. He slid himself behind her and wrapped his arms around her, his head resting on her shoulder. "Damned if I know. I thought she might be a whore, then I thought she might be a thief – though why she thought to steal from me, of all blokes on the street, I couldn't figure. When I caught her she knew my name, and eventually told me to take her to you – which means she knew you, too."

    "She doesn't know me," Drusilla said flatly. "She doesn't know the right music." She started to sway sensuously against Spike, who indulged her, nuzzling her throat.

    "Do you know what she wants, love?" Spike asked, his voice seductive. He opened his mouth and gently nibbled at Dru's neck.

    "She wants your blood," Dru said.

    Spike's expression changed to indulgent contempt. "Is that all. Just another vamp wannabe."

    "No," Buffy said then. "I don't want to be turned."

    That stopped both of them, and they looked at her, identical looks of surprise on their faces. "All right, Dru," Spike said, with a touch of exasperation. "You want to look at her properly now?"

    Dru stepped away from Spike and came up to Buffy. Buffy closed her eyes. She was unsure of Drusilla's powers – she knew Dru could see the future sometimes, and she didn't want Dru seeing who or what she really was. "I can't see her," Dru said then, and Buffy sagged with relief. "I see lines of pretty powder, and sharp needles dripping with sweet blood, and an empty bed and tears, but it's only a shield. She's behind there somewhere." Dru held her hands up flat, the fingers spread, and tried to see through them. She had her hands climb each other like a Jacob's ladder, tilting her head back and forth to peer at Buffy through her fingers. She reached forward, her fingers pointed at Buffy's eyes. Buffy started to feel sleepy. Her lids sank, and her ears buzzed, and her vision started to go grey. Then Drusilla pulled back abruptly, and Buffy shook off whatever spell she'd been trying. "She'll only go away if I play it that way. There's not enough inside to hold onto if I try to push her out." She reached out again and picked Buffy up by the throat. "She's a shattered mirror. I don't like broken things. Not unless I break them." Her face went dark, and she glanced at Spike with yellow vampire eyes. "Can I have her, sweet?"

    Spike shrugged. "If you like."

    "What? No!" Buffy tried to struggle. "Spike!" she called out. "Spike, I came to you!"

    "Your mistake," Spike said darkly.

    Buffy kicked out at Dru, with no slayer strength, but she wasn't about to just lie down and die, either. "Spike, please!" Spike glanced at her, drawn by his name or her pleading, but he didn't seem inclined to stop what was about to happen.

    "Drusilla?"

    It was a masculine voice that had interrupted. Every eye turned to the door Drusilla had come through earlier.

    "Mistress? You promised." He swallowed. "You promised you'd take me out." Buffy was disgusted by what stood in the door. A rather handsome young man with his shirt off leaned against the door frame. He had hair like a member of the Partridge Family, but it was mussed and sweaty. His skin was sallow and his eyes hollow with what Buffy supposed was blood loss. A still shiny wound was visible on his neck, dripping trickles of blood down his sweaty chest.

    Spike's eyes narrowed. "Oh. You're taking this one out are you?" he asked. He glared at Dru, who was still holding Buffy up by the throat. The distraction had not proved a rescue. Buffy was about to be throttled without Dru even knowing what she was doing. "What's he asked for? The ballet?"

    "Candyfloss," Drusilla said. "I promised him candyfloss, and a child with it."

    "It's late," the man said. "If we don't hurry..."

    "All the little children will have gone to bed," Dru said sadly.

    "Well, if you'd gone out earlier," Spike said pointedly, "rather than going to bed yourselves, you wouldn't have to worry about being late, would you." He was stiff with anger. He glanced over at Buffy and Dru. "Don't waste veal, love," he said. "One of us should have her."

    Buffy's whole world was red now, from the vice grip on her throat, and all was slowly going dark. Dru set Buffy down as if she'd forgotten about her, and Buffy collapsed to the floor, gasping and coughing. Dru went to the blooded man and licked sensuously at his chest.

    Spike looked away.

    Dru seemed to notice. "Don't be jealous of my dollies, pretty Spike," Dru said, without taking her hands off her human lover. "You know they're only toys."

    Spike's hand was clenched. "Of course," he said through his teeth. He nodded over at Buffy. "And what if I kept this one?"

    "Pretty kitties play better together," Dru said with a delighted grin. She looked over at the slowly dying man, who was clearly just as insane as Dru was. "Would you like another little kitty to play with during the day?"

    "Whatever you wish of me, mistress," the man said.

    "Oh, I know," Drusilla said. "You prefer the child in them. But her mouth looks sweet as cinnamon candy, doesn't it?" She smiled and kissed him, and Spike swallowed, as if he was about to be sick. She looked over at Spike. "We'll be back by the sun," she said.

    "Have fun," Spike said, his face hard as Buffy had ever seen it.

    They went back out through the door Buffy had come in through, leaving her and Spike alone. Well, alone save for the handful of clear minions nesting in the outer chamber. Buffy wondered how their appearance would rate in the outside world, but she figured a half dressed blooded victim and a mad vampire still reeking of sex would probably make any child run screaming for their parents, so she wasn't about to comment. She coughed, and scrambled backward away from Spike, toward the wall.

    "Shut the fuck up," Spike said. Buffy hadn't said anything at all.

    Spike strode over to a cupboard and pulled out a bottle of rot-gut whiskey, which he poured into a veritable tumbler. Buffy stayed as still as she could, out of his way, as he threw himself into a chair and set about, as far as she could see, getting himself drunk.

    When he was halfway through his second tumbler he glanced at her. "You got a name, pet?" he asked, his voice not quite as hard as it had been fifteen minutes before.

    "Bu – Sarah." She corrected herself before she'd gotten the first syllable out. "I'm called Sarah."

    "Well. Sarah," he said. "You have two choices. I'm gonna kill you. No choice there. If you're going to stalk vampires in the dead of night, there are consequences for that. But I can kill you tonight. Or I can kill you later. Don't answer yet," he added darkly. "You want me to kill you tonight, you just sit there quiet till I'm done with my drink, and I'm ready for a meal. If you want me to kill you later," he gestured with his chin at a sofa on the wall, "you unfold the bed out of that sofa and expect what I'm going to do to you on it."

    Ugh. Charming. It was one of the worst things she'd ever heard, and hearing it in his voice was revolting. And you love this guy? a voice in her head asked. She didn’t at the moment. At the moment, she felt like she wanted to kill him. She had never wanted to kill him so badly, not when she'd first met him, not when he'd nearly killed Xander or Willow, not even the time she'd actually managed to stake him. "Quite the come on," she snapped. "I know you can do better than that. You're not mad at me. You're mad at her. Why take it out on me?"

    "If you sit there prattling at me, I'm going to kill you badly," he pointed out.

    "You'll kill me, any way you like, no matter what I do," Buffy said. "That's what you do. So I might as well say what I want."

    Spike tilted his head at her, still annoyed, but a slight amusement tickled in the corner of his eyebrow. She was glad she knew his face so well. She was getting to him, at least a little. "What do you want?" he asked. "What the hell are you after?"

    Buffy decided to just be honest about it. "Drusilla was right," she said. "I want a cup of your blood."

    Spike's eyebrows raised. "You want a cup of my blood," he said, incredulous.

    "Yes."

    "To do what with?"

    Buffy swallowed.

    "Well? You don't want to be turned, what do you bloody want it for?"

    "A spell," she said.

    "A spell." He looked like he was about to laugh. "And you think I'm just going to slice myself open and pour it out for you, so that you can cast spells on me? You really think that."

    "The spell's for me," Buffy said.

    "Ah. And what's it gonna do for you?"

    "Does that matter?"

    "Probably."

    Buffy tried to figure out a way to answer without giving herself completely away. "If I can cast this spell," she said, "I'll be what I'm supposed to be."

    "And what's that?"

    "Just me," she said. "Dru called me a shattered mirror. She's right."

    Spike narrowed his eyes at her. "And why come to me?"

    “Because you can help.”

    “Well, maybe I can, but it’s obvious one of us isn’t playing with a full sack, here. I’m a vampire. What the hell makes you think I would?”

    Buffy longed to tell him the truth, but she didn’t dare. She didn’t trust Crowley, but he probably wasn’t wrong: Buffy probably could alter the future in ways she wouldn’t like. Spike – or rather Angel – had been involved in a time-fracture once before, and Spike had actually been killed by a murderous Illyria, and saved in a different time twist. Time could be altered. And Spike’s timeline was fragile. The sacrifice that he had made to achieve his soul, the forgiveness between both him and Buffy, the acceptance that had blessed his redemption had been powerful stuff. Forgiveness, redemption, repentance, sacrifice, and love, all of those had been potent weapons against the First Evil. It was all of that stuff swimming around in his soul which had defeated it – not just the shiny jewelry. The First had known Spike could hurt it – that was why it had targeted him so fiercely. If Buffy got back by taking short cuts on his redemptive journey, she might get back to a demonic hellscape run by Evil itself. Her life wasn’t worth the world.

    Which meant she couldn’t just tell him the truth. Her only choice was to keep him off-balance long enough to get to him. Either get him to treat her like a real pet – if only a pet pig – that he’d be willing to placate by helping her, or distract him enough so that she could steal the blood in some way. And she planned not to lie, if she could help it. He’d always been able to see through her lies, and a blatant lie might anger him. And Spike was impulsive when angry. An impulse to kill was always lurking in his hands. So. Why would he help? “Because you might want to.”

    He looked exasperated. “Why would I want to?”

    Buffy stared at him. “Because you can.”

    “You’re spinning in circles, now, pet. It’s my job to chase your tail.” Buffy didn't answer. "You claim you know me. How?"

    "I just do," Buffy said.

    "Not a good enough answer, sweetheart."

    "Why not?" Buffy asked. "You accept Drusilla’s weird visions. Who's to say I don't just know you, the same way she knows things?"

    Spike regarded her for a moment. Mentioning Drusilla in regards to the uncanny seemed to have been a reasonable key. "Well, you've got me curious. This is a new one. If all you want's a cup of vampire blood, this might be interesting to watch." He gestured with his chin at the apartment door. "Tell one of the gang to come in."

    "Not theirs," Buffy said. "It has to be yours."

    Spike did laugh then. "I'm not that dim, sweetheart," he said. "Answer's no. I guess all that's left now is to kill you."

    "I understand," Buffy said evenly, without any fear in her voice. "And what if I asked you to kill me later?"

    His eyes narrowed, and his tone turned dark. "I told you what that entails."

    "And maybe I'm okay with that," Buffy said coldly.

    Spike glanced up and down her form. "You don't look like it."

    "Yeah, well, I'm ticked off," Buffy said. "But I don't need you to answer yes or no now. I need you to know what I want. And maybe... if you come to trust me enough... you'll let me have it."

    "I don't trust anyone but the Big Bad," Spike said. "And that's me." He looked her over again. "Certainly never going to trust a little slut like you."

    "You don't need to insult me," Buffy said. "I've just agreed to be your willing pet, for as long as you'll keep me alive."

    Spike’s head cocked again. It was the first time either of them had outright said it, and it was Buffy who had used his specific word. Not doll, not slave. Pet. "How willing?" he asked. He drained his glass and set it on the table beside his chair. He stood up and came to her. "Are you really so willing?"

    Buffy took a deep breath. She swallowed her anger and her revulsion and tried to remember that this was Spike. This was the man who would one day risk his life for her. Who would nearly die for her sister. Who would go to the end of the underworld and back to prove himself worthy of her. This was the great champion who would perform the ultimate sacrifice to defeat the First Evil and save the entire world. She remembered Spike as he had looked at the hellmouth, amazed, resolute, so powerful and so deep, his soul shining in his eyes, through his body, burning through their clasped hands. She remembered him the last night they were together. So loving, so seductive, so generous. Right now he was angry, and hurt, and young. In comparison to the soulful man she loved he was a wounded, abused, teenage boy, scorned by his lover, and taking it out on whomever was at hand.

    She suddenly wanted to hold him.

    She could see the change in her own countenance by the confused twitch in Spike's eyebrows as her anger died. She placed her hands gently on his shoulders, letting him feel the heat of her palms through the black t-shirt. She knew he loved the heat of her – she may not be a slayer in this form, but she was still human. Slowly, she tilted her head, revealing her throat. She kept her eyes locked on his, and pushed up closer to him. "Yes," she whispered.

    His eyes went from blue to yellow as he gazed at her. He put his hands on her shoulders, holding her steady, not seductively. Then he struck – not quickly, but not romantically, either. It was almost clinical, as if he were testing her, unsure whether she was telling the truth. She knew a second later that he was testing her, as he gave nothing back. It hurt, and it kept hurting, and she felt no relaxation or sleepy euphoria, no desire to stay near him. He fed from her, and that was it.

    She knew what he was doing, and she knew why. Spike’s level of contempt for “suckers” was enormous. When he’d gotten the chip in his head, keeping him from killing, he’d come crawling to Buffy, starving and weak, a ragged blanket between him and dustville, rather than demean himself by sinking to their level. It would have been a reasonable decision – sell his venom hit for money, get human blood and cash, when he could no longer take what he needed from his victims. But not Spike. He only took blood on his own terms. He was never going to allow himself to be treated as that kind of whore. Whatever this ‘pet’ relationship was, it was never going to be anything akin to that.

    Buffy clenched her fists and just endured the pain, knowing he needed to hurt her now. He needed to inflict pain, to transfer the pain he felt in his heart as Drusilla ran off with her perverted human lover, leaving him alone. The closeness of him was uncomfortable as well, her body's knowledge that he was the source of the pain she felt. She had to fight herself not to struggle, or push him away. The pain was well on its way from endurable to excruciating when he finally released her. She gasped with it and let herself fall to her knees. He hadn't been at it very long, but she never had any idea how much he had taken. That knowledge was only ever his. She put pressure on the wound – a wide and violent bite, with much more tissue damage than he'd ever inflicted on her as Buffy. She looked up at him from the floor, trying not to allow any accusation in her eyes. "Do you have a bandage?" she asked evenly.

    "In the loo," he said, his voice monotone. He gestured with his head at another door. "Get it yourself."

    Buffy nodded. She climbed carefully to her feet and headed toward the bathroom. She was shaking. Damn Sarah’s pitiful body.

    The bathroom had only a narrow window, too small for any human being to sneak through, and she knew the windows in the main apartment had wire grate over them. With the minion gang squatting in the corridor, Buffy knew she was effectively trapped in Spike's apartment. She hadn't planned on running away, but knowing how to would have been nice. Spike she knew she could handle. Drusilla... she was too unpredictable.

     Buffy held pressure to her wound until the bleeding stopped, and then cleaned it carefully. She stole a little of Spike's peroxide to treat it, hissing as she touched it. She found bandages in the medicine chest, and dressed the bite properly. She washed her hands and gazed at herself in the mirror. Sarah's dark hair and cupid mouth looked back at her. She didn't know how she was going to handle Spike looking like this. Still, he seemed to find her attractive enough. She knew it wasn't just her body he had loved, anyway. She had to try and figure out the best way of kindling that fondness in him, without giving too much away, or ruining the progression of their own timeline when she returned.

    Or, she could just bash him over the head and try and steal the blood. But she didn't think that opportunity was likely to present itself. Not with Spike the way he was now.

    Spike glanced at her bandage as she returned to the main room. "I'll take that off when I want to," he said.

    "I know."

    "You'll be chained in the closet while I'm sleeping."

    Buffy hesitated. "Fair enough," she said. He didn't know her. He had no reason to trust her. And she had just been contemplating bashing him over the head, so he had a fair point. She looked at him. "On the floor, or forced to stand?"

    "If you're sweet, you get a pillow," he said, almost flirtatious.

    "Thanks."

    "You're the first pet ever bothered to ask that."

    "It's important."

    "Yeah," Spike said. "Funny how the thought occurred to you, though."

    "I've seen a lot of things in my time," Buffy said. She looked at him very seriously. "And I know full well what you're capable of."

    Spike looked flattered.
 

ANGELUS: Just don't get it now, do you? Well, you're new... and a little dim. So let me explain to you how things are now. There's no belonging or deserving anymore. You can take what you want, have what you want... but nothing is yours. Not even her.
        Destiny
 

    Spike pretty much ignored Buffy after that, descending into his bottle of whiskey, so she checked the sink. The tap worked, but the water tasted rusty. She drank it anyway, knowing she'd need plenty of fluids if she was going to be playing Spike's snack bar. The fridge had only a box of flowers in it, though it was cold. She decided to make herself useful – more likely to be treated well that way – so she cleaned the dishes that were piled by the sink . It was mostly drinks glasses, some of them tainted with blood. She washed and dried them and then opened a cupboard to put them away.

    A squeaking cage of rats startled her, and she jumped back. Rats didn't bother her inherently, but she wasn't expecting them to be there. Spike laughed at her startled gasp. "Dru's breakfast," he said. "She likes them with her evening paper."

    Buffy opened a different cupboard and put the glasses away in there.

    "Squeamish?" Spike asked.

    "Nah. What's a little hantavirus between friends?"

    "You'll only get that in Korea," Spike said.

    Buffy realized she didn't know the progression of the disease in the 1970's. He was probably right. She turned and looked at him. "So what's with the minions?" she asked.

    Spike raised an eyebrow.

    "You don't always keep minions," Buffy said. "They can be trouble."

    Spike stared at her. "How the hell do you think you know me?"

    "I just do. So what's with the minions?"

    “Why the hell are you asking?”

    “I’m curious.”

    Spike blinked at her. He was curious, too. Eventually he shrugged. "There's a slayer I'm stalking." He stopped and looked at her. "You know what a slayer is?"

    "I know what a slayer is," Buffy said evenly.

    Spike smiled. "I know she's here in New York. She knows I'm here looking for her. One of us will make a mistake one day, start moving chess pieces around. When that happens, I want extra pieces between her and Drusilla."

    Buffy was surprised. So even soulless, Spike could think ahead when something was important to him. Like Drusilla. Come to think of it, he’d kept minions when he was hunting Buffy, too. "The minions are here as Dru's bodyguards?"

    "Mostly for the lair," Spike said. "On the whole, Dru can take care of herself, well enough to run away at least. The boys are really just decoys and distractions. I don't have real hopes for any of them. I send them on errands, always keep a few here. Slayer fodder, to give us time to get ready. I got daytime escape routes, too. And no, you don't get to know where any of them are."

    "I don't care," Buffy said. "How do you control them?"

    "Some come out of the woodwork when there’s a big enough bad around. The clever ones, ‘cause they know I’d dust ‘em if they didn’t come to me, or clear out. Otherwise, you pick dumb punks to turn," he told her, as if it was obvious, "and tell them you're the boss before they're done dying. Works wonders for a few months. If they get independent after that, you stake them and make more." He took another swallow of his drink. "Your turn. What's with the attitude?"

    "What do you mean?"

    "I mean, you know I'm gonna kill you. Why aren't you hiding in the corner like the good mouse you should be?"

    "You don't respect mice," Buffy said. "You like cats. Hunters. If I'm going to be your pet, I'm not going in a cage next to Dru's rats." She threw the card he'd inadvertently given her down on the table. "Mice get poison. Pussy gets petted."

    She let the surprise glimmer on his face for a beat before turning away with a coquettish little tilt to her hip, pretending she was only putting away more glasses. She knew what that kind of sly flirtation would have done to her Spike. She had to hope it would have the same effect.

    She actually stunned him dumb for a long moment. Finally she heard movement. "Did you want to see about that?" he purred.

    Buffy just slightly glanced over her shoulder and saw him standing very close behind her. "Well, we have to start somewhere," she said.

    Spike's hand reached out, and he did pet her, caressing down her arm with his cool hand, his breathing very audible. She was reminded, fleetingly, of their earliest affair, back before he had a soul, and how he'd seduced her on the balcony at The Bronze into a public act she would never before have considered. The caress was still seductive. It was not hard to ignore that he was currently soulless, murderous, bloodthirsty, and evil. He was Spike, and he'd always charged her, one way or another.

    Even, apparently, while she was in a completely foreign body. Buffy arched her head back and let herself lean against him, her heart pounding in her ears. She knew he could hear it, and she feared his lust for her blood. These first days were the most dangerous for her, she knew. When he did not yet care for her, any more than a random victim on the street. He knew her name, knew the taste of her blood, knew her courage, and had listened to her flirtation. She knew she'd need more to hold him, even with his tender heart. His devotion toward Drusilla couldn’t be ignored, either.

    Buffy could feel him hard behind her, his erection against her hip, and she knew she'd passed another hurdle. Spike's other hand slid down her other arm, and she felt his breath on her shoulder, then his lips, then his teeth... she expected him to bite down, but he didn't. He erotically caressed her skin with his teeth, and she felt her body tensing in response....

    Only to have the moment shattered as Drusilla and her blood doll crashed through the door with a stick of cotton candy stuck in Dru's hair.

    Spike released her unhurriedly, and turned to look at Dru. “I see you found your candyfloss.”

    His voice was hard again.

    “It was a delicious outing,” Dru said. “I found the vendor’s daughter asleep.” She went up to Spike and kissed him. “You taste how sweet she was? So much sugar.”

    Buffy realized Dru had known who she was hunting before she left. Oh, god. A child had died tonight. Logic and timelines aside, the knowledge hit her hard. She winced.

    Spike glanced at Dru’s doll, who had a streak of blood down his chest which didn’t seem to have come from his own throat. “I wouldn’t have thought there’d be enough in her for two,” Spike said, as Dru released him. “Though I suppose the blood was just decorative, in his case.” He reached up and pulled the cotton candy stick from her hair. “You’re all sticky, love,” he said softly. “Candy isn’t very good for you.”

    “But it tastes so sweet,” Dru protested gently. She kissed him again, and Spike reached up and caressed her hair.

    His fingers got tangled in her sugar sticky snarls, and he pulled away. “You need a shower, darling. Come.”

    “But I love to taste sweet.”

    “And you do, pet,” Spike said gently. “Always.” He kissed her briefly and pulled Dru with him into the bathroom. He paused at the bathroom door and glared at Dru’s blood doll. “Get yourself cleaned up,” he snarled. “I don’t want to have to do this again.”

    “Yessir,” the doll said.

    “And the new girl’s mine,” he added as the door closed.

    Buffy was extremely glad that Spike had made that clear. Dru’s blood doll disturbed her. She knew why she was there; she couldn’t fathom why he was. Buffy looked him over. He was worn, pale, his throat covered in punctures and bruises. There were bruises on the rest of his body as well, some of them with bite marks, some with scratches, some just ripening purple in painful looking blossoms. And he was just fine with watching, and possibly even participating, in the murder of a child. He stared at her for a long moment before he indicated he wanted the sink.

    Buffy stepped away and let him step to the counter. “So who are you, then?” Buffy asked.

    “I had a name, once,” he said. “It doesn’t matter, now.”

    “I don’t believe that,” Buffy said. “We’re human beings, or we’re supposed to be. We can’t forget it.”

    The doll looked at her with his eyes distant, and his voice dark. “Not for long,” he said. “My angel will set me free of this mortal flesh. Soon. Every day she purges me of more of my human taint. I’ll be immortal, before much longer. A god. And then I can have all that I want.” He reached into a drawer and pulled out a dishcloth. “All that I’ve ever wanted.” He dampened the cloth and set about washing his face and neck, cleaning himself of sugar and blood.

    And what he wanted, Buffy knew, was children. Just like Dru. That was probably how she’d found him. She was disgusted. “How long have you been here?” she asked.

    “Three days of blissful hell,” he said, as if speaking to himself. Then he smiled, remembering something, and seemed about to fall over. Buffy was not going to catch him if he did. He shook the memory – or the flashback – off, and turned to Buffy. “Are you hoping for their immortal kiss as well?”

    “No,” Buffy said. “I’m here to die. Just like you are.”

    The doll gave her a condescending look. “You know nothing,” he said. “I belong to her. Completely. She sinks her teeth in, and I know I am destined to be by her side, forever.” Well, he was a die-cast blood junkie, Buffy realized. That was probably the other half of his problem. “I will be her new consort. He doesn’t even like you.”

    Buffy rolled her eyes. She knew that this man was never likely to become anything more than Dru’s toy. Drusilla needed someone to care for her, as Spike was right now, and this creature – she was loath to call him a person – cared for nothing. But his comment about Spike bothered her. “What makes you say that?”

    “You’re not bleeding.” He indicated the clean white bandage on her neck. “When they love you, you bleed for hours. And it doesn’t hurt at all.”

    Buffy wasn’t going to tell this madman that Spike had been hurt, and needed to hurt another. She wasn’t going to say he’d only been testing her willingness. Or that she really didn’t want to be bleeding, pain aside. “It’s early yet,” she said instead.

    He smiled at her, and she was more disturbed by his human wickedness than she was by Spike’s demon-charged bloodlust. “We’ll have lots of fun together, I’m sure,” he said. “My angel says you’re here as a companion for me.”

    “You touch me, and Dru won’t be the only one slowly killing you.”

    “I doubt he’d care,” the doll muttered.

    “Who said I was talking about him?” Buffy said coldly.

    The doll looked her over again. “You won’t last long,” he said simply. “So I’ll say goodbye now.”

    “Let me,” Buffy said. “Goodbye now.” She turned away and went to the sofa, feeling ill.

    He finished cleaning his upper body, and Buffy hoped to god he was going to stop there, because she didn’t want to see any more of it.

    A little while later, Spike led Drusilla out of the bathroom. She was swathed in a gorgeous black satin robe with feather accents, and her wet hair was making the feathers stick together. “Sit down, love,” Spike said softly. He perched her on a chair and set about brushing the tangles from her thick dark hair. “You should let me do this more often,” he chided her gently. “You know you hate it when it pulls.”

    “I’m afraid all my hair will fall out, and leave me bald as a stone,” Dru said languidly.

    “Never gonna happen,” Spike said, kissing her temple. The words were fond, but Buffy had the feeling this was a conversation that happened a lot between them.

    “Come here, my dolly,” Dru said then, and the man at the sink quickly fell to his knees by Dru’s side. She set about petting him, as if he were a cat, and he set his head on her lap to complete the illusion. “Well, where are my spiders?” she asked.

    Her blood doll let his hand walk up her bare leg, and Buffy swallowed in revulsion as he reached up under Dru’s robe. Dru hummed and shifted beneath Spike’s careful brushing. Spike rolled his eyes, but all he said was, “Keep your head still, love.” He sounded resigned. “I need to finish.”

    Buffy actually turned her head away as the blood doll opened Dru’s robe and began using his mouth on her. Buffy made herself look up at Spike, who was carefully not looking down at what the willing human victim was doing to the love of his life, right in front of him.

    He looked so pained, her heart ached.

    Finally Spike declared he was done, and Dru slapped her legs together so quickly they were audible. Dru’s blood doll was knocked onto his back, and Buffy was relieved that the obscene moment was over. She was an adult – she knew if this was the act of fully consenting humans, it would just have been a thing; a bit kinky, but nothing appalling. But she knew that Dru was insane, the doll was perverted, and Spike was basically being emotionally tortured as he waited on her like a servant. It was painful to see.

    Some part of Buffy wanted to slap Drusilla. Can’t you see what you’re doing to him? But the truth was, she was pretty sure Drusilla could, and that that was why she was doing it in the first place. Evil bitch. The question was, why was Spike putting up with it?

    Spike – her own Spike – was fiercely loyal and inherently monogamous. Remnants of his Victorian upbringing, and the depth of his devotion. There was also something mixed up with Drusilla and Angel, but Buffy had never gotten much detail there. He was known to get fiercely jealous, sometimes even when there was no real need. Usually it took the form of passive-aggressive jokes and veiled threats in her own time, but now he had no reason – soul, chip, or even common courtesy – to hold back on the violence. Buffy was known to get jealous herself – shades of Riley’s lies and abandonment issues she knew she still had – so she understood his position. But that was her own Spike’s position. The whole situation felt very strange to her. She wondered if it felt as strange to Spike, even though he seemed to be resigned to it.

    Drusilla stood up and caressed Spike’s head. “Thank you, darling Spike,” she said. She kissed him, slow and sensual, her hands sliding up his torso, and Spike began to breathe hard. He really did not hold back on the sexy with Drusilla. He let her completely take him over at every single touch. But something seemed off about it to Buffy, who knew his every expression, particularly the erotic ones. Yes, he was turned on, but it was almost as if... he wasn’t... really there. He just vanished into the sensation, his self completely subsumed. She’d been a little afraid that the deep and meaningful hundred year relationship Spike had had with Drusilla would be hard for her to watch. It was, but not for the reasons she’d thought it would be. It made Buffy feel more disturbed than jealous.

     Dru reached down and picked up her doll by the hair, and he shuffled to her side on his knees. “Are you ready to come to bed with me, love?” Drusilla asked Spike.

    Spike looked down at the blood doll clenched in her hand. “And your dolls?” Spike asked. “All of them?”

    “You know they like to watch.”

    Spike closed his eyes. “If you’d brought home someone to eat, I’d share it with you,” Spike said. “But I’m not really interested in your leftovers.” His glare flickered onto Dru’s mad willing victim. “Or in being them.”

    “You’re my silly darling Spike,” Dru said in her rich cockney. She let go her doll and caressed Spike’s head, watching him melt under her hands. She gripped the skin on his neck, gouging shallow wounds under his hair line. He hissed, and opened his eyes in excitement. She leaned forward as if to kiss him, and his mouth opened for her. “I’m still peckish,” she said coldly. Then she walked away from him, leaving him wounded... in more than one way. She collected her blood doll and swung him joyously into her bedroom, the door closing with a final click.

 

Warning: The following chapter is not romantic. Some have found it disturbing.

BUFFY: This just can't be me, it isn't me. Why do I feel like this? Why do I let Spike do those things to me?
        Dead Things
 

    Spike stood as if he’d been slapped.

    A pained and guttural moan came from behind Drusilla’s closed door. Buffy knew Dru had just bitten her doll. Spike’s lips twitched, and she saw his hand come into a fist. He stood breathing hard for a few moments, and then pointed at Buffy without looking in her direction. “You. Come here.” He pointed to the spot in front of him, still facing Dru’s closed door, where the sounds were becoming less distinct, but more frequent.

    Buffy took a deep breath and came to him.

    “Take your shirt off,” he said as she stood before him.

    Buffy only blinked at him. “Take. Your. Shirt. Off,” he said coldly. “Now!” the last word was a bark, and Buffy almost did it. She flinched. She felt very weak and vulnerable without the strength and power of a slayer, and she would have been lying if she’d said Spike did not scare her out of her wits. It was instinctive, the body itself fearing him, more than her mind.

    “You don’t have to play it that way,” Buffy made herself say.

    She half expected him to snap her neck without another word. “Are you arguing with me?” Spike barked. It was angry, but at least his torso was no longer frozen solid in shock.

    “Are you going to kill me for it?” Buffy asked.

    “I might,” he snarled.

    “You don’t have to order me about,” Buffy said. “I’m already yours.” She decided to show him how much she meant that. She went down to her knees and reached for his jeans. He did not stop her as she unzipped him, and reached for his cock.

    It was soft and disinterested, as wounded by Dru as his neck was. Buffy wished Dru hadn’t interrupted their moment earlier. She’d been getting to him. If she’d had just a few more minutes....

    No good regretting it now. She’d have to play it differently. She wasn’t aroused herself, either. The whole thing seemed scripted, like a scene from a play, and she was not in character. Still.... She took his soft cock into her mouth, sliding back the foreskin with her hand so she could caress him easily at the same time. He still tasted the same – cool clean vampire skin, just a hint of stale cigarettes. He stood very stiffly at first, and then slowly seemed to relax as she turned some of his pain into pleasure. He wasn’t even fully hard yet when he pulled away though, not even giving her the time she needed to play any of the tricks she knew. He went to the table and pulled a cigarette out of a package there. “Open up the sofa,” he said conversationally, and he perched on the table to watch her. As Buffy went to do so he regarded her, taking careful puffs now and then. “So, we know you’re willing,” he said. “But stubborn. Am I supposed to beat that out of you?”

    “Well, I can’t stop you if you choose to, can I?” Buffy asked. “But I was hoping for something else.”

    “The girls who agree to this all have their own reasons,” Spike said. “What are yours?”

    “I told you,” Buffy said. “I told you what I want. You know what I’m willing to do.”

    “Yeah, but why are you willing to do it? You’ve old needle scars, but no bites, so you’re not a blood-junkie as far as I can tell. You’re thin, but not starving, and you followed me here. I didn’t seek you out. You have some idea what I’m after from you. Someone done this to you before?”

    “No,” Buffy said. She found the sofa-bed already mostly made up, so she straightened the sheets and blankets. They were clean, but there were old bloodstains on both. Spike indicated the closet with his cigarette, so Buffy opened it. Four pillows were on the top shelf of the closet, and Buffy pulled them down. More bloodstains on the pillow cases. This bed was for blood games. She didn’t want to think about how many girls had died there....

    The rest of the closet caught her attention, though. A black leather spiked collar with a lock on it sat open on what was clearly a large dog bed. The heavy collar was attached by a thick chain to a bolt on the wall, which did not look at all like it would come undone with mere human strength or ingenuity. It would take power tools. Buffy swallowed, knowing she’d have to spend some time in that closet, helpless and chained, with a mad vampire, a sadistic demonic killer, and a self-deluded pervert. Not to mention the minions in the hall. She suddenly felt very helpless and alone. Spike, she thought again, calling to that disembodied soul, but she didn’t know what else to say. She didn’t know if she was asking for strength, or making a promise.

    She took a deep breath and carried the pillows to the sofa bed, arranging them nicely. “Well done,” Spike said, with a touch of irony.

    “Does he spend any time in there?” Buffy asked. She was ashamed at how quiet and frightened her voice was.

    “What?”

    “Dru’s doll.”

    “No. He has his own kennel,” Spike said. “I don’t really like her taste in toys.”

    “I could tell,” Buffy said softly.

    Spike snuffed out his cigarette in a well used ashtray. The sounds of Dru and her doll were rhythmic, now, and clearly Spike found them distracting.

    “Why don’t you kill him?” Buffy asked.

    He looked up at her. “She sulks,” Spike said. “Dru gets what she wants. If she wants to kill you, I’ll let her,” he added.

    Buffy swallowed. She was going to have to do her best to stay out of Dru’s sight. “But otherwise, I belong to you?” she asked, nervous.

    “Until I kill you. Yeah.” He came up to her and touched her hair, examining it more than fondling it. He was still unsure about her. His hands smelled of cigarettes, and a soft, feminine soap. Dru’s shampoo. “You can call me Sir.”

    Buffy choked back a laugh. “No.”

    Spike looked at her in surprise. “No?”

    “No,” she said. “It’s silly. You don’t even want me to.”

    “No?” he asked again.

    Buffy came up to him, and he moved his hand between them to stop her. He was seriously on his guard. “Come on,” she said, trying to make her voice heady. “You don’t want me thinking about some random ‘sir’ like I was just a mindless thing, bought and sold. You don’t want it not to matter whose arms I’m in. Who it is that I belong to.”

    She touched the hand that held her away, caressing it sensuously. “Wouldn’t you rather I was just here... thinking about you... wanting only you... your name heavy on my lips. Spike.” She let the word linger as she gently moved his hand aside. “Spike.... Spike....” She reached up for his murderous mouth, willing herself hungry for him, hungry to get back to him as she knew him, and to try and touch as much as she could of him as he was. “Sspii-ke...” she hissed into him.

    She found him hesitating. “I don’t usually let–” She pushed forward anyway, knowing she was charging him – or she would have been, if he was the Spike she knew. “Dru is... Dru sa....” He was breathing hard.

    “You keep your name for her,” Buffy realized. “So when she finally calls out ‘Spoike,’ you can feel it’s really all about you. But I know who you are. I’m not wasting my time with you calling you only sir. You’re worth more than that...William.” She said the last word in an almost silent whisper. She moved for a real kiss.

    He made a small noise of surrender, and then stopped cold. “How... do you know that name?” He grabbed her by the hair and pulled her head back, glaring into her face, but his eyes didn’t match the grimness of the rest of his expression. He was panting with arousal. She’d almost gotten to him. He was just so bitter right now, so guarded. “Where did you hear it?”

    “In my heart,” Buffy said. “It knows who you really are. It knows all your names.”

    He didn’t want his heart touched, she knew. He didn’t want to feel anything for her. He wanted her to be a receptacle for his bitterness and his pain, something to pour his jealousy into as Dru gave her attention to another. But Buffy knew she’d be nothing but a meal if she let him do that. She had to reach inside him and find his tender heart, reach the spot where there should be a soul, and make the hollowness ache for her. “Who do I belong to, Spike?” she asked. “Tell me who I belong to.”

    “Me,” he said darkly. “You’re mine. You belong to me, you’ll do what I want.”

    “Yes. Spike. I will.” She stood on tiptoe to whisper in his ear. “Whatever you want. Whether you say it or not.” She nibbled on his earlobe. “I know what you really want. Just let me show you.”

    He pulled away, swallowing. “I don’t trust you.”

    “If I betray you, you’ll kill me instantly. I know that. I’m helpless before you, you fiend,” she said with a bit of a smile. She knew he’d programmed that phrase into his Buffy-robot a long time ago... or a long time from now, if she thought about it.

    “Why, when you say it, does that sound like a joke?” Spike asked.

    Buffy grinned wide.

    “You look like you think it’s a joke, too,” Spike said, his eyes hard. He grabbed her hair and yanked her down onto the bed, half covering her with his own body. “This isn’t a joke, you know. This is life and death.” He glared down into her face. Buffy tried to quell her grin. She knew his face. His anger was tempered, heavily, by lust. She didn’t just read it in his eyes – Buffy could feel his erection on her thigh. “And from this point on, your life, and your death, both, belong to me.”

    Buffy moved her shoulders evocatively. “Then show me,” she said.

    He hesitated for only a second, and then finally kissed her. Buffy kissed him back, passionately, enough teeth to count as carnivorous, clenching his shoulders with her hands, devouring him as he devoured her. She knew exactly how he liked to be kissed, and he pulled away, startled. He looked down on her in confusion, surprised by her ardour, and then kissed her again, experimentally. She kissed him back again, just as deeply as before. Her skill clearly disturbed him. Buffy knew his kiss, knew how to please him. That troubled him.

    Troubled, he decided to take control. He pulled away and held her down with one hand while he reached up under her skirt with the other. He found and ripped the crotch out of her fishnets, tore open her underwear, and reached inside her with two fingers. Buffy was startled at the sudden – she didn’t want to think the word attack, because she’d pretty much asked him to, in so many words. But it was very sudden, anyway. She was very, very glad Sarah hadn’t been a virgin. She hadn’t thought so, but now she was sure.

    Spike held her by her cunt, his thumb firmly on her clit, and he moved his hand to see what her reaction would be. She trembled a bit, but shook off her discomfort – it was only from being startled, after all. She tensed around his fingers and thrust upward, letting her breath come hard, her eyes flicker for him. He regarded her for a moment, his face suspicious. “Well come on, bad boy,” Buffy said, and again, it came out sounding like a joke. Probably because it was. It was easier to think about it all that way, a game she was playing with her long-term lover. She didn’t let herself think about the fact she probably couldn’t say no. If she didn’t want to say no, the fact that she couldn’t didn’t matter.

    She was the one who had walked into this. Life was worth it. Spike was worth it. He had to be, or she’d been making a mistake the whole time, anyway. Buffy reached down and caressed the front of his jeans. He was still hard. It was obvious.

    Spike seemed to lose patience then, pulled his hand back, and fully unbuttoned his jeans. Without bothering to undress, he pulled his cock out and plunged it into her, nothing gentle or seductive about it. His head was at least two feet away, and he studied her as he thrust. He was utilizing her, as if she were a tool for his pleasure, not a person. Not even a victim.

    And Buffy knew she had to let him.

    Strangely, she didn’t hate it, as she’d feared she would. It was still Spike. She could see the man she loved in every movement he made, every flash of his eyes, every twitch of his expression. But he was so young, so impulsive, and so very confused by her. She suddenly realized, he was frightened of her. Not for his heart, and not for his person, but for whatever she meant. He didn’t understand her, and that frightened him. But he was intrigued, now. So long as she didn’t give him a reason to kill her, he was going to wait this out, and see what she brought him.

    What she brought him, or what she tried to bring him, was acceptance. Despite the emotionless, callus thrusting that he was almost inflicting upon her, Buffy reached up for him and caressed the back of his neck, carefully avoiding Dru’s scratches. She let her hands squeeze his shoulders, and she thrust up into him, enjoying his body. It was the same body, the same cock. She recognized it. Even without his soul, even without their history, even with her in the wrong body, he felt like himself. Spike let her fondle him, without bending any closer, no trust in his eyes. Then he reached up – still thrusting – and took hold of her right arm. He bent her elbow, brought her wrist to his mouth, and turned his face dark. He bit into the vein at her wrist and sucked, and sucked, and sucked.

    Buffy groaned, and tensed. “Ow!” she gasped. It hurt a lot. It felt like he was bruising her, and it ached all the way up her arm. She knew the tension of her pain was probably feeling pretty good around his cock, but most of her enjoyment had been killed by it. “Ow!” The second one came out a whimper.

    Spike let go her arm and looked down on her with blood on his lips. “Does it hurt?” he asked through his fangs.

    “You know it does,” Buffy said, without accusation. Then she thrust her hips up against him, and wrapped her legs around him. She grunted and pulsed under him, trying to bring the pleasure back into her body, and he stared at her in blank confusion. “You’re trying to hurt me,” she said then.

    Spike regarded her for a long moment, as if waiting for her to protest more. She only let him keep pushing into her, and trying to push back, despite the fact that her arm felt like it was in a vice grip, even without the pressure of his mouth.

    After a while, Spike took her arm back, and Buffy waited for the pain to increase. It didn’t. Not gently, but very completely, Spike licked the wound he had made, kissing it deliberately, activating the local anaesthetic, if not the euphoria. Buffy sighed, and almost smiled, and arched her hips. The cessation of pain almost made her come. “Spike,” she breathed. “Thank you.”

    His thrusts redoubled, and he ground into her quickly, almost perfunctorily. She felt him grow harder within her, then he grunted, tensing above her as he came. He pulled out of her then, his face back to normal, and looked down at her. He was still breathing hard, but nothing intense. This had been another test. She had no idea of she had passed or failed.

    She hadn’t come. It was the only time Spike had ever bedded her without making doubly or triply sure of it. He pulled away and looked down at her, regarding her, her hands, her clothing, her eyes. He stared into her eyes for a long moment, suspicious. The sun had fully risen by now, and the sounds from the other room had faded. “Go to bed,” Spike said, cold, but not ungentle.

    Buffy swallowed and nodded, looking up at him with eyes she hoped were accepting of his coldness. She knew she had to keep thinking of him as wounded, not cruel, or she’d never find her way through this. She rolled off the bed and crept into the closet, meekly taking her position on the dog bed. She felt like she wanted to cry, but her eyes were dry. This wasn’t her Spike, dismissing her like this. There was no love for her at all in this creature. She was just a thing to him.

    She realized how very painful it must have been, back when she’d used to call him a thing, and not a person.

    Spike followed her and set the collar around her neck. The leather was softer than she’d been expecting, and he didn’t buckle it tightly, but it was very noticeable. Every movement of her head told her that she was bound, and she was his. Her hair caught on the spikes. The lock clicked, and unless she found something very sharp to cut the leather in this closet – unlikely – she was trapped until he chose to let her out. Spike pocketed the key and stood to leave her.

    “Spike, could I....” She looked up at him, and she knew her eyes were shining. “Would you get me some water? Please?”

    He regarded her silently.

    “You know I need it, if you’re going to keep feeding from me,” she said.

    He turned away without a word, but a minute later she heard the sink running. Soon Spike returned with a large whiskey bottle, refilled with water, which he set by her door.

    “Thank you, Spike,” she whispered.

    She wasn’t really thirsty. Yes, she needed to keep hydrated, and yes, he knew that, but she had asked him only to make him do something for her. It was an investment, no matter how small, that he had now made in her. It made her belong to him more in his mind, made her more of a pet, less of a thing. Someone he had to take care of.

    It was a step.

    He turned away and took off his safety pinned black shirt, crawling into the sofa bed he’d just fucked Buffy on. Not into bed with Drusilla. Buffy made a quick glance around her “kennel” and noted a terra cotta pot with a lid in the corner. It looked like something to cook chickens in, but given Spike’s Victorian roots, it was most likely intended as a chamber pot. So at least she wasn’t going to be stuck if she needed the facilities. She took an obvious swallow of his offer – the water still tasted faintly of whiskey, which meant if nothing else that it was probably sterile – and curled up on the dog cushion, bunching a corner up to support her head. She lay and stared at Spike on his sofa bed, wide awake. Regarding him.

    Spike turned and realized she was staring at him. She looked shyly away for a moment, and then looked back. Think of him as you know him, she told herself. Think of his heart. Think of his soul. Think of his devotion. Don’t let this purely demonic past destroy the man you know and love with all your heart. See him properly.

    Spike gazed back at her for a long, long while, regarding her unabashed eyes. After a long while, he sat up. Buffy wondered if he was going to shut the closet door, so she’d be forced to stop looking at him.

    Instead he crossed the room and opened a trunk there. He pulled something out and came back to her. She thought at first he might be about to release her collar, but no. He had brought her a blanket. He draped it round her shoulders and sat back on his heels.

    Buffy pulled the offering close around her. “Thank you,” she whispered.

    He said nothing for a long moment. “‘Night, pet,” he said then. He climbed back into his bed and turned his back on her. Within a few moments, he was asleep.

 

Buffy: I’m fine.
SPIKE: Oh, right. Stuck in a dark corner with a creature you loathe, diggin' up past uglies, 'cause you're fine.
            Fool For Love


    Buffy lay awake that first day, her neck aching, her wrist sore, feeling moderately violated, trapped, and rather scared. It wasn’t that she hadn’t volunteered for this. But Spike didn’t love her at this time, in this form, and the dynamic was unequal. She was so used to being Spike’s equal. Being his inferior – physically and in positions of power – felt very vulnerable.

    Of course, Spike used to feel vulnerable around her, she remembered. For a long time, he couldn’t fight her. She held all the power. Hell, she’d had him chained in a bathtub for a week. She had not treated him with five-star-hotel amenities. And after that, she hadn’t cared about him, while he loved her desperately, so just about every word could cut him. It was different, of course. He was a killer of innocents, while she typically slew only the monstrous. He was admittedly killing her slowly, whereas Buffy had been testing his danger level, and eventually let him go. There was also some gender thing going on, between her, and Spike, and Drusilla, and the doll, which made the whole thing feel odd, particularly in the position she was in. Really, she just wasn’t used to being an ordinary vulnerable human girl.

    She sat and stretched Sarah’s weak body and did what exercises she could all chained up, and she tried to meditate like Giles had taught her. She could make this work. She knew Spike well enough that she could probably see to it that she survived, at least for the week or so she had. She just had to walk that fine line, stand strong enough to earn his respect, but not his wrath.     

    Still... she felt cold and alone that day. She took off the army boots, but she still was not comfortable. When she wasn’t stretching she clutched the blanket – that tiny symbol of the mercy in his demon-tainted heart – very closely around her.

    Shortly before sunset, Spike woke. Buffy looked up, having spent the day mostly awake, but she didn’t quite dare speak to him without being acknowledged. She sat up and tried not to look like she’d spent the day awake on the floor in the same clothes she’d worn the night before. Spike got up and folded away the bed without looking at her, then went to the kitchenette. Buffy leaned her head out the closet and saw him with a live rat, which he set in a ceramic pot with a lid on it. He set the pot on a tray beside a coffee cup, and then opened the fridge. He pulled a flower from the box and set it in a bud vase, then headed out to the hall. A few minutes later, he came back with a newspaper, which he also set on the tray, and he carried the offering to the bedroom. He didn’t knock, or close the door behind him.

    Buffy watched silently as Spike woke his beloved. He set the tray on the bed and gently kissed her cheek. She stirred, and woke, and blinked up at Spike. She caressed him, and pulled him down onto the bed, where he rolled over her and curled up beside her. For a few moments, Dru played with the rat on her tray, and then caught it with a feral grin. Spike gently fondled her hair as she tore open the creature’s throat with her fingernail, and poured the blood fresh into her coffee cup.

    Buffy couldn’t hear what they were murmuring, but she could imagine. Spike often made Buffy breakfast, as well. Tea, and toast, and grapefruit. She leaned back against the wall of the closet, collared and chained like a dog, and watched the current love of her life fondle and snuggle the current love of his.

    Just as the night before, she expected to be jealous. The problem was the corollary – the breakfast thing was all too human. The sight of him treating Drusilla as Buffy was used to him treating herself was a bit troublesome. But then she started focusing on Drusilla. Spike was Spike – soul or not, there were some inherent behaviors that he was always going to have, and much of his tenderness and affection fell under that. Drusilla was not indifferent to him, nor was she being purposefully cruel, as she had been the morning before. But there was something off about almost everything she did. She never really quite looked at him. Even when her eyes were pointed at him, she seemed to be looking through him, to something else. He touched her lovingly, and she didn’t always seem to feel it. She leaned against him as if she belonged there, but not as if she was grateful for his company. It seemed as if she felt entitled to it.

    After a little while, after Spike had watched and cuddled with Drusilla as she read the comics and made what looked like cryptic statements about the headlines, Spike set the paper and the tray aside and very clearly tried to make love to her in earnest. Drusilla let him kiss and caress her for a while, and then stood up abruptly. “I have to change Ms. Edith,” she announced quite loudly, and crossed the room. Spike was left alone on the bed.

    A moment later, her blood doll was tossed on the covers atop Spike’s legs. He was still alive, but bound and gagged with dull pink ribbons. “Could you feed the children?” Buffy heard her ask.

    Spike closed his eyes, looking exasperated, and then rolled out of Dru’s bed, knocking the blood doll onto the floor as he did. Dru picked him up, still bound, and set him tenderly on the covers, then set about brushing the man’s Partridge Family hair. Spike himself stalked into the livingroom and made a phone call. Buffy couldn’t understand what the hell he meant, at first, just reciting numbers into the phone. “One through three, full order, delivered,” and then he gave an address. Then he paused, looked up at Buffy – still and silent in her closet – and amended, “Make that one through six. And four extra egg rolls.”

    A moment later he poked his head out the door into the hall. “Delivery down the block,” he told his minions. “Bring him back here, you can all share him. Don’t forget his bag. Give that to me.”

    He came back and looked down at Buffy. Dru had closed her door. “Want the bathroom?” he asked her.

    “Yes, please,” Buffy said.

    Spike bent and unlocked her collar. Buffy stretched. “Thank you,” she said.

    “Don’t lie,” he said. “You don’t thank me. You’re not grateful.”

    “You haven’t killed me yet,” Buffy said. “I consider that quite an honor.” She looked him right in the eyes. “And I haven’t lied to you once,” she said. Except about her name. And that was only half a lie, anyway.

    “You just know me, and you want a cup of my blood for a spell, which has nothing to do with me.”

    “Yes.”

    Spike shook his head and pushed her toward the bathroom, not ungently. “Go.”

    When Buffy came out of the bathroom, Spike was standing with Drusilla, tightening her corset. “We’re going out for a little song,” Dru said to Buffy, without actually meeting her eyes. “Did you want us to bring back the singer, so you can watch?” She shook her head ruefully. “My little dolly was naughty last night. So he has to stay in his cradle, and watch the moon. Miss Edith will sing to him. But you’ve been a good girl, haven’t you, pet?”

    Buffy stood still, and shifted her eyes to Spike.

    “She’s been getting on,” Spike said, with neither fondness nor scorn.

    “Is she well trained?”

    “Not yet,” Spike said. He looked over at Buffy, more confused then sinister. “Give her a day or two.”

    “She won’t get mud on the furniture?”

    “Not if she knows what’s good for her,” Spike said. He tied off the corset and looked her over. Drusilla had the perfect blend of Victorian punk. Safety-pins on her black-dyed corset, tied up the back with a dusty-pink ribbon, her skirt ragged, her hair partially braided. Spike leaned forward and kissed her cheek. “Let me get your make up, love.”

    “Mm,” Dru said. She sat down and gazed up at him with distant devotion. “Shall I kohl your eyes?” she said with a smile.

    “Please,” he said. He bent to kiss her properly. “My reflection,” he whispered into her mouth.

    Buffy hadn’t quite realized that the two vampires would have had to use each other as mirrors in order to perfect their look – whatever look they were aiming for. This meant that Spike had likely always been doing Drusilla’s make-up, ever since she’d known them. She’d half wanted Drusilla to continue to be nothing but a dark and spiteful cat, treating Spike with indifferent cruelty, but Dru really did seem fond of him. It was simply that she was mad, distant, and somewhat selfish. Buffy watched them as they painted each other’s faces in various styles of gothic punk black.

    Someone knocked on the door. “Come!” Spike shouted.

    One of the minions shuffled in with a large paper bag, reeking of fried Chinese food. “You wanted the bag, boss?”

    “On the counter,” Spike said. A muffled scream came from the hallway, and Spike rolled his eyes. “Tell them to eat him a little more carefully?” Spike said. “Screams draw attention!” The last word was said in a ferocious roar, as Spike stood and glared. The minion scuttled out quickly with the message, slamming the door behind him.

    Buffy clenched her jaw against her nausea, but she could do nothing to save the delivery man. Spike shook his head. “Good help is impossible to find in this city.”

    “The boys are restless,” Drusilla said. “You think you’re better than they are.”

    Spike looked down at her, fond and dangerous. “Because I am,” he said, his eyes narrowed in what Buffy always thought of as his Big Bad look.

    “You should make an example, or they’ll get out of line.”

    “They know what’s best for them. If they need their screams, they can get them somewhere other than the lair.” He shook his head. “Come, my princess. I’ve got a proper hunt in mind for the evening.”

    “Should we bring some back for the children?” Dru said, looking again at Buffy.

    Buffy knew she couldn’t hide the look of disgust on her face. Spike regarded her. “No,” he said finally. “Your blood doll can suffer without his perks for the night.” He said nothing about Buffy, but he didn’t take his eyes off her as he said it. Buffy let him see her relief, and his eyes narrowed. He sent Drusilla through the door and turned back to Buffy. “Save the egg rolls,” he told her. “Eat what else you want, but save enough for that.” He gestured with his chin at the closed door of Dru’s bedroom. He paused. “I kill someone just about every night. You do know that.”

    “Yes,” Buffy said. “I do know that.”

    “You’re willingly in the thrall of a killer. All the dirty looks in the world won’t change that.”

    “I didn’t think they would,” Buffy said coldly.

    He regarded her for another long minute. “Door’s not locked, but I wouldn’t go out in the hall. Boys still seem peckish.”

    Buffy nodded. The warning was unnecessary.

    After they left, Buffy addressed the huge bag of Chinese food, sorting through the little white boxes for things she might be willing to eat. It all seemed fattening and greasy and not particularly appetizing, but she figured a lot of that was because she wasn’t hungry. Spike the murderer made her feel queasy. She finally found a box or two that didn’t make her actively retch, forced herself to add in some extra beef for iron and protein, and threw in a box of steamed rice. She set the bag of egg rolls on the counter, and put the rest of the food in the fridge.

    She ate a bit, and then set about examining the room. Spike had disconnected the phone, and taken the wire. No outside communication there. There was no way out except the door through to the hall, or at least nothing that she could manipulate with the strength of a mere human girl. Grates and boards on the paint-spacked windows were going to keep her trapped. There wasn’t much in the way of potential weaponry, either, at least not in this room. She didn’t open the door to Dru’s bedroom – she didn’t want to see where her blood doll was kept during the day.

    Eventually she turned on the TV. M*A*S*H was on. She felt she should be planning strategy or working out, but Sarah’s body was still exhausted, and Buffy felt miserable. It was hard to think while miserable. She sat and watched seventies sitcoms while occasionally shoveling rice and beef into her mouth with chopsticks. It wasn’t until the door opened that she realized she’d fallen asleep on the sofa. She sat up hurriedly, the Chinese food box falling to the floor. Spike and Drusilla came in looking happy, Drusilla actually waltzing. Spike shrugged off his motorcycle jacket and hung it on the wall. “Did you have fun, love?” he asked her.

    “Like a circus calliope,” Dru said.

    Spike slid his hands up her arms and pulled her into an embrace from behind. “I’m glad.”

    The television blared into a commercial, and Spike glanced up at it, annoyed. Buffy jumped up and turned it off – it felt weird not having a remote. Spike’s eyes followed her as she meekly bent down and picked up her fallen take-out box.

    “Want an egg-roll?” he asked Dru then.

    “Certainly,” Dru said.

    Spike looked at Buffy. “Fetch them,” he told her distinctly, as if she were a Victorian serving girl. “Nice.”

    Buffy gave a little bob, completing the illusion, but she was hard pressed not to laugh at it. The whole thing suddenly seemed ridiculous. It felt absurd, like she wasn’t supposed to be there at all. She opened the package of egg-rolls and pulled a plate – one of only three – from the cupboard. She arranged them as nicely as basic egg-rolls could be arranged, and carried them over.

    “You said she wasn’t trained.” Dru took the plate and bit into one of the eggrolls. She bit in the middle, Buffy noticed, as if it were someone’s throat.

    “She’s not,” Spike said with a slightly suspicious expression. “She’s play-acting.” He turned Dru around and kissed her gently. “Don’t worry on it. I’ll have her at my feet soon enough.” He nibbled on Dru’s neck and whispered something in her ear.

    Buffy decided to get out of the way. She headed for her closet, only to hear Drusilla hum, and then laugh. Then, to Spike’s evident surprise, she pulled away from him. “You’re a silly man,” she said. “You brought enough for the boy?”

    “Of course I did,” Spike said.

    “Feed him, would you, love?” Dru said. She pushed the plate of eggrolls into his hand. “My dollies need their eyes bled.”

    Buffy had no idea what she meant by that, and didn’t want to.

    Dru went into her room and closed the door, but Buffy could hear her singing softly to herself. Spike sighed, and glanced at Buffy. “There are leftovers?” he asked.

    She only nodded.

    Spike pulled what was clearly a dog dish from a lower cupboard and dropped it on the counter. “Put some in the bowl for her doll, and give it to Dru. I’m for a shower.” He looked her over. “Then I think it’s time we settle down to training you.”

    Buffy swallowed.

    The Chinese food looked a lot like dog food when presented in a dog dish, but Buffy didn’t think Dru’s blood doll would find himself in a position to complain. She knocked hesitantly on Dru’s door. When it didn’t open, she quietly turned the handle.

    “Khsss!”

    Drusilla hissed at her, less than six inches away from the door, and Buffy nearly dropped the bowl. The vampiress seemed to have been lying in wait for her, her black-painted talons poised to strike. “Ah... Spike sent this,” Buffy said, bending down. She set it on the floor and almost crawled away on her knees. Her heart pounded in terror – Buffy wasn’t sure why, exactly. She thought it might be the madness compounding the demon bloodlust in Dru’s eyes, contrasted with her usual childlike delirium.

    Drusilla slammed the door closed on her, and Buffy sat on the floor, gasping with relief. God damn it, Sarah! she told her body. Would you quit with the instinctual terror? You’re pretty much dead already, what’s it matter?

    Spike came out of the bathroom a minute later, wearing only his shirt and his acid-washed jeans. He laughed when he saw Buffy on the floor. “Dru hiss at you?” he asked.

    Buffy looked up.

    “She does that,” he said. “Spooky, i’nt it?”

    “I gave her the bowl, like you asked.”

    “And she’ll take it. But she doesn’t like my pets in her room, much.”

    “You should have told me that.”

    “I just did,” he said with a wicked smirk.

    Buffy climbed to her feet. “You set me up!” she accused.

    “Mm-hm,” he said. “Wondered if she’d kill you.”

    And he found that funny. She could tell he did. Buffy stared at him, more annoyed than wounded. “Charming,” she said. “If this is how you treat the willing ones, what about the girls you keep who aren’t?”

    “Chained to the wall, what did you think?” Spike asked. “Open the bed. And don’t bloody argue about it, I don’t find that funny anymore.”

    “Sure you do,” Buffy said. “Or you’d have killed me already.”

    Spike looked at her.

    “Or you will in a minute or two, when you realize I’m never going to stop arguing with you. Open the bed, you said?” She went over and did it, and then sat on the edge regarding him. He looked incredulous. “Training, huh?” she said. “All right. So what does this ‘training’ entail?” Buffy asked.

    “Why are you smirking at me as if I’m telling you some kind of joke?” Spike asked.

    “Well, okay,” Buffy said. “You’re setting me down here, deliberately, and rather awkwardly, to teach me how to obey you, and what you like. And I suspect that some of the time you do this training all fangy with a whip in your hand, am I right?”

    “And if I do?”

    “Well, you’d be wasting your time,” Buffy said. “Did you want to break out the handcuffs, or just let me go straight to the blow job?”

    Spike blinked at her. “Excuse me?”

    Buffy shook her head. “Look. I don’t even know what you think you’re doing. I’m already going to do what you tell me to, most of the time, because I’m a human being and I do have a survival instinct. I’ll be even more careful around Dru, ‘cause I know you, but I don’t know what she’d do most of the time. But honest, what training do I need? Just use words, and I’ll fetch and carry like a good housemaid. I’m not an idiot. I mean, ticking you off would be like playing Russian roulette”

    “As is annoying me,” he said with a growl.

    “I’m not annoying you right now, I’m talking with you. And if I got all cowed and terrified around you, I’d be wasting your time. You can get that from any ‘bint’ on the street, just go all bumpy on them.”

    Spike stared at her. “And you’re not scared of me?”

    “I’m terrified,” Buffy said honestly. “But get chatty when I’m terrified, not panicked.”

    Spike blinked. “Who the hell are you?”

    “Doesn’t even matter,” Buffy said. She quoted something she heard Xander say once. “I’m a mystery, wrapped in an enigma, stuffed inside a riddle.”

    “So, you’re a woman, then.”

    Buffy laughed. “Clever boy. Look, why don’t you just bring your bad self over here.” She let the humor fall out of her voice, and it became seductive, and deadly serious. She ran her hands through her hair, letting it fall around her shoulders. “And you can see how much training I actually need.”

    Spike regarded her for a long moment, and then sat down on the edge of the bed. “All right,” he said. “Take your clothes off.”

    Buffy smiled. “You do it for me.”

    “You’re already showing me you need a great deal of training.”

    “Or that I’ve already graduated,” Buffy said. “How is this a bad thing?”

    “If I’m the one to take those clothes off you, you may never see them again.”

    “Like I said,” Buffy said. “How is this a bad thing?”

    Surprise touched his eyes again, as she took his threat and made it a flirt. She knew she shouldn’t be taunting him like this, but she couldn’t help it. For her the whole thing felt like some kind of elaborate master/victim role play with her long term lover. Spike was an inventive lover, and, with them both taking one role or another, he’d played similar games with her before. Usually not for very long – neither of them had the patience to keep it up for more than half an hour, and it usually made them both laugh at some point. But it wasn’t entirely foreign to her, either. The only difference was, he didn’t know it. And her life really was in danger, but that was true anyway, no matter what he did.

    Buffy climbed over the bed and slid herself over him, straddling his lap. “All right,” she said against the skin of his arm. She slid her lips down his flesh, occasionally stopping to catch his skin in her teeth, nibbling fondly down his arm. “You want... a well... trained... pet... to show off to your yellow eyed boys out there.” She slid back up and started nibbling at his throat. “Take your little kitten to the pet show,” she whispered into his ear, and then started nibbling at it. His head arched back and he gasped. “What do they need to know, anyway?” she asked him. She sat back and wrapped her legs around his hips. “That you can make me scream?” His eyes were bright with arousal, and his teeth were slightly bared with hunger. She grinned. “Well, I can do that.” She tilted her head back and screamed for him, starting softly, just a moan, then growing to a crow, sounding half in pain, half in ecstacy. She felt his cock twitch as she carried it further, louder, and she only ended it because he lost patience and kissed her, drawing her to him hard enough to bruise her shoulders.

    It was power itself, hunger in its rawest form, but there was no emotion in it. He still didn’t know, or care, who she was, but his mouth pressed against her, demanding, forceful, and she gave it back as if it were a gift. “Easy,” she whispered a moment later. “I’m breakable, you know.”

    “I know,” he breathed back, half a threat.

    Buffy slid her fingers in under his ripped and safety-pinned t-shirt, letting her warmth travel over his torso. “Would ripping this any further make any difference?” she asked conversationally.

    “Sod off. It takes hours to craft this look.” Spike slid his home-crafted shirt off over his head, and then put his hand on her shirt collar. “This, on the other hand....” He slid his hands over her breasts for a moment, then took hold of her shirt and tore. The rough sound seemed to excite him, and Buffy ran her fingers through his spiked hair, messing it up.

    “There’s my bad boy,” she teased.

    He growled, and Buffy stopped. She tilted her head, looked into his eyes, and frowned. She reached out and touched his face, very gently. “Shh,” she said. She ran her thumb over his lips. “What haven’t you had, lately?” she asked.

    “I–”

    “Wait,” she said. “What are you really hungry for?” She let her fingers climb his neck, slowly, one by one. “I’m sure you’ve had girls cowering in terror, so you don’t need that. Begging for mercy. Probably getting old hat. It’s not like you need any help in the blood play department.” Her fingers found the scratches that Dru left the day before. They weren’t deep anymore – already half healed by his demonic aura. “And I think you’ve suffered enough humiliation lately.”

    He growled again, angry this time, and Buffy surged forward, biting at his neck. His growl faded to an aroused gasp, and Buffy licked up his throat, nibbling at his jaw, and then pulled back, looking at him again. “You talk too much,” Spike panted.

    “Did you want to punish me for that?” she asked with a perky grin. She leaned forward and whispered in his ear. “You liked how I screamed. Didn’t you.” She trailed her tongue along the rim of his ear and added, “I’ll do it again, if you ask.”

    He took a firm hold of her hand, and then her index finger. “You’ll also do it if I break your fingers one by one.”

    Buffy sat back. “And then I’d be crying and moaning and secretly hate you,” she said. “No matter what I said to you to keep you from doing it again, you know that’s how I’d feel. It’s how they all feel. Even if they’re as broken and perverted as in their own way Drusilla’s doll, the resentment is bound to be there. Is it really worth it for perfect obedience?” She slid off his lap and went to her knees. “Yes, sir,” she said in a dull monotone with her head bowed. “No, sir. Whatever you say, sir. I’d never dare do anything to anger you, sir.” As always, it was silly. She knew it was a game. She knew it sounded like one to him, too. Kind of a stupid one, from the slightly embarrassed set to his shoulders.

    She let the obedience hang between them for a second, and then lifted her head slyly, her eyes seductive. “Hey, lover,” she said instead, soft, almost teasing, but very loving. “I’m glad you’re home.” She slid up onto the bed beside him and buried her head in his chest, as she would have with her own Spike, holding him for comfort. The deadly, murderous demon, who killed men, women, and children without mercy, and she snuggled him like a teddy bear. “I miss you...” she swallowed – oh, god, did she miss him! – and added, “when you’re gone.” She fell bonelessly to the bed, and tried to pull him with her.

    He went, but only to hold her arms down. He stared down at her, perplexed. “You seem to have the wrong idea of who and what I am,” he said, but he said it quietly, informing her rather than irritated. “I like hurting women.”

    “Then you can hurt me,” Buffy said. She shifted, and he allowed her to lift one hand to catch his. Buffy took his hand and guided it, using Spike’s black painted nails to scratch red and white lines down her shoulder to her breast. To Buffy’s annoyance, it didn’t feel as good as it usually did. Her slayer’s body took pain as something natural, a part of who she was. It fired her. In Sarah’s body, while it still felt like something Sarah was used to, she didn’t enjoy it as much. It was so much more difficult, and more vulnerable, to be only human. Still, Spike’s eyes had grown bright seeing the scratches, and that still pleased her, just as it always did.

    “And that’s what you want?” he asked.

    Buffy tried to explain it. “I actually want what you want. That’s what I’m trying for, here. I want you to want me.”

    “For my blood.”

    “For your pleasure,” Buffy said, almost exasperated. Getting through to him inside this murderer was like mining through a freaking mountain of evil and suspicion. “I admit it freely, there are things I want. But you seem to have the wrong idea of who I am, and what I’m doing. This isn’t payment. I’m not here trying ‘buy’ blood from you with my services.”

    “Aren’t you?”

    “No. I’m no whore, and I wouldn’t treat you as one either.”

    “Then what’s the point?”

    “The point is, there is something I need. You won’t just up and give it to me because you don’t trust me. Fair enough, you don’t know me.” She touched his cheek. “Come to know me,” she said. “Let me be yours. When you know I’m yours... it won’t matter what else I want.”

    “It matters.”

    “Not right now. Right now,” She touched his lips with her thumb again. “Right now what I want... is to touch you. I want to make you happy. Not to keep you from killing me. And not only for your blood. I want to see the joy in your face. The real joy, not the evil joy in death and blood.”

    “That’s real.”

    “But it’s limiting,” Buffy said. “And it’s easy. It’s everywhere, all you have to do is reach out and take it. I want to be something else for you. Something all those victims can’t give you.”

    His eyes flickered, curious. If Buffy hadn’t known him so well, she would have missed the undercurrent in his eyes. There was some kind of sadness there, something she wasn’t sure even he recognized. “You are a victim.”

    “I’m not. And what I really want is for you to see that.” An idea struck her. “You want me trained?” Buffy asked. “Ask your pet to put on a show for you. See what I can do.” She smiled at him gently. “Then you’ll see what I really want.”

    He hesitated. “All right, then,” he said.“Show me.”

    Buffy smiled and pulled away. This, she could do. This was easy. All she had to do was go home, in her mind, throw this purely demonic creature out of her thoughts and think about Spike. Her Spike. She pulled herself up the bed and lay back on the pillows. Then closed her eyes and touched herself. You want to watch, honey? The words were to herself, to the man he would become. She knew that he liked to. Hell, he’d confessed he’d gotten off on just watching her move in her sleep, let alone moving sensuously. Granted, that was when she was Buffy. But it had to be something inherent in him, didn’t it? It couldn’t be entirely dependant on her being the slayer.

    She slid her hand up her ribs and along her bra, barely sliding her thumb under the fabric when she reached the top. She slid the bra strap down her arm, caressing her shoulder with her cheek as she did so.

    The body was different, but something about that made it even more erotic. A small, aroused breath slipped between her lips. She slid her breast out of the bra and caressed it, pinching at the flesh, revealing the softness and fullness of it. She ran her finger in a circle around her nipple. It hardened under her fingertips, perking out pink and excited. “Mm...” She pinched it, and then twisted it, pulling it up from the soft skin until it seemed to glow.

    “Am I supposed to keep my hands off you?” Spike asked.

    “You’re the one giving the orders,” Buffy said, glancing at him. “But I can’t imagine you’d want to spoil the show.” She took her other hand to caress her other breast, pulling it out slowly, by degrees, leaving the nipple hidden, straining at the fabric before it finally popped loose.

    She felt Spike’s hand on her ankle. It slid up until it found a rip in the fishnets, and pulled. The nets tore further. Buffy shivered. She was thirty years in the future, showing off for her lover, and his touch actually felt good. She bit her lip in anticipation.

    That was all he did. He left his hand on her ankle as she continued to caress and gently abuse her breasts, one, then the other, leaving all her actions visible to him. Finally she sat up and lifted the bra over her head, crossing her arms and stretching her torso to accentuate the view. She passed the bra to Spike as if she were in a strip tease. He took it, and she caressed her cheek and throat when she took her hand back. She slid the hand down her torso, using her nails, scratching down her ribs and belly until she reached her black leather skirt.

    “Allow me,” Spike said quietly, and she felt his hand undoing the clasp on the side of the skirt, and then slowly lowering the zipper. Buffy looked at him. She knew it was a throw away phrase, but... he’d just sort of... asked.

    She smiled at him, and arched her back. She lay back down, wriggling her shoulders, and lifted her leg. “Could you help me with these?” she asked, indicating her fishnets.

    His eyes flickered down her form, and he lifted his hand. He pulled the nets down slowly, one leg at a time, and Buffy raised her legs one after the other, dancing them over his head as he helped. Once they were off, Buffy lifted her hips and slid her skirt and the tattered remains of her underwear down over her thighs. Spike took them without comment, pulling them down and dropping them on the floor, leaving her naked and exposed.

    Buffy caressed her thighs, then, sliding her fingers up until she reached the edge of her mons, then slowly opening her legs to slide into the crease between her thigh and her labia. She slid the hand back up and pulled at her pubic hair, her hand cording, making it look like the pulling hurt much more than it did. She moved the whole of her mons with her hand, still leaving her clit untouched. Spike’s eyes were riveted. She let herself hum gently, and then reached forward and took his hand.

    Spike evidently thought she was going to put it on her, but she surprised him by unbuckling the spiked leather bracelet he was wearing. She’d had an idea. She took the strap, buckled it again, and slid her fingers through it. She used the spikes to comb through her pubic hair, slide down her labia, and then open her labia to reveal the rest of her. The symbolism of the spikes doing this was undeniable.

    She slid the spiked bracelet further down her hand, and moistened her finger with her own juices. Then she slid up and began to circle her clit, dancing over it gently until it swelled between her folds like a ripe strawberry. With her other hand she caressed her thigh, her hip, sliding up her torso to her breasts and back down again.

    She thought about Spike. Her own Spike, her generous, affectionate, tormented Spike, and how he would love seeing this. She thought about how he would react if she told him – reminded him – of this moment when she got back. Because she was getting the hell back. She forced herself to be certain of it. Which would mean this whole dangerous journey was just a memory to her Spike. It was already a memory, it was already over, and she’d already come home.

     She pushed harder on her clit, and shifted her hips so Spike – the current Spike – could have a better view. The spikes on the bracelet around her hand dug into her labia, but they weren’t razor sharp or anything, and she was controlling how hard she pushed. It looked much more painful than it was. She let herself react, moaning and humming with the pleasure she wrought.

    It took her longer to come than she’d wanted it to, but she didn’t want to fake it. She’d never been completely sure, as she’d never asked, but she thought Spike could probably smell the difference. He’d never been uncertain, anyway, even when she’d come completely silently. She pushed herself harder, had to slow down, and then did it again. Spike just watched, his eyes entirely unreadable.

    When she finally came it was a thin and pitiful excuse for an orgasm, but she went with it anyway, crying out and letting her face show her pleasured tension. She grunted and looked up at him, her eyes still heavy. “Hey,” she said to him.

    He didn’t seem to know how to react. He stared at her, then blinked, looked away, and looked back. She sat up. He was hard a rock, and she smiled. She climbed over him again. “I see you enjoyed the show,” she said. She slid down off the bed and unbuttoned his jeans. “Now, where were we last night?” She addressed his cock, not Spike. She knew that usually amused him, when she treated it as its own entity. She slid just the tip of it into her mouth and played and nibbled, knowing it wasn’t enough, and it was likely to frustrate him.

    As she’d almost expected, his hand found her head, and was about to push her down. “Wait,” she said, pulling away completely.

    Spike only growled. She was really on the edge of what he was going to be willing to take from her. She reached for his jeans and pulled them down, making him scoot closer to the edge of the bed as she pulled. That was what she wanted. She bent down again, separating his legs, and finally able to reach his balls. He did not force himself down her throat, to her relief. It gave her the freedom to do what she’d actually been meaning, which was to slide her hand down under his scrotum, and slip one finger up his crack, just fingering his anus. She tickled the tip of his cock with her lips as she did it.

    To Spike’s surprise – but not to hers – he came almost instantly. He all but roared with the shock of it. She let his vampiric semen slide down her chin and around her throat, and then she surged up before he really had time to finish coming. She held her throat to his mouth, and he kissed it automatically, his own semen drawing him. All of a vampire’s juices tasted slightly of blood. It was almost instinctual for him to lap at it. She wasn’t really surprised when he bit her again, mixing the blood with his demonic semen. Her own Spike had never done that, but they were more careful about when and where they bit. This Spike... the biting was going to be pretty much uncontrolled. She trusted her own Spike’s statement that he hadn’t messed up in a long time. If he was going to kill her, he would mean to.

    He didn’t draw her down into euphoria, but he didn’t make it hurt too badly, either. Whether that was intentional on his part, or he was just too shocked to try and hurt her, she didn’t care. After a long moment, while Spike held her on his lap and kissed and sucked at the new wound he’d created, he grunted and pulled away. “What... the bloody... fuck.”

    Buffy laughed at him. She couldn’t help it. “Enjoy that, lover?” she asked.

    “Bloody hell. Where did you...?” He gulped, still panting.

    “I’m here to please you,” she said. “Not to buy you. Do you believe me now?”

    He stared at her, almost awestruck. She knew what she’d done to him. She’d done it to her own Spike a lot. “I think I trust you even less,” he said.

    Buffy laughed again. “But you like me more,” she said. She kissed him, and this time he let her.
 

***

    As the sun rose, Buffy curled up on her dog bed happier than she had been the day before. Spike still insisted she stay locked up while he slept, but he hadn’t threatened to kill her in hours. He’d gone in to Drusilla for a while, and when he came out he seemed resigned if not contented, with a new shirt for Buffy. She didn’t have to contend with Drusilla having been too cruel to him, whatever she’d done. She’d eaten more of the Chinese food and they’d watched television until the sun rose. He didn’t really touch her, didn’t snuggle or fondle her as her own Spike would have done, but they chatted a little about the guests on the late show. Every once in a while she’d look up to find his eyes fixed on her, more perplexed than anything else. Then he’d sent her to bed.

    She snuggled up under the blanket he’d given her, with two pillows he’d added to the nest, wearing one of his own black shirts – much less ripped and torn than his carefully handcrafted punk costume. The shirt smelled of Spike.  When she closed her eyes on her surroundings, she could almost forget that the Spike it smelled of wasn’t completely hers.
 

Spike: I get this spell reversed, they’ll be finding your body for weeks!
Buffy: Oh, make a move. Please. I’m dying for a good slay!
        Something Blue
 

    The ritual the next evening was pretty much identical. Spike woke, woke Drusilla, snuggled with her a bit, and then was quietly rebuffed. He released Buffy, and the two vampires went hunting. The only difference was, in this instance, Dru left first, and Spike headed off – Buffy presumed to the CBGB club – alone.

    The Chinese food was cold, and even less appetizing today, but Spike hadn’t provided more food yet, so she made herself eat some of it. There was a bookshelf on the wall, filled with paperbacks. There were science fiction novels and some random magazines. There were also – Buffy smiled when she saw them – a few books of romantic poetry. There he was. It was those little remnants of the gentle Spike she loved inside that made this whole dark situation bearable for her. Even without a soul, he could still appreciate others’ poems, and did. She picked up a book and read, keeping an ear open for the door. She didn’t want to be surprised by Drusilla’s lone return.

    When she heard the door rattling, she jumped up off the couch and headed for her closet out of the way of the unpredictable vampiress. Except... as she closed the door two voices came into the room. Neither of them were female.

    “I dunno, man! The boss isn’t gonna like this!”

    Buffy didn’t like this much, either. What was it that Drusilla had said? The boys were getting restless?

    “The boss gets to go hunt when he chooses,” said another voice. “There wasn’t enough in that overseas chink last night to even be an appetizer.”

    “I think he was from Soho. And Korean.”

    “I don’t care where he was from, he was a tease.”

    “You know we can go hunting if we want.”

    “Yeah, the lowlives out there.” Uh-oh. Buffy was afraid she knew where this was heading. She prepared herself. Not a slayer, not in this body, but Willow had fought vampires. Xander had fought vampires. Hell, Anya had fought vampires, and her first impulse was always to run the hell away. “And you heard the boss last night. Bitching us out for making that chink scream when he’s torturing his own little slut right in front of us. He gets to make ‘em scream. How’s that fair?”

    “Well, yeah, man, but... the boss is the boss, right? I mean, that’s the point.”

    “Well, I gotta make my point. And my point is that we deserve as much fun as the boss, yeah?”

    “But–”

    “And he keeps his fun,” the first vampire added, “right here.” The door to Buffy’s closet was torn open. Two of Spike’s yellow-eyed, weak willed minions stood before her. One was tall and arrogant. The other slunk like a ferret, and looked nervous.

    “I wouldn’t,” Buffy said without preamble.

    The tall vampire laughed at her, and lunged. Buffy cracked the terra-cotta pot over his head and tried to push out past him, but the ferretty one grabbed her. He looked like he didn’t know what to do with her once he had her, and held her nervously. “Um...” he said.

    The tall vampire picked himself up from the floor and grabbed her from his partner. She elbowed him in the ribs, but her strength was negligible, and he was on the hunt. He held her by the throat and pushed her up against the lamp table. “Look at her! Look at that neck, and he expects us to eat winos off the streets?” He chuckled, and then held her out to his friend. “You wanna take a first bite?” he asked.

    “I dunno, Chet,” his partner said nervously. “I think the boss’ll get pissed.”

    “Maybe he shouldn’t be the boss anymore,” Chet muttered. “I’ll bet if you, me, and Danny get together, we could take him out.”

    “But he made us, man. That’s, like... wrong.”

    “Isn’t that the point?” Chet said. He pushed Buffy at him. “Here, you bite first.” He seemed reluctant to take full responsibility. Buffy knew he’d turn on his ferretty partner in a second if Spike came back. “Come on. No one’s looking.”

    The ferret wasn’t buying it. “No, man! This was your bright idea!”

    “I think neither one of you are very bright!” Buffy snapped. She shifted and kicked the lamp table, until the whole thing fell at their feet. The light went out, the bulb shattering with a pop, and Buffy used the vampire’s distraction to duck out of his grip. She twisted and dove in the direction of Drusilla’s room. She might have to share it with the blood doll, but she figured there’d be more chance of weapons being stashed in there.

    She didn’t get far. The vampire Chet grabbed her by the shoulder and threw her across the room. She rolled into the throw, keeping herself from being bruised, but she didn’t have the agility she usually had in order to hop up and face her attackers. God damn it! She realized they might actually manage to kill her in this pitiful junkie’s body. She wasn’t afraid. She was just annoyed. She’d expected to deal with Spike, evil or not. She’d accepted he might kill her. The chance of being bitten to death by his idiot disposable offspring was not supposed to be in the cards. It seemed quite the ignoble ending for a famous slayer. Offed by someone’s newborn minion.

    Not that anyone would ever know.

    She only managed to get up into a crawl before the vampire Chet was on her again. His partner didn’t seem to want to attack the boss’s pet. Buffy kicked Chet off and rolled away, but she didn’t get far. Chet grabbed hold of her ankles, dragging her back to him. Buffy scrabbled at the lower cupboards in the kitchenette, hanging on to the handle of one for dear life. It opened under her weight, and her scrabbling made the garbage can inside fall over. She threw it behind her, and it hit the vampire’s face, exploding into empty liquor bottles and sticky Chinese cartons. The vampire seized her hips and turned her. “Let’s see how loud you can scream for me!” he growled. He opened his fangs and lunged for her throat.

    He didn’t even have time to be surprised before he flickered into dust.

    The ferretty vampire stared at Buffy in horror as she forced herself back to her feet, her hand still clenched around the discarded chopstick she’d found amongst the refuse. It hurt. Her hand didn’t have the strength she was used to, but the stance felt right, and even this puny weapon filled her with confidence. “Boy did he have the wrong end of the stick,” Buffy said. She laughed, giddy with the slay. She felt like herself for the first time since she’d been dragged back.

    “You!” The other vampire backed away from her, confused and scared. “You dusted him! She –! You –! We’re –!”

    “Need me to stick it to you next?” Buffy asked with a grin. She advanced a step.

    “And what the bloody hell is going on!”

    Buffy and the ferretty vampire both stared at Spike in the doorway. How long he’d been there, Buffy had no idea. She wondered if he’d actually seen the slay.

    “She dusted him, boss!” the vampire cried out. He ran to Spike as if Spike were a rescuing parent. “She dusted Chet!”

    Spike looked at Buffy, the pile of dust on the floor, and the vamp panicking at his feet.

    “What the hell, right?” the minion continued. “We get her now, right? We get to eat her?”

    Spike knocked the vampire into the wall without really looking at him and advanced on Buffy. She tried to think of what to say, and didn’t have time to decide whether dropping the stick or holding it in a defensive posture was the best plan. Spike attacked her with a roundhouse, kicking at her hand with his boot. Her hand went numb, and the stick went flying. Spike rolled and picked it up in the same movement, and then faced her in defensive crouch. Buffy took several steps back, her hands up and empty. Buffy tried to look harmless. She didn’t know if she pulled it off. She wasn’t sure her perky-innocent dumb-blonde cheerleader grin would have the same effect in this body.

    “Do we get her now, boss?” the ferretty vampire continued from his position against the wall. “I can get Danny. We’ll tear her apart for you, right boss? It’ll be fun, right? She’s been–”

    Spike’s hand shot out, and he grabbed the vampire by the scruff. “What the hell were you doing in my lair?” he snarled.

    The vampire dangled like a kitten in its mother’s mouth. “It was... Chet, he... he thought....”

    “Shut up,” Spike said. “Chet thought. And Chet’s the boss, is he?”

    “He’s dusted, man!”

    “He shouldn’t have been in my fucking lair!” Spike snapped, shaking his minion. “And neither should you.”

    “Yeah, but she dusted him! With that... thing! And we’re still hungry, and–”

    “And you talk too much!” Spike glowered. He dragged his minion out the door. “Oi! Listen up, mates. Any of you think my orders don’t need to be obeyed?” he asked the nesting vamps. He staked the minion without ceremony, and let him go. The ferretty vampire screamed, and fell heavily to the floor with a thump before he exploded into dust. Spike smacked the chopstick between his hands then, crumbling it to splinters. “When I say stay out of my lair stay the bloody hell out of my lair!”

    There was dead silence from the hallway. Spike tossed the splinters onto the floor and came back into the room, slamming the door behind him.

    Buffy had no chance to think up any explanation before Spike had her against the wall. “What the bloody hell are you?” he demanded.

    “I’m... I’m just a girl,” Buffy said, her heart beating wildly. She wasn’t sure if it was Sarah’s instinctive terror or her own.

    “A girl who stakes vampires with kitchen ware!” he growled. “You’re not just a girl. You’re a witch or a demoness or – or... I don’t know. You don’t smell, or taste like a slayer, and I’ve met the slayer, so you’re something else. What are you?”

    “I told you! I’m just a girl!”

    “Bollocks! You know too much! You do too much.”

    “I saved my own life, because you left it in danger,” Buffy snapped. “What did you expect me to do? Just let them kill me?”

    “Any other bint would have.”

    “Well, clearly I’m better than that, aren’t I,” Buffy retorted.

    “What the hell are you?” Spike asked, pushing her a little higher up the wall. “Why the hell are you here?”

    “You know why I’m here.”

    “No, I bloody don’t. You're not a sub, or a junkie, or a runaway. You're not crazy or suicidal or homeless. You aren’t desperate, you don't get off on watching murders, and you're not even that much of a masochist. You bloody up and threw yourself at the biggest bad in the area, and now you’re staking my minions. What the bloody hell are you after?"

    “I’ve told you what I’m after!”     

    “And that doesn’t make any god damn sense!”

    “Life doesn’t!” Buffy yelled into his face.

    He looked incredulous. “And now you’re getting all existential in the face of certain death. Maybe you’re just insane.”

    “I’m not–”

    “I should kill you right now. You’re a liability.”

    A thought struck Buffy. “So why haven’t you?”

    Spike blinked.

    “You’re not actually pissed off at all, you just want to be.” Buffy laughed, realizing what his problem was. She let her eyes flicker seductively. “Having fun, Spike? I’ll bet the fact I just staked a vamp turns you on like a boiling kettle.”

    Spike growled and pushed her harder against the wall, but Buffy was herself again. She was not going to be afraid, not of Spike, not of any vampire. She was the slayer, god dammit. “But he was mine,” Spike snarled.

    “You didn’t want him anyway,” Buffy said, certain of that. “He was too independent.”

    “If you can stake him, what’s to keep you from staking me?”

    “A cup of your blood, and ten minutes to do what I want with it,” Buffy said.

    “That doesn’t mean you want me alive.”

    “Sure it does. I can’t get blood from you if you’re dust.”

    He pushed her harder. “And what’s to keep you from staking Dru when I’m not looking?”

    Buffy wanted to be hard, but she knew what Dru meant to him. At least, right now. It would also alter her own timeline too much, she knew it would. She let her face soften. "It would break your heart," she said. "I wouldn't do that to you.”

    Spike scoffed. “Bollocks. And if she comes to kill you?”

    Buffy shrugged. “She's no fledgling. I'll bet that minion was. He was too easy to kill."

    “What the hell do you know about it?”

    “Think about it,” Buffy said. “Someone knows the future. Bits of the future. She knows you. What do you think she’d do? She’d learn about vampires, right? She’d learn everything she could. She’d learn how to protect herself, wouldn’t she?”

    “That doesn’t explain why she’d follow the big bad into the dark of the night and throw herself into his bed.”

    “Well, that one you’ll have to figure out on your own,” Buffy said. “Why don’t you ask Drusilla?”

    “I did,” Spike said, not surprising her. “All I got were ravings about you not being who you are.”

    Buffy shrugged against the wall. “Then that’ll have to do you,” Buffy said, “because I don’t have a better explanation to give you. All I have is me.” She let her arms go up around him. “Come on, Spike,” she said. “I hid nothing from you. I told you I had teeth. You kept me anyway.” She smiled at him. “You want to feel me out? See how much of a liability I am?”

    “What do you mean?”

    “You know what I mean, warrior,” she said. “See what I can do.” She idly fingered the bright scar on his eyebrow – the one she knew he kept intentionally, his mark from his first slayer. He'd recently cut it open again, and stuck a safety pin through it for effect. He drew in a breath, aroused. "I'm not really strong enough for you, but... I know how to dance."

    He paused, and she felt him draw in a breath. "Do you, now?"

    Buffy nodded. She didn't have the strength, the agility, the speed, the endurance, or the instincts, but she still knew the moves. "Don’t you wanna dance with me?" she asked slyly. "You'll have to just play; you actually land a blow, you'll shatter me. But don't you wanna see my moves?"

    Spike's breath came a little harder and his eyes narrowed. "Show me." He backed away.

    "I may be a little rusty," Buffy admitted, and she started to stretch. Sarah's body was not as limber as her own, not by a long chalk. She'd have to take that into account. Her legs were shorter, too, and her breasts far larger. They were going to get in the way. Still, she thought she could come up with something in this ill-fitting suit she found herself in. “All right,” she said. She swallowed. “Come at me.”

    Spike’s eyes flickered down her form for a moment, and then he complied, pouncing like a tiger. Buffy sidestepped, shifted, and landed a blow on his ribs. And hurt her hand. “Ow,” she muttered. She shook her wrist. She changed styles, raising her hands up to block, and he swung at her. She knew he was going slow – for him – but she was still hard pressed to block the attacks. She hit his blows aside so hard she felt herself bruising her own arms, but she didn’t ask him to stop. She did have to retreat. She backed up until she felt the counter behind her, then ducked and rolled, rather than going for another block. Spike missed her move and punched his own cupboard. Drusilla’s rats squeaked as he rattled the cage.

    He laughed as his fist went through the wood, and he spun to catch her again. She hadn’t been able to get up fast enough, and he stepped on her hair. She shifted up on her shoulders and kicked at his stomach – futilely, but he chuckled and let her go as if her weakened blow had actually done damage. She jumped awkwardly to her feet and leaped for him, aiming her fists at his face, and he caught her arms and held her. “All right, cutie,” he chuckled. “You’re know you’re playing with one of the big boys–”

    Buffy kneed him in the groin, and he buckled. “Ough!”

    Buffy’s own knee was bruised, and she could hardly breathe for the adrenaline hit, and Sarah’s weakened muscles had formed a strident union and were picketing for better treatment. She knew she was already pretty much done with this fight. Shame. She was starting to get into it.

    Still in a crouch of pain, Spike grabbed her by the leg and dragged her to the floor. She kicked away and scrabbled to her feet. Spike growled and surged upright. He grabbed her by the throat and pushed her back up against the wall. “You’re a dangerous little mouse,” he grinned at her.

    “And I keep telling you,” Buffy panted up at him. “I’m no mouse.”

    “Who the hell have you been fighting?” he asked, still laughing at her. “That was so damn cute.” He kissed her then, and for the first time it felt real. She felt him against her, and knew the difference immediately. He actually wanted her this time. He wasn't just trying to take vengeance on Drusilla, or play the big bad for the sake of it, or even take her up on a tease. This was the first time she'd turned him on by herself, not just because he was lonely or angry or wanted to prove he owned her. He nibbled at her lips, and his body pulsed against her, muscles tensing, breath catching. Buffy felt electricity. Hot damn, he was still Spike... “All right then, pussycat,” he growled, and slid into his fangs “You just met the bad dog.”

    He bit her. She tensed under him, frightened. Maybe she was wrong, and she’d actually angered him. Maybe he was going to kill her. And then the pain faded and she felt him sliding over her and through her, and then she felt the first trickle of euphoria as he gave to her. “Oh, god,” she breathed, melting under him. She moaned and gasped. “You don’t... ung! You don’t have to do this... if you don’t... oh!” She had to stop talking.

    Spike released her throat and looked down at her. “And miss out on that look on your face?” he asked with his thickened eyebrow raised as much as it could. He reached for his jeans and unzipped, pulling out his already erect cock. “Can’t wait to see this one–!” He pulled up her skirt and slid inside her, and her eyes flickered. He turned back to her throat and lapped at the blood until her whole neck felt numb with it. He thrust in her against the wall as she wrapped her legs around him, and sucked as she groaned beneath him.

    She’d forgotten how nice it felt. The pain of the last two days had begun to block out the memory of Spike’s powerful bite, the need she felt when he gave it to her. Over their time together it had trickled into the love she felt, making the whole thing as intense as a first kiss. It was wonderful to feel it again. She hadn’t realized how lonely she’d felt without his soul – this was the next best thing. And... dangerous. She knew it was. Still...

    His fullness pulsed inside her, and his muscular arms held her secure, and he had her ride him, supported by the wall, and his cool breath tickled the back of her neck. Over and over, deep and deeper, little sounds of lust and pleasure escaping both of them. This really was Spike. Maybe it was the bite affecting her, but she felt like she’d come home. She could have sobbed with how good it felt.

    The blood and the sex and the euphoria bled into each other, and Buffy all but swooned against the wall. His movement against her was fierce, intense, single-minded in its passion. It caught every part of her. She felt it building, tensing inside her as if she were cording muscles to land a blow, and it struck her as hard as if she had landed one, an orgasm as fierce as her own strikes. It left her feeling warm and full of light – glowing. That was the word Spike always used. Glowing. She sagged against him like a ragdoll, spent, but enjoying every movement he still thrust against her.

    Then the front door opened, and in came Drusilla. Buffy was too dazed to protest, or even really register her presence. “I thought you’d already hunted, Spike,” Drusilla said with a teasing grin.

    Spike pulled his head away from Buffy’s throat and glanced at her, his eyes slipping back to blue. “Bit busy, Dru.”

    “Don’t let me spoil your fun,” Drusilla laughed. Then she looked about the room, the broken lamp, the upended garbage. “Your pet’s got into the rubbish bin. She’s messy.”

    Spike turned back to Buffy with mischief in his eyes. “Kittens will do that sometimes.” He thrust into her harder.

    Drusilla laughed again, and headed for her room. “I need to change my dollies.”

    “Mm,” Spike said, which might have been an acknowledgement, or might have just been enjoying Buffy. Buffy was still too dazed to even be embarrassed. In some way, this wasn’t even her. Spike gazed at her, his ice-blue eyes warm with his enjoyment of her. Over and over again he pushed her, thrust inside her, staring into her. He didn’t take his eyes off hers until he came. He grunted with it, his teeth clenched, and paused for a moment, looking as if he might growl. Then he sucked at her still bleeding wound again.

    Still bleeding. The anti-coagulant. She’d been immune to it in her old body. Buffy swallowed as she realized how much easier it would be for Spike to kill her in this form. Kill her accidentally, even. Spike released her wound with a final lick, and pulled back. He looked into her eyes as he set her on the ground. “You knew what I was doing.”

    She nodded.

    “But you haven’t been a blood junkie. No scars. You got friends?”

    “No,” Buffy said, finding it hard to talk through the bite. “I just know you.”

    Spike started to pull away, and she clutched at him. She’d never had him try to pull away after before. The sudden panic of the idea of losing contact with him frightened her. “S-sorry,” she said. She swallowed.

    He grinned, and looked down her body. “Don’t worry, pet. I’m not done with you yet.” He lifted her and carried her across the room and set her up before the sofa bed. He embraced her from behind, licking at the trickling bite, and then whispered into her ear, “Open it.”

    She licked her lips, longing for him to touch her more, and then made herself leave contact with him to open the sofa bed. It almost hurt, letting him go. She reeled, from the exertion, venom, blood loss, she wasn’t sure. Opening the sofa was harder than it should have been. She had to think carefully about what she was doing, and stop herself from following at his heels like a god-damned puppy. She had to tell herself  that two minutes out of Spike’s arms were not going to be the death of her. Quite the contrary.

    Spike went to fetch the pillows. A moment after she had the bed fully unfolded, Spike pushed her down and pulled her skirt off. She sighed with relief once she felt his hands on her again.

    He kissed her and caressed her as he stripped off the rest of her clothes. Her heart was racing – damn. The bite again. She was used to Spike being more careful with this stuff. She supposed that meant she couldn’t let herself fall as far as she usually liked to....

    Too late. She grabbed him, burying her head in his collar as if she’d burrow inside him, and she almost hated herself for it. She did not feel in control now. Not even knowing him as well as she did, not even being able to manipulate how he felt and what he wanted. He wanted her now, and only because she’d set him up with things she knew would turn him on, and still she felt out of control.

    “Sweet thing,” he said, and he lifted his shirt over his head. He pulled her close to him and licked at her throat. “That better?”

    She clutched at him. “You know exactly what you’ve done to me, don’t you.”

    “You seemed to have some idea what you were doing to me,” he said. “I’m the one who’s supposed to be in charge, here.”

    “Is that why you went all bitey?” Buffy asked. “Feeling out of control?”

    Spike grinned down at her. “I went all bitey ‘cause that’s what I do. It’s what you’re here for.” He closed his teeth on her nose, a teasing kiss before letting her go. “Or did you forget?”

    “Fair enough,” Buffy said, still clinging to him. He smelled of stale cigarettes, a different brand than she was used to him using. Harsher. She didn’t like it much. She still clung to him.

    He licked at her throat. “Your blood’s sweet,” he said. “Gentle trickle. You’ve a tiny little heartbeat. Almost like a child.”

    Buffy’s ardour cooled, and she went still beneath him. “I don’t want to know how children taste,” she said quietly.

    He pulled away a little and looked down at her. “And yet you’re willingly fucking a vampire,” he said. “What do you think I eat?”

    “Whoever you can get your hands on,” Buffy said. “That doesn’t mean I like it.”

    “So why are you here?” he asked – again.

    Buffy pulled him closer. “I love you. That can mask a lot of evils.”

    “You what?”

    Damn. That bite was really affecting her inhibitions. “Never mind,” she breathed.

    Spike stared at her for a long moment, curious, flattered. “Say it again.”

    “You won’t believe me if I say it again,” Buffy said. “You’ll think it’s the bite talking.”

    “Wasn’t it?”

    “You wouldn’t believe me either way.”

    He gazed at her, both fond and perplexed. “I don’t know what to believe. You could be extremely dangerous.”

    “Like you?” she asked with a soft smile. “You don’t trust me yet. I’m not saying it again.”

    “Why?”

    She shrugged. “Those are powerful words. You’ll think I’m trying to manipulate you.”

    “Now that, I know you’re doing,” Spike said.

    Buffy looked up at him. “Do you?”

    “You think me a fool?”

    “Sometimes,” Buffy teased.

    He laughed, not even insulted. “How the hell do you know me?” he asked in a whisper.

    “I’m inside you,” she whispered back, her eyes closed in euphoria.

    “Some of you,” Spike said. “Until I take all of you.”

    He really thought that idea was sexy. Damn, this was complicated. She knew her Spike was inside there – most of him. But there was also this really sadistic creature with no leash on him at all. She missed his soul, yes, but she hadn’t realized how much she’d miss the neuro-chip. He was still evil even with it in, but she had never realized exactly how much it had tempered him. Kinky was one thing, but this Spike was well past that, and it really disturbed her. But she had no choice, and it was easier to try and love him. Either way, she’d be gone in ten days. She knew this. This wasn’t her time. She just had to get through it, one way or another. She’d known his past. And much more importantly she knew his future. He had to be worth it.

    He slid his jeans down and kicked them off the bed, then arched over her. “Who taught you to fight?” he asked.

    “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” Buffy said.

    He took hold of her arms and held them up above her head, pressed down against the mattress. His whole body weighed down on her. She grunted at how good it felt. “Try me,” he said.

    “My high school librarian,” she said. “And cheerleading practice.”

    He laughed and kissed her. “Are you trying to tell me I’ve stolen a school girl?”

    Buffy grinned up at him. “Do I look like a school girl?”

    “No,” Spike said. “You look like a naked little bint that I’m going to ravish, and never let go.”

    Buffy kissed him rather than respond, and he returned it passionately, pushing her head down into the mattress, barely giving her time to breathe. Spike loved to kiss – vampires and oral fixations. She liked it, she wanted him, but it started to get uncomfortable. Buffy hadn’t realized it before – Spike always let her breathe. Even from the beginning, even under that stupid spell Willow had cast, Spike was always careful to let Buffy breathe as they kissed. This Spike didn’t seem to care, or notice, that she was being half smothered by his lips, that she didn’t have time to take in air. He didn’t need to breathe himself, not really – not anywhere near as much as a human, at any rate – and it didn’t occur to him to take that into account when bedding a human girl.

    After a while she felt it necessary to pull her head away. He didn’t really let her. “Wait!” she gasped.

    He growled low, annoyed. “What. Now.”

    “Just give me a moment,” Buffy whispered against his jaw. She gasped and panted. “Give a girl some air.”

    Spike pulled away and looked down at her. “What?”

    “I need to breathe,” she said with a slightly giddy laugh, “give me a minute.”

    “You nee–” He cut himself off and gazed down at her, perplexed.

    Buffy looked up. “Have none of your other pets ever told you this?” she said, teasing more than anything else. “Humans need air sometimes.”

    The look on his face told her that in all honesty, none of them ever had.

    Her teasing demeanor changed as the truth struck her. “They’ve all been too scared to complain,” she realized. It seemed very sad, suddenly. He’d never been loved as a man, never even been kissed. He had no knowledge or memory of how to make love to someone like a man would. And every human victim would either have been terrified of him, or using him, or, at best, have no idea who or what he was. He’d had nothing but death or fear in his bed. “Oh, you poor baby.” She lifted her head and kissed him in earnest. He was still looking at her with bewilderment when she finished. She knew she was still a little high on the bite, but she felt such sympathy for him she couldn’t help but whisper, “I love you.”

    “Don’t lie to me.”

    There was no malice in his words. No accusation.

    Buffy moved beneath his body. “Make love to me,” she said. “You’ll know I’m not.”

    Spike regarded her for a long moment, and then finally released her arms. She put them around him and pulled him close, opening herself beneath him. He found her and slid inside, moving in her gently. “You really are a cutie,” he whispered.

    “And you’re dangerous,” she whispered back, both teasing him, and stroking his ego. “Kiss me.”

    He did, and stopped, and kissed her again. After the third awkward break, she chuckled. “You don’t have to stop. Just let me pick when to breathe.” She kissed him again, and then pulled away. He was trying. That meant... what? That he was changing? Toward her, at least.

    “Where did you come from?” he whispered as he moved in her.

    “It doesn’t matter.”

    “Tell me.”

    “The name is Sarah MacArthur. Look me up.”

    “I will,” Spike said. He arched over her, moving in her sensuously, occasionally grinning down at her until his tempo started to speed up.

    Buffy was annoyed that mostly what she felt was exhaustion. She was used to more endurance, more control, and the ability to go five hours straight, giving back as good as she got. As it was she felt weak, tired, sated – and her neck still bled a trickle. She could feel it pooling under her shoulder, sticky and wet.

    Still, he seemed to find it hot, which was sort of the point. He rocked over her, then grunted as he came inside her again. He sank his head down to her throat and kissed again at her wound.

    Finally, he seemed satisfied, and rolled off her. “You are a sweet little bit, I’ll give you that,” he said. He slid up higher on the sofa bed and reached down under the mattress. “Come here.”

    Buffy scooted over, and lay her head against his chest. He smiled. “Come here, cutie.” He took her arm and lifted it. A dull clanking drew her attention. A second later, Spike slid a manacle over her wrist, and screwed her into it.

    “What’s this?” Buffy asked. Her tone was languid, rather than worried.

    “Chains, pet,” he said. They’d been stuffed under the mattress, probably bound to the bedframe. He pulled out a second manacle and pulled up her other arm.

    “What are they for?

    “What do you think?” He kissed her.

    “No closet?”

    “Not today,” he said. “I’m cold, you’re warm. You’re gonna be my hot water bottle.”

    Buffy laughed. Spike loved to just hold her, keep himself warm against her life. It was good to see that reflected in him from this time. But still.... “And the chains are supposed to...?”

    “Keep you locked up,” he said.

    Buffy looked at him. “You’re an idiot.”

    Spike blinked at her in surprise. “Excuse me?”

    “You’re an idiot,” Buffy said.

    “And you’re insulting the guy with the fangs, love.”

    “And you want to keep me quiescent, why give me a weapon?”

    “What?”

    Buffy shifted, twisted, and crossed her arms. The chains were loose enough she managed to loop them around Spike’s neck. She pinned him down, pulling the chains taut, and grinned down into his face. “I probably couldn’t kill you,” she said. She knew she probably could in her slayer body, using the chains to break his neck and then rip the soft flesh, but Sarah wasn’t up for that. “But it’s still a damn fool idea.”

    “You are so damn cute,” he said again. He breathed heavily under her, an amused grin still on his face. “So I take it it’s back to the closet.”

    “Well, that’s dumb too,” Buffy said. “Do you want to hold me, or not?”

    His grin faded and he gazed up at her. “What am I supposed to do. Trust you?”

    “Take the gamble,” she said. “Is it worth it for a hot water bottle?”

    “You just staked my minion. I trust you about as far as I could throw you.”

    “Well that’s pretty far, big bad.” Buffy considered this. “Got any handcuffs?” she asked. She shook her head. “Of course you do. Just bind me to you.” She kissed him. “Then I can’t go finding anymore chopsticks... and you won’t be going anywhere without me.”

    “You want to lock me up.”

    “Just a little. To me. And you hold the key.” She kissed him, nibbling at his lips with her teeth. “Come on, Spike. You know you wanna hold me. I’ll snuggle up... keep you warm and toasty... all... day... long.” She kissed and nibbled him again as she spoke, and he groaned quietly. He kissed her briefly, and then sat up. Buffy’s arms were wrenched by the chains as he shifted her. “Ow.”

    “All right, then,” he said. “Give us a minute.”

    He went into the bathroom, and Buffy yanked at the manacles. She felt a little better, despite his leaving – the euphoria of his bite was wearing off. He hadn’t given her as much as she’d feared. He came back with a bowl in his hand, and she grinned at him. “These are pretty good chains,” she said. “Good sound. Musical.”

    He tilted his head at her, perplexed.

    “We should use them some other time.”

    “Now you’re volunteering for them?’

    “Of course,” Buffy said. “Did you think I was complaining on principle?” She sat up. “Okay, why do you think I’m here?” she asked. “Do you really think you’re keeping me prisoner?”

    “Yes,” he said flatly.

    Buffy’s smile softened, and she twitched her nose flirtatiously. “I’d be here, anyway.”

    “Until you got your pound of flesh.”

    “Cup of blood, and it’s really more complicated than that.” She shook her head. “Lets not talk about it. It doesn’t matter right now.”

    “What does matter?”

    Buffy shrugged. “Well, I thought you were cold. Doesn’t that matter?”

    Spike sat down on the bed beside her and unscrewed the manacles. “I was right. You’re definitely insane.”

    “No,” Buffy said. She slid her hand over his shoulder as soon as it was loose. “I’m just already yours.” She let her hand slide down his chest. “You don’t need to train me. You don’t need to bind me. You don’t need to threaten me. What do you want, hon?” she asked. She slipped her hand back up his throat, and touched his lips with her thumb. “Ropes? Chains? I’m breakable – you don’t want to waste me – but I don’t mind if you hurt me. Much,” she added with a wink. “I’m all yours.”

    “I still don’t trust you,” he said quietly, but his eyes were half closed. He was clearly feeling very fond of her just then.

    “Then break out the handcuffs,” Buffy said. “But I can’t wait to hold you.”

    He released the second manacle and then wiped her neck with a wet wash cloth he’d brought in the bowl. “What are...?”

    “Don’t want to waste all that sweet blood,” he whispered. He pulled out another bandage and covered the wound.

    “I guess I should be flattered,” Buffy said. She snuggled against his chest as he made sure the tape was secure. She hummed with contentment. He really did smell good. And feel good. And maybe that bite wasn’t out of her system yet, after all.

    “You really are a sodding pussycat,” he said. He snapped a handcuff around her wrist and pulled her against him. “Do you purr?” he asked in her ear.

    “Only if you ask me to,” Buffy whispered.

    He chuckled, stood up, and turned off the light. The rising sun trickled in through the painted, grated windows, and he closed one of the curtains to block more of it out. He started picking up the fallen trash can.

    Buffy shifted on the bed. “I can help with–”

    “You can stay right where you are,” Spike snapped, not sounding particularly fond. “I’m not letting you get your hands on a weapon again.”

    “Now it’s bothering you?”

    Spike glanced up. “Just because I like risk doesn’t mean I’m an idiot,” he said. “You sit right there where I can see you till I clean this room up a bit.” Buffy noticed he found and destroyed three more chopsticks. He threw out the broken lamp, collected all the wood splinters from the broken cabinet, and for good measure put the whole trash bin out into the hall with his minions. Buffy slid in between the bloodstained sheets, and waited for him to join her. He did a moment later and pulled her close against him, proprietorial. “Don’t keep me awake.”

    “No?” Buffy asked. She let her hand slide up his bare thigh, and just tickle his cock.

    He chuckled. “Maybe in the evening.”

    “Plan,” Buffy said. Spike snapped the second handcuff around his own wrist and slid his leg over her. She knew the gesture. Often, he’d murmur mine when he did that back home... back in her time. Then it was mostly a joke, my love,more than, my property. Now, she knew he really was thinking that way.

    Still. Even with the awkwardness of the handcuff, it was nice to curl up against him. Much nicer than being tied up alone in the closet. He’d softened toward her. He wanted her more. He trusted her more.

    All she’d needed to do was stake a vampire, do a little play sparring, and volunteer for the chains. Basically, be herself. She snuggled in. Maybe she was finally getting somewhere with him.
 

 

Chapter End Notes:

I don’t want to hear a blessed thing about Xin Rong’s supposedly blessed blade. My explanation for Spike still having a scar on his eyebrow from back then makes much more logical sense, and her blade can still be blessed.

Spike:  I've known you for two minutes, and I can't stand you. I don't  really feature you livin' forever. Can I eat him now, love?
        Lie To Me


    Sleeping together could be a hundred times more intimate than screwing. Buffy already knew this. As did Spike – her own Spike, anyway. He still regarded the first time they’d slept together as the best night of his life. He’d claimed that other nights, involving blood and bodies and beatitude had come really, really close (or actually, he’d written that in one of his more self-indulgent word-exploratory poems, which he had no idea she had read, but she hadn’t let on he’d left it lying around)  but the wonder and the magic and the awe in the closeness of that first time stayed with him. It had been so new to him, to be close to someone in a way that he could feel it, feel it in his soul in a way that made it so much more than just their bodies. He’d always longed for it, and never gotten it, particularly not with Buffy, whom he had loved well beyond reason. Apart from the occasional exhausted post-coital stupor, which never lasted more than an hour, Buffy had never slept with Spike when he didn’t have a soul.

    Which was probably why she forgot where she was.

    She was still asleep when he bit her, and he killed the pain so quickly it only half woke her. The anesthetic pulled her right back down into a dream state, and she hummed and turned to him. It felt so natural that it was only right when he pulled his body over her. His flesh, warmed through with her own body heat, felt familiar to her, and her arms went around him without thought.

    Her breath escaped her in a contented hum. It was not the soulless demon in bed with her. It was Spike. All of him, his heart and his soul, too. He slid inside her, and moved within her, and she lay back against the pillow and held him. They had, of course, done this countless times. There was nothing special or inventive in this. It was very basic, half-asleep, early morning sex – or truly, early afternoon, since Spike stayed up all night. He moved with her, and she moved with him, and held him close, and melted beneath him. She came quietly, the gentle glow of half-wakened pleasure, and she blinked up at him contented. Nothing original. Nothing fantastic. In ordinary circumstances, she and Spike would have continued on with their day half forgetting they’d made love upon awakening.

    Which was why his reaction when he was finished surprised her. He grunted his release, and blinked at her. Then he pulled his head up and stared down at her, his eyes wide. “What did you just do?”

    Buffy blinked her eyes open, still blurry with sleep. “What do you mean?”

    Spike stared down at her, trembling. “What was that? What did you do?”

    It was only then that Buffy remembered when and where she was. She’d been in bed with her lover. That was all she’d done. Now she was in bed with a soulless demon she was trying to manipulate into sharing his blood so that she could finally get the opportunity to leave him behind. But something about where she had been in her mind – the forgetting – somehow, that had shocked him to the core. She shrugged. “I... I don’t know.”

    Spike pushed her shoulders down. “You tell me what that was!”

    Buffy was bewildered. “I just let you make love to me.”

    Spike looked almost in tears. “How did you...?” He swallowed and tried to pull away from her. He was surprised when the handcuff stopped him, and he quickly unlocked it with a key he’d hooked onto the chain around his neck. He climbed out of bed, almost backing away from her, and a moment later he went into Drusilla’s room.

    Buffy felt sick. She lay there, confused, and then started to shake. She wasn’t sure why until she realized she was bleeding again. Damn anti-coagulant. And damn Spike for biting and running; no wonder she felt bereft. She got up and went to the bathroom to wash the wound and put pressure on it. This was the fourth bite mark she’d gotten. Her neck was starting to look frightening. She put on a bandage, and saw bruises on her arms. She took a shaky breath. How long could a normal human body put up with this kind of punishment? And damn Spike for leaving her! It was unkind, that’s what it was.

    She sighed. Just because she’d forgotten in the half-awake dream state of domestic slumber didn’t mean that Spike had suddenly become who she remembered. This Spike had no soul, did not love her, and had very little reason to treat her with compassion. Of course he was unkind. Still... she wished she was in his arms.

    Damn venom.

    She glanced at the clock on the wall of the kitchenette as she came out of the bathroom. It had probably been fifteen minutes since he’d bitten her. The worst of the need to stay near him only lasted about twenty, depending on how much he’d given her, and the last time he’d done it. After that it mostly just made one lethargic. Five or ten more minutes. She could endure that much. She did not have to go opening the door to Drusilla’s room and throw herself at him. That would have been suicide. But the fact that the thought had even occurred to her disturbed her. She was really used to Spike being much more careful with this... drug.

    Buffy climbed back into the bed and comforted herself with hugging Spike’s pillow. It smelled of him. She clenched her fists and took deep breaths to control herself. The shaking was the scariest part, but the mad impulses were the worst. She hated herself for it. She’d never thought of herself as a druggie before. The venom hit wasn’t what she really loved about Spike, after all. It was nice, but she stayed with Spike and made love to him and admired his strength and courage and sacrifice because of who he was, not because he was her... supplier. God, that made it sound so sordid. No wonder he had such contempt for those suckers and blood junkies who exchanged this stuff for money. He treated it as sacred. Or he had.

    This Spike... she wasn’t sure how he was using it. He wasn’t selling it, that was for sure, but it sure wasn’t sanctified, either. It seemed to be just another tool in his bag of tricks.

    The hit – she’d never really thought of it as a hit before – wore off after a little while, leaving her nothing but fatigued. The fatigue would last about two hours, she knew. She wondered how long she could do this before she was actually addicted, and started jonesing for his bite in between sessions. Sarah’s body, if her history was any indication, was prone to addiction. Buffy, if she was honest with herself, was prone to addiction to Spike himself. It was the dopamine and adrenaline he’d given her, not his venom that she’d become hooked on before, but the feelings were not dissimilar. Either addiction was dangerous in this time, in this form, with Spike as he was. She needed to keep her wits about her, and she couldn’t if she was addled in any way. Even last night she’d made a few missteps. She shouldn’t have told him she loved him. It was going to make him suspicious. She wasn’t even sure it was true at the moment, anyway. She loved future him, that was sure enough. This Spike... well. He was a killer. He was... wrong. Loving him would be, too.

    Not that that had stayed her addiction before....

    Once the need for him faded, she found herself feeling violated again. She felt like she’d been breakfast in bed. And to her near disgust she’d unthinkingly made love to him this morning as if he were her beloved Spike, self-sacrificing and devoted and, dear God, she missed him. And what was his reaction about? What did he even mean, what had she done to him? What they’d done was so normal.

    Maybe that was it. Maybe the simple, ordinary naturalness of it was what had made it so strange for him. The fact that it could be taken as granted – not dismissed or treated without respect, but that it was part of the natural shape of normality – maybe that was what made it so foreign.

    That look in his eyes.... She’d seen it before, but she couldn’t put her finger on when. It wasn’t lust or hunger. It wasn’t love, either. But she knew it...

    It didn’t matter. He’d left her, accusing her of... something, she had no idea what. She didn’t know what state he’d be in when he got back. She missed her own Spike. She’d just felt like she was home again, and now it was gone. Her tears annoyed her, and she buried them in Spike’s pillow. Just get through it, slayer, she told herself. You can. I know you can.

    She realized she’d told herself that in Spike’s soft voice.

    She went back to sleep.
 

***

    Spike was frightened.

    He didn’t want to admit to himself that he was frightened, but he was shaken and bewildered and he needed Dru.

    He curled up to Drusilla, wilfully ignoring the passed out blood doll chained to her bed. Dru. His mother, his child-lover, she was everything to him. She was the first woman he’d kissed, the first person he’d shagged, the first blood he’d tasted. She had created him and cared about him, comforted him when his plans went awry. She laughed and danced and laid her head on his lap, and begged him to admire her dresses and her dolls and the paintings she’d made out of the blood of her victims. She bowed for him and screamed for him and opened for him and teased him. She’d chained him up and drained him and tortured him. She’d submitted to him and cried for him and begged him to stop tormenting her. They’d shared victims and shared lovers and shared their dark and murderous unlives. Drusilla was the whole world. They’d done everything.

    And Drusilla had never done that.

    He had no idea what that pet outside had even done. He’d woken up with a warm little victim in his arms, sipped from her as if she were breakfast tea, and then decided to bleed off his awakening arousal. He hadn’t even really registered who the hell was beside him. He’d all but forgotten her name, she was just a warm body he could crawl over and pour himself into. Then she’d opened her eyes, and blinked up at him half asleep, and it felt as if he’d been staked. It went right to his heart, tore him asunder, and the moment he’d come he’d felt empty. Not satisfied, not fulfilled. Empty. Like something was missing. But at the same time, it felt wonderful, because she’d eased the pain even as she’d awakened it. He’d wanted to clutch her to him, in the hopes that she could fill him up. He felt she could, as if she held something that he lacked, and it wasn’t her blood and it wasn’t her heat and it wasn’t her life, and he was terrified. He had felt, for a brief moment, as if he was alive, as if she were life itself. He didn’t want to kill her. He wanted her. Not to feed from, and not to screw, but just... to be near.

    And what the hell was her name, again? He buried his head in Drusilla’s hair and tried to tell himself it didn’t matter. A dumb human pet, what did it matter what her name was? Usually he didn’t bother – Sarah. That was it. What the hell had she done?

    “Dru.” He whispered in Drusilla’s ear. Drusilla rolled over, away from him. “Dru. Love... please.” He hated himself for saying it. Drusilla was his. He shouldn’t have to beg her.

    She was in one of her more distant cycles at the moment, of course. Dru often went through cycles, where different parts of her personality rose to the surface. When she was getting a lot of visions she tended to become quite helpless and childlike. She needed him then, to play the caretaker, and he enjoyed being needed. When things were calm she was often very womanly, the perfect princess, dancing and throwing parties, Guenevere, taking the hand of her Lancelot. (That had left Angelus as the king Arthur of the scenario, of course, but Spike tended not to think about that.) Then she was seductive, and delightful, and hungry for him. He was her partner then, her equal, her paramour. Those were his favorite times.

    Right now, of course, she was in a different state. At the moment, she had gone cold. She was catty and selfish, and she enjoyed hurting Spike in every way possible. There were three ways to handle this mood, and he’d been going with the first: ignore it. It took longer, but it tended to change her back to one of her other states with the least repercussions. Another way was to submit and turn himself completely into her thrall, but that could take a while, and sometimes had unpleasant results – Angelus had taught her torture far too well. Eventually she’d relent, feel terribly sorry, release him and break down, crumbling into his arms like a grieving little girl. It was a pleasant enough ending, but getting there wasn’t easy. And with the slayer in town, Spike had to stay strong. He might not be able to afford the recovery time.

    There was another method of dealing with it, but it was his least favorite. He could turn her into a victim. He hated it because it made him into Angelus, and he hated being that for Drusilla. Sometimes she needed it, and there was no way to break her out of her hard shell except by being the mallet. Except he loved her, and every time he hurt her, it hurt him. He’d do what she needed him to do, but he’d never been a big fanatic for torture himself. It took so long, and it was so hard to see if you were getting anywhere. It wasn’t like killing or feeding or fighting. Those all fed him. Torture just drained him. He preferred to get his screams from fucking. Then, at least, he was getting something out of it. The torture, by itself, had never been that big a turn on for him. He’d done it, experimented with it while he was young, but really, it was Angelus’s kink, while Spike preferred the rush of battle.

    He didn’t want to have to go with either of the latter methods of cracking Dru out of her current humor. Being tortured, or being the torturer, both exhausted him. But that pet’s eyes had shaken him, and dammit, he needed Dru. He needed her to pet his head and kiss him whole again, remind him who and what he was. He was a vampire. He was a god. He had everything he needed. There was nothing missing. “Dru.” He kissed her throat, turned her body, arched himself over her.

    The blood doll opened his eyes and stared at him, resentful. Spike threw a pillow over thing’s head and went back to Drusilla. “Drusilla,” he whispered to her. “My love.” He gently bit at her throat.

    Dru opened her eyes. “I’m tired, Spike.”

    “I need you,” he whispered to her. “My love. I want you so.” Let me... please...! He couldn’t quite bring himself to beg. Not with the doll listening six inches away.

    “Pretty Spike,” Dru said. She rolled away, pushing him down atop her doll. “I need to die now.” She turned away from him.

    Spike lifted himself off the victim and went back to her. “I can do that,” he whispered. “La petite mort, all for you.” He kissed her throat, moved her hair aside and kissed down her back until he reached the edge of her nightdress. He reached his arm down and caressed her backside.

    “Not now, love.” She pushed his arm away.

    Spike growled. He could force her, but... that would start the cycle of one of the other methods, and he didn’t want to be tortured or torturer. He just wanted to be loved. Of course, that was the point of keeping a pet. So that when Dru got like this he wouldn’t have to feel it. If nothing else, a good pet was a nice distraction. This one....

    A low chuckle behind him made him turn, to see the pillow had fallen off the face of Dru’s blood doll. “And what are you laughing at?” he asked the bastard.

    “Nothing,” the doll said. “She just doesn’t want you.” He laughed again.

    “And you really think that’s gonna last, do you?” Spike said.

    The doll shrugged. Spike knew what his ambition was. This toy really thought that Dru was going to turn him, throw Spike over, and make him her new consort. He honestly thought that Dru’s mercurial humor had to do with a genuine loss of affection. He had no idea how often Drusilla had done this. Of course, Spike wasn’t allowed to tell Dru’s dolls anything different – it tended to alter their behavior, and she liked them subservient. The dangling carrot of eternity as her new dark knight was alluring to many of them. He wasn’t to snatch that away, or she got really pissed. Still, there were all kinds of things he was allowed to do to them. Spike reached up and broke three of her doll’s fingers before he climbed back out of the bed.

    The blood doll screamed quietly, and then settled down to a distinct moaning. Drusilla laughed gently, and rolled over, snuggling up to the bastard – her own hot water bottle. Spike clenched his jaw. He could slowly break the doll’s ribs one by one, but he was already bored with hurting him. Killing him would have been a nice rush, but that was off the table for now. He couldn’t wait for Dru to be sick of this one. He thought about trying again for her affections, but each rebuff hurt too much, and he felt too strange and raw after what that pet had done. That was why he’d come to Dru. Pity he couldn’t make her understand... but how, when he didn’t understand himself? And it was personal – he couldn’t bring it up in front of that creature she was playing with. He considered grabbing the thing, dumping him in the closet, and turning back to Dru, but he knew how that would play out. Screaming, tantrums, possibly torture on one side or another. It wouldn’t let him unburden himself, and it wouldn’t be sweet.

    He stalked back out of the room, ire boiling in his chest.

    And there was that pretty little pet, curled up in his bed. She was asleep, clutching his pillow. Spike could smell dried tears on her face. Oh, god, she’d cried, and he’d missed it...! Disappointment sparked in him. He could make her cry again, of course. Hurt her. He was good at that. But that would change the dynamic between them, and he was enjoying her playing... what? What was she playing, anyway? She talked back to him and insulted him to his face and teased him and had staked his bloody minion. What was she playing at?

    And what had she done to him this morning? Was it some spell, like the one she wanted to cast with his blood? A hypnotic thrall, like Dru was so good at? All he knew was it had felt amazing, wonderful, powerful, and it hurt at the same time. It wasn’t like that second night, when she’d played that trick on him that frankly no one had dared play since... well, that didn’t matter. That was wildly erotic, but it was pure genitalia. The sex this afternoon had been very basic. Under ordinary circumstances, he’d have called it boring, even. But it had done this... thing....

    She’d told him she loved him. This morning, as she lay beneath him, surrounding him, molding to him, those words.... Even if it was the bite talking, the words always.... Spike knew the power of words.

    He wanted to hold her again. It scared him. No, dammit, no more of this. She was far too much of a liability. She was some kind of witch or something. Too risky. Best to end this now. He climbed onto the bed and put his hand on her bite-marred throat, ready to end it quick, just a snap of her neck.

    She hummed in her sleep, and he found himself caressing her collarbone, instead. His hand slid back up and over her shoulder, down her arm, lifted up her hand to examine her tiny fingers... Bad skin, bony, didn’t look like she’d ever been fed properly. Mousy brown hair, straight as an arrow, mussed with sleep. She wasn’t even that pretty, damn it.

    And she was beautiful.

    Bloody hell. There was no way he was going back to sleep, now. He got up and turned on the telly, then curled up under the sheets and pulled the girl half into his lap. “Mm... Spike,” she whispered. The sound of his name made him gulp.

    Dammit. He knew he should kill her. Now. Before things got complicated....

    But she felt awfully warm.... Hey, daytime television. Entertainment for the undead, and the unemployed.

Warning: graphic descriptive imagery

Spike: “Slayer? Here, kitty, kitty. I find one of your friends first, I’m gonna suck ‘em dry! Use their bones to bash your head in. Are you getting a word picture here?”
            School Hard


    Buffy woke curled up on Spike’s side. She opened her eyes, and they caught at the TV. “Is that Dark Shadows?”

    Spike looked down at her. “You know it?”

    “I thought it was canceled in ‘71.”

    “It’s on reruns on channel four. You watch it as a kid?”

    “No, you’ve got it on DVD.”

    “What?”

    Buffy shook her head and sat up. “No, it’s... just here on TV,” she said. Fortunately, she knew what she’d said made no sense whatsoever in this time. “What’s Barnabas up to?”

    “Begging his dad to kill him. Wanker. All that tormented crap.” He chuckled. “Stay quiet. It’s almost over.”

    Buffy’s Spike still found Dark Shadows funny, and he himself had his tormented moments. It was definitely one of the more compelling lame TV shows Buffy had seen in her time. She hadn’t had the patience to sit through all the hundreds of hours of his DVDs of the thing, but she’d watched bits of it before, mostly half asleep. It made for good background noise. Buffy snuggled up against this Spike’s shoulder, still tired. She wondered how much blood she’d lost in the last three days, and whether – or rather, when – the signs of anemia would start to show. She certainly felt very tired. But it was nice snuggling up to Spike as he watched one of his melodramatic paranormal soap-operas. It almost felt normal.

    It stopped feeling normal quickly. Spike petted her head absently as he watched the antics of tormented vampire Barnabas Collins as he and his fictional family knocked about their cardboard set.  After a little while, Spike picked up her hand. “Ow!”

    “Shh.” He’d bitten her hand between her forefinger and thumb. He sucked on it absently, killing the pain, but not trying to zone her out. He kept on for a while, inattentively. He’d set her hand down, fondle her fingers, sip from her again. Buffy realized she’d just been turned into a bowl of popcorn. God, evil vampires were weird.

    She lay there, letting him snack on the trickle from her hand, trying very hard not to feel resentful. She’d signed up for exactly this, hoping for blood for blood, but her own future Spike paid much more attention to what he was doing when he fed. It was the sheer casualness of it that was troubling to her. As if her life didn’t even merit his full attention. It did not mesh with the Spike she knew. She wondered what had happened to him that he cherished the blood so much more in the future. She knew that on the whole it was herself – her Spike loved her, and her blood and life mattered to him. But there was more to it than that. She wondered if it was the chip that had done it. Having the prospect of living blood stolen from him might have made the whole thing more important. But she had the feeling it was even more than that.

    When the show ended, he poked Buffy with his elbow. “Turn it off,” he said.

    So she’d gone from breakfast in bed, to pet kitten, to bowl of popcorn, to remote control. Buffy sighed as she did as she was bid. That’s why he was so casual about her life. She was barely alive to him in the first place. “And what’s that look?”

    “Nothing,” Buffy said. She’d felt she was getting somewhere with him. Now she was afraid he was already getting bored with her. Except... why had he run away earlier? And if he had run away... why had he come back?

    “Come over here.”

    Buffy climbed back into the bed with him, and he took her into his arms. He held her closely, but there was no affection in it. It was as if he was experimenting with something. After a bit he pulled away and tilted her head up to look at him. His empty blue eyes searched her.

    “What?” she said after a while.

    “What did you do, earlier?”

    “I don’t know what you mean.”

    “Just tell me, I won’t be angry. I just need to know what it is.”

    “Spike, I really don’t know what you’re talking about.” Despite what he’d said, he did look annoyed. “Is it... the reason you ran away?”

    “I didn’t run,” he snarled.

    “Spike... all I did... I was just there. That’s all I did.”

    He looked frustrated, and let her go. A world-weary sigh breathed over her shoulder. Then he shrugged, and pulled the covers back. “You want a pizza?” he asked absently as he stood.

    Buffy was hungry, and was about to give a profound yes, when she stopped herself. The girl in the club. The child Dru killed. The delivery guy. The death was starting to pile up around her. How long could she do this, and not be tainted by it herself? No. She was done. She couldn’t stop him, but she couldn’t take this anymore, not without at least a token resistance of some kind. “I think I’d rather starve,” she said quietly.

    “What was that?”

    “If it means another slaughtered delivery guy,” she said, and forced herself to meet his eyes. “I’d rather starve.”

    Spike regarded her for a moment, and then shrugged. “Suit yourself,” he said. “Starve.”

    Buffy’s head sank. This whole debacle was going to be harder than she’d thought. She’d thought last night – or this morning, really – that she’d been getting to him. Now he seemed more distant than ever. He pulled on his jeans. “Get up, put the bed away.”

    Buffy held out her hand first. “Ahm... could you?” The handcuff was still locked onto it.

    Spike’s face clouded. “Stop giving me orders!” Buffy was taken aback. It was a complete one-eighty from the casual dismissiveness of second ago. “I’m the one in charge here. Just shut the hell up!”

    Buffy didn’t even have time to apologize before Spike dragged her off the bed. He picked her up and dropped her roughly in her closet. He grabbed the handcuff and locked it to the doorknob, then shoved the door closed on her.

    Buffy couldn’t reach the light cord. She sat there on the floor, in the dark, naked and bewildered. What had she done? It didn’t make any sense. One second, snuggling and chatting about daytime television and pizza, and the next....

    Evil bastard.

    Her confusion and annoyance only had time to simmer before the door opened again, and Spike unlocked her wrist. She couldn’t have been there more than ten minutes. “Spike.”

    “Shut up.” It was a murmur this time. He scooped her up like a new bride and carried her to the couch. He’d closed it up, and he sat her down gently. He reached down and slid her shirt – his shirt – over her head. Spike’s shirt was so big on Sarah’s body that it reached to mid-thigh, and she didn’t feel anywhere near so vulnerable. He touched her face and caressed her lips with his thumb. She couldn’t read the expression in his eyes. It was very inhuman. Whatever it was, he hadn’t just unchained her because of guilt. It was something else entirely.

    His touch was tender. He fondled her hair, ran his fingers over her ear, down her bitten throat, and slowly he shook his head. “I don’t get it,” he said to himself.

    She didn’t dare say anything after earlier.

    A moment later he sat back. “Go. Use the bathroom. Take a shower.”

    Buffy swallowed and nodded. She cleaned up, then took a long, long drink from the bathroom tap, just in case his unpredictable mood continued. When she came out, Drusilla had her arms around Spike, and was rocking back and forth to unheard music. “East side, I think,” Spike was saying. Dru’s eyes caught on Buffy, and Buffy took a step back.

    “Your puppy looks whipped,” Drusilla said.

    “Not yet,” Spike said.

    “Can I help?”

    Buffy cringed.

    “You’ve your own toys to play with,” Spike said, more teasing than anything else.

    “It’s more fun to play dollies together,” Drusilla said. “Can we, later?”

    “Of course, my sweet,” he said, and he kissed her. He stood back from her, still holding her hands. “Just as soon as me and the boys get back.”

    “Do you think you’ll get her tonight?”

    Spike shrugged. “She’s a tricky one,” he said with a grin. “But I’m all healed up, and aching for a good kill.”

    Drusilla laughed. “You’ll kill her for me?”

    “Of course, my dark goddess,” Spike said. “And she owes me a blooding, now.”

    Buffy knew they were talking about Nikki. She wondered how many conversations of this type the two had shared over her, the first year she’d met Spike.

    “And when she’s dead?”

    “Finest knight in the land, baby,” Spike said, and he spun her joyfully in the middle of the room, then pulled her back into an embrace. “I’ll lay her skin at your feet.”

    Buffy felt ill.

    “Just let me put the pet away, sweet,” Spike said, and he kissed Dru’s fingers. Buffy went to her closet without being told. Spike set her down and locked the collar on her.

    “I’d just stay here,” Buffy said.

    “And go staking more minions,” he said fondly.

    “They attacked me,” Buffy pointed out.

    Spike kissed her forehead with an amused smirk. He seemed in a much better mood now that Dru was treating him nicely. “I’ll lock up the lair,” he said, like he was promising a child to check for monsters under the bed. Then he walked away, retreating into Dru’s room.

    “I’m thinking of taking my dolly out in his pram,” Drusilla said.

    Spike came out of her room a moment later with something denim in his hand. “Suit yourself,” he said. “But he doesn’t look up to going anywhere. And you might want to put a cloth on his leg, love. Or kill him quick. He’s staining your pretty lace.”

    Buffy didn’t want to know what Dru had done to the guy. She’d never wanted to feel sorry for a sadistic pedophile before.

    “All right,” Dru said, looking disappointed.

    Spike tossed the denim to Buffy and then caught Dru up, lifting her as if they were in a ballroom. “I’ll be back soon, my lovely.”

    “Please,” Drusilla said. “My wonderful warrior.” She bent her head to kiss him, her feet still dangling. It was heated, passionate, unbridled. Buffy felt as if they were about to find a nice wall. She looked down. Spike was playing the gallant romantic for his beloved, dancing and kissing and offering her his kill. And he had given his pet Buffy a pair of his jeans, so she wouldn’t have to spend all night half naked. The tiny gesture made her want to break his sternum. If he was going to have sparks of random humanity, why were they so pitifully small? They didn’t make her feel grateful. She hated them.

    The two vampires finished kissing, finally, and Spike left. Buffy could reach the door to the closet. She wondered if she dared close it. Whether the movement would draw Drusilla’s attention, or if seeing her would be worse.

    Drusilla went to the kitchenette and pulled the last of the leftover Chinese food out of the fridge. She dumped it all anyhow into her dog dish, and then Buffy heard a clink as she picked up the plate of eggrolls. Buffy expected her to go into her bedroom – she intended to close the closet door as soon as the vampiress’s back was turned. But Drusilla stopped at her closet. “Time to feed the children,” she said quietly.

    Buffy cursed Sarah’s cowardly form again as her body shivered instinctually. Drusilla wasn’t just a vampire. Buffy knew simple vampires. Drusilla was transcendental. She was strange and almost miraculous, and her eyes saw through everything. She stood before her and stared right through Buffy. The very air seemed broken around Drusilla. She wondered what Tara would have said about her aura. Dropped before her in a mere human body, Buffy thought she finally understood exactly what it was about her that had seduced Spike into becoming a vampire, and seduced Angel into making her into one. The pure face with the rough cockney accent was a contrast like light in darkness, perfect in itself. She was long and graceful and elegant in a way that seemed sharp, like a needle. She was unearthly, dark and seductive as a creature of evil. As a pure and chaste human being, she must have been just as alluring.

    Now, of course, Buffy knew Dru might kill her with a flick of a single finger, and might not even notice if she’d done it.

    “Poor Spike,” Drusilla said, kneeling down to stare at – stare through – Buffy. “He doesn’t see how twisted up he’s getting. Past and future and present, all presented. Pretty present, your presence.” Buffy wondered how much she knew in her madness. She petted Buffy’s head. Her cool fingers raised goose bumps, and Buffy’s breath shook in her throat. “Good puppy,” Drusilla said. “I had a puppy once,” her eyes distant. “He was a birthday present, too. We called him Biscuits. I found him nailed to my front door.” Her eyes were at least two worlds away by now, and Buffy was afraid she was falling with her. “My baby niece had been in his little stomach. Three months old. He’d opened it up, and I got to see the bits. Little hands. Little fingers. Pretty little thumbnails in the viscera.” She laughed and hummed, as if someone had just offered her a treat. “Good, good puppy.”

    Buffy felt sick, a cold lump in her chest. God, she wished she’d been left in ignorance of the details of what Angel had done. Buffy was glad she’d only had her mother and her vampire-savvy friends to worry about when Angel had chosen to torture her. Drusilla was evil, but... good god, to have that in your head! And the memory of that horror being that of a human being, an innocent girl who had loved that creature, that infant; that moment must have been....

    Buffy could all but hear the screaming.

    Dru left her then, leaving the plate of eggrolls behind for her. Buffy stared at them in a kind of horror. There was no way she was eating after that. Shame, because she’d been hungry a minute ago. She retched, but there was nothing in her stomach. She pushed the plate to the furthest corner of the closet, and tried to think about anything other than the image Dru had just painted in her head.  

    Buffy slid on the ripped jeans. They were far too large, but she rolled up the cuffs. Her own leather skirt was still lying on the floor near the sofa, but she couldn’t reach it, and she felt safer in the jeans, anyway.

    She was left there for hours. Some part of her wondered if Spike was killing Nikki even then. After a while the horror of Dru’s terrible story faded, and Buffy made herself eat the stale eggrolls. She wasn’t sure when Spike would bother feeding her again.    

 

Chapter End Notes:

130 episodes of Dark Shadows were released for syndication in 1975 by a spin-off of ABC Films. I do not know if it was playing in New York at the time, or at what time or station if it was, but I didn’t feel any deep need to be more accurate than that.

Warning: disturbing sexual content

SPIKE: Hello! Vampire! I'm supposed to be treading on the dark side. What's your excuse?
            Smashed

    “I’m home!” Spike called out. “Dru?”

    Drusilla hadn’t left the apartment all night. She’d whistled to herself for an hour at one point. Then she sat and watched the television. Just the television, not a program on it. Then she’d taken out half a dozen porcelain dolls and set them on the table for a tea party. She’d dragged out her blood doll and cut his wrist, filling the tiny tea set with his blood. Buffy wished she had remembered to close the closet door. Dru’s story had made her not want to feel trapped, but she didn’t dare make any movement that would draw attention now. The blood doll sat on the couch when Dru was finished with him, and the way he looked at Buffy made her wish she hadn’t eaten the eggrolls. Buffy eventually fell asleep. Spike’s call made her start awake.

    “Did you find her?” Drusilla asked. “Did you find the slayer? Did you?” She sounded like a little girl asking for a treat.

    He took Dru into his arms, as if in consolation. “No dice. The boys had fun, though. Sorority house.” He flickered his eyebrows, amused. “It would be easier if I knew her name.”

    “I can’t find it,” Drusilla said. “You know I can’t. It’s all dark.”

    Spike shook his head. “No matter, dearest. I know what she looks like now. I have her scent, I’ve tasted battle. She won’t escape much longer.” He looked around the room, and his face darkened as he saw the blood doll on the couch. “What’s he doing out here?”

    “We’ve been having a tea party,” Drusilla said. “Do you like tea parties?” she asked.

    It took Buffy a second to realize that Dru had directed the question at her. “With tea,” she said quietly.

    Drusilla laughed. “Mummy used to like tea parties,” she said. “With cakes and custard...”

    “But we’ve so much more to think about now,” Spike said quickly, with the air of an intervention. He spun Dru around again and started kissing up her arm. “Like the slayer. And her sweet blood.”

    Dru looked sad. “You were supposed to kill her for me,” she said, pouting a little.

    “Aw. Give me that lip, pet,” he said, and he kissed her. “It’s all for you, you know that.”

    Spike led Dru into the bedroom, and the door closed behind them. Buffy swallowed as the unbound blood doll smiled at her. “It won’t be long now,” he said. He had a nasty looking wound on his leg, which didn’t seem to be from a bite mark. Buffy didn’t really want to know what had caused it.

    “Don’t talk to me,” Buffy told him.

    “Why not? I can be as strong as they are. I can show you.” He got up from the couch and limped over to her in the closet. “Don’t you want to get to know your new master?”

    Buffy stood up, glad that the collar and chain gave her that much free movement. “You are never gonna be the master of me, or anyone else. You don’t even master yourself, don’t you get it? You’re dinner. That’s it. You’re just her... tea-pot.”

    He reached out for her, and Buffy knocked his hand aside, hard. “Don’t try it,” Buffy snapped. “I really will kill you.”

    “She’d kill you for it,” the doll said.

    “I’d rather that than get your slime all over me,” Buffy said.

    “Little girls are the ones with the slime,” the doll said. “I know. I’ve checked.”

    Buffy kicked him, and he went staggering back across the room. Buffy reached forward and slammed the door of her closet shut, hoping that would be an end on it.

    It seemed to be, though a moment later, another door opening gave her pause. She couldn’t quite hear the exchange. A few minutes later, Spike opened her closet door. He had a strange look on his face.

    Buffy was nervous. “Hi?”

    He laughed. “Kitten really does have teeth,” he said. He unlocked her collar and let her out. “I think you broke a couple of his ribs, pet.”

    Dru and her doll had retreated to Dru’s room by then. “Can’t say I’ll lose any sleep over it,” Buffy muttered.

    “No. You get a treat. Here.” He went to his motorcycle jacket on the wall and pulled out something wrapped in paper. He threw it at her. It was a cheeseburger. It had gone cold, but Buffy opened it quickly and started to eat anyway, still standing. Spike regarded her. “And if I told you I killed the vendor?”

    Buffy paused, then took another bite. “You didn’t ask me if I wanted you to,” she said when she’d swallowed.

    “What’s the difference?”

    “You did it, not me,” Buffy said. She finished her burger quickly. It wasn’t enough. With all the blood loss she was ravenous, even with the repeated nausea of the situation she was in.

    “And what if I said I didn’t?”

    Buffy looked at him. “If you think it’s fun to play mind games, feel free,” she said. “But I’m not rising to the bait.”

    Spike smirked. “I just stole it.”

    “Splitting the difference, I see,” Buffy said. “So you didn’t find the slayer?”

    “Not yet,” Spike said. He sat down nonchalantly and kicked his feet up on the table. “I will, though.”

    Buffy knew he would. She picked a bit of melted cheese off the paper and slipped it into her mouth before she set the paper on the table.

    “You’re hungry,” Spike said.

    Buffy shrugged.

    “Think I’m a bit peckish myself,” he said. He sounded bored. “Come ‘ere.”

    Buffy sighed, and then looked up, resigned.

    Spike frowned. “Now that is not the look I got last night.”

    “I hadn’t been breakfast in bed or a bowl of popcorn last night, either.”

    Spike’s head tilted. “You think I’m taking you for granted?”

    “Yes.”

    Spike regarded her. “That bothers you?”

    Buffy was tired of this. “What does it matter what bothers me? You don’t know who the hell I am, and you don’t care.”

    Spike put his feet down. “I keep bloody asking!”

    “But not paying attention.”

    “What do you mean?”

    “If you’d been paying attention,” Buffy said, “you’d already know what I meant.”

    Spike surged to his feet. “Quit talking riddles!”

    “I’m not!” Buffy retorted. “Quit being a jerk.”

    “I’m a sodding vampire. What do you expect of me?”

    Buffy stared at the ceiling. “A lot more than I’m going to get, apparently. Here.” She held her arm out. “Eat up. I’m bored.”

    Spike knocked her arm away, contempt on his face. “I’d been feeling rather fond of you until this moment.”

    “So kill me,” Buffy said, almost meaning it.

    “I could!”

    “Then do it!” Buffy snapped. “At least I’d know where I stand!”

    “You’re a sodding pet!”

    “Yeah!” Buffy said. “A willing one! And you’re being a right idiot for tossing it aside.”

    “No one’s really willing.”

    “How the hell do you know?”

    “They’re all after something. And you are too. A hit or a change or a few more days of life. It’s always a bleedin’ exchange.”

    Buffy came up to him. “And you’re a dope.”

    “Are you insulting me?”

    “Yes!”

    “You dare–?”

    “Yes! I dare! Open your damn eyes!”

    “My eyes are open.”

    “Then look closer. It’s all right here, Spike, someone who wants to give themselves to you. A willing young woman, a gifted life, blood in an open goblet, and you’re treating it like cheap beer.”

    He cringed, but he was too mad to back down. “Maybe that’s all you’re worth!”

    “And maybe you’re not worth jack, either.”

    “I am worth–”

    “What?” Buffy asked. “What are you worth? Are you even worthy of your blood?”

    “Hey. I’m a fighter. I am a killer.”

    “And that’s supposed to impress me?”

    “I am a warrior!”

    “You are an idiot!” Buffy shouted into his face.

    And she wasn’t entirely surprised when he kissed her. Spike, on the other hand, was shocked. He grabbed her hard, plunged into a passionate kiss, and a moment later tore himself away as if he’d been slapped. He stared at her, breathing hard, his eyes wild. “What the hell...?”

    “Just go with it,” Buffy said, and she stepped back up to him. He groaned as he took her back into his arms, and they gasped and clung to each other. There he was. The Spike who had first seduced her, the wild antagonistic passion that had burned them both from the inside out. It was a dangerous indulgence, a candle burned at both ends, but she only had a few days here, anyway.

    Spike was kissing her neck now, and his hands were wild as they gripped her. Buffy, to her annoyance, could not return passion for passion. Her body hadn’t the strength, and it hadn’t the power, and it was weaker even than it should have been from blood loss. In her old body, a vampire was her equal, or near equal. Now, this vampire was much more powerful than her current body, and swamped it. Where ordinarily she’d have gripped him strength to strength, all she could manage was an enthusiastic submission.

    Her head fell back, and she held him until the strength of his arms made her own lose their grip. He’d picked her up like a child, and didn’t seem able to stop kissing her. A moment later they were on the ground, and he was above her, and she laughed at herself for swooning beneath him like a character from a badly-written romance novel.

    Then, despite her delight in the passion their antagonism had ignited in him, she was suddenly done. Pain was probably what had done it. “Ow. Ow!” He was twisting her shoulders back too far, and he’d bruised her hip. She remembered the first time she’d had sex with him, in the middle of a wildly brutal fight, and the pain then had felt right. She didn’t have the endurance for it now, and it galled her. Sarah’s body simply couldn’t take it.

    Her enthusiastic excitement cooled. Then something, something she’d buried deep inside her, rose to the surface. This position beneath him, this unequal passion. It reminded her of a moment she never wanted to think about again. And Spike – this Spike had no soul, fed on human blood, and did not love her. He had no reason at all to curb his desires. He’d lost control before, and he’d loved her then. Now he barely knew her. Why should he have any control at all? She’d known this heat was dangerous, but she’d stoked it all the same, and she hadn’t the strength for it. But she was afraid to ask him to stop, for fear he wouldn’t, and the whole traumatic experience would be repeated. She lay back, tensed, willing everything to be okay, god, it’s got to be okay...

    And then he surprised her. He stopped.

    Without her even asking, he pulled away and shook sense back into his head. He looked down at her, panting. “That was nuts.”

    Buffy laughed. She laughed somewhat hysterically, and threw her arms around his neck. “Kiss me,” she said. “Oh, god, kiss me.” He did, much more calmly than he had a moment before. “Thank you,” she said when he finished.

    “For?”

    “For stopping.”

    “You froze.”

    “I know I did.” She gasped with relief and confusion.

    “I’d have broken you if I kept going.”

    He was probably right. But... “How did you even notice?”

    Spike blinked. “I’m not blind, little bit.” He touched her face. “See? My eyes are open.”

    God, it didn’t make sense. Why would he stop now when he didn’t stop then? He had no reason; no love, no soul, no... oh.

    Something clicked in her head. The look on his face a few minutes ago, that had been lust. She knew it. And she knew he could control lust, even now. Every time he hadn’t killed her, he was controlling some kind of lust. But the look on his face during that terrible moment in the bathroom had been something else – need, for lack of a better term. Need, or emptiness. And Buffy had seen that look recently. She’d seen it that afternoon, when he was scared. Then he hadn’t been able to control himself, either, but then he’d run away.

    It was need. It was the look of a demon feeling the lack of his soul. She’d actually seen that look on Angel’s face, too, once, while he had been rendered soulless. They’d been possessed by loving spirits and made to kiss and forgive. When he’d been released from that possession, that hollow need had been in Angel’s eyes, too. It had made Angel run, just like it made Spike run that afternoon.

    That was what she’d done to him by forgetting. Her soul had reached out for his and found that hollow space, probably made it ring like an empty barrel, shaking him to the core. She did not, of course, have the vaguest idea how she did this. If they were both human, neither of them would even really know it was happening. But Spike was a demon.

    When Spike had loved her, he’d been able to fill that hollow space inside himself with her soul, as she’d filled her own hollow of misery with pleasure and passion. It had worked, for that short amount of time. But as Buffy had started to heal, and realized she could not be with someone who had no compassion for others, Spike had had no recourse for the hollowness she’d filled for him, and then left barren. That night in her bathroom, he’d been desperate for her, trying to force her back inside him as he thought to force himself into her. Trying to fill that emptiness. Now, barely knowing her, never having had that space filled, the same hollow need had only made him flee, run away from her and her reaching soul.

    She didn’t know if that was a good sign or not. She’d reached him, but he’d fled, and when he came back, she was no more than a victim. A bowl of popcorn. Cheap beer. But if she’d done it once, she could do it again. But she had to... she had to actually reach out for him. She couldn’t just keep turning to her memory of his future. She had to reach out for him now.

    God, all that death...

    “Thank you so much,” she whispered.

    Spike’s eyes narrowed, partly seductive, partly evil. “I’m not done with you yet.”

    “I don’t care why you did, I just...” She kissed his neck and breathed into his ear. “There you are.” She kissed him again and again. “I knew you were in there.”

***

    “I’m going to swallow you whole.”

    That was what he’d said as he’d laid her down. Buffy lay in a completely dazed state, unable to move or feel, barely able to breathe. It was early, early morning. The light coming through the painted windows was still grey. She knew she was on the bed. She knew Spike was with her. She could feel him against her. And her whole body was numb, with one wildly glaring exception.

    He’d started by biting her wrist. Then the soft flesh inside her elbow. Then her shoulder, just below her throat. He’d gone up her other arm. “Ow! Oohh... Ow... ohh, god....”

    She’d lost count of how many times he’d bitten her. Shallow bites, no veins or arteries, nothing ordinarily life-threatening, but at each one he paused and kissed and caressed with his tongue, killing the pain, numbing her flesh, sending a bit more of a trickle into her blood stream. Her legs were numb, and her breasts, and her belly, and he danced around her, lapping at one wound or another, occasionally adding a new one. This was a blood game Spike had never played with her before. She knew why; the tissue damage was going to be enormous.

    After a little while, she hadn’t cared. She floated on a cloud so profound she wondered if she was about to lose her grip on Sarah’s body – it was only hers because the body longed for a spirit, not because she fit there perfectly. She had fallen down the rabbit hole, as she’d used to put it, but Spike had left one part of her completely undamaged, un-benumbed, and hyper-aware.

    When he lowered his mouth to her clit, she thought for a brief moment she was about to be sent back to heaven. It was nothing pure, however. It was deadly and manipulative and obscene, and to her shame, she loved it. This was altogether demonic. The first touch of his cool, moist tongue to her hot flesh had been a shock. She’d have flinched if she was able, but she wasn’t able. She could force her arms or legs to move if she used a lot of concentration, as if they were asleep without the pins and needles. But for the most part, the only part of her she could move was her head, and she’d gasped at his touch. “Spike!”

    He’d only chuckled, and lowered his lips around the little nub, sucking at it gently. He’d taken off his game face, so his teeth, when they scraped gently against her flesh, were flat and smooth, and only served as a contrast to his soft mouth, rather than causing any pain.

    The idea of pain was far from her benumbed body. Spike sucked and lapped and kissed her swollen flesh. The numbness made it feel like her whole body was just that hyper-sensitive nodule, until he’d slid his fingers inside her and began to caress her. There was nothing else, so it felt so full. Her pelvis felt huge, as if it were the size of the bed itself, and he was filling her and filling her, and moving within her, and it was everything. He tickled at her moist flesh, sending shocks through her whole being – her whole being having been reduced to that one tiny, sacred space. No. Not sacred. Not anymore. Profane and perfect.

    She cried out, and it sounded pitifully weak to her ears. She lifted her head, to find he’d moved her legs around him – she was too numb to have realized – and the blood from her bitten thighs was trickling along his shoulders. She let her head fall again, and completely vanished into sensation. She felt literally nothing but her own breath passing through her mouth, and his cool, expert tongue and fingers as he drew pleasure out of her as expertly as he could draw blood.

    She wasn’t aware of being about to come. She went from cloudy contented numbness to a blazing sunlight of pleasure so strong she couldn’t even scream with it. The sound she made was high to low, and it lingered, coming again and again, like a siren. She was half blind, her body dripping with her own blood, her mind addled and her body numb with demonic venom, the demon himself lapping at her most secret places. She was far from home, from her body, from her power, from her strength, from the soul of the man she loved, and for that moment, Buffy did not care. This wasn’t heaven. Heaven was clean. This was the throne of hell itself, and she was the demon’s queen.

    Spike let her go after that, crawling up her body like a panther. “Do you still feel taken for granted?”

    Buffy couldn’t speak. He knew she couldn’t. Blood was smeared along his body in several places, and he stopped to lick several of her wounds again before insinuating himself above her. “Sweet little pet,” he said. “You fall so far...”

    Buffy knew she did. Her own Spike had warned her about that. Still... there wasn’t much she could do about it. Spike slid himself inside her. She was so wet he slid in instantly, and she moaned. It was still the only part of her body save her head that had any real sensation left. He was the size of a fist, the size of a body, the size of the moon. He was everything, and he filled her, and he overflowed her. She was a fount of life, of blood, of pleasure, she was pouring herself out and over him. The blood, which in ordinary circumstances would have disturbed her, was beautiful, crimson streams, scarlet paintings, droplets of glittering rubies that he had drawn from her. A fountain of living gems.

    Buffy realized some of her thoughts were actually Spike. He was whispering to her, still the poet even without his realizing it, and she was so far gone the words poured into her heart, as if they’d bypassed her ears altogether. She’d always found him a better poet when he wasn’t trying. She was further down than he had ever taken her, and she wondered if she was about to die. She couldn’t even bring herself to care about that very much. Whatever he meant to do to her, for that moment, it didn’t matter. He was right – she was his. Buffy was gone inside the moment.

    A suck is more dangerous than a blow, love.

    Didn’t she bloody know it! Buffy melted into the bed.

    He was still pulsing softly inside her when the door of Drusilla’s bedroom opened. Dru wandered out in her feathered robe, as if a bit confused. Buffy turned her head, still dazed. Dru’s doll could be seen chained to her bed, passed out behind her, but she seemed to have forgotten him. Dru wandered into the bathroom, and Buffy could hear the water running, but what she was doing, Buffy had no idea.

    Spike did not look embarrassed or even distracted by her appearance. He’d seen her, but it wasn’t that important. Buffy decided not to react, though it kind of bothered her that they’d been interrupted. This had been too powerful an experience, one she’d actually wanted to treasure. But she was here for Spike, she had to make him see her, and Drusilla didn’t matter.

    A few moments later, though, she really did. Without saying a word, Drusilla had shed her robe and crept under the blankets beside them, nuzzling at Buffy, licking at some of her bites, her wiry arms languidly caressing her torso. Buffy knew Spike could feel her tense up beneath him. He slowed, stopped, looked down at the two of them, and Buffy felt wounded by the love she saw there. Love for Drusilla, not for her. “She really is a beauty, isn’t she,” Drusilla whispered, almost in Buffy’s ear. “Is she well behaved?”

    “She’s a sweet little pet,” Spike said.

    “Let me see,” Dru said, and she put her lips to the still seeping wound on Buffy’s shoulder.

    Buffy drew in a breath of pure terror. She stared up at Spike, silently begging him with her eyes to do something. But Spike did nothing but gaze down upon them. Dru’s soft feminine coolness was relentless, and she snuggled up to Buffy as if they were longtime lovers. Buffy closed her eyes, and tried not to sob. It was all gone. No more the demon’s queen, now she was just a victim, drugged and ravaged and used. She didn’t feel like a victim herself, but she knew that was how they saw her, both of them. Demons. Hungry, soulless, and evil, and she was only their prey. Even with Spike still above her, still inside her, she felt utterly abandoned.

    “Not too much, love,” Spike said then. “Don’t want to waste all my training, now, do we.”

    “Mm,” was all Dru said, but Buffy could tell she did slow her feeding. She licked and lapped at the wound. And Spike was right in what he’d kept telling her; Buffy found she could fight off the high. She knew she had no say in whether or not Dru fed from her, not with the power Dru held over Spike, but she was not going to fall into the vampiress. She did not belong to Dru, not her heart, not her mind, and certainly not her body. She clenched her hand and kept her eyes wide open, staring at Spike, who was gazing down as if this was a lovely tableau.

    He probably felt it was.

    The thought made her almost nauseated, but she knew she couldn’t fight the woman away. She just had to endure this, even though it made her tremble with terror and disgust. It was a startling jump from pleasure to pain, as the greatest blood game ever had been turned into this strange interruption and – and... violation.

    Buffy tried not to cry.

    A moment later, Spike left her body, sliding over to Drusilla with a groan, caressing her gently, drawing her attention away from Buffy. She could tell he’d entered her by the childlike “ooh!” Dru hummed against her throat. Then he started to move in her, rhythmically pushing her against the mattress.

    Dru left Buffy’s wound and tilted her head back, revelling in the sensation her lover was so carefully bestowing upon her. She pulled Buffy close against her side as Spike always did, using her heat like a hot water bottle, borrowing her life as much as her blood. Buffy wasn’t sure whether she felt relieved or not. Dru was no longer feeding from her, which was a relief to her – was that what he’d intended? – but she’d lost Spike. God, she felt confused.

    Drusilla looked less mad in the throes of languid passion, but she didn’t look any more present. She let herself fall into sensation, as if it were its own world, occasionally tensing her face as if something pained her. Spike made love to her gently, lovingly, cherishing every touch, with such adoration in his eyes, as Drusilla simply vanished inside herself.

    She never opened her eyes, Buffy realized. Spike looked down upon her with love. Drusilla stared into her own self.

    Buffy tried to make up for it by gazing into him. For a long while, it seemed like he wouldn’t look at her; as if with Dru around, Buffy couldn’t possibly exist. But the pull of her gaze seemed to catch him, finally, and his eyes flickered to her, meeting hers for a moment before flicking back to Dru. But that single look was enough to split his attention. His eyes kept flicking back to Buffy, as Dru writhed beneath him, gripping on to Buffy as Spike pushed inside her faster and more urgently, pulling her toward her release. When she cried out, he stared into Dru’s face, pride and purpose glowing in his expression. Then, as he continued, changing from pleasing Dru to pleasing himself, his eyes were again drawn to Buffy’s. He looked confused as he came, closing his eyes on both of them, more pained than pleasured.

    Dru shifted then, and Spike was pulled to her other side, where she snuggled up against his chest as if she were a little girl. Her arm finally released Buffy, sliding out from under her to gently caress Spike’s chest. Buffy lay there, wondering for a long while what she was meant to do. Spike was caressing Dru’s hair, occasionally kissing her forehead, and Buffy felt very out of place. She felt abandoned, which she knew was madness, because she wasn’t Buffy now. She was Sarah, and Sarah had only the role of compliant pet to fill, not partner, not equal, not soulmate. She was only a thing.

    She swallowed and decided to retreat to her pet bed, where she belonged.

    She started to get up, but Spike’s hand on her arm held her. She looked at him. He was gazing at her over Dru’s snuggled head, his ice-blue eyes soft, pleading. “Stay,” he murmured. It was an order, something you’d say to a dog, but the twisted confusion and affection in his gaze softened it. He did not add please, but she could see it in his eyes.

    He pulled her arm over Drusilla, so that Buffy was cuddling her vampiric body in a warm embrace, and Spike kept his hand on Buffy’s shoulder. He caressed Buffy gently with his thumb, looking down on Dru with love, and then up at Buffy with true affection.

    Buffy realized this was probably very important for him. Drusilla had joined them, joined her. She had accepted that Buffy was Spike’s property and treated it with respect. A pet, not a mere victim. With the way Buffy had been trying to make Spike feel, how deeply she’d been trying to penetrate his heart, this was probably one of the best moves that could have happened. She had now been insinuated into his devotion toward Drusilla, and the love for both of them was probably mingling in his soulless heart.

    Buffy almost wished she could love Drusilla too, for him. But the vampiress was evil, and mad, and she ate children and tortured Spike for fun. There was no redeemed future, no destined soul, no selfless heart beneath her cold flesh. Buffy knew Dru was wounded – she knew how, and why. She felt deep sympathy for the mad vampire, but it could never be affection. Buffy reached over to touch Spike’s side, her warm fingertips on his ribs. She was trying to figure out the best way of escaping, when Spike opened his mouth.

    “Thank you,” he whispered.

    It was deeply heartfelt. He looked nearly in tears. Buffy blinked. She wondered how long it had been since Drusilla had willingly taken to Spike’s bed without trying to torture him in some way. Though this experience had been strange and disturbing to Buffy, Spike seemed to regard it as a miracle.

    Dru did look innocent and childlike curled between them in Spike’s arms. Buffy couldn’t begin to love Dru for herself. But Spike... she could let herself love this moment for Spike’s sake. He looked so content, so at peace, as if a wound had finally been eased...

    That story Drusilla had told, of her infant niece. No matter how many lives she took, no matter how wrong that was, Drusilla was always going to be a victim, as well as a killer. Buffy moved her hand and let herself stroke Dru’s long soft hair. She closed her eyes, and resigned herself to keeping Drusilla warm while she slept.

    Possibly it was the residual effect of the bites she’d tried to shake off. Possibly it was exhaustion from blood loss. Perhaps she felt more sympathy for Dru than she wanted to admit. Perhaps, like a prisoner, she was simply getting used to the strange dynamics of the monstrous household she found herself in. Whatever it was, she was surprised that staying there, embracing both of the murderous demons, wasn’t very difficult.
 

SPIKE:
Every day you wake up, it's the same bloody question that haunts you: is today the day I die?
        Fool For Love


    Buffy slept through sunset. She had been Spike’s pet for many days, being drained of blood regularly, and without a proper diet. She knew she was probably anaemic at this point. She didn’t have enough red blood cells to carry enough oxygen, so her body was conserving energy. Sleeping was the easiest way to do that.

    Spike seemed to be the only one home. He sat beside her on the bed the moment he saw her eyes were open. “Hey there, pet,” he said gently, and pressed a warm cup into her hands as she sat up. “Cuppa tea.”

    Buffy blinked down at it. As far as she knew, it was the first time Spike had turned on the stove, let alone thought much about what she should be eating or drinking. “How are you feeling?” he asked her.

    Buffy shrugged. “Tired,” she said, sipping at the tea. She had to admit, it was excellent. Spike always could make a wicked cup of tea. She didn’t mention that she felt disgusting. Dried blood was caked along her skin in several places, the bites ached dully with the anaesthetic out of her system, and she had no idea what she looked like after yesterday.

    He didn’t seem to mind her appearance. His brow furrowed in sympathy, and he stroked her head like a child... or a dog. “I got some steak for you,” he said temptingly. “And milk. And eggs and bread and butter.” He tilted his head. “I really ought to be feeding you more, oughtn’t I.”

    Buffy shook her head. “I’m not starving.”

    “But I’ve been remiss. I’m a bad, selfish man,” he said. Buffy frowned at him. He’d sounded almost like himself as he said that, gentle, just little self-effacing. “I just went and got that stuff,” he said, indicating a pile of groceries on the counter. Buffy didn’t want to think who he’d killed to get it all. At least none of it had obvious blood stains. “Never really been a cook, though. Still, you just heat steak, right?”

    Buffy finished her tea and put the empty cup on the coffee table. “Okay, why are you suddenly being so nice to me?” she asked. “Is this the last supper? You killing me later?”

    “We already know I’m killing you later,” Spike said, without scorn or annoyance. “But not tonight.” He rolled over her and crept into bed beside her, pulling her close to him. He kissed her face gently, over and over, and hummed with contentment as he snuggled in against her.

    He seemed so much like the Spike Buffy knew that she was somewhat taken aback. “What’s with the lovey dovey?” she insisted.

    “I can’t pet my pet?” he asked, amused.

    “You’re scaring me.”

    Spike laughed. “Now I scare you.”

    “Now, I don’t know what’s going on,” Buffy said.

    “I’m in a good mood,” Spike said, kissing her cheek. He leaned back and gazed at her. “Thank you. For last night. I could tell it bothered you.”

    “Why do you care if it bothered me?”

    “Because of how you handled it,” Spike said. “If you’d done anything else, it would have been...” He chuckled. “You were right. You don’t need training. Not even with her.”

    Buffy wasn’t sure if she was pleased or not. She liked how he was acting toward her now. But she had no idea if it would last. “Dru does frighten me,” Buffy said honestly.

    “And I don’t?” Spike asked.

    Buffy sighed. “I’d rather die in your arms than hers.”

    “Death is death,” he said.

    “I’m...” Buffy decided to just bite the bullet. “I don’t love her,” she said. “I’d rather you feel I belong to you.”

    “You do,” Spike said, and he kissed her softly, holding her close. “You’re all mine. Just... thank you. For making her jealous.”

    “She’s jealous of me?” Buffy said, suddenly even more frightened of Dru.

    “No, of me,” Spike said. “She knows she’ll never lose me. But she saw us together last night, heard you with me. And you were sweet and soft and... She wanted you, and that made her want me. She hasn’t wanted me in... god, months.”

    “She’s invited you in.”

    “With her doll,” Spike said. “I’m allowed to touch them, not her. Not like I want to.” He shook his head. “It was just... today was very precious.” He touched Buffy’s hair. “Just like you.”

    Buffy didn’t know what to say. She was glad Spike felt happy around her, but if her duties were about to include offering blood and body to Drusilla as well as Spike, she wasn’t sure she could keep it up. “Why doesn’t she want you? Doesn’t she love you?”

    “‘Course she does,” Spike said, with only a touch of anger. “She’s punishing me. Or she has been. She doesn’t like it here.”

    “You can’t just find a better lair?”

    “She doesn’t like New York,” Spike said. “And it’s harder to find a better lair than you’d think. You need a hunting ground that doesn’t draw attention. Harder to find in upscale neighborhoods.” He shrugged. “Besides, I like CB’s.” He looked up at her slyly. “As you know.”

    “Why do you stay in New York, if it makes her so angry?”

    “I want the slayer,” Spike said, as Buffy had known he would. “It’s taken me better part of a century to find her. Every other time I’ve gotten close, she’s been killed by someone else before I got my chance. I’m not giving that up because Dru’s in a bad mood about it.”

    “I thought she wanted you to kill the slayer.”

    “She does. She wants me to come home hot with her blood, and maybe with her heart in my hand to gnaw on. She just thinks I should have done it months ago.”

    “And you can’t find her.”

    “I found her once,” Spike said, tensing his arm under Buffy. “Just before you showed up. We went a round. She nearly got me. She’s more inventive than the last slayer I fought, more clever. Dru thinks I should have gotten on with it long before now. She thinks if I just performed enough of a rampant slaughter, the slayer would have to come to me.”

    That thought hadn’t occurred to Buffy. Spike never had performed truly intense slaughters, heading down busy streets and breaking necks left and right. At least, not in Buffy’s experience he hadn’t. He’d never done it in Sunnydale, and apparently he hadn’t done it here. “Why don’t you?”

    “It’s inelegant,” Spike said, sounding annoyed. “It’s a game, not a war. I don’t kill for the fun of it.” He stopped. “Well, actually, yes I do,” he said. “Constantly. It’s a lark.” He laughed. “But reaping wheat isn’t fun, it’s a chore. Hunting is hunting, and that’s a lovely meal. Violence is an art form, it’s not just random killing. I like the fight. Butchering rabbits would just be work. And if I bring in the human police, they’ll just shoot up the neighborhood, and I’ll never get the slayer. There’s an art to all this.”

    Buffy looked down at him. “Since when?”

    “What do you mean?”

    “I don’t know. You just always struck me as... more hands on. Impulsive.”

    Spike looked up at her. “Where do you think you know me from?”

    Buffy shook her head. “I just do.”

    “Well, maybe not,” he said. He fondled her fingertips. A thought seemed to strike Spike, and he looked up at her. “You’re not a reincarnation of someone from my past, are you?”

    Buffy shrugged. “If I was, who do you think I’d be?”

    He gazed at her, troubled. “I don’t know...” he said slowly. He seemed to fold into himself, considering.

    Buffy suddenly realized what his problem might be. “I’m not your–” she cut herself off abruptly from saying she wasn’t his mum. She wasn’t even sure he remembered his mother at this stage, beyond a vague knowledge of having had one. Whether he properly remembered the circumstances of her death or not, the thought would have been deeply disturbing for him. Particularly given his and Buffy’s current relationship. “Anyone,” she said instead. “I’m not anyone you’ve known. I swear.”

    He frowned, the troubled look still in his eyes.

    “What?”

    “Well, there’s no one I’ve ever known that I’d particularly like to meet again, and particularly not in that sweet body,” he said. “But it’s the only idea I’ve had that makes sense for what you are.” He sighed. “In answer, yeah. I can be impulsive. I wouldn’t have taken you on if I wasn’t, kitten. I follow my blood, ‘cause I like to see what happens. But the slayer is business. I think about her all the time. And I’m not gonna waste this opportunity by jumping in feet first.”

    “All the time?” Buffy asked.

    “For over a half a century,” Spike said. “Someone... someone once insinuated that the last slayer I killed was a fluke. That I’d just had a good day, and I couldn’t do it again. I intend to prove that statement wrong.” His voice was very hard as he said that. Buffy suspected that the person who had said that was Angel. Or Darla.

    “And Drusilla doesn’t respect that?”

    Spike shrugged. “To her, killing is all some kind of lovely dream. A dance, or a children’s party. She seeks out happiness and devours it. That’s why she came to us last night – you were happy. She likes happiness. She’s a charming creature.”

    “And her doll?” Buffy asked.

    Spike’s tone darkened, but he still held her tenderly. “He seems happy enough.”

    “But keeping him makes you unhappy.”

    Spike took a slow breath. “I’m not her prey, am I,” Spike said. “It’s just the way she is. She’s hard right now. She’ll be soft another day. It’s one of the things I love about her. She never stops surprising me.”

    “She doesn’t... seem to look at you.”

    He shrugged. “She can’t always see me. She’s always in two or three worlds, Drusilla. The present, the future, and what ever reality I can’t find.”

    Buffy looked at him. “She keeps hurting you.”

    “We’re vampires, sweet. We like to hurt.”

    “To hurt, or be hurt?”

    He shrugged. “Both.” He scratched his nails down her arm, leaving red marks, and pulling some of the scabs off her bites. Buffy hissed. He smiled at the droplets of blood and kissed them off, killing the fresh pain.

    “I’m not really strong enough to hurt you,” Buffy said quietly. “I’m sorry.”

    Spike looked up at her, his eyes soft, with an amused expression. “That was probably the sweetest thing a human being has ever said to me.”

    “I know,” Buffy whispered. She bent down and kissed him. He was quickly charged with it, and grabbed her close, kissing her back with violence.

    After a bit he pulled away. “How do you do that to me?”

    “I wish I knew what I was doing,” Buffy said.

    Spike looked at her and shook his head. “I think you’re lying. I think you do know.”

    She wasn’t. If she knew how she did what she did, she’d be doing it harder, and faster, and getting the hell back home. “You’re good at reading lies, Spike. You tell me.”

    Spike blinked up at her. “I think,” he said after a moment, “that I need to feed you.”
 

***

    She wasn’t really a pet, Spike thought. That was what was off with the whole thing. She wasn’t, in fact, taking on the role she said she was. No, not a pet. She didn’t act like one, or think like one. There was no real submission. There was no fear. No loathing. She didn’t seem entirely thrilled, either, as the sadistic ones who wanted to be turned were. She didn’t make any sense.

    Spike watched her as she laughed at his failed attempt at making steak, and took the sauce pan from him. It was the only pot in the apartment apart from the tea kettle. “You need to turn the stove down just a bit,” she said. “Do any of the windows open? The smoke will clear soon.” Spike slid open one of the windows, and the smoke sailed out through the grating. “You’ve never had to cook in your life, have you.”

    “I make tea,” Spike said. “Forgive me, pet. Never had to cook as a human.”

    “How did you feed your other pets?”

    “Pizza,” Spike said. “You seemed a bit put off by the concept.” She looked at him as if he’d just given her a gift. That heartfelt grin of relief on her face made him want to laugh with pleasure. She didn’t quite dare to ask if he had killed anyone for the groceries. He hadn’t, actually. Well, unless she counted the cash he’d taken from some of the boys’ victims the night before, but that couldn’t possibly count, could it. “Is it too burned?”

    “It’s a little blackened. I could still eat it, but.... Here, we’ll give it to Dru’s doll,” she said with a bit of a laugh, and she set it on a plate.

    She really wasn’t scared of him. At all. She didn’t have the cowed and tormented terror he was used to from his pets, even the ones who used to claim that they too were “willing.” She didn’t get off on the idea of the murders, either. That was the other kind of pet, usually the kind he handed off to Dru to play with. This Sarah girl... she was a little manipulative, and she could fight – she’d actually landed some serious blows on him, the other night – but she wasn’t looking for someone to hurt.

    “Put it in the dog dish,” Spike said. “I don’t trust him with ceramics. They can cut things.”

    “Good point,” she said, and she started up the second steak. “You know he’s... really creepy.”

    “To be fair, the dolls get a little worse after Dru starts playing with them. She’s good at making people... well. Not very human anymore.” It was something he adored about Dru, actually. Her many, many skills.

    “Where does she find these guys?”

    “Same way she found me,” Spike said. “And anyone else she wants to find. Closes her eyes until the right idea comes to her. She goes looking for someone her brand of torture can make happy.”

    “Yet she can’t find the slayer?”

    Spike shrugged. “She says slayers are often dark to her,” he said. “Some kind of protection, probably to do with their calling. Everything about the slayer is kind of... blurred.”

    She looked considerably relieved at that statement. And Spike kicked himself. What was he doing spilling Drusilla’s secrets to this highly suspect pet? He couldn’t seem to help himself.

    He felt unleashed.

    That morning, with the pet’s deep, deep brown eyes gazing up at him, and Drusilla’s quiet acceptance, and the two of them contentedly curled up in the same bed with him.... He’d melted more than a little. He’d been trying to get through to Drusilla for so long, and it was so... hurtful. Dru knew it was, and that was why she pulled away like that. Spike felt useless without a lover to pour himself into. She knew he’d never leave, and she used that against him. She did everything she could to hurt and abuse him, for the same reason she gouged the eyes out of her dolls and tore open her blood dolls. She enjoyed taking happiness, and her goal was either to devour or destroy it.

    When she got like this, she was taking Spike’s happiness, and his joy in his love for her, and eating it alive. It was only when it was gone, bruised and battered beyond all recognition, that she’d bring it back to life. Just as she had brought him to life, the first time she’d killed him.

    This pet was cutting though all of that. She was bringing his joy back, and that drew Drusilla back to him. He couldn’t begin to express his gratitude for that.

    He’d been fighting her. He’d been suspicious and mistrustful. He’d been testing her and setting mind games and trying to trip her up. The decision to stop all of that and just accept this gift he’d been given made him feel as if someone had just opened the door to a cage.

    His mind had begun to race. What could he do for her? Well, feed her, for one. He’d been terrible about that. He left Dru’s blood dolls half starved on purpose, hoping they’d die quickly. She deserved food more than once a day. Lots of it. Good stuff, too. He’d stood in the grocery store feeling completely helpless, trying like hell to remember what he’d eaten as a man, and drew a complete blank. Instead, he focused on TV shows, and got stuff that echoed those.

    He’d come back laden with her groceries, actually singing. He had something for her! Something she needed. He wanted her fed. He wanted her happy. He wanted to see her smiling and laughing, and curl up beside her, and pick her up and kiss her, and chain her up, and hold her down, and lick her, and bite her, and tear her pieces. He came up behind her as she stood at the stove, and had no fear that she was about to pick up the hot sauce pan and smash him in the face with it. Last night, he’d have been sure that was going to be her next move. Tonight... why fret if it was?

    He wrapped his arms around her and kissed her throat. “Stop that,” she said, sounding teasing. “I don’t want blood on my steak.”

    He kissed her again. “I’m not biting you...” he kissed down to her shoulder, “yet.”

    “Then you’d really better stop,” she said, still with a smile in her voice. “Or you’ll make me burn this one.”

    She enjoyed his touch. It made him hum with desire. He was hard pressed not to turn her around and set her on the stove to have his way with her. No. Burning her wouldn’t be fun for long. “Wouldn’t want to spoil your meal,” he breathed in her ear. She shivered.

    Spike poured himself a cup of tea and held it while she cooked. She sat down to her steak dinner and then looked a little lost, as there was no silverware. “I... could get a knife out of the weapons chest,” he said slowly.

    The pet looked up, caught his suspicion, and shook her head. “Nah, I’m good.” She picked the steak up and gnawed on it like a neanderthal.

    She hadn’t just begged for something sharp. When she might have cut him with it, and gotten her blood. Granted, she wouldn’t have lived long enough to do anything with it, but he was the only one who could have been sure of that.

    “You eat like a little beast,” Spike said with a smile.

    “Not most of the time,” she said. “You want some?”

    “I don’t eat cattle.”

    “Why not? It’s good.”

    “I have something sweeter in mind,” he said darkly.

    “You’re silly,” she said. “You shouldn’t look down on a good rare steak.” She tore a bite off her steak and came up to him with a piece clenched in her teeth. She kissed him, and the bloody meat slid into his mouth. “Just bite down hard,” she whispered to him.

    He did. It was pretty much instinctual, he wanted to bite her so badly suddenly. She was right. The barely seared meat tasted bland compared to human flesh, but it felt good in his teeth, and as she straddled him he could gnaw on it as hard as he wanted without tearing her pretty pink throat out...

    He swallowed the steak down and cocked his head at her. “I should get more of that,” he mused.

    “Yes,” she said. “I think you should. And while you’re at it, may I recommend onions, spicy chicken wings, and wheetabix.”

    “Now you’re pushing it,” Spike said. “Anything else you want on your menu?”

    “It’s not for me, it’s for you,” she said. She kissed him again. If he’d had a heartbeat, it would have been racing. His blood burned.

    “I have much better things to eat,” he said when she finished with him.

    “Yes,” she said. “I know. But a little variety never hurt.”

    “I get variety,” Spike said. “I like the punk rockers. They’re spicy. Kids are tender, but they don’t have enough hormone kick for me. Had one of the college girls last night. They all have this dorm-food undercurrent which...”

    The pet got off his lap and went back to her plate. Nope. She was not at all impressed. Or afraid. If anything she seemed disgusted. “What did you think I ate?” he asked.

    She looked up at him, and her eyes were cold. “I don’t know why you do that to yourself,” she said.

    He frowned.

    “You know I don’t like it. You know I’ll stop whatever sweet thing I’m doing to you. Then your only choices are to either force me, or do without. Does it make you feel all manly, or something?”

    He looked away. He didn’t know why he’d done it. It had just seemed the thing to do. It was perfectly normal. That was how he got variety. But... he supposed that wasn’t normal for her. What was normal for her? How did she live, day to day, in that breakable little body? How did she stand so strong and so brave in the face of a brutal killer, starting shouting matches no less? He could snap her neck with a twist of one hand. He could tear her head off with a single pull. He could crack her spine over his knee and tear her apart without straining a muscle. As charming as each of these images was, the image of her bending over her plate, filling herself with food he had provided for her... he liked that innocent image, too.

    God, what was she doing to him?

    Spike stood up and carried the dog dish into Dru’s room. Her doll was chained in his kennel, and Spike threw the dish onto the floor for him. For a long moment he regarded the creature. That looked right. Clearly afraid of him, kind of fanatical, with a cold deadness of acceptance to his situation.

    “Where is she?”

    “Hunting,” Spike said.

    “She’ll be back soon?”

    Jonesing for a bite already, he was. And Dru’d only been gone about three hours. Blood junkies all tasted thin and watery.

    The pet was starting to taste that way, but she’d been clear when he’d first bitten her. This guy, he fit the pattern. He smelled right. But Sarah....

    Spike went back to find she’d finished her meal. She’d gone to the bathroom, and was taking a shower. She hadn’t asked permission. God help him, he found her self-determination charming.

    Spike sat on the couch and turned on the telly, and a little while later she came back out. She got herself a big glass of milk and came to join him. She’d clearly forgiven him for bringing up the murders, because she sat alongside him, and let him put his arm around her. God, she was warm. And sweet. And strange. And he wanted her.

    She set the cold milk on the floor as he turned to her and kissed her. And then pressed her down into the sofa and kissed her some more. And then more. And more. Oh, bloody hell. She knew how to kiss him. The right mix of passion and sweetness, just a hint of teeth, and even though he had to keep letting her pull away now and again to take in a breath – oh, bugger. It made it even sweeter, that taste of her living breath, the tease of her leaving him, and coming back...

    The sit-com on the telly changed, and he realized he’d been kissing her for nearly half an hour. Just the taste of her kisses were electric. He hadn’t even wanted her blood....

    He pulled away and looked down at her. Her eyes were shadowed with desire. “Hallo, little bit,” he whispered to her.

    “Hey there.”

    He loved that smile on her kiss-swollen lips. And the way her hands were hot around his back, and the warmth of her beneath him. He’d taken her completely that morning. It had been wonderful, the look on her face, the feel in her body, the pure ecstasy he had clearly bestowed. He’d had complete and utter power over her, in absolute perfect joy....  And then Dru had come and stolen it.

    Now, that was a weird thought. Dru couldn’t steal anything from him. Everything he ever had, everything he ever was was Drusilla’s, she owned him entire...

    He sat up and pulled the pet with him. “Here,” he said, pulling the milk up from the floor. “We have to feed you up. Keep your blood up for me.”

    The milk had gone room temperature, but Sarah didn’t seem to mind. “Thanks.” She sipped and snuggled in under his arm again. “You know that’s not really how it works,” she added.

    Spike drew in a breath. He’d never had a pet last more than two weeks... Don’t think about it. “Yeah,” he said. “I know.” He kissed the top of her head, and settled back to watch the telly.   

Warning: implied violence and rape

Buffy: ...you made her a vampire.
Angel:  First I made her insane. Killed everybody she loved. Visited every mental torture on her I could devise.
        Lie To Me


    Buffy was pretty much abandoned the moment Drusilla set foot in the apartment. She came in in a bit of a dream state, and Spike jumped up and went directly to his paramour. “Did you have any luck, darling?”

    Drusilla sighed. “All the little children are locked away these days,” she said glumly. “Where are all my orphans? My wastrels and urchins don’t play in the alleys any longer.”

    “I’m sure there’s something around here we could find for you to eat,” Spike said, running his hands down her arms.

    “I found an old man. But he disagreed with me. Loudly, and with curses. And the city screams at night like burning churches.” She sank her head onto Spike’s chest. “Spike? Would you love me even if my hair turned white?”

    “Of course I would, my sweet. Love’s not love that alters when it alteration finds, and all that,” he said, catching her into a hug, which he spun her out of.

    “Would you love me if I fell into the wrong body?” she asked then, looking up at him with her head tilted.

    Spike looked wildly confused, and then dismissed it. “I will always adore my Drusilla,” he said simply, and he kissed her. It was clear Dru often made little sense. Buffy, however, felt more than a little nervous.

    Dru fell back into his arms and rubbed her head against him like a cat. “You’re warm. Were you hunting?”

    “Not exactly.”

    Dru looked over at Buffy, sitting as still as possible on the couch. “She doesn’t smell right,” Dru said. “O, wash me in thy precious blood...” she sang quietly. “She’s crumbling.... Will she be my hand maiden?”

    “Of course she will, my sweet,” Spike said.

    Buffy looked at Spike meaningly as Dru slipped into her room. Spike took Buffy’s hand and helped her up. “Hand maiden?” Buffy asked, having horrified visions of the book by Margaret Atwood that Professor Walsh had made everyone read in psych class. “What exactly does this entail?”

    “Don’t worry about it,” Spike said as he led her into the bedroom. That wasn’t actually answering her question.

    What the role of hand maiden actually entailed wasn’t near as horrific as Buffy had been afraid of. Drusilla asked for help changing into her nightgown. In her instance, her nightgown was even more elaborate and elegant than the punk look she’d been wearing, corset notwithstanding. The nightgown was white, with lace cuffs, and it smelled of lavender. She went from fashion punk to Victorian aristocrat, and unlike Spike, seemed to feel much more at home with the latter. Spike always said he felt like an idiot when he was confronted with anything that reminded him of his own original time.

     Drusilla continued to hum dreamily as Buffy unlaced her, and then buttoned her up the back. She sat at her mirrorless vanity, covered in gagged and blindfolded dolls, and held out her foot. Spike bent on the ground like a courting swain and changed Dru’s shoes. He kissed up her leg, stopping at her knees, and laid his head on her lap. Drusilla petted him, and then handed Buffy a hair brush. “Brush that out for me, will you doll?” Drusilla asked.

    “I’ll get that,” Spike said, preparing to stand. Buffy knew he loved to brush her own hair out, the gentle intimacy of lacing his hands through her flowing locks. He said the scent was intoxicating, and it was like petting satin. He considered it a treat to brush his lover’s hair.

    Dru pushed his head away. “She’s got the spikes!” she growled, her mood changing from dreamy to terrifying in a heartbeat. “And she’s the one to smooth them!”

    “Love–”

    She didn’t even let him speak before she slapped him, hard. Cruel claw marks graced his cheek. It wasn’t deep – Buffy knew that as a vampire, Spike would heal the damage in a day or so, but it was still cruel. Buffy knew why Spike had always just let Buffy hit him. He was used to it. Most of the time he could give back as good as he got – why did he never hit Dru?

    “Get. On with it!” Drusilla hissed over her shoulder. Buffy quietly started to brush the vampiress’s hair. Dru’s harsh demeanor faded again, and she sank back into her chair.  “A few more years shall roll,” she sang, “a few more seasons come, when we shall be with those that rest, asleep within the tomb.”

    Spike sat back and watched them. Buffy couldn’t read the expression in his eyes.

    “Then O my lord prepare my soul for that great day. O wash me in thy precious blood and take my sins away.”

    Buffy realized that Drusilla was singing, of all things, a religious hymn. It was creepy. The purity and sanctity that had been stolen from Drusilla was turned into a horrifying and rather gruesome concept when sung by a vampire.

    Drusilla... the holy novitiate... and Spike.... Buffy looked at him, curled up on the floor, confused, a little hurt by Dru’s rebuff. The gentle poet. The evil poisoned everything pure and good. The slayer in her clenched its fists, prepared to do battle, but this wasn’t the time or place for violence. This was a different war she had to fight now. A war against time, and against the nature of evil, and it was going to take patience and clarity to get through it, so that she could get the hell back to her own time and properly hit something! That was so much easier than this... constant mental and emotional conflict. Spike had once said that Buffy was drawn to evil only in order to heal it. She believed it – it was the only reason she could make sense of for how she made friends or lovers out of demons and kept turning villains into heros – but the disease was too strong here. She had no help, no electronic chip, hardly even any logic, and no time to play it slow. A lot of what she had to do here was just... endurance.

    Dru stood up, indifferently knocking Buffy aside as she did, and went to her closet. “Wakey, wakey!” she whispered at the door. “Where’s my precious baby?”

    Spike stood up and took Buffy away before Dru got her doll out to play with. Spike was bleeding. “You okay?”

    “Fine,” Spike said.

    He didn’t sound fine. “Hang on a sec,” she said. Buffy disengaged herself from his arm and went into the bathroom to wet a washcloth. A bit later she came out to find Spike opening up the sofa bed. “Here,” she said. She came up used the warm damp cloth to daub the demonic blood from his cheek.

    He regarded her. “Gonna save it?”

    “It’s not enough,” Buffy said. “It would have to make a circle.”

    “Then why...?”

    “It just looked painful,” Buffy said. She looked up at him. “You’ve really never been with anyone good, have you.” She went back to cleansing the wound.

    “Not both,” he said quietly.

    “Both?”

    “Good and brave. Anyone good wouldn’t dare...” He stopped. “It wouldn’t take much to turn you,” Spike said, “if you were near death.”

    “I know that,” Buffy said. She folded the cloth and dabbed the wound again. Their faces were very close. He looked down at her, a lot of confusion in his eyes.

    “And that’s really not what you’re after,” he said in wonder.

    “Not remotely.”

    He frowned. “Eternity,” he said, his voice heady. “Power. Freedom. You don’t want that?”

    “No,” Buffy said.

    He was leaning toward her now. “What do you want?” he whispered into her mouth.

    Buffy smiled at him sadly. “If I told you everything I really wanted, you wouldn’t even believe I’d consider it.”

    “Try me.”

    His presence was heavy upon her. “Kiss me,” she said instead.

    He did. Slowly, seductively, his whole self poured into it. Buffy’s heart pounded. “What do you want?” she whispered when he let her go.

    “I want to bite you,” he said honestly, without even opening his eyes.

    Buffy laughed low. She turned away and set the cloth on the table, then came back. His eyes were open by then, dilated, hungry. She took up his hand with both of hers, and set the hairbrush, which she hadn’t set down, inside it. “Would you brush my hair, first?” she asked softly.

    Spike looked at her with an amused expression. “You are a manipulative little bitch, aren’t you,” he said with a grin.

    He pushed her onto the bed and stripped her clothes off, covering her with ardent kisses, caressing her with his strong, cool hands. He ran his nails up and down her arms, peeling off scabs again until she was dotted with fresh blood. He kissed the droplets off her, and then settled her into his lap. Then he brushed her hair. Over and over and over again, the brush smoothing through Sarah’s thick brown tresses, until the sun began to rise. It wasn’t until then that he let her lift his shirt, and push him down in turn. They rolled over and over, kissing and fucking, and he bit her at her climax, until the orgasm faded into euphoria, and she moaned and gasped beneath him, fading away.

    When he finally released her she was so far gone she burrowed into his chest like a rabbit seeking a home. She trembled and clung to him, desperate to stay near him. “I’m here, pet,” he whispered, running his hand through her hair. “You’re all mine. I’m not letting go.”
 

***

    It was broad day when Drusilla suddenly started screaming. Buffy woke startled, a little confused, unsure where the sound was coming from, but Spike shot up like an alarm had gone off. He rolled out of bed and burst into Drusilla’s room. Buffy grabbed her clothes, tripping over her jeans as she pulled them on, and followed him almost by instinct.

    Dru’s blood doll stood by the side of the bed, looking completely bewildered. Spike pushed him aside and he fell on the floor. Spike crept into the bed with Drusilla and took her tenderly into his arms, pulling her to his chest. “It’ll be all right, darling,” he said, loud enough to carry over her screams. “Dru, darling, princess, it’s all right. Open your eyes, it’s all right. The whole world is good. Blood and sweet music, and darkness to dance in. Open your eyes. Come on, Dru, love, come to me.”

    Drusilla was having a nightmare. Buffy stood in the door, feeling awkward.

    “Come on, baby, come to daddy. Wake up, baby, I’m here. I’m here, love. You’ll never be all alone again. I’ve got you.”

    Dru finally stopped screaming, and her eyes opened, staring into nothing. She paused, and then moaned, curling into Spike’s chest in soft despair.

    Dru’s doll appeared to be on his last legs. He crawled toward the bedroom closet, which Buffy noted with some disgust was done up like a baby’s bassinet. “I did nothing, I swear,” he croaked.

    “Shut up. Lock him in, pet,” he said, glancing over at Buffy in the doorway.

    Buffy jumped to obey, if only to get the disgusting doll out of the way. When he wasn’t going fast enough, she actually hauled him by the arm and threw him in – though not roughly. She noticed a baby’s bottle of water on the table by the door, and tossed it in after him – she still had a conscience, even if no one else in the household did.

    “Get us a flower, will you?” Spike asked once she was done. He slid onto his back and pulled Drusilla with him, curling her half atop him so that he could stroke her hair. “It’s all right, love. I’m here. Your Spike. Sweet William’s here for you.”

    “The birds had eaten my pretty garden,” she said. “All in the sunshine, devouring my daisies, over and over again.”

    “We’ve grown you a new garden, darling,” Spike said. He glanced over her head meaningfully at Buffy. She actually ran to the fridge to get the flower, pulling the rose from the box without bothering to close it up again. She came back to Spike carrying it, and Spike took it from her without ceremony. “There you are, my sweet,” he said. He caressed Drusilla’s cheek with the flower petals and gently dusted her nose with it. “The garden’s grown afresh.”

    “But everything I put in the ground withers and dies,” she said.

    “And grows out again stronger than ever,” Spike said. “Just as I did.” He kissed her forehead and her brow again and again. “Don’t mourn for it, love. We’ll go dancing and singing tonight, just you and me.”

    “But what of the children?”

    “Forget the children,” Spike said. “They can look after themselves.”

    “I can’t let the little boy cry,” Dru said. “It’s so sad when he cries.” And very suddenly she began to sob on Spike’s chest. “He’ll come, and he’ll take them apart,” she said. “He’ll take them all away, one by one, I can’t stop him. It’s coming! It’ll always happen, over and over again! Taking my family away. Daddy!”

    “Shh, shh, darling, it’s over now. You are strong, you are beautiful, he’ll never hurt you again. I am with you, no one will ever take me from you. You have me. You’ll always have me.”

    She looked up, as if in a panic. “But he’s supposed to hurt me! Why won’t he hurt me? Where is he?” she asked. “My Angelus. He can’t have gone!”

    “He left you with me,” Spike said. “I’m here to take care of you.”

    “Where is he? I need him! He’s the center, I need him! The snake. The hands, the fingers, I need him!”

    “You’re fine, love.”

    “But my sisters....” Dru sobbed.

    Spike looked over at Buffy and gestured her out with his chin. She gently closed the door on the tender tableau – Spike nursing his mad lover back to the present, such love and concern on his face.

    And Dru still hadn’t looked at him properly.

    Buffy decided to go to her closet, so she could close the door and stay out of the way. She didn’t know what state Dru was going to be in once she stopped weeping in Spike’s arms. She crept to her cushion, nervous about what the rest of the day would bring.
 

***

    A few hours later she was woken up by her closet door being opened. Spike came in and sat on the floor beside her. “No, no, you’re good,” Spike said as she lifted her head. He settled his back against the wall and closed his eyes. Buffy shifted and placed her head on his lap. He smiled down at her and began to pet her like a cat. “Thanks for your help.”

    “Does Drusilla have nightmares a lot?”

    “Not usually that bad,” he said. “Not for a long time. Her... sire messed her up bad before he turned her. Did things to her before he killed her. Ate her family, fucked with her mind. It still bugs her sometimes.”

    “Isn’t that sort of... usual?” Buffy asked. Without mentioning Spike’s mother specifically, she was curious. “Don’t most vampires lose their family, one way or another?”

    “A lot of us eat them,” Spike said, “but that’s our choice. All Dru’s choices were taken from her before she was turned. He was... creative. Into the slow torture. He was good at it. I’m more of an action man, myself. Torture can be fun, in its way, but it takes forever.” He touched Buffy’s throat with all its bite marks and then reached beside him for the broad leather collar. He set it on her neck, the chain clicking with his movement, and buckled it, but didn’t attach the lock. He smiled down at her, adorned with his spiked black collar, and petted her from her hair down her arm. “Well, that’s lovely.”

    “Does holding her help?”

    “For a little while,” Spike said. “He messed her up, and now he’s gone. She misses him sometimes. He kind of took the place of her family, and now she’s... well. ‘Least she’s got me.”

    She looked up at him. “You’re very devoted.”

    Spike looked down. “Think that’s a problem, do you?” he asked. Buffy couldn’t tell if he was displeased or not.

    “Not for me,” Buffy said.

    He gazed at her. “I’ve had pets get jealous,” he said.

    “Have you.”

    Spike continued to regard her for long moments. “Usually the ones who wanted to take her place.”

    “Be turned?”

    “Yes.”

    “I don’t want that,” Buffy said.

    “What do you want?”

    Buffy smiled. “You know what I want,” she said. “I haven’t actually lied to you about anything.”

    “You haven’t told me the truth about anything, either.”

    “Sure I have. About lots of things.”

    Spike frowned. He pushed her down gently and placed her head on his thigh. He resumed stroking her, and she let him. “I wanted to tell you to avoid her for a few days,” Spike said. “If you can. She gets odd when she’s like this. Wants to relive the kinds of things he did to her. She gets off on it. Or it clears her head out. Something like that.”

    Buffy gazed up at him. “Are you warning me?” she asked. “Are you... trying to protect me?”

    Spike touched her cheek. “You’re such a pretty little thing,” Spike said. “I’d like to tear you to pieces.” He sounded so fond as he said it that Buffy could almost accept the disconnect. He let his fingers travel down her collared throat. “I want to be the one to kill you,” he whispered heavily. “I’d rather Dru didn’t ask for you.”

    “Because you’d give me to her,” Buffy said. It wasn’t a question.

    “I’d give her everything,” Spike said. “I’d give her the world. Precious jewels, precious gifts, even my most precious pet. But it would be quite the wrench.” He took her head by the collar and pulled her into a kiss. A moment later he let her go, looking sleepy and content, and a little sad. He gently guided her head back down to his lap and began petting her again. “What are you doing to me?” he mused.

    “I don’t know,” Buffy said. “If I told you what I think it is, you wouldn’t believe me.”

    “Try me.”

    Buffy tried to come up with a way to say this without frightening him with the concept of souls. “I think... there’s a little piece of me... kind of reaching out to be part of you.”

    “It’s called your blood,” Spike said. “And I’m taking it. It’s not reaching.”

    “It can come with the blood,” Buffy said. “But that’s not what it is.”

    He whispered down in earnest, “Why do you want to give yourself to me?”

    “Because I want you to give of yourself back.”

    “Drusilla has all of me,” Spike said, defensive.

    “I know she does,” Buffy said. “That wasn’t what I meant.”

    “Wasn’t it?”

    “I don’t want to take you from her. It would be cruel.”

    He blinked. “Cruel?”

    “Yes.”

    “To her, or me?”

    Buffy shrugged. “Take your pick. The only way splitting you up wouldn’t be terrible is if she left you herself.”

    Spike smiled indulgently. “Never gonna happen. Dru and I are eternal.”

    After seeing them today, Buffy knew how amazing it was that Dru had left him in the first place. She wondered if Drusilla had had some idea about the kind of man Spike could become if she left. It was a nice idea, that, anyway – that some part of her had loved him enough to let him go, to let him grow and change and become the champion he became. Spike had told her that Dru had seen Buffy all over him. And that he tasted like ashes.... Given that he had burned, she wasn’t wrong. What her motives had been, Buffy would never know. It was possible Drusilla hadn’t known, either. “Isn’t it nice... how it seems that way?”

    “It doesn’t seem, it is. I love her.”

    “I know you do,” Buffy said. “It’s the best thing about you.”

    Spike frowned down at her.

    “Your love,” she said. “Can any of those yellow eyed boys in the hall love anyone?”

    “Not them,” Spike said. “They’re all just minions, not children. Well, sometimes the dumb punks I target surprise me with some carried over personality, but usually they’re just newborn vamps. Demon, demon, bite, kill, do it again. Best thing about them is their ‘yes, boss.’ And that I gave them as they died.”

    “You made them, though?”

    “About half of them, and not well. I only gave them a drop to change on. Doesn’t even always take, sometimes they just die. And I take weak personalities, if I can pick them out. I don’t want ‘em strong.”

    “Personality?”

    “Yeah. It’s not intelligence or bloodline or anything that makes a good vampire. It's who you are. Or, who you were.” He gazed fondly at Buffy. “It takes a strong personality to make a strong vampire. The rest are all waiting for dust. Well...” he shrugged. “Maybe if they stick around long enough, they might make something of themselves. I was more impulsive as a newborn myself. Followed pretty blindly, couldn’t stop the need to brawl. Lost all sense of style. But it’s easier if you been fed strong and taught right, like I was. Like a child, not a hire.” He smiled at her. “‘Course the whole thing might just be old wive’s tales, like how to grow good cabbages. I’ve heard different theories. It could just all be random. There’s never been a scientific study or anything.”

    “It wouldn’t be pretty if there was.”

    “Either way, you’re real suggestible as you’re dying, and all newborns kinda like to follow someone stronger. And that I know for sure. And I’m sure not gonna train up any of these guys as if they were my kid.”

    “Have you ever?” Spike had never mentioned anyone, but she figured it might be painful for a besouled Spike to talk about if he had.

    “Nah. Never tried for a child, me. Not like Dru and her sire did, someone they target and feed slow, so they wake strong, trying for a companion. Someone worth keeping....” The possession in his eyes made Buffy a little nervous. “I never needed to. I got Dru,” he continued, “and I never met anyone I liked enough... to try... really....” Buffy knew was still suppressing his memory of his mother. He looked her over. “You truly like that about me? Me and Dru?”

    “Of course.”

    “You’re not jealous?”

    “Of Drusilla? No, never.” She shuddered. “Never.”

    “Why?”

    Buffy thought it would be obvious. “To be jealous of her, I’d have to want what she’s been through. I’ve... tasted enough of that kind of torture in my life. I don’t ask for more.”

    “Who tortured you?” Spike asked.

    “Well. You, for one.”

    Spike actually chuckled. “You haven’t begun to see me torture you,” he said fondly.

    “No,” Buffy said. Time to work on him some more. “I think you’d prefer it if I tortured you.”

    “I don’t thi– ah.” He stopped as he realized that Buffy had undone his jeans again, pulling his cock out and slipping it into her mouth. He shifted beneath her so she could take him in more fully, and leaned his head back against the wall. He just let her play with him for a long while, still petting her head like a cat, until he was hard as a stone, and his breath was catching with it. “Why are you always doing this to me?” he gasped.

    Buffy lifted her head and crept over him, kissing his face, pleased by the look of pleasure she’d painted on it. She left her jeans on the floor and slid him inside her, riding him gently, staring into his eyes. “You want me to stop?” she asked.

    “Never,” he said, without a beat. He looked down at her, and lifted her shirt over her head. It caught on the chain of the collar, and he unhooked it, leaving the collar on, but the chain abandoned. Her breasts exposed he caressed one, then the other, and then wrapped his hands around her and writhed under her. She rode him harder, staring into his face. She knew this dance. Even soulless, she knew the passion of him, the power of it. There was a depth missing, and a tenderness they hadn’t developed, but this was Spike, and she knew every move of this heated waltz.

    She could tell when he was about to come, and true to her threat, she lifted herself at the wrong moment, leaving him hungry for the orgasm he’d been about to reach. He opened his eyes, his nostrils flared in annoyance, and she dropped back to the floor, taking him again into her mouth, but gently, too gently to give him what she’d just denied him. She licked and teased and kissed, and when he tried to force her head down, getting close again, she twisted aside.

    He must have let her, or she must have surprised him, because he was more than strong enough to hold her down. She slid her hands up his torso and followed with her mouth, nipping and biting at the cool, pale flesh. When she was back up on her knees she straddled him again, but didn’t sink down, instead teasing her clit with his straining cock. Not enough.

    He looked at her through narrowed eyes. “Is this your idea of torture?” he asked. His voice was a purr.

    “You like?”

    He smiled, his face languid and hungry. “I should tell you no. I should hold you down and rape you till you bleed.” He touched her jaw, and let his fingers travel over her collar down to her collarbone. “I should break every bone in your body until you know who’s master here.”

    “Is there any doubt?”

    “Fuck you,” he said fondly.

    “You are,” she said. She sank down over him and he gasped, and then she lifted back up. She felt his cock twitch, as if it were trying to follow her.

    He grunted with disappointment. “Oh, god, what are you doing to me?” he groaned.

    Buffy leaned forward and bit his throat, hard, and he gasped. Before he had time to react to the pain, she slammed back over his cock again, and he cried out as if he’d been punched in the stomach. She lifted herself on her knees then, over and over and over, sliding up and down him as if she were on a carousel horse. He cried out, and Buffy sank down and thrust in earnest, finally taking pity on his straining cock. He crushed her to him as he came, hard enough to bruise, and then abruptly let her go, as he realized he was about to break her. “Not yet,” he growled through his teeth, mostly to himself.

    She knew how hard it was for him to keep from killing her. Even as Buffy, stronger and more powerful, even with his heart saturated with love for her, there was always that impulse to kill her. Vampires were made to kill what they loved, and while common sense could overcome that, their first impulse was always to kill. She remembered a conversation she’d had with a newborn once, still technically an innocent, never yet killed a single soul. “We had a moment. You opened up, it was really sweet. It made me want to bite you.” It was just vampire nature.

    The fact that Spike could contain it at all was impressive. Particularly for a kept victim he fully intended to kill later. Buffy kept thrusting over him, gently working herself toward orgasm. She knew he liked to see it pass over her face. It made him feel wanted. “Delayed gratification,” she whispered to him. “It has its charms...”

    Spike moved his hand down and worked his knuckles by her clit, to give her something firm to work against. He flexed his hand just a little, until she felt like she was thrusting against a vibrator. It didn’t take long to come.

    She was hot and sweaty by this time, and Spike was as out of breath as she was. “I do so want to be the one to kill you,” he whispered.

    “You have me,” Buffy said. “I’m completely in your power. You can do what you want with me.”

    “Why does that still sound like a joke?” he asked. Buffy didn’t say because it is. Spike shook his head at her, and then his arms went around her. He pulled her into an embrace, his head resting gently on her shoulder, and stayed there so long Buffy wondered if he’d fallen asleep beneath her warmth. She shifted a bit, and he kissed her neck, just above the collar, by her ear. “Right now, I plan to keep you,” Spike said. “So stay out of Dru’s way, eh?”

    “If I can,” Buffy promised.

    Spike tilted sideways and lay down on her pet bed, bringing her with him. Very tenderly he wrapped the blanket around her and looked down at her from his elbow, just admiring the view. “Why aren’t you afraid of me?” he asked after a while.

    “I am,” Buffy said honestly.

    “No, you’re not. You never really have been. You don’t act afraid, you don’t smell afraid. You tease me and tempt me, as if I wouldn’t kill you with a twist of my fingers. That’s not fear.”

    “I’m afraid every moment,” Buffy said. “Just not of you killing me.”

    “Then what?”

    Buffy tried to figure out the best way to say it without lying. “I’m afraid I won’t find you,” she said. “I’m afraid... you’ll shut me out. Turn me into nothing but a victim.”

    “I’m going to kill you,” Spike said. No threat to it, just truth.

    “I know that,” Buffy said. “But I want to reach you, first.”

    “What does that mean?”

    “You’ll know when it happens,” Buffy said. “If it happens.”

    “How?”

    Buffy shrugged. “That, I don’t know. I don’t know everything.”

    “Could have fooled me,” Spike said. He ran his fingers lightly through her hair. “Go back to sleep, pet. It’s nearly sunset.”

    “And Dru will be up soon,” Buffy said. “I’ll stay here.”

    “That’s my girl.” He kissed her cheek and headed back into the apartment to make Dru’s breakfast, carefully closing the door behind him.  

    It wasn’t until Buffy rolled over that she realized – he’d neglected to hook the chain back onto her collar.
 

***

    Drusilla was not better when she woke.

    She stabbed Spike with her nails and accused him of betraying her, and taking her from her Angel. Then she burst into tears and only screamed louder when he tried to comfort her. Then she rocked back and forth on the ground muttering to herself for half an hour. It was only then that she stood up, suddenly perfectly lucid, and declared she was going out to play dollies.

    She dressed her blood doll up and dragged him limping outside, and Spike didn’t even care that she was taking him out. Usually it made him jealous, the idea that she was sharing the sky and the city with her human playthings, when he was the one she was supposed to share the world with. Right now, he just wanted her out of the way. Whatever torture she needed to bestow, he didn’t really want to be on the receiving end at the moment.

    Also, he wanted her away from his new pet.

    He let Sarah out as soon as the house was clear. She’d left the collar on – which was really cute. Coquettishly concealing that narrow throat of hers.... Hm. That was getting dangerous.

    “I have to go out,” he told her after he’d made sure she’d eaten.

    “No you don’t.”

    He’d considered staying in. Her scent was intoxicating, and he wasn’t going to find anything sweeter out there... and she’d be happier with him if he....

    God, no. This was insane. He had to hunt. He’d stayed home the night before to play with her, but she was so damned appetizing, he’d nearly killed her four or five times. He couldn’t live on the snacks he took from her, not with the things she did to him. It was either hunt or.... He kissed her. “I’ll be back soon.”

    “Don’t,” she whispered.

    Spike stepped away from her, both tempted and annoyed. Didn’t she realize he was fighting not to kill her? “You’re just a victim. You don’t get to say don’t,” he said. “And I wasn’t asking permission, pet,” he said as he left. He did not look at her eyes.

    Hunting was a fine art, in its way, even for Spike. He wasn’t like Angelus, of course. He’d never been one for the slow hunt. The stalk and the tease, the seduction and the slow degradation. Get in, get out, get on with it was more Spike’s style. Unless it was a slayer, of course, but a slayer wasn’t ordinary prey. The slayer was the game. The hunt was dinner.

    But the first thing about the hunt was to pick out the right prey. Spike had something in mind for what he wanted, tonight. He needed a new minion – he was down two – and Sarah was... doing things to him, so he needed to take the edge off of that, as well. This meant a couple. The line outside CBGB had started early tonight. He didn’t remember who was playing, but the end of the line caught his attention. Someone seemed restless. A tall and burly young man stood with his arms around a slight and simpering young woman. They’d do. They looked perfect. The guy was stupid, the girl was insipid, and they both looked like they were about to tear each other’s clothes off right there, anyway.

    Spike’s instincts paid off. Sure enough, the two looked about them, looked at the length of the line, and the guy gestured with his chin down the block. The couple left the line and headed down the street. A risky proposition in the Bowery, but the man was big enough he clearly felt confident to protect them from any muggers or winos who might molest them. He probably was. His strength wasn’t gonna do jack against a vampire, though.

    Spike almost rolled his eyes with how easy it was when the couple slid into an alleyway behind a dumpster, and proceeded to feel each other up.

    Spike came up behind them and pushed them against the wall without preamble. His left hand on the girl, and his right hand on the man, he looked them both over and slid into his fangs. “You two make me despair for the fate of humanity,” he told them with a grin. “Thanks.”

 

WARNING: GRAPHIC RAPE AND MURDER
This chapter has been written intentionally in such a way that it CAN BE SKIPPED. While it includes major character development, it is not needed to understand the plot as a whole, and you can jump straight to the next chapter without having any misunderstanding of the plot. There are no punches pulled in the writing of this scene, which depicts graphic rape and murder through the joyful eyes of a heinous monster. If this is not your cup of blood tea, YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

Spike: “You want to know the things I’ve done to girls Dawn’s age? This is me, Buffy. You have to kill me before I get out.”
        Never Leave Me
    

    He started with the man. The girl was more easily held down, and he wanted time to play with her. He grabbed her by the throat and held her stiffly against the wall as he bit the man hard, first injuring his trachea so he couldn’t scream. The man was strong – his blood came quickly, and washed over Spike’s face, trickling down his chin as well as his throat. Mm, yes. That was how it was supposed to be, pure life leading to pure death. Spike sucked hard, swallowing heavily, not like he drank from little Sarah, her tiny throat and delicate little heartbeat trickling the blood like fruit juice into his mouth.

    He made himself forget Sarah and think about the hearty meat against him as he sucked and sucked at the blood, until the heartbeat began to slow. Spike let him go, then. He wasn’t dead – Spike didn’t want him to die yet. The man looked strong, and weak headed – perfect minion material. But Spike wasn’t ready to finish the job yet. He had sweeter meat to gnaw, just now.

    The man slid to the ground, his back against the wall, his eyes glazing over. Leaving the man to battle with consciousness, Spike turned to his lover. “Hello, cutie,” he said with a seductive grin.

    The girl was tinged with blue, half throttled from his strong hand on her throat. She hadn’t been able to scream, either, not even as her boyfriend was ripped apart beside her. Spike pushed her to the ground, waiting for the moment when she got enough breath to scream. He grabbed her before the sound came out, forcing his hand over her mouth. “You’re a sweet little thing,” he said. “Aren’t you. Let’s see how sweet you can be.”

    He didn’t rape all his victims, the blood being as much as he usually needed to be satisfied. But with what Sarah had been doing to him at home, and Dru’s recent reluctance to take him to her bed, his lust was nearly as strong as his blood lust, and this girl was going to feel both. A bite, first. Just a small one. Not too painful, make her quiescent, but don’t make her want it. Her man is watching. Let him hear her – it’ll reinforce the submission of the minion if he watches her taken as he dies.

    Her muffled screams pressing against his hand, he bit down at her throat, her boyfriend’s blood smearing over her skin before her own cascaded into Spike’s mouth. Oh, she was a sweet one. Tender. Young. The best kind of victim. Not so young there isn’t enough blood, or so childlike that the sweet spice of the hormone balance is immature. But young enough to be tender, and untainted by bitterness or the weight of the world. About Sarah’s age...

    He gave her a little, just to ease the pain, but she was still scared of him. As the blood loss began to slow her down, and her screams faded, he knew she was ready to play. He took his hand off her mouth. “That’s right, baby,” he told her. “Time for some sugar.” He knelt up and tore her pants down, right in front of her boyfriend. The man reacted, trying to get up, but Spike had taken far too much blood for that. He sagged back against the wall, a little more sideways this time, and Spike grinned at him. “It’s fun to watch,” he said. “You’ll see.”

    He arched up over the girl, holding her weakly protesting body down with his as he slid his hand into her cunt. “I’m gonna make you feel it,” he whispered to her. “Right in front of him. How do you feel about that?”

    Any reply she made was muffled as he kissed her, his fangs still sharp, his mouth and face still saturated with blood. She screamed weakly into his mouth, and he bit her tongue, hard. She screamed again, writhing under his body and his hand, the twist of her unwilling hips against him making him hard as a rock. He wasn’t sure he could play as long as he wanted. Little Sarah had been making him so randy lately, and he’d have killed her if he even fucked her as often or as hard as he wanted to, taking her blood aside. This little victim would have to take her place, because he wasn’t ready to kill Sarah yet. The thought of his willing human pet made his cock twitch, and he twisted his hand in the girl’s cunt, pressing against her clit, trying his hardest to make her feel it.

    He knew how to force the pleasure. It didn’t always work – every woman, every victim, was different, and some came more easily than others – but this time it seemed like it was going to. Just hold on he told himself. You can hold on until she’s flush with it. The blood is so much sweeter that way, rushes in so much faster. Like those bites you’ve been getting from that... Stop it!

    She was starting to feel it, despite her bleeding mouth and his rough hand and the height – he could almost taste it – of her fear and the loathing of what he was doing to her. Her tension and the writhing to get away felt too good. He couldn’t hold it anymore, he had to feel her surrounding him. Pulling his hand out of her, he undid his jeans and pulled out his cock, half wishing Sarah was there to pull it out for him. She’d been doing that so often, lately. Drusilla never hunted it out much, usually letting it find her, instead. The way Sarah had been manhandling him, he was starting to feel like his cock was her property as much as his own. It was enough to drive a man to distraction.

    He found the hot core of the woman quickly, and planted himself inside her, abandoning the bloody kiss. He sat up on his knees and thrust in her, quickly, short, rough little bursts, because he’d almost made her come before, and he didn’t feel he had time to tease her. “You gonna feel it, baby?” he hissed at her through his fangs. “The monster’s inside you, and you’re gonna die.” He shifted, thrusting against her, pushing down on her clit, as her ass and back were scraped on the concrete, and her boyfriend looked on in shock and tortured dismay, unable to move or cry out, only to watch in horror as she was violated before him.

    “Please,” she whimpered. “Please, stop. It hurts!”

    He probably was hurting her, but he knew there was more. He started to feel it, how she was building against him. She hated every movement he was making; she’d have been fighting him tooth and nail if he left her enough blood and energy to do it. And he was gonna make her come, anyway. That was the best way of it. To make them feel terrible that it felt good. Destroy all the pleasure they’d ever felt in their own bodies before taking them away completely. Rape them hard, rape them right, make them cry, make them all yours, forever.

    Sarah didn’t need that, though. Her sweet little pussy, open and wet and ready, already his... Stop it! he told himself. Think of this sweet little bint, this bitch is yours.

    Sarah was his. His gift. This girl... she was only being stolen...

    By him. “That’s right,” Spike said. “That’s right, pet, feel me in you, fuck you right like he never did. You knew this was what you wanted, didn’t you. The monster in you, making you come and come. He knew it. He knew you never wanted him, you wanted something like me, inside you, fucking you, hard and harder, making you feel it. That’s it, baby, feel it.”

    “No.” She was whimpering. “No, don’t! Please!”

    Her pleas didn’t fall on deaf ears. They were music. “Yeah, that’s right, baby, say please. Say please. Maybe I’ll leave you alive, if you say please.”

    “Please! Please, please, stop this....” She was definitely crying, now. Saying please often did that to women. The tears were beautiful, and he licked them off her cheeks like the garnish to her blood. He pushed into her harder, and she recoiled under him, “Please! Ahh!”

    He’d made her come. She didn’t want it, she hated the feeling, it was so much worse than if he’d just taken his pleasure and let her lie still in disgust. But he had made her feel it. Against her will, hating every moment, he had made her body spasm with pleasure.

    Sarah came so easily. He didn’t have to work so hard on her, his hands, his cock, his mouth, all of them little gifts she seemed to love. She worked to come for him, to give him her pleasure as much as she gave him his own....

    Forget Sarah! Think of this... delectable.... He bent down to bite her again, almost ready to come as he thought of his willing little pet at home, writhing under him, riding atop him, the way her mouth slid up and down his straining cock. Shame he couldn’t kill her yet. Not like he could this little bitch. He didn’t even wait for what used to be his favorite moment – for the girl to be hungry for the torment to end, where he could taste her gratitude in the death he was finally gifting her with. Sarah hadn’t left him with the patience. He had to have the girl now. He bit her hard and fucked her harder, coming inside her as she grunted, still saying please... please don’t....

    Spike... Sarah’s voice the way she said his name, as if it were a gift to say. Spike....

    He was half tempted to tell his victim to use his name, like Sarah did, but she was already too far gone. He pushed inside her, and sucked her blood out of her and... and... there! He came roaring into her cunt, and gripped her so hard as he did it he broke something. Probably her collarbone. She grunted and he sucked harder, breaking her neck as he did so, still feeling her soft and warm around his cock. He thrust, and thrust, and thrust, until every last heartbeat and spasm had faded from her dying body, and he finally released the wound he’d bitten into her throat. He looked up and spat out the chunk of flesh he’d bitten out of her.

    He looked down at the girl’s dead and staring eyes. Sarah’s deep brown looked up at him from his memory, animated... vital. This dead girl had given him nothing.

    This wasn’t sweet.

    Well, that was a dumb thought. “Now that’s how it’s done, mate,” he told the victim who was to be his next minion.

    The man stared at him, tragic and dying. He was crying, too. Spike rarely kissed off his male victims. It wasn’t unheard of for him to rape them, but it was more rare than his rapes of women. It wasn’t as much fun, the logistics of it simply being more complicated. He’d never used his cock at all before he’d become a vampire – not for it’s intended and unholy purpose, that is – and where he stuck it didn’t matter as much as the why he was doing it. Gender wasn’t usually the important thing. Angelus had taught him that. It all depended on how he wanted his victims to feel.

    This man, Spike wanted to feel helpless. He’d taken his blood, taken his woman, and was about to take his life. “Great, wasn’t it?” Spike told him, hitching his jeans back up. He crouched down and gazed into the man’s face with a bit of a deadly grin. “You lost her to me. And I’m gonna take you. When you come back, you’re my boy, mate. I’m the boss. You’ll do what I say.”

    He didn’t need the man to agree. He lay against the alley wall, almost dead, staring at his murdered and violated lover, and Spike knew that in a few days, he’d be hanging out in the hallway with his other minions, and this moment – that now tormented his human mind – would be a lovely one for his new, demonic thoughts and desires. Just as he looked back on his own death with pleasure, despite the pain and the terror Drusilla had inflicted along with her demonic seduction.

    Spike ripped open his wrist with his fangs and pressed the gushing blood to the man’s mouth. He refused at first – they all refused at first – until the pressure forced a single drop against his tongue. Even silly Willy himself, Spike remembered, had shied from the blood until Dru had pressed his lips to her flesh, and it had suddenly been impossible not to take it. And William had asked for it... for whatever it was. He hadn’t truly known the details of the darkness she was drawing him into. Spike shook his head and focused again on the man. “Come on, mate,” Spike said. There. He’d tasted it. It was all over now. With sudden abandon the man swallowed, and sucked, and his eyes rolled back into his head with the desperate instinct to take the demonic blood in. “That’s right,” Spike said.

    He didn’t give him much. He liked his minions weak when they started. When he thought the man had had enough, he pulled his hand back. The victim made a half-hearted movement to follow after it, and then slumped to the concrete in the alley. He was dead. The demon blood had done what Spike’s bite hadn’t quite.

    Spike considered the best method of disposal. He didn’t like leaving his victims in the territory. His minions’ winos, yeah, no one cared who they were or how they died. But the rockers and the new-wavers he pulled out of CB’s, they usually had family and friends who gave a shit about them, and CB’s was a popular haunt – Spike didn’t want it sullied by news of murders. And he didn’t want to eat winos and derelicts like his minions did.

    Spike waved down his taxi. The newest minion was on taxi clean-up tonight. “Take her to the river,” he told the delivery guy from the other night. The authorities would probably blame her boyfriend – and in a few days, her boyfriend actually would be a vampiric murderer, so it wouldn’t matter. “He can be brought back to the lair,” Spike said, indicating the man. It was easier to have his minions come back to life in their flophouse rather than wait for their corpses to be buried, climb their way out of the grave, and try to find him. Besides, every once in a while he’d try to turn someone who seemed like they would be a perfectly good minion, only to have their family cremate the sucker. Bastards. Drusilla liked the dreamlike rebirth symbolism of her victims having to crawl out of the grave, as Spike himself had had to do, but it was much easier to just leave the turning corpses where they were easy to reach.

    The taxi pulled into the alley, and Spike lifted up the girl to help his minion load them up into the back. The girl’s head lolled on her broken neck, and her hair fell over Spike’s arm. The feel of her silky tresses felt like Sarah – again, like Sarah! That stupid bint was starting to be everywhere in his thoughts. He couldn’t even rape and murder without thinking about her soft, willing lips, her gentle touch, the catch in her voice, the way she’d say his name, say that she was his, that she loved him....

    He should have killed her that first day. It was getting hard to breathe without catching her scent on his clothes. He was full of two victims worth of blood, he’d ground his lust out raping a wet and unwillingly pleasured bint, he’d killed twice tonight, and made a decent minion into the bargain. He was hot, warmed through with the fresh blood and the violent death. There was nothing he should need, now. He should be ready to go home and sleep, possibly in Dru’s wicked arms, but he’d be okay without her for a few more days.

    So why did it all taste like ashes? Why the hell did he still want the taste of that willing little girl? That stupid, suicidal pet, who claimed she knew him, claimed she loved him, and hated that he was a killer. He couldn’t get her out of his head. Her heat, her blood, her affection. He should be sated. He should be full of blood, quenched of lust, satisfied with the death.

    And he felt hungry. And lonely. And cold. He had everything a vampire could ever need.

    And he still wanted Sarah.

Spike: I can't cry the soul out of me. It won't come. I killed, and I can feel them. I can feel every one of them.
Sleeper

    Buffy had retreated to her closet.

    She supposed at some level it was like a cage, but in another way, it was the safest hole possible to hide in. She read silly seventies science fiction, because she didn’t feel up to contemplating any of Spike’s books of poetry. It felt painful to do that, indulge in that little romanticism she loved about him, when he was out murdering at that very moment. It was stupid, she knew. He was always murdering in this time. He always had had, and she had always known it. And somehow, she’d been okay with it....

    And that was absurd! Why was it okay? It shouldn’t have been okay to her, future redemption or no. It had started bothering her how okay she was making herself be with it. But... she’d done the same with Angel, and she’d done it with Spike even before he’d earned his soul. What was it about her that made it okay to sleep with vampires? Was Crowley right? Did she need the violence? Didn’t she have a choice in who she found attractive? Did it have to be a monster? The idea bothered her. She didn’t like to think about herself that way.

    If it had to be a monster... what did that say about her?

    Spike had always said he followed his blood, and didn’t have a reputation for being a thinker, but the truth was, Buffy was just as impulsive and intuitive as he was. She didn’t like thinking about the reasons for her actions. She didn’t always have a logic for her instincts. And as for her emotions... she’d stopped examining them reliably back in High School when Angel had lost his soul and crushed them all as Angelus. So rather than try and analyze the logic of the whole horrific situation, Buffy hid away.

     She hid from Drusilla, yes, but more, she was hiding from the whole thing. From Spike and his evil, from herself and her own sick desires. She’d gone to earth like a hunted thing, claimed her small space in the world. She lay on her stomach and flipped her legs up against the wall, snacking on the popcorn that Spike had bought for her. That spot was hers. It was tiny, it was degrading, but it was hers.

    So why it didn’t feel like an invasion when Spike came in, Buffy had no clue.

    She was still – righteously, but still somewhat irrationally given the circumstances – pissed off at him, so she ignored him. He’d been testing her when she first came. Now she wondered if some part of her was testing him. To see if he’d grab her and force her when she showed no interest. Amoral, soulless, evil, what would he do when his “precious pet” emotionally abandoned him in punishment for going to kill?

    And what he did was sit and watch her.

    Buffy flipped several barely read pages in her book before she finally looked at him. She expected him to be leaned back and content, replete with his kill, idly watching her with evil satisfaction as he viewed the creature he owned. Instead he sat gazing at her intently, and the look on his face was not fond or proprietary. His eyes heavy, his nose twitching faintly as the nostrils flared with nervousness. Buffy had seen this look on his face before, the anxiety in his soulless eyes, right as he first tried to tell her that he loved her. Her, the slayer. Without – they both knew – any real hope of reciprocation. A kind of desperate nervous longing. Buffy rolled over onto her side and watched him for a moment over her book. Then she went back to it, pointedly.

    Spike waited for a long minute, and then sighed. A moment later he completely shocked her. He bent down and curled up with her, laying his head on the hollow of her waist. Almost hiding in her. It was somewhat submissive, yes, and it was remarkably trusting, but if Buffy didn’t know Spike as well as she did, she wouldn’t have found it shocking. What shocked her was, she knew this gesture. She knew this posture. It was the position he took when he’d had a nightmare, and wanted her to comfort him. It was also one he took sometimes when he’d told her a particularly troubling story from his past.

    Good god, he was in there. Even now. The idea terrified her, and she couldn’t stay mad. Not now, not in this time. She’d come to a vampire in the height of his evil, it wasn’t even fair to hope he’d just up and stop his killing. Whatever it was she was doing to him, he was wildly confused. His need for comfort now could not possibly be guilt or shame, but he was deeply troubled. And she was the one he was turning to in order to ease the tension of it. With Dru as she currently was, he couldn’t possibly have any one else to turn to. Buffy let herself pet his head, run her hands down his cheek. He felt startlingly warm. She wasn’t used to that, unless he’d been holding her. “You feel hot,” she whispered.

    Spike closed his eyes. “Don’t ask.”

    Don’t ask, and I won’t tell. She could hear it as loud as if he’d promised her. And she couldn’t let it go. “One question.”

    He didn’t respond.

    “Did you even notice the color of her hair?”

    “I never look that close,” he said.

    Buffy waited a moment. “What color are my eyes, Spike?”

    “Over-steeped tea,” he said instantly, surprising her. He usually said African jade. Then she remembered, she was in Sarah’s body, with Sarah’s dark eyes. He chuckled. “Okay. Point taken.” He had seen her, really seen her. She wasn’t just a victim. He was getting to understand that. He closed his eyes and his hand wandered over her arm, idly caressing her with his thumb. “I really... really want to kill you,” he said quietly.

    Buffy ran her hand through his hair. “I know.”

    A moment later he sat up and closed the door to the closet. Then he returned to his place on her stomach. Curled up together, he shared her self-exile into the cage.

***

    Dru rebuffed Spike again when she came back, but Buffy noted he didn’t seem to care much. He curled up next to Buffy on the sofa bed, idly running his fingers through her hair. He neither bit her, nor had sex with her. Buffy was afraid she knew why, and didn’t ask. Don’t ask. That was going to become a mantra at this rate.

    After a while he began massaging her back. Eventually he took her clothes off so he could perform the act with more care. He ran his hands all up and down her body, occasionally using his nails, or nibbling on her with his teeth. It felt fabulous. Buffy was used to a much more athletic lifestyle, and she longed for the physical stimulation. God dammit. She really was a Spike addict. Even evil, he fired her. It bothered her. But after their tacit reconciliation, it was nice to be cherished like that, without him making any other demands of her. She was almost ashamed that his touch, so familiar to her, could draw her into a fond stupor almost as strong as his bite.

    They woke in the afternoon, and watched more Dark Shadows, and Spike made her tea. He was very undemanding. He helped her cook up more of the groceries and promised her a proper meal later that night. Buffy retreated to her nest before Dru woke. She’d stopped thinking of it as a closet or a cage sometime last night, with Spike. He’d spent hours in there with her, just wanting to be close to her. He’d fondled her fingertips and gazed at her while she read, and curled up just holding her. He had been behaving just as haunted as the soulful Spike she knew. She knew it wasn’t guilt that was dragging him down, it couldn’t possibly be. But something troubled him, and it was something more than bloodlust and rage – and that was something, wasn’t it?

    Spike went out just after sundown, after Drusilla had gone hunting. This time, Buffy did not tell him not to go. He came back some hours later with a new box of flowers for Drusilla, and a fresh roll of ribbon for her to torture her dolls with. He arranged half the flowers in a vase by Dru’s bed, put the other half in the fridge, and then pulled a few feet off the ribbon, leaving the rest of the roll on Dru’s vanity. “Come here, pet,” Spike said.

    “What?”

    He smiled wickedly. “It’s my turn to torture you.”

    Buffy took a deep breath. “Spike... I–”

    “No, I’m not killing you yet. Come here.” His tone was very gentle.

    It was either trust him or anger him. God, she hated living with an unchecked demon. She loved the bits of him she recognized, but those other bits.... She came up and placed her hands on his chest. She was about to ask what he was after when she realized the skin beneath his shirt was cool. He hadn’t hunted?

    She was still frowning, bewildered over that, when Spike turned her and wrapped the ribbon around her eyes, blindfolding her. He started to lead her, but she bumped into a chair, and he lost patience. “Sod this,” he muttered, and scooped her up into his arms. Buffy wrapped her hands around his shoulders and let him carry her. He opened the door of the lair, growled – which Buffy thought had more to do with his minions than her – and carried her up a flight of stairs.

    Buffy breathed in a sigh as she felt fresh air on her face. He must have taken her to the roof. Spike set her down, turned her to face him, and kissed her. He kissed both her cheeks,  her lips, and the tip of her nose, and then stepped back, taking the blindfold with him.

    Buffy’s eyes blinked open on a ridiculously romantic dream. As in romantic, and frankly completely ridiculous. The full moon shone down on the city, and even the derelict neighborhood of the Bowery could look lovely under the silver of the moon. But he’d done far more than rely on nature. Dozens of candles, couched in mason jars, flickered on every flat surface – the wall around the roof, the top of the shack that covered the stairwell, upside down crates and cardboard boxes. In the middle of this glowing fairyland Spike had laid out a blanket with a cheese board and a bottle of wine, and two glasses. Rose petals were scattered over the blanket.

    Buffy blushed. She wasn’t sure if she was embarrassed for him, or herself. At the same time, she was touched. The whole thing was absurdly hokey, she was still technically a prisoner, if a voluntary one, and Spike was evil and all but pure demon right now, and she still blushed.

    But she didn’t melt. “All right, what are you buttering me up for?”

    Spike gave her an amused glare, and then shook his head. “I suppose asking you to give me the benefit of the doubt is daft, i’nt it.”

    “Yep.”

    “Well, bugger. You caught me, pet. I have truly heinous acts in mind for tonight.”

    “And they include?”

    “Well, I thought I’d start with a neck massage, and go on from there.”

    “Go on, huh? Are you up and planning on seducing me?” she taunted.

    “Would I dare?” he asked. He reached up and pulled a transistor radio off the roof of the stairwell. “Here,” he said, pushing it into Buffy’s hand. “Your choice. Though if you could find something that isn’t disco, I’ll honor your memory for the rest of my unlife.”

    “Don’t worry,” Buffy said, quietly turning through radio stations. “You haven’t been secretly eating a super freak. There will be no taint of disco in your blood.”

    “Oh, sometimes I’ll take ‘em–” Spike stopped so abruptly that Buffy was surprised. He turned away and set about opening the wine.

    He’d been about to say something about taking them out, and stopped. So, that was it. She’d been play acting the submissive for him. He’d decided to start play acting the innocent for her. She couldn’t figure out if that made the evil inherently better or worse. Worse, she decided after she’d found a station that didn’t sound too awful. It was a lie. “You don’t have to pretend you’re not a killer, Spike. I’m not shielding my eyes from the truth.”

    Spike looked up at her. “Then what are you doing?”

    “I just don’t like you taking pride in it,” Buffy said. “If you start to brag to me about it, I won’t be impressed.”

    “I do take pride in it.”

    “I know,” Buffy said. “But there’s a time and place for everything. I wouldn’t boast to you about how I’d... found the greatest ever tampon brand, or the best place to get scrunchies. Brag to your boys about it, not me.”

    “What the hell’s a scrunchie?”

    “Girl hair stuff,” Buffy said. “Forget it. Just like I assume you’re not interested in shoe bargains, I don’t need to hear you boast about how great you are at killing. It’s serious, it isn’t a joke.”

    He looked at her. “I guess it isn’t,” he said.

    “But hiding it isn’t what I was after, either.”

    Spike handed her a glass of wine. “Good,” he said. “‘Cause without killing, I don’t really have a lot else to talk about, here.” He let his hand travel down her bare arm. “You cold?” he asked.

    Buffy chuckled. “And I know you kept that jacket on just to offer it to me.”

    “Well, hell, least I’m not lying about my evilly conniving gallant gestures,” Spike said, slipping off his motorcycle jacket. He draped it around her shoulders and fondled her collar. “You’re cute all covered in spikes, little bit.”

    Buffy grinned up at him, but she said, “Don’t call me that.”

    “Why?”

    “Because it means you think of me as a child. And I’m not.”

    “It means I think of you as tiny, bite size.” He bent down, nuzzling her face. “Did anyone ever feed you right?”

    “I’m not sure,” Buffy whispered.

    He chuckled. “So you know everything about me... but have questions about you?”

    “Actually... yes.”

    “Now that’s interesting,” he said before he kissed her. “Because I do, too.” He breathed in her scent and groaned. “You smell delectable.” He sighed and led her down to the blanket. “And in here,” he said, pulling out a take-out box, “is a fine meal I highjacked from an actual restaurant. Which I hope smells delectable to you, as well.”

    The meal took the form of salmon and gnocchi, with steamed vegetables, and cheesecake for dessert. It had gone cold, and Buffy missed microwaves, but it tasted fine even so. Spike still hadn’t provided silverware. She scooped up bits of the food in her fingers, licking them off one by one, until Spike couldn’t take it anymore and started picking the food up himself. He slid his fingers into her mouth, bite by sensuous bite, and watched her swallow with such relish that Buffy wasn’t at all sure he was telling the truth about not killing her that evening. He refilled her wine glass whenever it got low. The whole thing was unbelievably romantic. After she’d finished her cheesecake, he lay his head in her lap and looked up at her.

    “Thank you,” he said.

    “You’re not demanding thanks of me?”

    “No. I’ve been enjoying myself.”

    Buffy let her hand caress his throat and collarbone, and he closed his eyes and hummed. “Is this something you ordinarily do for your pets?” she asked.

    “No,” he said. “But you’re not really a pet, are you pet.”

    “What do you mean? I’m here, I’m all chained up and ready to service you.”

    “And you’re joking again,” Spike said. He sighed and stared up at the moon. “You see, I figured it out. You think I’ll give you what you want if you make me fall in love with you.”

    He was right, so denying it would be pointless. “So what’s wrong with that?”

    “Apart from bein’ a bit Machiavellian, nothing at all. It’s quite clever, really.” He sort of shrugged. “Ain’t gonna work, but it’s cute. ‘Cept when you bugger it up and forget not to hate me.”

    Buffy frowned at him. “I don’t hate you, Spike.”

    “But you hate what I do.”

    “I do hate what you do. Doesn’t mean I can’t love you.”

    “I don’t know if I follow you around that bend, love.”

    “People aren’t... you aren’t... ugh.” She’d had too much to drink to try and sort it out – that a vampire’s behavior wasn’t coming from the man inside. “This is way too logicy for me right now. Just believe me.”

    “I’m not sure I can, if you hate the killing.”

    “Oh, come on. If I adored everything about you, you wouldn’t believe that, either.”

    “Why do you say that?”

    “Because I’m a human being,” she said. “If human beings all thought it was cool to kill people, the whole species would go extinct. And I know that’s kinda what the demons are after,” Buffy said, “but I’m not a demon, am I. Wanting you to go around killing people... that wouldn’t be right.”

    “But loving me is right.”

    That was a stumper, actually, and had been bugging her for years. She hesitated, and the radio took the floor. “Loving you isn’t the right thing to do,” it suddenly announced through Fleetwood Mac. “How can I ever change things that I feel?” “Oh, shut up!” Buffy said to the radio. Then she laughed and stood up. “Ha! Okay, that’s a freakin’ sign. I need to dance.”
 

 

Chapter Notes:

Warning: questionable sexual content

SPIKE: Yeah, you know what I prefer to being hunted? Getting caught.
        Fool For Love


    Spike was amused. “You dance now, do you?”

    “Come on! I’ve been stuck in that damned apartment for days!” She got up and danced alone, twisting her hips and tossing her head.

    Spike got up and caught her in his arms, and moved with her, unable to keep the smile off his face. God, what was she? Dragged out of his sodding dreams? Spike had always loved to dance, battle or no. She seemed to actually be having fun, and he could hear her heart pounding – pounding a little too hard, actually. Her blood was weak. But she seemed to enjoy getting some exercise that wasn’t shagging.

    Suddenly she stopped, staring in horror at the radio. “Is that Barry fricking Manilow?”

    Spike laughed and flicked stations. “You see why I like CB’s?”

    “Ugh.” Sarah shuddered. “What is he doing poisoning the airwaves?”

    “He’s always on the pop stations.” How did she not know this? “Where have you been living? Alaska? In a cave? Under a bear?”  Sarah laughed. “Seriously, I know centuries old vampires who are more up-to-date than you are.” He flipped until he recognized a heavy base line. David Bowie. He’d do. “A small jean genie, snuck off to the city...”

    Spike came up and took her into his arms. “Really. Where’d you come from, pet?”

    Sarah took in a breath. “Well. I walked out of a hospital not twenty-four hours before I came to find you.”

    Spike gazed at her, quizzical. “What were you there for?”

    “An overdose.”

    “Of what?”

    “To tell you the truth, I’m not entirely sure.”

    It was sad. She didn’t even know what she’d been taking? Spike pulled her close and ran his lips over her skin, sending shivers through her entire body. He kissed her neck, nibbling at the spot where it met her shoulder, squeezing her tightly to him until her heart beat wildly, and she gasped. “Am I better than a drug?” he asked in her ear.

    “Ah!” She seemed unable to find her voice. “You are my drug,” she whispered. Spike realized she was more than a little drunk.

    “Then I guess I’d better bite you.”

    Sarah blinked up at him. “I didn’t say your bite. I said you.”

    Wow. Just wow. He stared at her for a long moment, his eyes soft. Then he laughed. “You,” he said, grinning wide, “are such a manipulative little bitch!” He said it only because it had almost worked. He had sworn not to be on his guard anymore, and damn was she taking that to its limit! He kissed her hard. “I’m tempted to kill you now, just to teach you a lesson.”

    Sarah shook her head. “I am getting bored with the constant death threats,” she said. She pulled away, and danced across the roof, her hips shifting with the music.“She loves him, she loves him but just for a short while,” Bowie sang, “She'll scratch in the sand, won't let go his hand....” “Are you really so hungry for my death?”

    “You know I am.”

    “Oh, I know you’re a killer,” Sarah said. “And I know the idea of killing me excites you. But I don’t think you really want my death.”

    “You don’t know a thing about me.”

    “Don’t I?” Sarah unbuttoned her jeans and danced out of them, letting them fall to the ground. The long t-shirt was barely modest, a little black mini-skirt under the spiked jacket. She looked great. Really great. Spike salivated, she looked so great. The moonlight caught her brown hair and made it shimmer, and her skin glowed in the yellow light from the candles. She seemed incandescent. There she was, all by herself on the rooftop, surrounded by light, wrapped in black leather and spikes, tossing her head provocatively. The base line continued to thump, and she moved her hips to it. She danced over to the edge of the building. There was a fire escape there, broken, rusted, completely unusable.

    “You can’t get down that way,” Spike said. He didn’t know if she actually meant to.

    “Not trying to,” she said. At the very top there was nothing but a ladder, long railings arching up over the side of the building. Sarah hooked one leg around it, placed one hand on the rounded top, and let go, dangling precariously over the street.

    Spike jumped forward and caught her, and she laughed. “Bugger. Are you trying to commit suicide?”

    “No,” Sarah said. “I’m flirting with danger.” She tipped back, shifting her weight so he had to adjust, and she grabbed his belt.

    He nearly lost his balance. “Okay, this–” he tried to pull her back in.

    She did not let go of the rail. “Look around,” she said. “Anyone could look up, couldn’t they?”

    Oh, bollocks. She... oh god! A second later, she’d gone for his jeans. She dangled like a worm on a hook over the edge of the street, and went and manipulated his cock out with one hand. It came out like an arrow, hard as stone already, and she twisted one leg around his hip. The angle was wrong. He was pressed up against her warm belly, but she flexed against him anyway, and his breath caught. She trembled, and he was afraid he might drop her. It was a very real danger. “You get off on the danger, do you?” he asked. “I could drop you. Death is just a slip of my fingers away.”

    “It always is,” Sarah said to him, still rubbing against him, clenching her stomach muscles against his smooth, hard shaft.

    “You like the fear?”

    Sarah chuckled. “I’ll bet there’s only one of us scared right now,” she said. “And it sure isn’t me.”

    “Why not?”

    Her eyes were bright with mischief. “Because I trust you.”

    “You’re daft.”

    “I don’t trust you not to kill me. But to drop me?” She shook her head. “Nah. You wouldn’t give my death to mere gravity like that. Just like you don’t go driving around hitting random pedestrians with your car. You don’t hand the death away to something else. You want it for yourself.” She inched backward until she dangled even more precariously over the edge. “You want to drop me, Spike? You want me to die four stories below, too far away to hear my heart stop?”

    Now Spike was trembling. He didn’t know if it was fear, but god he fucking wanted her! “Don’t tease me,” he said.

    “Why? Isn’t that what you like? To be teased and tormented? To be tripped up and beat down?” She suddenly let go of the rail, and he cried out, unsure he had the right angle to keep her. But she caught herself a foot lower, and her back was arched down, her head below her shoulders. She slipped her leg off his hip and twisted until she went to her knees, her head hung forward over the street. Gripping onto the railing, she raised her hips toward him, still dangling over the edge. The invitation was impossible to ignore. He followed her down and went to his knees, grabbing hold of her hips, trying to drag her back toward him, and onto his straining cock.

    She wouldn’t go backwards. She gripped that railing tightly and pulled herself back over the edge, and used the edge of the wall to push against him. Her hair hung down, free in the air, and he gripped her hard enough to bruise, suddenly terrified – yes, terrified – that she was going to fall. God, no. She could not escape that way. Her death was his, just as her life was! But he had to admit... the terror charged him like a lightning rod.

    Her heart beat, so tiny, so fast, so beautiful as it pulsed the heat through her. He thrust in her, each thrust seeming about to throw her off the building and into the alley, where her sweet body would lie still in the shadows, hidden from the face of the moon. But so long as he held her, so long as he didn’t let her go, there she was, shining in the moonlight, against him, surrounding him, moving with him, again and again and again. It was electric. Spike felt like he was the one on the precipice, the one dangling over the edge. She cried out, and it wasn’t with fear. She was so tiny, so delicate, so breakable, so very much at the edge of death, a butterfly he was going to crush. He couldn’t possibly let her fall. He’d go over the edge with her before he’d let her fall....

    The thought raced through him and he groaned as he came, his cry echoing around the street. Anyone could look up and see them, the vampire and his stupid, suicidal victim screwing half in midair over brutal and unforgiving pavement. “Ow!”

    Damn. He’d hurt her again. Gripped her hips too hard. She’d have more bruises on that pale flesh.... She finally – oh, thank god, finally – pulled back from the edge and turned to him. She hadn’t come yet. She lay him down and straddled him, and he stared up at the night sky, gasping. She rode him like a hobbyhorse, even though he didn’t know if he was still hard. He reached up for her clit, pressed his knuckles against it, and it didn’t take long before he felt her clench above him, heard her tiny little “ung!” of release. She lay down, warm and soft and perfect, nuzzling his throat with her smooth red mouth.

    He was still shaking. Good god, what the hell was she doing to him? He put his arms around her and snuggled, caressing her soft hair. She felt so good to him. This wasn’t fair. She was a victim, just a little victim, with that low voice and those deep, dark eyes, and that hair that shimmered like watered silk.... “Thanks for taking me out tonight,” Sarah said. “In so much as this counts as ‘out.’”

    He smiled. She was pleased! “Having fun, pet?”

    “Well, I was getting a little bored. As nice as feed me, fuck me, rinse, repeat, is, it’s not exactly the most intellectually stimulating chapter of my life.”

    “Are you telling me you don’t like being my pet?”

    He was teasing, but she stopped. A heavy moment passed. “I hadn’t meant that to be a real question,” he said into her hair. “I know the answer’s no.”

    “Actually, that wasn’t what I was thinking.” She sat up and looked down at him. “I do, actually. I shouldn’t. And... god, I really shouldn’t.” She looked down and shook her head. “Well, I like parts of it,” she amended. “If we took the constant death threats off the table, and I wasn’t walking on eggshells with you, Drusilla, her doll, and your boys, and I could leave if and when I wanted to then, well yeah... if all those were gone, bits of it are... kinda nice.”

    He frowned. “You like being chained up, bitten, left hungry...?”

    “The chains might as well be a game,” Sarah said, “and the bites you make fun. You’re not leaving me hungry anymore. In fact, you’re coming up with inventive ways to feed me.” He chuckled. “You like taking care of people,” she told him, though how she knew that, he had no clue. “Truth to tell, sometimes I like being taken care of. I spend so much time trying to be nothing but strong, and making decisions for everyone, and it’s nice to take a break from it. It’s kind of fun to just fall into each other. With all the fighting and the army, we don’t really have much time for that.”

    “What army?”

    She looked embarrassed. “Nothing, I’m drunk.” She fondled his neck. “What are the dog tags from?”

    “Hm?” She was deflecting his question, but he let her. It was one of those things she let slip, which he thought might give him a clue as to what she actually was. She’d dropped a few of those, here and there. He was storing them up, but they weren’t enough to make a coherent picture. He looked down and shrugged. “Dunno. Took ‘em from a victim one time. They looked cool.”

    She looked down at him. “That’s sad.”

    “For the victim, or me?”

    “Well, both, but I meant you.” She got up off him and went back to the picnic blanket. “Something that’s supposed to be an identity, and it means absolutely nothing.”

    Spike had never thought of it that way. “I have an identity.”

    “Do you?” She picked up her glass of wine.

    It was an odd question. Who was he? “William the Bloody,” he said. “Bit of a rebel. You know, one of my... sires, grand-sire something once invited me to join up with her ‘Master’, after I’d killed that slayer. She hadn’t thought me worthy before. Seemed to think it a real honor and all that rot. I laughed in her face. Didn’t even go. Struck me as stupid.” He shook his head. “Was never gonna be anyone’s sodding minion.”

    “Not anyone’s?”

    “‘Course not!” Spike said. He settled down beside her.

    “Not even Drusilla?”

    Spike blinked. He had never, not even once, thought of it that way. The pet was gentle and innocent and looking down at him with true curiosity, not accusation or contempt. He still felt as if he’d been punched in the gut. “Shut up,” he said darkly.

    She looked away. She didn’t dare say anything more for a long time.

    Unfortunately, what she had just said made him feel so cold and so confused that after a while he wanted to hold someone. He wished Dru were there. He grabbed Sarah instead and pulled her into his lap, snuggling up to her without looking at her. Bitch. Manipulative little bitch. God, she felt good. He opened his mouth and bit at her throat above her collar with his human teeth, just holding the warm flesh against his tongue. The salt tasted good. “You are the most confusing pet I’ve ever had,” he said after he felt a little better. “Pets aren’t supposed to act like you.”

    “Why not?”

    “A real pet needs me for something.” He let her go and leaned back on the picnic blanket. “A roof, a meal, a bite hit, vengeance, something. Something real. They wouldn’t accept the price if they didn’t.” He shook his head. “You’re too independent. You like the bite, but you’re not hooked on it. You’re not helpless. You don’t need me. That blood thing... I don’t get it, but it’s not the same as a pet. You’re not submissive enough for that.”

    “Why do you admit to the price?” she asked. “Why don’t you promise me you’ll let me loose if I play the good puppy?”

    “Would you rather I did that?”

    “No. I wouldn’t believe you,” Sarah said. “I know vampires too well. You need to kill, or you feel wrong inside.”

    Spike stared at her. She was right, of course. That was why those suckers who didn’t kill usually lived like animals, and why Spike had such contempt for them. They were trulls, nothing more than whores, and they were wounded by it. Just as living without love could wound a human’s heart, living without killing wounded a vampire’s demonic nature. Spike, however, felt he needed both.

    “But I’m me,” Sarah went on. “Other women... Dru’s doll. Do they all think they’ll be changed, rather than just die?”

    “No,” Spike said. “But I’m not going to pretend I’ll let them loose, either.”

    “Why?”

    Spike looked back up at the moon. After a long moment, he finally spoke. “I like them to see death coming,” he said. “To see me as that death. Dru likes playing the change game, promise them eternity. I don’t. I promise them death, and that’s how they come to me. Some try to talk me out of it. Or shag me out of it. Some think it’s part of the game. Some – the really broken ones. They don’t care.” He peered closely at Sarah. “You don’t seem to care, but you’re not broken. And you’re not afraid. And you don’t want to be vamped. I don’t get you.” He sat up and leaned casually against the wall to watch her. He took another sip of his wine. “You know, I had Dru look you over, that day when you were asleep. The three of us. She can read a cancer, or a disease. There are some who are already dying who will come to a vampire. She says you’re fine. The only thing killing you is me.”

    Sarah looked nervous. “She says there’s nothing strange about me?”

    “I didn’t say that,” he said. “She said your mind was a blank picture screen, and there was death in your dreams. But you’re not about to kick it, either. Which leads me to think you’re insane.”

    She chuckled. “Do I act insane?”

    “Well, I wouldn’t know, would I? Is being suicidal insanity?”

    “Says the vampire hunting the slayer.”

    “I’m not suicidal. I might win.”

    “I’m not suicidal, either.”

    He blinked. “Are you saying you might win?”

    She only smiled, wickedly enough that he wanted to bite her. God, she liked to play with fire.

    “You came asking me to kill you,” Spike said. “I got news: that’s suicide, pet.”

    “No. I came asking to take on this role, as your pet. I wanna live. I accept that you might kill me. That’s not the same as wanting you to.”

    What the hell was she thinking? God, she was cute. Yeah. He needed to bite her. “You accept that I might,” he said. He began to crawl over the blanket on his fists, moving towards her like a panther. “Do you accept that I’m going to?”

    “That is... likely,” Sarah said, allowing herself to be distracted by his seductive movement. She leaned forward until her lips were almost touching his. “But I think I’ll get through to you before that.” And she pulled her head away.

    Spike smiled as he pushed her onto the rose petals. “You don’t get to escape,” he whispered into her mouth. “I want you,” he whispered after he kissed her. “I want you so hard. You’ve succeeded that much, you bitch.”

    “I’m not trying to escape,” Sarah said. “Not as you’d know it, anyway.”

    “What is this spell you want to cast?”

    “I told you,” Sarah said. “Dru told you. She’s the one who said I’m not who I am. If I cast this spell, I’ll be who I’m supposed to.”

    He looked down at her. “Why my blood?” he asked. “What is it about my blood that’s so special?”

    Sarah just kissed him, hard, and a moment later he wasn’t up to asking again. Fire was raging through him, and he felt all charged again.  “Oh, god!” he breathed, trembling above her. “What the hell do you do to me?” He kissed her again. “How?”

    Sarah looked about to say something. He was desperate for an answer, any answer, and bit his lip as she started to talk. Then the door to the stairs opened, interrupting her. Spike looked up angrily, expecting one of his boys. Then he gasped. “Drusilla!”

    Suddenly he was ashamed of himself. This wasn’t the kind of thing he usually did for his pets. This form of romantic interlude was usually reserved for his beloved, and suddenly here she was, and he was giving it to someone else.... Some one? God, some thing, this pet wasn’t supposed to be real. Playing with a pet wasn’t supposed to count... and somehow... Sarah did.

    He felt he’d been unfaithful. No other pet had ever made him feel that way before.

    The only thing he felt he could do was to see to it that Dru didn’t feel the same way. “There you are, my darling. Come here, poodle.” He reached out for her. “Come and have some wine.”

    
***

    Buffy sighed. She’d been getting somewhere with him. That moment when she’d half accused him of being Drusilla’s minion had been powerful for him, she could tell. His realization that he was frightened of Buffy’s death. That was key. If things had gone on as they were, she’d been hoping she could get home before sunrise. Now she felt as if she’d have to start all over again.

    “How charming, the nights of wine and roses,” Drusilla said. “You left me a bouquet, and the boys said you’d brought dinner upstairs.”

    Buffy realized this meant she was suddenly dinner. Her head sank.

    “Not really enough to fill us,” Spike said. “But a nice glass of wine.”

    “Has she had enough?”

    “Plenty,” Spike said, quite honestly. Buffy knew she was still a bit drunk. Her blood alcohol content was probably pretty high – most likely, she’d taste great. She tried really hard not to sigh too loudly.

    Spike grinned and pulled Drusilla down into his arms. She giggled and rolled her shoulders into his chest with delight. Buffy moved away a bit. Her movement drew Drusilla’s gaze. “She smells bright,” Dru said, staring at Buffy.

    “It’s the moonlight, love,” Spike said.

    “I want some wine.”

    Spike flicked his eyes up at Buffy and kissed Drusilla’s throat. “Now there’s not much in her,” he said carefully. “She’s a tiny little thing.”

    “Bonbons and pomegranates,” Drusilla said. “Tiny bites of sweetness?”

    “Promise?” Spike whispered.

    Buffy looked down at the blanket. This was not how she wanted this evening to go. She didn’t quite catch how Drusilla responded, but Spike crawled over and took Buffy into his arms. “Spike...” Buffy whispered, but she couldn’t figure out how to ask him not to make her.

    “Please,” he whispered. “She won’t take much. For me.”

    Buffy wanted to argue, but she knew it wasn’t safe. He looked so helpless, suddenly. God, sometimes this was so much fun, and sometimes....  It might not be so bad if he did it. “Would you...?”

    He understood what she was asking. He slid into his fangs and kissed her hand, over and over, slowly inching up to her wrist, which he turned, kissed deeply, bit, and then kissed again. The pain faded quickly, and... boy, he was giving her a lot, suddenly. She hoped being drugged would actually make it better. It felt good, anyway. She sank against him, her body crying out for his cool hard flesh.

    Spike pulled Buffy into his lap, hugging her against his chest, and then invited Drusilla with a flick of his chin. Dru crept up, and Spike took her hand, pulling her to the rose petals. He pulled Drusilla’s head into Buffy’s lap, took another swallow from her wrist, and then held Buffy’s hand over Dru’s mouth.

    The blood dripped, running down her arm in cracks of vermilion before it trickled, drop by drop, between Dru’s waiting lips. Dru opened her mouth and took each drop as it came, catching it with her tongue, shifting her shoulders in comfortable excitement, always waiting for the next droplet.

    It was teasing. It was seductive. Buffy knew it was probably just the bite in her system – god, she hoped so – because the whole thing was kind of tantalizing. For one, she wasn’t actually being fed from. She was just bleeding, and Dru was only catching it. Moreover, Drusilla was, in fact, quite beautiful in the moonlight. Her eyes did not currently have the vicious cruelty of her darker moments, but the distant delirium that made her so childlike, so innocent in her madness. Spike held Buffy close, and Drusilla’s head was cuddled in her lap. Buffy didn’t feel like food. The closest it came to food was maybe as a bunch of grapes, but she was more of a seductive game the two vampires were playing, a link between them. It wasn’t really dehumanizing. Maybe it was the drug, and again, maybe she had more fellow feeling for Drusilla than she should have. But it was kind of hot.

    Why she should be so aroused by it, she had no idea. Again, she didn’t like to think of herself turned on by vampires and evil. But, though Dru was very much a vampire, she wasn’t being evil at the moment. She was just being herself, catching tiny drops of blood between her red lips. Whatever it was that Buffy was feeling, Spike clearly felt the same. He shifted beneath her, and she could feel his erection. He kissed her throat above its collar, nibbling at her ears, breathing tiny endearments. “Sweet pet. There we are, love. Got you.” She wondered if Dru thought they were all for her. She knew, as far as Spike was concerned, it had to be for both of them. He was holding her too closely. His hand slid down the collar of her shirt, inside the jacket, and found her breast. He fondled the nipple, gently raising it with his fingers, pinching it gently, twisting and caressing. She gasped and shivered, clenching her buttocks against his erection, as Drusilla stuck out her tongue and caught drop after drop after drop, as if they were snowflakes.

    Buffy grew more and more heated, gasping and shivering, pushing herself down against Spike, and she became more and more aware of the fact that she hadn’t put her jeans back on. Drusilla’s head was just an inch from her groin. Spike pinched at her nipple hard, and Buffy groaned. She clenched her legs tight, and Dru’s head slipped, and it wasn’t really anything, and it was still enough to send Buffy over the edge. She was startled by how hard she came, wanting it, but not wanting it, and... she hadn’t felt like this since her first affair with Spike. It was that dark feeling of, I shouldn’t be wanting this. But she did.

    She was a slayer, and she wanted the vampire.

    “I’ve a taste for a game,” Drusilla said after they’d been at it for Buffy had no idea how long. Long enough for the hit to be fading. "Would you play with me, pretty Spike?”

    “You know I will, sweet.”

    “Partners dance? I’ll play the music.”

    Spike went very still beneath Buffy.

    “I’ll go get everything ready,” Drusilla said. She rolled away, leaving the last droplet of blood to stain the blanket. “She can clear up here, yes?” She gave a truly angelic smile as she stood and looked down on the two of them. “So very sweet.”

    She headed back downstairs.

    Buffy shook off the high as well as she could and pulled away from Spike. She put pressure on her wrist. “Spike?” she asked.

    “Help me get the candles,” he said. “This whole neighborhood will go up if a fire starts. Fire engines will not come promptly.”

    Buffy knew he was avoiding the issue. “Spike, what’s this game she wants to play?”

    “No worries,” he said. “I won’t let her hurt you.”

    Buffy stood up. “You already told me you’d let her kill me.”

    “This won’t kill you, all right?” he said. He started blowing out candles.

    “Spike?”

    He ignored her.

    “Spike.”

    Silence.

    “Spike!” She came up and took hold of him, turning him. “What is it that she wants to play?”

    “We’ve played it. You and me.”

    Buffy frowned. “What?”

    “You know how I’ll bite you just at climax? The blood is very hot, hormones rushing, it’s like a hit. She enjoys it.”

    “So...” Buffy already wasn’t really down for this. “You’ll have sex with me, and she’ll bite me?” No matter how irrationally okay Buffy found herself with being a sexual blood link between Spike and Drusilla, this was getting a bit much.

    “Sort of,” he said.

    She did not like the cold look in his eyes. He was retreating. He’d gone down inside himself somewhere, was hardening. “Spike, what does sort of mean?”

    “Sort of. It’ll be fine, I’ll make sure you don’t get hurt.” He turned away again.

    “Spike! What the hell aren’t you telling me?” He didn’t answer. He just went back to blowing out candles.

    “William.”

    He looked at her then. His blue eyes were cold and dead as crystal. “She just wants to play at dollies,” he said.

 

Warning: violence, disturbing content, implied rape.

SPIKE: It was an accident. It just happened.
BUFFY: Nothing just happens!
        Dead Things
 

    “Don’t do this,” Buffy told him.

    They were back in the kitchenette. Spike had pretty much ignored her as she got herself dressed, and he finished up the candles and caught up the blanket and wine glasses. She’d demanded details as she followed him down the stairs, and she didn’t like them when she got them.

    She was to be tied up, raped by Drusilla’s blood doll, and fed from by both of them. For starters. It was appalling. It was horrifying. It was completely evil. And Buffy hated herself for not expecting it.

    She still had hope that she could talk him out of it. A hope that was growing smaller by the second.

    Spike looked at her, suspicion in his face. “You said you’d do anything I wanted you to do.”

    Buffy swallowed, and steeled herself. “I will,” she said evenly. “But you don’t want me to do this.”

    Spike cocked his head, but it was scorn, not wonder. “Oh, really. And you know me so well, you know what I want in this.”

    “Yes,” Buffy said.

    Spike lunged forward and grabbed her by the hair. “What makes you think I don’t want this?” he hissed into her face.

    It hurt, and tears stabbed her eyes, she hoped only from the pain. He was gone, he was almost completely gone. The man who had curled up to be comforted the night before, the man who had spent the early part of that evening preparing a romantic evening straight out of a cheesy movie, the easy companion who watched melodramatic supernatural soap operas and would rather brush her hair or rub her back than shag her senseless, he had all but disappeared.“You like to own,” she said, reaching for a logic she thought he could understand. “I’m supposed to be yours.”

    “You are mine,” Spike growled. “I can only give away that which is mine.”

    Buffy choked on a sob and sagged under his punishing grip. “You can fuck me,” she said to him. “You can beat me, chain me, bite me, even kill me, for crying out loud, use me for whatever pleasure you like, but if you hand me over to this man for one of Dru’s games, you will regret it.”

    “You think you’re going to make me regret it?” Spike asked.

    “I didn’t say anything about me,” Buffy told him. “I can’t make you do anything, not like this.” Contempt for her current form poisoned her words. God she wished she could be a slayer again! Spike let go her hair, and she gasped with relief. Sarah’s pitiful body wanted to run from him, but she knew how that would play out. Forcing herself to remember him as he was – or as he would be – she pushed herself to her feet and wrapped her arms around his waist. “Please, Spike,” she said. She lay her head on his chest. “You don’t want me to do this. If you make me do this, you’ll never forgive yourself.”

    Spike did not push her away, but he didn’t embrace her, either. “You think I’m suddenly going to grow a conscience?”

    “I didn’t say that,” Buffy said. She looked up at him, unable to hide the tears in her eyes. “I can handle Dru touching me, because you love her. And I want you to touch me, because I do love you. But I do not want that killer anywhere near me. Please. Please don’t make me bow under him, feel him violating me, please.” She choked. “Please!” she whispered.

    There was a long silence. “Dru gets what she wants,” Spike said.

    Buffy felt like she was talking to the wall. “Well, what do you want, Spike? You, just you. What is it that you want? To fight, to kill, to feed, to torture? Is that all of it? Because if that’s all of it, then why even stay with Dru? Why take me on? Why try to make me happy? Why aren’t you like those boys in the corridor, alone, empty, brutal?” She grabbed his jaw and made him look at her. “You can’t want this, I know you don’t. Stand up! Don’t just fall under the evil, think about it!”

    “I am thinking about it,” Spike said.

    “Then let this go!”

    He tensed. “It’s Drusilla.”

    “And that’s a cop out. It’s her idea, but you’re doing it as much as she is! Is this what you want?”

    “It’s Drusilla,” he said again. “I owe her. You can’t understand. She is everything. She is love, life, passion, everything. Do you hear me? I adore her.”

    “So adore her some other way!”

    “I can’t,” he snarled. “I will give Drusilla everything, my life, my heart, my blood. I will always – always – give her what she wants.”

    Buffy almost screamed with frustration. She knew they wouldn’t survive this. Even if she made it back, if Spike did this thing to her... if he ever found out... No. He’d find out. She couldn’t keep it a secret if she got back, and the whole thing would destroy them. Lock her up, chain her, drink from her, hurt her, share her with Drusilla, all of that and she could endure it, she could treat it as a game, forget she couldn’t say no. She could blame the demon, dismiss it as the evil itself, not him. She could forgive him for all that. He could forgive himself for that. But to tie her up to be raped by a human child killer...? No. If this happened, all they had been through, all they had fought for, their passion and their trust, his soul and his sacrifice, her acceptance, and their love, all of that would die. She would hate him, and he’d hate himself, and there could be no forgiveness. It would all end. She buried her head in her hands.

    “But that’s not actually you,” he said then.

    “What?” Buffy looked up.

    Spike gazed down at her, and then kissed her cheeks, twice, once under each eye, catching her tears as they fell. “It’s all right,” he said. “You really don’t want to?”

    “No. God, no.”

    “All right then, pet. I don’t have to give you to him.”

    She swallowed, hope glimmering. “Really?”

    “Yeah, it’ll be fine. I’ll just go out and get another girl.”

    Buffy blinked. “What?”

    “You don’t want to do it, I’ll pick up someone else. Someone random, Dru’s probably not picky. It makes sense, there’s really not much blood in you, little bit. How’s that?” He actually smiled. “Feel better about it?”

    She could tell he thought this was a kindly and generous offer. He really, really didn’t get it. At all. Buffy felt as if she were burning from the inside out. Rage ripped through her, and she slapped him. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” she demanded.

    He looked bewildered. “Hey, it leaves you off the hook.”

     “How can you say that!” she screamed at him. “That doesn’t leave me off the hook, it makes me into a monster, as surely as if you’d gone and turned me. Make it my choice whether you let him rape me, or go and slaughter some innocent girl? That is completely sick! Just tell Dru no! Just let her sulk, let her scream, let her rage, it doesn’t fucking matter! What are you, her fucking thrall?”

    “Now you wait–” he snarled.

    “Wait, hell, you know what you’re doing. You’ve got to. If you want to kill me, kill me. Because that’s what you’ll be doing, if you do this. You’ll kill me, you’ll kill this, you’ll kill everything between us, and if that doesn’t matter to you, then do it clean!”

    “Fine then, I won’t,” he said. “Just quit bitching and do what I say. It won’t be so bad. He won’t hurt you. I’d see to it.”

    “Fuck you, there are ways and ways of hurting, and you already know it, you bastard! You wouldn’t be trying to torment me with making an impossible choice if you didn’t. If you want to break me, break me. If you want to kill me, kill me. If you want to hand me over to the two of them to be raped, then do it, but that’s what you’re doing, and it’s nothing to do with me! And you can’t blame them for it, either, because you’ll have done it, as surely as if the whole sick game was your vile idea.”

    “You don’t get a say–” he began.

    “Well, what about you?” Buffy yelled. “Do you get a say in what you do?”

    “Of course I do.”

    “Then think about what the hell that is. If you’re ready to end this, then end it, and good fucking riddance to you, and to me, and to this sick, soulless, impossible helltrip!” She hit him again, as hard as she could, and it hurt her hand, and she didn’t care. “God I wish I was home! Just kill me already!” she demanded. “If this is what you do with love, you don’t deserve it. And I don’t deserve it, either. No one could deserve this shit. I don’t deserve this, I don’t deserve you, good or bad. I don’t care how many inner demons you or I have to contend with, I can’t take this! I should burn, I should die, heaven, hell, it doesn’t even matter anymore, it’s fucking over!” She hit him. “I take you to bed, and I try to find you inside the demon, and it doesn’t fucking matter, because there’s nothing left in you! There is no heart in you! I was insane to think there was. Just kill me! Do it! Kill me!” She hit him over and over and over, pushing him back against the wall, and her hand went numb with the pain, and it didn’t even matter. She was done.

    She already wasn’t sure if she could forgive him for this.

    Spike grabbed her, held her, glared down at her. “I am not ready to kill you yet!”

    “You already have!” Buffy yelled at him. “Even by offering me that sadistic choice, you’ve killed everything you know of as me. It’s not just cruel, it’s insane! You knew I couldn’t do it. If you didn’t, you weren’t paying any attention. Just fucking kill me! ” She tried to struggle out of his grip. “Or I’ll do it myself. Let me go, I’ll go to Dru, or your boys out there, just let them rend me limb from limb, it’ll be better than dealing with your sadistic idea of...”

    Spike hit her with the side of his arm. It wasn’t that hard for him, she knew, but it dazed her anyway. “Shut up!” he said. “Just shut up! Keep your bleeding knickers on and let me think dammit!”

    “Fuck you!” Buffy yelled.

    Spike picked her up, and she beat at his head as he carried her to the closet. He dumped her down on her dog bed and slapped her. “Keep your fucking mouth shut!” he yelled. “Over, is it? It’s never over, not until I say it!”

    “Just kill me already!”

    “No!” His yell made her ears ring. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his handcuffs. He struggled her hands behind her and pushed her down onto her face, so he could lock her up. She struggled, hard enough to hurt herself, and he abandoned the attempt. He pushed her down into the pillow with a final shove and pulled away, slamming the door closed on her, and he left.

    He hadn’t hooked her collar back on, so Buffy stood up and kicked at the door. The closet door was locked. She hadn’t known it did that. “Go to hell!” she yelled at the door.

    She only heard another door slam.

    She sank onto the dog bed, and fell into angry, rage stoked tears. This was insane. This wasn’t happening, it couldn’t be happening, it wasn’t fair. After all they’d been through, all the sacrifice, all the forgiveness, none of it mattered. She knew it was over. Spike didn’t know it. Her own Spike didn’t know it, but in her heart she’d just ended everything. She wrenched off the motorcycle jacket – his lying gesture of gallantry – and wrestled the collar off her throat. She couldn’t forgive him for this, not for this.

    And what the hell makes the difference? asked a voice in her head. Just because it was herself he was torturing this time, just because she was the one who endured it. What made him doing this sort of thing to all his other victims any better? She should never have been with him at all. Hell, even he knew that; he’d abandoned his pursuit of her after he’d gotten his soul. Their being lovers had ultimately been something he’d let her pursue, and win. He’d only wanted to be a help. He didn’t think he deserved her.

    And he thought that, because... Buffy groaned as the memories cut her. The pain of him. In her own time, Spike hated himself for all of this. He looked back and wept and screamed and woke from horrified nightmares of doing exactly these things. There was some part of him even now that didn’t want to look, let himself forget, bathed in the pleasure but wouldn’t allow it to be real. Once he could actually feel it completely, the memories of it had actually driven him mad. Spike, or William, to be more precise, the man he had been... he was just as unwilling a participant in all this horror as Buffy.

    That was the nightmare of it all, she realized. That was the creature who curled up beside her in her prison, and begged for her hands to comfort him. Not this twisted hell-creature who gleefully tortured human beings beside his mad lover. William was stuck there, shadowed, bound. He didn’t even have the strength to struggle. Even if the depravity felt good to him inside the demon... it wasn’t what he really wanted.

    It was as if he himself were being raped, every day, every hour, over and over and over again.

    Buffy was torn. The tears of anger turned into sheer misery, and she banged her head against the wall to try and make sense of it.

    And then she heard the door open. And a voice.... A girl, begging – Buffy couldn’t make out words in her terrified gasps. Then Drusilla’s voice. Buffy put her hands over her ears, but it didn’t block out the sound. Spike had gone to get another girl, just as he’d said he would. Buffy hadn’t made the choice. It had nothing to do with her. He was still the evil one, and she’d been left out of it. But she couldn’t ignore it when the girl started to scream.

    Buffy cursed him, loud, through the door. The only result was that the girl’s screams became muffled as someone closed the door to Drusilla’s room.

    Buffy wanted to scream herself. What was happening? Not what was happening in the other room; she knew that, all too well. What was this insane experience? Why had fate – which she knew had a pretty sadistic sense of humor when it came to her life – made her go through this horrible moment, endure this time in Spike’s life, put her in this position? It wasn’t right, it wasn’t fair.

    Or maybe it was. Maybe she’d needed her eyes opened.

    What was it that made it okay to her? What was it that had drawn her from the beginning? What was it that made her turn to Spike, and to Angel, and to bloody Dracula for god’s sake? She was even a little drawn to Drusilla, if she was honest with herself. What the hell was it? It wasn’t a thrall. They weren’t exacting magic on her. But why was it that vampires drew her, when Riley and every other human man on earth all seemed... pale. Wrong. Like they weren’t really made for her. It was like human food to a vampire; she could eat it, but it didn’t taste right.

    It wasn’t the evil. She knew it wasn’t. That horrified her. It didn’t excite her, or draw her, like Drusilla’s evil little doll, wanting to bask in Dru’s gruesome depravity, be as evil as she was. And it wasn’t the blood games, as hot as they could be. She hadn’t really played those with Angel, and she’d loved him like it was a sickness. It was something else. It was something more innate.

    It was the vampires themselves. Their flesh and their scent and the way they moved. Spike had always known that about her. Vampires get you hot, he’d said. She’d been insulted at the time, insisted it was only Angel that had done it to her, his tormented soul and his desperate need for forgiveness. But that wasn’t it. Though her soul needed another soul to be close to, just as all humans did, her body ached for the touch of the demon. It seemed she didn’t have a choice about that. Though at the same time, she was very much repulsed by the evil.

    She’d been able to ignore it with Spike. She’d dismissed their first relationship as self-destructive depression, and by the time they’d gotten together again, he’d had a soul and was one of the most self-sacrificing creatures she’d ever known. Just as she was. But right now, there was none of that. She wasn’t in a hell of depressive grief. He wasn’t a sacrificing champion. She didn’t even have the excuse of being a slayer, and liable to break a human man. He was just a vampire, and she was just Buffy, and she wanted his touch even though she knew he was steeped in blood. The fact that she needed him now, needed his blood to get home, to live, that was just window dressing. She still wanted him – had always wanted him – whether it was right or not.

    Ugh, she couldn’t think about this anymore. The noises were growing louder, and she hated herself for them as much as she hated Spike. This Spike. She wasn’t sure how she felt about her own Spike, in the future. She couldn’t think about that right now. All she knew was, she wished he was here.

    “Spike,” she whispered to herself, trying to drown out the noise. She covered her ears tightly with her hands. “Spike, I’m coming back to you. I know what you are. I know what you’ve been. I know what you’re trying to be. I know what you’ll do – oh, god, get me out here! Please! Please let me go back to you soon! I miss you. I miss all the rest of you. Please!” She wept into the blanket he had given her – the small show of humanity that he had offered that first day. “Either end this nightmare for good, or fight your damn demon, just for ten minutes. One way or another. Please get me out of this soon.”

Warning: further implied rape, and reference to Seeing Red

SPIKE: Do you know how much blood you can drink from a girl before she'll die? I do. You see, the trick is to drink just enough... to know how to damage them just enough... so that they'll still cry when you... ‘cause it’s not worth it if they don’t cry.
        Never Leave Me


    Buffy's hands were still over her ears when he opened her closet door. His shirt was off, his hair was mussed, there was still a spot of blood on the side of his mouth. She felt sick, and hadn't been able to make herself stop crying. She tried to turn away when Spike touched her. "What's with you?" he asked, lifting her partially up and into his arms – not entirely ungently, but it wasn't romantic, either. "You knew this was going to happen."

    “Fuck off.”

    He picked her up properly, and she slapped him. “Did you want me to hit you back?” he asked evenly.

    “Get off me.”

    He tensed with anger. “You’re not making sense, pet. Is this where we are, now? Is this going to be the rest of it? Vampire and victim? ‘Cause that wasn’t how I wanted it.”

    “You are so fucking evil.”

    “You knew this when you came here,” he said. “You knew the sorts of things I do. Things like this, or worse than this, and I do them all the bloody time. What’s the difference?”

    “You tried to make me do it,” Buffy said.

    Spike stared at her, his blue eyes like ice. “Yeah,” he said. “But I didn’t.”

    He left it at that.

    She couldn’t. “I said no, and you still went and...”

    “I tried,” he growled. “I saved you. And you’re being right petty about it.”

    “About you murdering someone else because she wanted me?”

    “She’d have wanted someone whether you were here or not,” he told her. “She does this sometimes. It’s nothing to do with you.”

    He was probably right. Which made the whole sordid affair no more her doing than any of the other thousands of people Spike and Drusilla had killed in their hideous unlives. But she had been there... it had been hers to witness. She’d always known he’d done things like this. “You know what I am,” he’d told her once, back when he still had no soul. “You come to me all the same.”

    What did that make her?

    But seeing it felt so different from just knowing it. Buffy sagged in his arms in resignation. "Please tell me it's over," she said. "Just tell me she's dead."

    "’Course she's dead," Spike said.

    Buffy winced, but she was still so relieved. If she wasn’t dead, Buffy would have had to make another decision – trying to save her or not – and she wasn’t up to it tonight. She didn't want Spike to touch her. Unfortunately, he seemed keen to exercise his supposed right to, despite her tacit revulsion. He pulled her out of the closet and down onto the sofa bed with him. He held her, pulling her close to his chest so tightly Buffy knew he wasn’t going to let her struggle away.

    Buffy nearly retched. The sounds that woman had been making, the knowledge that it was Spike – or at least partially Spike – that was doing it made her want to vomit. She wanted to run away so badly. She wanted to be strong enough to fight him off, or even slay him. She wanted Spike – her own Spike – to acknowledge how terrible it was, tell her it was okay, and that it was over now. He'd gone through physical and mental tortures, he knew what it was to endure them. But this wasn't her Spike; this was Drusilla's Spike, and he was a monster.

    She cringed away as he started to kiss her, but he didn't let her go. He kissed her cheeks and her eyes over and over, gently, lovingly, until she realized he wasn't just establishing dominance, his rights over her. He was kissing her tears away.

    The realization made her open her eyes and gaze at him. "What are you doing?"

    "What's it look like?" he asked, and kissed her gently on the lips.

    She pulled away. “Don’t.”

    Spike looked wounded. "What’s going on, pet? You know I kill someone almost every night. You were watching me in CB’s, I felt you. You saw it. You stood and let me do it, and followed me home like a sodding puppy. You know I am a killer. I know you’ve had your knickers in a ball about it, but you knew. And I let you off the hook. I thought you’d be happy about that.”

    “I hate what you just did,” she said.

    “I let you off.”

    “And you want me to be grateful?” Buffy said. She shook her head.

    Spike’s eyes narrowed. “Yeah,” he said pointedly. “Actually, I do.”

    “Go to hell.”

    He swallowed. “This has been hard, girl. You have no idea how hard. You have no sodding clue how much I’ve been controlling myself around you. You don’t make sense, bit. You’re treating me as if I weren’t a bloody vampire, when you know better. You know what I am. You've been just fine with every other depravity that's come through these doors."

    "I'm not fine with it," Buffy told him. "I just know it's going to happen, and there's nothing I can do about it. Not now."

    “But you’re okay with it.”

    “I hate it.” She closed her eyes in misery. “I hate it,” she whispered.

    “So if you hate it so much, why are you all right with me touching you?”

    “Who says I am?” Buffy asked, annoyed.

    “You have,” Spike said. “Until just this moment. Every day, every night. You’ve been willing and open and smiling.”

    Buffy sank her head. She had been. And she was entirely twisted up about it. She’d been making love to the man inside him and pretending the evil didn’t own him. He couldn’t tell the difference, though. It was all one to him.

    “Why have you been all right with it, when it’s me?”

    She couldn’t explain. “Because it is you,” she said. “God, don’t make me try to explain.”

    “I’m the most prolific killer in this house. Compared to the boys, to Dru, I’m nastier. I’m hungrier.”

    “So?”

    “So, you know that, and you’ve been okay with touching me. And yet you freak out at a doll that I wouldn’t have allowed to hurt you.”

    “He’s evil.”

    “He hasn’t killed near as many as I have. And he’s the one who makes you tremble with revulsion?”

    “He’s a willful killer.”

    There was a long pause. “I’m a killer,” Spike said quietly. “What’s the bloody difference?”

    “You’re a vampire,” Buffy said.

    “And?”

    “You’re a demon. You were made to kill, it’s your nature, it’s a need that was born in you the moment Drusilla turned you.” Spike looked startled again, and Buffy realized she’d just revealed she knew another truth about him. No matter now. “The demon ripped out your soul and turned you into a creature of darkness, and now that’s what you are. The rules of humanity, of morality, of good and evil... they placed you on one side, and it would take a miracle to make any difference. But that... thing in there... that beast that was born a man has no such excuse.”

    “I thought you accepted the killing,” Spike said, his voice dull. “I thought you wanted me, the warrior, the murderer. I thought you understood that.”

    “I accept that,” Buffy said. “But that doesn’t mean I have to like it. I hate that you kill. I hate that almost every night someone, somewhere, is going to die at your hands. But that’s what you do. That’s not you.”

    “It is me,” Spike said, sounding angry. “I thought you grasped that. I am the killer, the killer is me. I bloody love it. I revel in it. I bathe in it, in joy and exultation. Nothing’s ever going to change that.”

    “Maybe not,” Buffy said. “But Spike, you’re evil because you are a vampire, and as a vampire... were you really left with a choice?”

    Spike stared down at her. “What do you mean?”

    “Think about it,” she said. “Think about when you were human. Is any of this what you would have wanted?”

    “I never think about that.”

    “Why not?” Buffy said. “You see? It hurts, doesn’t it?”

    “No!” Spike said.

    “Think of yourself as that person, and then look and see what you are.”

    “That person,” Spike said, “wasn’t me.”

    “I know it wasn’t,” Buffy said. “Because he was murdered.”

    “And now I am the murderer,” Spike said. “And I revel in it. That is what I am.”

    Buffy’s head sank into his shoulder. “Why can’t you see it?” she said. “I know you remember. Why can’t you remember how it felt?”

    “I do,” he said. “I remember how it felt. It felt weak, and scared, and lonely. I wasn’t alive until I was killed.”

    “And now killing is the only thing that makes you feel alive?” Buffy asked. “That’s it, you know. The difference between the doll, and you. The choice to be only yourself was taken from you, blasted by bloodlust and the need to kill. You were made into a monster. He chooses to be.”

    “I choose to be,” Spike said.

    “No,” Buffy said. “The way you are, the killing is all but forced on you. You woke poisoned by a lust for blood, the feeling that bad was good, and a complete disregard and contempt for humanity. You kill and you feed, because that’s what... what god or fate or the devil made you do, not because you wanted to.”

    “No one makes me do anything.”

    “Maybe. But you’re a chess piece in a supernatural war of good and evil, turned into a wicked creature, and separate from the laws of man. He’s a man – or he should have been.”

    “And that makes him better?”

    “No. It makes him a hundred times worse. You have no soul, you have no conscience, both have been stolen from you. You didn’t abandon them or corrupt them on your own. His soul is drenched in depravity and blood.” She shook her head. “The rules of the demon world and the human world are different. You can’t help what you are. He should be able to.”

    Spike regarded her. “And what the hell are you?” he asked. “What about your soul, your precious conscience? You think they stay so clean, when you willingly crawl into bed with a murderer?”

    Buffy sank under the twisted logic of it all. She couldn’t tell him that he was a vampire with enough heart to grow the tiniest hint of a conscience, enough to make choices beyond evil, enough to choose to earn back his soul. A miracle that no other vampire had managed – Angel had been forced into it. She couldn’t tell him that she was making love to his past, only because she knew his future. She also couldn’t tell him the real reason: that her own soul was also tainted by demonic energy. She’d had violence and death burned into her soul from the time her dreams had started as a potential, before she was even called as a slayer. She too was a killer... she was just more discriminant.

    “This is where I need to be,” she said instead. “I know you’re a killer. I have to accept that.” For now, she didn’t say.

    He was silent a long time. "So you accept that,” Spike said. “So what started this?" He kissed each of her eyelids in turn.

    “Because what you did was terrible.”

    Spike regarded her. “She wasn’t hurt much.”

    Buffy threw up her hands in frustration. “That doesn’t make it better!”

    “Wouldn’t hurting her have made it worse?”

    “Yes, but...! Oh, god, Spike, I am so talking to an empty void. It was rape, and it was death.”

    “Yeah, but it was gentle.”

    “And you couldn’t hear her screaming?” Buffy groaned. “No, of course you could, you liked it. I can’t do this.” She made to get off the bed.

    “No. Explain it to me. You begged me to tell you she was dead, and it was over. You watched me kill before, and followed, you didn’t pull away then. If it wasn’t the death that was the problem, and it wasn’t pain, then...?”

    “Spike, what you just did was pure evil!”

    “So is just killing. Why is there a difference?”

    “God. Spike... to be held down and forced like that is one of the most horrific things that can happen to anyone.”

    “I don’t know if I agree.”

    “You don’t have to agree! Just believe me, I know, okay? Personally.”

    Spike regarded her. “You’re saying that’s what I’ve been doing to you.”

    Buffy sagged. She was probably the only real person in the world to him at the moment. Accusing him was the worst possible thing she could do. It would turn him completely evil in his own eyes, and destroy all the progress she’d made.  “No.” She rolled her eyes and sighed. “I came here with... whaddyacallit, informed consent. I knew what I was getting into.” She looked down. “That was something else.”

    He was gazing at her with concern. “What?”

    Buffy swallowed, and then decided, what the hell. Might as well tell him the truth. Or part of it, anyway. "I was nearly raped once," she said. "It was... horrible. And I know what she... I couldn't help but think... remember... what that felt like... when I thought you’d make me... and as I listened to what was going on in there." That had been harder to say than she’d expected. “So, yeah. I know personally, okay?”

    Spike looked at her. "Grabbed in an alley?"

    "How many rapists really lurk in alleys like vampires?” Buffy asked.

    “So you knew him.”

    She wouldn't look at him. "It was a friend of mine,” she said. The memory of it was confused, with darkness on both sides of the equation. It was no longer traumatic to recall, but it was dark and pained. She knew how much the moment, and the situation itself, had tortured both of them. “More than a friend, actually. Someone... someone I'd once tried to love. And for a lot of reasons, I wasn’t... prepared to love him. Some of it was him. Some of it was me. But I couldn’t love him properly, not as things were. He loved me a lot, and I’d... hurt him by leaving. Hurt him a lot more than I meant to. He couldn’t accept my decision... felt he needed me back. He thought... for a brief moment there... that he could make me love him." She swallowed. "He betrayed me."

    She couldn't see his eyes, but she could feel the weight of his stare. "Want me to kill him for you?"

    The black humour of his blunt question made Buffy laugh aloud. She was actually touched. She almost started crying again.

    "I mean it. If he's in New York, he'll be pretty easy to find. Phone books are wonderful things. I can even bring him here and kill him in front of you, if you want." He ran his finger down her cheek. "Make sure he knows why he's dying." His tone was both dark and seductive, and she knew he meant well. In his sick, soulless way. “I can do it really, really painfully.” He sounded like it would be a sexual treat.

     "No," she said. "In a way, you already killed him." Or you will have, she thought to herself.

    Spike grunted, almost disappointed. "One of the CB crowd? Sorry. Probably wouldn't remember, I kill a lot of people."

    "No," Buffy said. "You wouldn't remember."

    "Is that why you came to me?" he asked softly. "Because of that?"

    "In a way," she said. She looked up at him, finally. Another two tears escaped her eyes, and Spike gently kissed each of them away. "Why are you doing that?" she asked. It was an uncharacteristically gentle gesture – or uncharacteristic for this version of Spike, anyway.

    He shrugged. "I like to. I've always liked to. That's why I make girls cry." He stared at her through half hooded eyes. "Tears aren't blood, but..." He ran his lips along her skin. "I like to take it from them anyway."

    Buffy was stunned. "You make girls cry because... you like to kiss it away?"

    "Yeah," he said. He leaned back against the pillows and gazed at her, propping her against him so he could run his fingers through her hair. "Learned it from a mate of mine. He used to have ideas about the best ways to kill, came up with really inventive death games. He liked to take a bunch of girls – he'd use a whorehouse, if there was nothing else available, but he preferred garden parties, reading or sewing clubs. Virgins, ideally. He'd lock 'em up, start raping and feeding, while the others watched, screaming in terror. He got off on how their terror fed into itself. But you know, you get full if you take a whole victim, so he'd take part of a girl, and then leave her while he turned to another. I started out just taking one of them, and watching, but his leftovers looked really appealing. Pale and crying and tragic, and... it got to the point I'd come up after him and just take them in my arms."

    His eyes were distant then, almost wistful, as he fondled Buffy's hair. "I'd pull them up real gently... kiss all those tears away, and then just take away their pain. They were so glad to see me. They were so grateful, they’d just fall into me. Some clung to me like they’d been drowning before I came to them. It was wonderful to be wanted like that. I'd kill them so gentle..." He glanced down at her. "Ah, well, but you know what that's like."

    Buffy was amazed. "You... Angel tortured them, and you'd... rescue them?"

    Spike's eyes narrowed. "You know Angelus?"

    Buffy shook her head. "Not really," she said, rather than try and get into details she'd have to keep vague anyway. "I just know you."

    "Yeah, well. Dunno if you'd call it a rescue, I was killing them."

    "But you did it gentle," she said.

    Spike shrugged. "I enjoyed it," he said. "Loved feeling all that pain and terror just disappear in my arms. The way they'd give themselves to me, completely, just to escape." He glanced down at her chuckling fondly. "There aren't a lot of victims who'll do that." He brushed a strand of hair out of her face, his eyes remarkably soft. "Not naturally." He gazed at her for another long moment, confusion and questions in his eyes, which they both knew she wasn't going to answer properly. "Finally he realized what I was doing, and asked why I waited for him. Told me I didn’t have to. So I do it all myself now. Make 'em cry, and take it away. It's nice."

    Buffy stared at him. "You are so twisted."

    Spike smiled a bit. "Hey, evil, pet. What did you expect?"

    "I didn't say evil. I said twisted. You're right – it is nice. It's disgusting and vile and horrifying, and kind." She touched his cheek. "God, what did they do to you? You must have been the sweetest man in the century when you were human."

    "I was weak," Spike snarled, but his anger was only on the surface, she could tell. "I was pitiful. Now I'm a bloody god." Then he grabbed her by the hair and lifted her, painfully, dragging her up so he could stare into her eyes. "I'm your bloody god."

    "I'm your pet," Buffy said softly, trembling again. She would have given anything to be a slayer again, to be able to win against him with strength and agility she didn't have. All she had was what she knew of him, and her love for him, and the hope – the slim hope – that both of those things might soften his heart long enough for him to show her mercy, for just ten minutes.

    "Then don't insult me," he said.

    “I wasn’t trying to insult you,” Buffy whispered. “I was just trying to find you.”

    “What do you mean?”

    “Your heart,” she said. She reached forward, even though it pulled at her hair, and kissed his hollow cheek. “Your blood,” she added. “The reason you didn’t make me go into that room when I begged you. No matter how... twisted... your offer was.” He released her hair, and she climbed over him, straddling him, kissing at his throat, his face, wishing that she could magically transform him into her tender, loving Spike as she did it. “All the things that make me love you. The warrior...” she kissed along his heated, blood tainted skin, “and the poet. The hunter and the lover. The rebel vampire.”

    He lay still beneath her. “The poet. How did you know that?” he asked without inflection. “How did you know what I was?”

    “Spike...” She looked up at him. “William. Haven’t you figured it out yet? I know you. I love you. What does it matter how?” She reached down and unbuttoned his jeans. His cock, when she found it, was sticky and soft in her hand. Oh, god. Buffy nearly retched. He was examining her reaction with his face neutral. “You raped her too, didn’t you,” Buffy said quietly.

    He only stared at her. They both knew the answer.

    Crossroads. He’d told her, years ago, what he’d done to girls before the chip, before the soul. He’d told her, and she’d taken him to her bed all the same. Thirty years in the future, she’d accepted he had done this. Now she was here, when he had. So. Could she accept his past, or couldn’t she?

    No. She didn’t have to accept it. She only had to know it, and move on.

    So move on.

    Buffy climbed off him and pulled away. “No you don–” he began.

    He was about to drag her back when she caught his hand. “Come with me.”

    “What?”

    “Come. Please.”

    “I am not your dog to come when I’m called.”

    He was hot with the blood and high on the evil. She had to be patient. “No,” Buffy said. “But you live a life drenched in blood and screaming, filled with people you need to lie to and manipulate and torture and force. Have I been any part of that?”

    He didn’t answer. Buffy pulled on his hand to make him sit up, and this time he let her. “Let me clean that stuff off you,” she said. She shouldn’t have to snuggle up to it, after all. She touched his cheek, avoiding the spot stained with the girl’s blood. “Give yourself one thing in this world that’s pure. Just for a few more days.” He stared at her, and when she pulled again on his hand, he stood up with her.

    As if in a daze, Spike let her lead him into the bathroom and turn on the shower. She turned to him to strip him down. There were blood spots on more places than his lower lip. She did not want to think about all he had just done to the girl. She knew that in thirty some years, when he looked back on this moment, he himself would be horrified by what he had done to the girl. That thought was the only reason she was able to keep going. She kept her thoughts focused on his future. That girl... she’d been tortured, raped, and killed, all of it without her consent. And Spike had just been made to torture, rape, and kill... and ultimately, it was without his own consent, either.

    Somewhere out there was a stripped soul, who would look back on this evening and scream with the horror of it. Deep in his heart, echoing in the hollowness where his soul should be, William the romantic poet was just as trapped and horrified and tormented by this whole thing as she was, and refused to let himself look at it. Two prisoners of circumstance. He’d been able to deflect the worst of it from someone he cared for tonight, but that was the current limit of his strength. It would take thirty years and more for that prisoner inside to grow strong enough to break out. He had needed help to do it. He’d needed time and healing and reasons beyond himself. He had needed an electronic leash to help him get off the addictive human blood long enough for his mind to clear.

    And he had needed Buffy to help him. Through pain and pleasure and trust, both honored and shattered. She’d demanded he be held accountable, and he had needed her strength to find his own. And he had. He would. He would fight this demon, and ultimately defeat it, though he himself admitted he’d never really be free of it. And once he had, there would be almost perfect equality between him and her, but until that time, he was still trapped. She loved the man he would become inside the horror. She reached for the tortured prisoner inside his own flesh.

    She removed his clothes slowly, letting the steam from the shower fill the room. Then she removed her shirt and showed him into the water.

    Without a word she rubbed him down, using the stream of water to caress him as much as her hands. She lathered him with soap, sliding down his arms, lacing her fingers through his, letting the slippery bubbles wash away the blood and sweat and whatever else he was covered with.

    She cleaned the blood taint away with her own hands, his face, his arms, his chest, his cock, touching every part of him, sliding down his legs and lifting his feet, cleaning every drop of blood and slime and filth away from his cool flesh. He closed his eyes and let his hand lace through her hair, resting over her scalp. The warm water poured over her head, dripping down her jaw line, trickling along her breasts and down her torso, eventually soaking the edge of her jeans.

    He made a deep noise and stepped back in the shower, pulling her with him. His wet hands reached down and pulled the jeans down off her hips – they were loose enough on her that he didn’t actually have to unbutton her. They fell around her ankles, and Buffy stepped out of them as she let him pull her into the shower with him.

    She wondered if he was going to try and have sex with her. She wasn’t sure she was ready for that yet. But that didn’t seem to be what he was after. Spike closed the shower door and stepped back from the stream of water, pulling Buffy directly under the shower. He went down to his knees with her and gazed at her, his head tilted, confusion and awe stark on his face. The water fell around her shoulders, soaking her hair, and he reached out to touch her cheek. “Is this pure, for you?” he asked her. “Is this clean?”

    His eyes were very bright in the steam, and he searched her face. “Yes,” she said.

    He didn’t seem like he believed her. “I haven’t forced you?”

    Buffy shook her head. “You may have meant to,” she said. “But I knew what I was getting into. I walked in all the same.”

    “I’ve hurt you,” he said. “I’ve bitten you, painfully. I’ve chained you up and held you down, and none of that felt forced to you?”

    Buffy shook her head. “Some of it has been troublesome. But I came to you willingly.” She touched his cheek. “William, look at me. I am not one of your sins.”

    Spike stared at her. Then he closed his eyes, as if in pain, or ecstasy, and he hissed with something she couldn’t decipher. Then he looked at her again. “And all this killing and corruption... you hate it.”

    Buffy held his eyes with hers. “I am not like Dru’s doll,” Buffy said. “I’m not here to be corrupted. I am here to love you. That’s all.”

    He searched her eyes for a long moment, and then reached for her. He pulled her into his lap as if she were a little girl, and then gently lowered his mouth to her throat. The bite was gentle, and he gave back immediately, killing the pain and sending her down. The warm water cascaded over both of them. He was breathing hard, as if in the throes of wild passion, but his movements were all deliberate and very gentle. Buffy realized he was shaking, slightly. He pulled her down quickly, the bite drawing her deeper and deeper into the lethargy. Little sounds of desperate pleasure escaped his throat, and she gasped. The feel of him against her as the warm water poured down her back and over his legs, the hard tingling sensuality of his bite, it all felt so right just then. It was a link of death, but right then, it was sacred.

    Just like it used to be.

    It was so perfect, and she felt so lost. She wasn’t a slayer. He had no soul. This wasn’t slayer and vampire, the perfect yin and yang. This wasn’t kindred souls gripping to each other against the sea of the world’s confusion and pain. This was just Spike and Buffy. It didn’t make sense. And it was still perfect.

    As the darkness flooded through her, she wondered if he really was about to kill her this time.
    

***
    
    She woke curled up in the bed, with Spike’s arms around her. Still naked, her hair still damp. Something smelled different. She realized he’d washed her hair while she was out, just as he did for Drusilla. She was still a little high on the bite, she could tell. She snuggled in close to his chest, and he caressed her damp hair. “Back?” he asked.

    “Mm-hm,” Buffy hummed.

    He let them snuggle there for a long moment before he said, “You can’t redeem me, you know.”

    “I know.”

    His voice was very low, very calm. “I’m not only steeped in sin, I am made of it,” he said. “I am a vampire. There is no redemption for a demon.”

    “No one would think so,” Buffy said neutrally.

    “I cannot be made clean. No matter how you try to cleanse me. No matter how pure and unsullied your gifts are, no matter how freely you give them, they are placed at the feet of a monster. All I can ever do is corrupt, or kill.”

    “I know that.”

    There was a long, long silence before he spoke again. “I love you,” he said then.

    Buffy sank her head into his chest. She had missed his voice, and those words. It felt so good to hear it, and she knew it had to be a lie. “You don’t have to lie to me,” she said. “I know I’m only a pet.”

    “Yes, you are,” Spike said. “I didn’t say I loved you like I love Drusilla. I am going to kill you one day. But I don’t think I’ve ever had anything pure before. Not since I was a man.” She could feel him shake his head in bewilderment. “You’ve up and made me love you,” he said. “Bloody hell.” He kissed her forehead. “I could almost hate you for it.”

    Buffy smiled. “I know that feeling.”

    He kissed her face, over and over again, and then his hand slid down her side, over her hip, until it slipped in between her legs. He manipulated her clit with his first two fingers, and she gasped, her legs spreading automatically. He slid down, moistening his fingers with her, and then sliding back up to tickle around her clit, over and over again, sliding up and around and over the swollen nub as if he were dancing with it. She hummed and moaned and bit her lip, letting every nuance of pleasure pass across her face, which he stared at as he worked her.

    He took nothing for himself, just stared and tried to pleasure her. She was so tired it took a long time, but he didn’t seem to get bored with her. She got so close to coming so many times, and each time the sensation plateaued and faded again without the final shudder of completion. She kept expecting him to give up, but he just lay there, working her with his fingers, seeming to enjoy playing with her, until one of those plateaus lingered... and lingered... and lingered... lulling her into a peaceful, blissful state, which quite suddenly exploded, leaving her whimpering, then moaning, then eventually screaming under his hand. When her pleasure had reached the point of pain he let her go, and she lay there gasping, still whining like a whipped puppy as every pulse seemed to start another spasm.

    She looked up at him, and his eyes held such wicked pleasure that she grinned. She’d have laughed, if she had the energy, but she was still suffering aftershocks. Mischief shining in his eyes, he raised his two fingers to her mouth, half forcing, half inviting her to taste her own juices. She opened her lips and he slid his fingers in. She tasted of salt and sex, and just the hint of their shower. She bit down on his fingers, and he hummed with pleasure at it. For a few moments he slid his fingers sensuously around her mouth, as if they were making love to her, and she sucked and bit and played with them as they danced round her teeth and tongue. After a bit he pulled his fingers away and replaced them with his mouth. He kissed her passionately for a few moments, and then pulled away to look at her. “I do love you,” he said.

    Buffy knew what this was going to do to him, if that was true. “I’m sorry.”

    “You will be, you little bitch,” he said, his voice very fond. “It means I’m going to kill you very slowly.”

    “Looking forward to it,” Buffy said. She was already half asleep again.

    Spike bent to her neck, but he did not bite her again. He kissed and sucked on the wound he’d inflicted earlier. It probably didn’t give him much in the way of blood, but it went numb, and probably did send her back into a high. She closed her eyes and let him do whatever he wanted to her.

    What he actually did was let her sleep.

 

Warning: rape reference – past tense

ANGELUS: Don't mistake me. I do love the ladies. It's just lately... I've been wondering what it'd be like... to share the slaughter of innocents... with another man. Don't... don't think that makes me some kind of a deviant, hmm? Do you?
            Destiny            


    Buffy woke to Spike nuzzling her fingers. His arm was around her shoulders, and his hand gently running through her hair. And she woke startled, with a feeling akin to panic the moment she saw his face.

    The night before had taken its toll. Spike had crossed a line that was difficult to excuse. He’d stepped back behind it – barely – but it had left a stain. Buffy knew intellectually what was real and what had to happen. She could understand and rationalize and forgive. But Sarah’s vulnerable body and Buffy’s own moral conscience could not be so easily placated. There was a moment of instinctual panic, her heart racing, a startled gasp, a moment of wanting to flee.

    “Hey,” said Spike quietly. “Hey, it’s okay.”

    Buffy blinked and tried to settle herself down. “Hi,” she said, swallowing the panic.

    “And that is the first time I’ve seen actual fear on your face.”

    “I just woke up,” she said. “It doesn’t count.”

    “Yeah it does,” Spike said. “You only just realized I’m a monster.”

    “I always knew that,” Buffy whispered.

    “But it didn’t strike you until last night. Not for real.”

    He was right. Buffy heaved a sigh, and was ashamed to realize it shook. “There’s a big difference between knowing, and seeing.”

    “Is there?”

    “Yeah.”

    He looked curious. “What do you mean?”

    “I mean, actually seeing horror can be as bad as having it done to you.”

    “Bollocks.”

    Buffy rolled her eyes. “Spike... vampires don’t really have it, but it’s called empathy. Humans feel it when they see it happening to someone else. To some extent, seeing pain, hearing fear, we feel the pain, we’re made afraid. To a lesser extent, but it’s real, it’s there. It’s why we like watching porn, or romantic movies. We feel it.”

    “Seeing pain...”

    “Only makes you feel good, I know. But to me, it hurts.”

    He looked completely bewildered. In life, Buffy knew, he’d been sheltered. He’d never really been around actual violence. “So how the hell do humans hurt each other? They do it all the time.”

    Buffy sighed. “It’s not a superpower. It’s a neruopathway thingy. And some feel more or less than others, that’s all. Just like some enjoy music more, or are better at dancing. It’s the same as with everything else.”

    “But it doesn’t make sense.”

    “Do you really not remember? Think about it. When you were human, was there anyone you didn’t like seeing in pain?”

    She knew there was – his mother – but she wasn’t sure if he could remember. “I...” He didn’t answer.

    She skipped back to his vampire memories. “Like those girls you mentioned, that Angel attacked. They felt for each other. That girl last night... I felt for her.”

    “I... can’t even imagine....”

    “Sure you can. I know it’s complicated, ‘cause she kinda likes a lot of it, but... like that dream Drusilla had. You feel bad when Dru’s hurting like that. Don’t you?”

    He blinked. “And you’d feel that for every sodding human being on the bloody planet?”

    “Most of them,” Buffy said. “Yeah. At least when it’s put in front of you. I even feel kinda bad for Dru’s doll, and he’s evil.”

    He looked horrified. “How do you endure it?”

    “You have to try and turn it off, sometimes,” Buffy admitted. “But mostly... you help. As much as you can. That’s what the good guys do. We help, and we heal, and we save.”

    He thought about this. “So I didn’t save you last night. I just hurt you a different way.”

    “And here you’d been pretty proud of yourself, weren’t you.”

    He looked disgruntled. “What does it take?”

    Buffy laughed. This was old Spike, soulless, selfish, and flabbergasted, but she knew him. “Don’t worry about it right now,” she said. “It’s done.”

    “Is there anything I can do?” he asked.

    Not for about thirty years, Buffy thought. “No.”

    Spike regarded her. “I can treat you gently for a while.”

    “You’ve been doing that, anyway.”

    “Yeah,” he said. “I guess I have.” Then he stopped. “I’m sorry I hit you.”

    “I hit you, first,” Buffy said.

    “That doesn’t make it right.”

    That was a surprise. “Since when do you care about right?”

    Spike paused. “Never,” he said. “You’re messing me up something royal, pet.”

    “Join the club,” Buffy said glumly.

    Spike touched her chin. “That wasn’t how I wanted last night to go.”

    Buffy closed her eyes and let her head sink against him. “I know it wasn’t.”

    “You know, it didn’t even occur to me...” he hesitated. “Before I decided to leave you out of it, I didn’t think.... It’s been a long time since I was human. I didn’t realize... I thought so long as I didn’t let you get hurt, you wouldn’t mind.”

    Buffy looked up at him. “You thought I’d be just fine with being raped.”

    “Well, yeah. You’re not a virgin. There’s no one weighing a dowery on your chastity. What have you got to lose?”

    Buffy stared. Vampires looked so human. They had the memories and the voices and many of the interests of humans. Sometimes it was hard to remember that they weren’t just evil human beings – they were demons. A completely different species. Things which any human being would take for granted, they had to be reminded, or taught. She remembered before he’d gotten his soul how Spike had knocked her out and chained her up to declare his love, then offered her his kill as if it were a sacred sacrifice, and he had honestly thought that was romantic. From his perspective, it had been.

    “Spike,” she said carefully. “There is no one on earth who would honestly be okay with that. And I’m not talking rape-style role play, that’s a game, and even that you have to be careful with. No one would ever be okay with being violated like that.”

    Spike shrugged. “I don’t see why not.”

    “God, talking to a wooden post. Violated. What part of that word is hard to understand?”

    “The part where it would bother you.”

    “Wha..?”

    “No! I mean, why fret? It could be fun. New experience, something different. And whatever you live through just makes you stronger.”

    “That is so not true. Ask anyone who’s been traumatized. It can make people stronger, but it can also break them.”

    “Well, yeah, but you can learn how to deal with it.”

    Buffy was rapidly losing her ability to have this conversation, let alone touch him while having it. She sat up and glared at him. “It is not fair to ask anybody to just ‘deal with it.’”

    “It works. You just decide to, and you do it.”

    “Spike, that’s insane.”

    “No. That’s how it works.”

    “Like you’d know.”

    “‘Course I do.”

    “Like you’ve ever been raped.”

    “Sure I have.”

    Buffy stopped, and blinked. “What?”

    “Of course I have,” Spike said with a casual shrug. “Vampires don’t treat each other any more gently than they treat their victims. I wasn’t always the biggest bad in the pack.”

    “What?” Buffy asked again.

    Spike looked at her with delight. “Have I actually said something that has surprised you, for once? Yeah, I’ve been raped. By Dru, by her sire, even his sire, in whatever game they were keen on playing at the time.”

    “Angel... he did...?”

    “Angelus. You keep saying Angel. Only Dru called him my angel.”

    “Angelus,” Buffy said. “I didn’t....” She blinked at him. “You never told me.”

    Spike blinked at her. “Why would I? The subject’s never come up before.” He pulled her close to him and nuzzled her ear. “I realize it feels like we’ve been together forever, love, but I think we’re on day six.”

    “I just... I didn’t think...” Buffy was stunned. She’d known him all this time. She’d lived with him and made love to him and heard about his murder and his mother and his childhood. Spike had told her about being tortured, and being insane, and being dismembered, and being burned to ash. There were a hundred different traumas that he had discussed with her, and she had commiserated over. And he’d never told her this. “He raped you? He really raped you?”

    “Oh, all the bloody time,” Spike said blithely. The casual way he discussed it made it somehow worse. “Dru belonged to him. I couldn’t have Dru without having him, too. He started slow, of course, months after I’d been turned. Almost seducing me into it, but by the time he was done...” Spike chuckled, darkly. “Sometimes I was into it, sometimes I really wasn’t. The first time... that one was horrific. I was such a stupid kid. I barely even understood what he was after, the first time. And often he preferred it when I screamed. And... not in a good way.” He chuckled. “But he was a master at that sort of thing. The hunt. The seduction. The final sting of betrayal and what all.”

    Buffy knew this. Through experience.

    “Angelus said if I was going to be part of his gang, I had to be his,” Spike went on. “And there was only one way to be made into his.” He fondled Buffy’s hair. “Blood... and flesh... and life... and death.... Yeah, he did what he wanted to me,” Spike said, and he crept over Buffy like a hunting cat. He kissed her lips, her cheek, her throat, and breathed heavily into her ear. “He’d strip me naked and drain me dry of all my new vampiric blood, leaving me too weak to even lift my head.” He kissed her shoulder, her collar bone. “He’d hold me down and force himself on me while I cried with the ache and the shame of it. He made my body writhe with it in twisted pain and pleasure until I couldn’t tell the difference anymore.”

    He was all turned on by the thought. Buffy didn’t know what to think. It was the kind of thing that would make her go all, “That’s too thinky for me,” and make her want to go out and hit something. Also the idea of Spike and Angel, and all the times she’d touched both of them.... But the horror of it... the violation in it... that was....

    Finally she just put herself aside and decided to absorb the information now, and think about it later.

    But Spike was all about the imparting now, and Buffy didn’t want to admit his ardor was getting to her. She remembered in their earliest affair how she’d demanded he tell her some unpleasant truths while they fucked for five hours straight, talk to her in the abstract about how he used to kill, for instance. It had turned her on wildly, at the time. But they hadn’t added the discussions of violence into their lovemaking for a long time. Buffy didn’t know if it was due to his reclaimed soul, or her own less-destructive emotional state, but neither of them had really felt the need to bring anyone else into their bed, even in words. Shared blood and shared pain belonged to them now, and the victims were far away from all of it. But Spike had just brought Angel in, with himself as the victim, in a way she was sure he never would have in their own time. Buffy’s heart beat wildly. She didn’t know herself if it was horror or arousal; that would be way too thinky.

    “He pounded into me until I felt I’d split in half,” he whispered. He bit gently at her throat and his cock prodded between her legs. It felt good, and she wasn’t sure why, given the images he was painting in her head. Vampires. Vampires, being vampires, feeding on and fucking each other. She trembled, and it wasn’t entirely with revulsion.“Just imagine,” he went on. “Picture me, new to darkness. I had instincts to kill, but the rest... that was all new. I’d abandoned the rules, but I didn’t know what I was doing. I couldn’t have.”

    He kissed her, and then pulled away to stare into her eyes. “I was a thousand times more innocent than you, sweet one,” he said. “It wasn’t like now, sexual revolution come and gone, the pill on every girl’s dresser, free love made positively passé. My youth wasn’t like this lust powered decade. I’d never even kissed a girl until Drusilla turned me. Innocence... ignorance... what was the difference? Blood and death were just as taboo as sex. Actually... that era made love to death, jet jewelry and photographs of dead children. But sex...”

    He chuckled. “In Victorian England, we never even discussed the ‘limbs’ of the furniture, covering them all with long tablecloths, because thinking about legs was considered too erotic. And then to be caught up... by an Irish libertine out of a Gothic novel, who relished torture like a fine wine....” He laughed softly. “There he was... what was your word?  Violating me.” He kissed her, hard. “And I knew what it was to be evil. Finally.” He found his way inside her, and she was wetter than she’d expected to be. God, she had to be totally sick to find this erotic. He pulsed in her, breathing hard with lust.

    “Freedom to take anything,” he whispered. “Anything, and anyone at all. There were times he’d plunge himself so deep down my throat I passed out. There were times he tore me open with how hard he took me. There was even one time he used a stake... carved himself a new space for his pleasure, sliding in and out with the blood–”

    Oh, god, way too much. There it was. Spike’s pull back question, Too much for you? chimed in her. She wished she could say that now. Buffy made a sound, feeling sick, but she didn’t want him to pull away, and she didn’t ask him to stop. She couldn’t imagine the memory wasn’t painful for him, even soulless and empty. She wondered if he could only face it by contrasting it with pleasure, comforting himself with it, in the same way horror movies could make some women extremely horny. In some ways, that was how she was feeling.

    “He made me his disciple,” Spike breathed, “made himself my guru.” He slid into his fangs and scratched Buffy’s shoulder with his teeth, not biting down. Just a single scratch, a slight trickle of blood. He licked at it, and kissed along it, and then kissed her – just the slight taste of her blood still in his sharp mouth. “There isn’t an evil I’ve done that he didn’t teach me how to refine. Don’t just find a girl and kill her – slaughter a wedding party and rape the bride. The irony. The torment. That was what he taught me. He was a master of the slow torture,” Spike said. “But in the end, only I was strong enough to kill a slayer. It wasn’t until I did that that I knew... I could be better than him. I didn’t... need... him.” He chuckled. “I didn’t need to be like him, either.”

    “I didn’t know that had happened to you,” Buffy whispered.

    Spike smiled down at her. “There’s something about me you don’t know?” he said. “I am delighted.” He kissed her.

    Buffy had known that Angel had taken Spike on, acting as a kind of a mentor, teaching him the proper respect for his new darkness. She had thought he’d just taught him how to kill. Angel had admitted he’d done terrible things to Spike. Buffy had had no idea how terrible. There had been hints, but Spike had never said anything, and he’d been willing to share so much. She’d just assumed it hadn’t happened. Now she knew she was wrong. Woefully wrong.

    No wonder they hated each other so much. Their relationship had just taken on at least three new dimensions of confusion. Close family, mentor and disciple, victim and abuser... lover? She was pretty sure neither of them would want it characterized as that in her own time. And she was between them. Because she couldn’t keep her hands off these beautiful vampires.... “I’m sorry.”

    “Don’t be. He was my sire. Or, grandsire, I guess. I all but worshiped him. I grew used to it. Came to like it, even. But it could be very... intrusive... at times.”

    “I love you,” she whispered, meaning it more than she could have thought possible. Her sorrow and sympathy ached inside her. Why hadn’t Spike ever told her before?

    His darkness faded, and his blue eyes smiled down at her. “You are a wicked, wicked bitch,” Spike whispered back. “You actually care what’s happened to me?”

    “You know I do.”

    “That empathy you mentioned?”

    “Yes.”

    He chuckled. “Sounds hellish.”

    “You have no idea.” She touched his face. “Particularly right now.”

    “You mean what happened to me?”

    “I mean, what you do to others,” she whispered.

    He swallowed and pulled away. “Do you need me to stop?” he asked.

    She shook her head. “I don’t need to hear anymore,” she said. “But you don’t have to stop.”

    He gazed down at her for a long moment, crouched on the bed between her knees. “Do you want to know what he used to do to me?”

    Buffy swallowed, nervous. “I’m a lot more breakable than a vampire,” she said quietly.

    Spike bit his lower lip in arousal. “I don’t have to be that rough.” He slid over her, kissing along her torso as he did, and then turned her over. “Hang on a sec,” he said into her ear. He left her on her stomach on the bed for a moment and then came back. One finger started fondling her anus, gently sliding in and out, slippery and soft. She realized he had grabbed some kind of oil – probably the baby oil she’d seen in the bathroom. “I could use blood,” he whispered. “He usually did. I’m being nice, pet, say thank you.”

    “Thank you,” Buffy whispered. His finger inside her felt strange and wonderful, as it usually did. She and Spike were no strangers to anal sex. In fact, back home, with her own slayer’s resilient body, it was usually rougher than the gentle fondling he was currently giving her. He slid another finger inside, softening and loosening her muscles, and she slid up onto her knees in a crouch, lifting herself for him. He chuckled, and slid his fingers around in a circle, opening her wider.

    “Oh,” Spike said. “Not scared of me, are you.”

    “Not of this. No.”

    “You want to feel me in you?” he asked. “Impaled on a spike?”

    “Any time,” she said.

    “Why do you always act like you’ve shared my bed for years?” Spike asked. He got up on his knees and positioned himself behind her. He guided himself into her, and she felt him just at the opening, then pushing it wider, slowly, slowly. Buffy was in a different body. It felt different, but he was very hesitant, waiting for her to relax and take him in before he went further. And then he was in, completely, and moving back and forth, and it was far more erotic than she ever thought it had any right to be. She’d always been surprised by that. Done wrong, she suspected it could be the worst thing that could ever happen to anyone. Done right, however... as this was... she tilted her hips and pushed herself against him, moaning a little.

    “Oh, bloody hell, that’s tight,” Spike breathed. “Oh, my pet, my love. I lied, it was nothing like this,” he said then. He pushed deeper, thrusting faster. “For one... I usually didn’t writhe like that....”

    Buffy moaned again, and he growled with arousal. “I don’t think I sounded like that, either. And your heat... Oh, god...”

    They didn’t talk after that. He worked himself in her single-mindedly, and Buffy breathed into the pillow, and just felt him inside her. It always felt like he was about to slip right out, but he always slid back in with each thrust, and she stayed open for him, the pulsing, sliding fullness of him making her pelvis hum and her body quiver.

    He began to speed up, pushing himself toward orgasm, and Buffy groaned with anticipation. “That’s right, honey,” she found herself whispering. “Pour it into me. I’ll take it away.”

    He made a deep sound, then a louder one, then he muttered, “Oh, yeah,” pounded into her twice more, and then froze, rigid as a statue for a moment, then pulsing a few more times to work it all out and into her. He swallowed his cry, holding it tight in his throat, then drew in a deep breath, as if he’d just won a battle. He slid out of her, and Buffy sat up, following him to the foot of the bed. She could still feel where he had been in her, tingling. “Kiss me,” she told him.

    He did, gasping still from his release, and Buffy straddled his leg. She kissed his throat, his collarbone, took both hands and held them up above him, as if – as if – she had the strength to hold him down and have her way. He let her,  gazing up at her fondly, as she worked herself over his thigh, her clit bearing down and sliding over his firm, cool, flesh. His cock, still oily and half erect, caught beneath her hip, and he gasped when she pushed too hard.

    She came quickly, charged by what he’d done to her, and she rolled off him with a gentle hum – the contented hum he always said was her purring like a kitten.

    He took in a deep breath and let it out in an expressive sigh. “You are... mmm.”

    “You too,” Buffy whispered. She kissed his chest, caressing his nipple with her tongue.

    “What are you doing to me?” he murmured.

    “The best I can.” She kissed him again, and then snuggled in under his arm, leaving her head against his chest.

    He bent and kissed her forehead, then flipped her again, so he could bury his head between her breasts. He rested there, soft and still, for a long moment. Finally he looked up at her. “I’m in trouble, Sarah,” he whispered.

    Buffy ran her fingers through his hair. “Why?”

    “I was scared last night,” he admitted. “When I thought you might fall.” Buffy didn’t say anything. “And I was scared this morning. When I thought you wouldn’t forgive me. And I’m scared now.”

    “What are you scared of now?”

    “I wish I knew,” he whispered. “That’s my trouble.” He sighed. “Care to enlighten me? You know everything about me.”

    Buffy chuckled. “I can’t read your mind, silly.”

    He paused. “Don’t know if I can, either,” he said. “I love you,” he murmured. “I don’t want to, it’s messing me up.”

    “You’re not very good at not loving when you don’t want to.”

    “But I’ve always wanted to,” he said. “Always. Even when I was a man.”

    She was making him remember. She hoped that was right. She was tempted to ask him for his help again, but if he wasn’t ready yet, it would only regress him. Instead, she told him a truth he was going to learn one day, if not now. “Love doesn’t make things easier,” she said. “It can make things worse than ever.”

    “It helps with Dru,” Spike said.

    “It helps you,” Buffy said. “She’d be impossible to live with, otherwise.”

    “I don’t–”

    “I’m not saying you should stop loving her,” Buffy said, before his face could darken any further. “But what makes one situation nice, can make another one hell. Love doesn’t always make sense....” She looked down at him. She was in love with a vampire. She found it easier to love vampires than humans. That didn’t make sense, either. “And you don’t always have a choice in who you love.”

    “I always thought we did.”

    She’d thought he knew better than that. He was the one who had told her, after all. Then she laughed. He’d never loved anyone but Drusilla before now. Never questioned his devotion, never considered whether it might be similar to the following instinct of a minion. He’d never picked up a perfectly devoted dumb-blonde companion, and found himself unable to care for her in any way. He’d never found himself chained by his love for a slayer, like a mouse in love with a cat. He’d learn. He was learning right now. Buffy smiled at him. “Oh, Spike. You’re so young.”
 

 

Spike: Love isn't brains, children, it's blood... blood screaming inside you to work its will.
                Lover’s Walk


    “If you didn’t need my blood for this spell... would you still be here?” 

    Spike had his feet on the table, leaning back with a cigarette. He was watching her eat again. He seemed to really enjoy feeding her. He probably didn’t know what else to do. It wasn’t as if he knew her as well as her Spike knew and cared for The-Actual-Buffy. This relationship was short, hot, confused, unequal, and filled with deeply unpleasant mysteries, so there was a lot less common ground. Buffy had realized that he was treading on completely foreign territory when he wanted to be genuinely nice to a human being. Vampires were the quintessential demon of hunger. Feeding her was probably a step down from screwing or biting her.

    Drusilla had gone out again. Spike had told Buffy she was probably safer now. Dru had gotten what she needed, and seemed to be less unpredictable. She’d been perfectly sweet to Spike after she’d woken, and her mood had seemed considerably lighter. She’d invited him out hunting with her. Spike surprised both Drusilla and Buffy by declining. He’d said he wasn’t hungry. Buffy actually believed it, as he’d had the girl last night, and however much he’d taken from Buffy that had made her completely pass out. But neither Dru nor Buffy believed that was the real reason.

    “Are you still playing with your new kitten?” Dru asked.

    Spike smiled. “She’s fun.”

    “She’s unbreakable.”

    “She’s just a human, love.”

    “Part of her.”

    She hadn’t said anything more coherent about Buffy after that, and Buffy was glad. Buffy had been asked to play handmaiden again, and helped to dress her, and then do her make-up. Dru let Spike brush her hair out. She petted Buffy like a dog, but didn’t seem keen on feeding from her at the moment. She seemed to find Spike’s interest in her amusing. Hell, it probably was. The whole thing seemed a sick, macabre joke.

    Dru had gone off after that, and Spike had run out to get more food for Buffy. He’d brought back burgers and fries. They were even still warm.

    “Would I...?”

    “Would you still be here?” Spike asked. “Would you still be my pet?”

    Buffy regarded him for a long moment. “I don’t know if I am your pet. Not the way you think of it. And you don’t think I am, either, do you.”

    “Not really,” he said quietly. “But... would you?”

    “I think you’re asking two different questions,” she said. “If you’re asking do I really love you, blood or no... yes. I love a lot about you. Even some of the darker things.”

    “Such as?”

    “Well, how you’ll beg for flattery isn’t top of the list,” Buffy said with a grin. If he could have blushed, he would have then. “But it’s kinda cute. I love how you never give up when you set your sights on something. I love your passion. And your cheesy romanticism. I love how you get hooked on silly things, like supernatural soap-operas. I love... I love the way you make love to me, as if the whole world was in me.” Most of the other things she loved he didn’t have yet. Like how he’d write crappy poetry, and spend hours studying before changing a single word, and then refuse to let anyone ever see it. And how he’d stare in wonder at an infant, as if he’d never seen one before, when he’d eaten them for decades. And a lot of other things that came about once he was no longer a cartoon character of violence and need, which was how he frequently seemed to her at the moment. “And you fight well,” she finished. “Very well. And I think you’ve fished up enough compliments, Spike.”

    “All right,” he said with a smirk. “But would you be here?”

    “Would I be with you, you mean?”

    He nodded.

    Buffy took a deep breath. “Probably not,” she said. “At least, not right now.”

    He looked more confused than hurt. “Why not right now?”

    “Because if you hadn’t noticed, between your temper, and Drusilla, and everything else, I’m walking a razor’s edge.” She looked down at her burger wrapper. “Prison is difficult, even voluntarily.” she looked back up at him. “And you had to know that was the answer when you asked. But again, that’s not really the question.”

    “What do you think the question is, then?”

    Buffy looked at him. “Yes,” she said. “Is the answer. Yes, I always want you. Whether it’s safe or not, whether it’s right or not, whether I should give in to it or not. But loving you... and wanting you... that doesn’t mean it would be safe to be here. Or right.”

    “Why wouldn’t it be right?”

    “Spike.” She knew she didn’t even have to answer that question. He had to be capable of finding that answer on his own, or he wasn’t the Spike she would come to know.

    “You can’t trust me,” Spike said eventually.

    “You know I can’t,” she said.

    He stared at her for a long moment. “It’s not just about trust, though. It can’t be. I can’t trust Dru a jot. She’s unpredictable. That’s what I love about her.”

    “And loving doesn’t make that right,” Buffy said. She sighed. “Spike, you’re a killer. I’m a human being. There isn’t always a lot of choice about loving. But there is plenty about what you can do about it.”

    “So you wouldn’t be here.”

    Buffy didn’t even have to lie. “Part of me would want to be. Badly. But no. Not with you as you are, I couldn’t.”

    “You couldn’t.”

    “No.”

    “Not with me as I am.”

    She shook her head, no.

    “And if I changed?”

    Buffy sighed. “It’s not right to demand someone change for you, either. I don’t know. I love you. It tears me apart too, okay?”

    He regarded her. “You know I wouldn’t let anyone hurt you,” he said. “Not really. Not anymore.”

    “No one. Except yourself. And maybe Drusilla.”

    “No, not Dru. I couldn’t bear it.”

    “Not even if she demanded it? Threatened to leave, or go... more insane?”

    Spike looked at the table.

    “And what about you?” Buffy asked.

    Spike regarded her for a long moment, enough that Buffy began to feel awkward. “I’ll kill you gentle,” he promised.

    Buffy gave a sound somewhere between a laugh and groan. “Thanks, I think.”

    He tilted his head. “I suppose that’s cold comfort, isn’t it.”

    “Spike,” Buffy said, shaking her head.

    Spike looked for a moment as he always did when his pain chip had fired. He put his palm to his forehead and seemed to be trying to push something out from between his eyes. “You’re right,” he said finally, his teeth clenched. “This isn’t right.” His head sank, and his hand passed over his hair, until he gripped the back of his neck in confusion.

    Buffy cringed. Here she was trying to inflict upon him in a single week what it had taken him five years of slow progress, the crutch of a pain-chip, and a madness inducing agony to achieve: a conscience. “Don’t worry about it right now, honey. It doesn’t matter. I’m here.”

    “Because you want something of me.”

    Buffy sighed. “Does that mean it’s not love?” she said. “You want Drusilla. You want her touch and her laughter and her devotion and her songs. You want my blood and my body. Does that make it any less real?”

    He looked right at her. “What do you need it for?”

    “Do you really need me to tell you?”

    “Yes!” he said. “Blood is life; a demon’s blood can control, can summon, can destroy. You could erase my very existence. With enough power, enough knowledge, with blood as old as mine, you could erase my sire, and her sire, all the way back to Darla’s freaking Master. A truly gifted witch or sorcerer could mojo up the ghost of any human I’ve ever drunk from. It could reorder time. It could alter the bloody world. I’m not the idiot some people have called me. Magic has consequences. And this is my blood, I can’t just give it away, not for what I can’t understand.”

    “Spike. If you trusted me, it wouldn’t matter.”

    He sagged, and his eyes were heavy. “So, you can’t trust me, so I can’t trust you.”

    Buffy stared back, weight for weight. “Not right now,” she said again.

    He snarled. “I bloody hate you,” he muttered. She knew what he meant, and it wasn’t hate. He took in a deep breath. “I want you,” he said stiffly. “Right now.”

    She realized he was asking. Given the weight of their conversation, she understood. She was glad he was even seriously considering the matter. “I’m glad,” she said. “I don’t want to fight.”

    “Me either.”

    “Do me a favor first?”

    “Hm?”

    She picked up one of the burgers and tossed it to him. “Give that to the doll. I don’t really want to do it myself.”

    “I thought you hated him.”

    “I do,” she said. “But he needs fed.”

    “You said he was evil.”

    “He is,” Buffy told him. “But I’m not.”

DRUSILLA: You're a killer. Born to slash ... and bash ... and... oh, bleed like beautiful poetry.
    Crush
 

 

    Drusilla invited Spike to her bed that morning. No, Spike thought. She didn’t invite him. She all but dragged him. He’d fallen into her arms with relief, leaving his new pet passed out in the livingroom, dazed with him. He had missed Dru. Even after that single morning beside Sarah, which had been confusing as hell. He’d deeply wanted Dru that strange morning, but it had troubled him, her being there. The interruption, and the look on Sarah’s face when Dru came, and the weight of her eyes as she pulled his gaze... No. Don’t think on it now.

    He was glad Dru wanted him now. Glad that Sarah only seemed to make her want him more. He never wanted Drusilla to feel abandoned or alone. God, she didn’t deserve that. His entire purpose in his whole unlife was to keep Dru from being alone. He loved Sarah, all but against his will, but he loved Dru with a life-long eternal devotion which could never, ever, never be shaken.

    Dru pulled him like a succubus to her bed, her seductive smile and suggestive movements as always making him feel like he’d entered a dream. Dru was always his dream. She had drawn him into the night, granted him her gifts of blood and pain, pulled him into her dark fantasies until he barely felt real. “Come, my sweet William,” she cooed, her tongue caressing the words as her hands caressed his flesh. “It’s been too long.”

    “It has been, my sweet,” he said. “Far...” he kissed up Dru’s arm, “far too long....”

    He’d kissed Sarah all evening. Kissed her all over. She’d asked, she had actually asked him to bite her senseless. “Why?”

    “I want to forget last night.”

    She’d pulled out his chains herself and slid her arms into them, making them clink and jingle musically. He hadn’t realized they were musical, before. He’d thought they were just secure. She wore them like jewelry, and told him to bite her. She made him salivate with anticipation, and tremble with desire.

    Drusilla hummed beneath his touch, and he lifted the white silk over her head, revealing her pale, wiry form. He’d always adored Dru’s body. She was a sylph, an angel, a goddess. A demon. He fell over her with a hungry groan, as exhilarated by her as he had always been. “My black beauty.”

    He bit Sarah over and over, shallow, harmless bites, reprising his game of the other night, making her whole body numb with it. His tongue was sore from giving back to her, and his teeth ached from not biting down as hard as he wanted. Her blood was thin. He’d taken very little, considering all the bites, and it didn’t take much to throw her down into perfect euphoria. She had moaned and gasped and whispered his name even before he’d shifted his attention between her legs.

    Drusilla, however, scratched her nails down his back, and he groaned with the twisted pain and pleasure, like the stripes on a candy cane. “Promise me hell on earth, my William.”

    “Every night,” he whispered, bending to her cool throat. “Every sin-blessed night, my sweet.”

    Sarah had wanted to fall inside, disappear from her body, become nothing but the pleasure he would bestow. And she had asked – hoped – that it wouldn’t end as before. That this time, it could be only her. He hoped so, too. He didn’t want to admit that there was something he did not want to share with Drusilla. At least... not all the time.

    He gently kissed Drusilla’s cool flesh, caressing her with his lips, feeling her shiver beneath him in girlish joy. He nuzzled down her throat, along her breasts, gently nipping at her nipples as he slid his hands down her ribs to her waist, scratching her gently with his own black nails as she gasped.

    Sarah tasted of salt and wanton innocence, no guilt in her acceptance of the act of pleasure he bestowed upon her. A product of her time – it would have taken a whore or a vampire to accept this joy when he was a man. But she wasn’t evil, and she wasn’t filled with prudish ideals that turned this into any kind of sin. It was only sheer delight. Even laughing in musical chains, ignited by his bites, spread eagled unmarried on his bed, she still felt innocent. She didn’t act like an eighteen year old girl. She never had. She was far too comfortable with everything he’d done to her. She was open, wanton, wise. He slowly dipped his tongue in and out of her soft little quim, drawing her wetness into his mouth, better than her tears, almost as sweet as her blood.

    While the Victorian novice was gleefully sinning beneath him. He lapped at her as if he was feeding, the faint taste of vampiric blood between her legs, and she accepted it joyfully just as Sarah did. But Dru was a vampire, innately evil, and a product of her time. For Drusilla it was a sinful act of lust, a wicked indulgence, just as it had always been for him. An act considered as immoral, in its way, as killing. No. Worse. A soldier could be forgiven for killing. An unmarried liaison was considered utterly beyond the pale, and could not be accepted in polite society. Really in the end it would be no more accepted in Victorian England than forceful rape would have been...

    And Sarah gasped and moaned and melted beneath him. After he made her scream – scream so beautifully and with such desperate pleasure – he’d crawled up her body and kissed away her tears, and begged her to tell him why she cried. “I miss you,” she had whispered.  And telling her that he was right there only made her cry harder, but she told him she loved him, over and over again, so many times he hummed with it, and she kissed him desperately all the same. He could taste her tears in her mouth. His bites had tangled her mind, it was the only explanation, but it was so sweet. It made his heart bleed, it was so sweet. He unchained her and made love to her, and she clutched him closely and begged him to fill her. It was beautiful. It was perfect.

    It was hell.

    “Drusilla,” he said, after he’d made his vampire lover squeal with her sinful release. “Love.”

    “Mm?”

    “My new pet. Do you like her?”

    Drusilla wriggled her shoulders. “She’s tender and broken and hard and unbreakable.”

    Which meant nothing. “But do you like her?”

    “She’s a killer.”

    “Her?” He stopped, remembering his minion. “Well. Maybe a little bit.”

    Drusilla opened her eyes and blinked at him. “Why do you ask, pretty Spike?”

    “I like her,” he confessed. “I like her a lot.”

    “Then you’d do best to eat her, before she withers away.”

    She hadn’t really heard him. “Drusilla. Listen to me.”

    “There are pansies in the ceiling.”

    “It’s just a ceiling, Dru.”

    “And they’re eating all the butterflies. It’s a terrible travesty of tapestry.”

    “Are you listening to me, pet?”

    “Time to unravel. Unravel time.”

    Spike looked down at her, resigning himself, again, to being left out of her fantasies. He’d wanted to talk to her. He’d wanted to explain to her about Sarah, about what she was doing to him, how he’d felt more real and more complete this last week than he’d ever remembered feeling before. He’d wanted tell her that something was happening, something important. He’d wanted to talk...

    He’d wanted to talk about anything. He wanted to talk about anything at all and have her respond sensibly. She was beautiful, and seductive, and unearthly, and bloodthirsty, and she was always a world apart and three thousand miles away. She could see through reality to the past, present and future, but she couldn’t see the reality in front of her nose. His love, his companion, his creator, and most of the time he couldn’t have a conversation with her that made sense for more than six sentences.

    While Sarah gave lengthy and eloquent speeches debating the nature of evil, and joked with him about disco and Dark Shadows.

    He kissed Dru’s face, over and over again, and even if her mind was traveling, her body was there with him, and she hummed and writhed and loved every touch. He slid into her welcoming body, the first body he’d entered, his first intimation of destiny. He knew better – Angelus had taught him better – but he still got that thrill of eternity every time he touched her. Devotion. No one understood devotion. They threw it aside, just a word. It was more than that. It was everything he was. Drusilla was all he’d ever wanted. God, he loved her. She was his goddess. His perfection. His evil queen. His mad child.

    He really wished he could talk to her.

    All he’d ever wanted had become very complicated these last few days.

Spike: Becoming a vampire is a profound and powerful experience. I could feel this new strength coursing through me. Getting killed made me feel alive for the very first time. I was through living by society's rules. Decided to make a few of my own.
                Fool For Love
 

 

    Buffy was asleep when Spike crept into bed beside her. He slid the blanket down over her shoulder and kissed her neck, her shoulder blade, up along her arm, caressing her skin with his lips.

    Buffy woke gently, and then lay there, letting him touch her. “I thought you were sleeping with Drusilla today,” she said. She’d gathered that, though she’d been half asleep at the time.

    Spike paused for a long moment, his head resting on her shoulder. “I’m still peckish,” he said quietly. She heard the lie. He knew she did, too. He sighed, tormented, and Buffy turned to look down at him. “She’s sleeping. I was... cold.”

    Buffy caressed his cheek, without comment.

    He lay with his head on her breast, looking up at her. A submissive position. He closed his eyes, his face tight with tension. “What am I going to do with you?” he whispered to himself. He sighed. His hand reached up and he caressed her cheek in turn. “Are you sure you don’t want to be turned?” he asked temptingly. “It’s a powerful experience. I could make it beautiful. It wouldn’t have to hurt at all. I could just take you down and down and down, gentle as a cloud. Then just before your heart stops, put the blood to your lips. It only tastes strange at first. Then it’s just everything you’ve ever wanted, pet. Everything. It’s ambrosia, you can’t stop.” He let his fingers fondle her bitten throat.  He was so caught up, Buffy let him have his fantasy for a moment. “I’d hold you to my throat, let you drink and drink, feed you as strong as I could, so you’d wake quickly. You could swallow me down as I’ve been swallowing you. Make myself part of you. I could hold you as you die, kiss your life away. Set you to turn in your little bed, all tucked up and safe. No clawing your way out of the earth for you, my pet. Just open your eyes, and the world is yours. No more rules, no more weakness, no more fear. Just blood and peaches and moonlight dances.”

    Buffy actually smiled down at him. He really meant well. The way he’d put it had sounded attractive, though she knew better. He knew better, too. “No,” she said, petting his head. “That isn’t what I want.”

    He propped himself up on his elbow and moved himself up a little, putting himself in a more equal position. “You don’t have to agree, you know,” he said. He didn’t make it sound like the threat it was. “I can just do it, whether you want it or not. Force the blood against your lips. The moment it touches your tongue, you’re helpless against it. It’s instinctive. The blood demands to be taken in, and you take it. You’re just drinking in power, there’s nothing better. Truly. It would make you a goddess.” He touched her face, lightly biting his lower lip in desire. “You’d be mine, forever. I’d be your sire... and you’d be mine.”

    Even though she knew better, he sounded so wistful, she was touched. A little feather of fondness tickled in her chest. “No, I wouldn’t,” Buffy said. “And you know I wouldn’t. You don’t even mean it.”

    “How do you know I don’t?”

    “If you meant it, you wouldn’t be talking about it, you’d just do it. You don’t really want to turn me.”

    “Oh, don’t I? Enlighten me.”

    “You don’t want a demon wearing my skin,” Buffy said. “You want me. You want the heat, and the sweetness of me. You get off on how fragile and vulnerable I am, and how I don’t seem to care. How I act like I’m stronger than you are.” He looked like he was about to say something, but she placed a finger on his lips. “You like my purity, Spike,” she went on. “You like that I’m not evil. That I accept the evil in you, embrace it, but I’m not of it.”

    “Why do you say that?”

    “Because you’re swallowing my goodness along with my human blood, and you relish it. You hunger for it, more than just for blood. That’s why you keep coming back to me after you hunt, even though you’re heated through, and should be sated. You like the feeling of corruption I give to you – the taste of something pure.” She petted his head and gazed down at him. “You love my soul, William. You don’t want to take that away.”

    He looked at her with his eyes narrowed. “You really should have been a poet, bitch,” he said, but there was no anger in it. It was just that she’d already convinced him, and it was clear he didn’t like the truth of it.

    She caressed his head, fondling his ear, his throat, down his shoulder. “Besides, it wouldn’t work. Do you really think Drusilla would accept me?”

    “Why not?”

    “Someone to take your attention away from her, someone who isn’t a midnight snack?” Buffy shook her head. “You already know she’d kill me.”

    “She might take you on,” Spike said. “If we could persuade her you were our child, she would.”

    Buffy shivered. “I can’t imagine anyone wanting to be Drusilla’s child.”

    It wasn’t until after she’d said it that she realized – she was actually speaking to Drusilla’s child. Which meant that all the terrible things she was shuddering over had probably already been done to him. It was testament to her accuracy when Spike only closed his eyes, and let his head sink back down upon her breast, not arguing her opinion. “It’s all I can think of,” he whispered.

    “Does the thought turn you on that much?”

    “No,” Spike said. “It’s the only thing I can think....The only way to keep you.”

    Buffy closed her eyes at the haunted sorrow in his voice. “You can’t keep me, Spike. You already know you can’t.”

    Spike sighed, and pushed his head deeper against her. “I don’t know how... you fire me like you do,” he confessed. “How you fill me. It makes no sense, how you excite me. You’re just a human. You’re just a pet.” He squeezed her close. “I just don’t want to let go.”

    Buffy lifted his head and slid down a little so she could reach his lips. “Nothing lasts forever, my love,” she whispered. She kissed him tenderly, and he kissed her back, over and over, almost chaste.

    “Sarah,” he breathed.

    Buffy shook her head. “I’d prefer you call me ‘pet,’” she said.

    “Why?”

    Buffy thought of the best way to say this. “I don’t like being Sarah MacArthur. I’d rather be your pet.”

    “You are,” he whispered. “My most beloved pet. My little mortal angel.”

    Buffy tilted her head, inviting him to her throat, to the blood he longed for, the small comfort she could bring him. He kissed her, licking at the old wounds seductively, but did not bite. He paused, breathing onto her skin, and then rolled over, pulling her half with him, so that he could look down into her face. He ran his fingers through her hair over and over, his eyes fixed on her. “You’re not hungry?” she asked.

    He was silent for a long moment. “You’re pale,” he said. “I should wait.”

    Buffy felt such sympathy for him. “You can’t keep me, Spike,” she said. “One way or another... this is going to end.”

    He picked her head up by the hair, but it was more gentle than usual. “I choose when I drink,” he hissed at her. Then he let her down, his eyes so soft they were almost in tears. He pulled her close and kissed the top of her head, her forehead, over and over again, cradling her against him. “God damn you, bitch,” he whispered in torment. “Damn you to hell.”

    Buffy held him warmly. “I won’t let go,” she promised. “I got you. I won’t let go.”
    

***

    Buffy slept a long time, at least an hour past sunset. When she woke, Spike had already prepared her a meal, and laid it out. Buffy could hear Drusilla singing to herself in her room, but Spike didn’t seem nervous about it. Buffy climbed out of bed, kissed Spike on the cheek, and retreated to the bathroom to shower the residual blood off. God, she felt tired.

    Buffy came out in Spike’s t-shirt and jeans, and he grabbed her. For a long, long moment, he just held her. She let him. A long, almost perfectly still embrace. Finally he stepped back and sat her down to feed her, the gallant gentleman holding her chair for her. He’d gotten her gyros this time, probably from some street vendor. He joined her at the table and wouldn’t take his eyes off her. She started to feel a bit nervous about it. “What is it?”

    “Nothing,” he said. Then he said, in the same tone, “I want to kill you.”

    Buffy swallowed. “Now?”

    “No. All the time. Every second. I want to hold you to me and take your life away.”

    Buffy’s sudden nervousness faded. “Oh,” she said. “Well, I knew that.”

    He took another breath. “I’m going out. CB’s has a benefit concert.”

    Buffy’s nervousness returned. There could be only one reason for those two thoughts to be in the same conversation. “Can I distract you?”

    “Not safely,” he said.

    “You know I’d rather you didn’t.”

    “And you know I’m going to anyway.”

    Buffy closed her eyes. “You don’t have to.”

    “When I can feel your neck breaking beneath my hands as we speak?” He shook his head. “I can’t even bite you properly. Not right now. I need to feed.” He stood up. “Or at least kill someone.”

    “So it’s feed or kill me?”

    “Yes.”

    Buffy shook her head. “There are other ways.”

    “None I’m gonna sink to.”

    “If you’re asking my opinion, I’d rather you killed me,” she told him.

    Spike regarded her. “I’m not. And I wouldn’t.” He kissed her forehead, like a man heading out to work. “And I get to pick,” he whispered to her. He headed to the door and pulled on his jacket.

    “Don’t.”

    Buffy had stood up, her eyes pleading. He looked at her very seriously for a long moment. “Why not?”

    Buffy hated feeling helpless in that moment. All the millions of reasons why not, and he couldn’t see any of them. “I suppose telling you it’s wrong would mean absolutely nothing.”

    He stared at her, impassive.

    “Because you love me?” she tried.

    He actually smiled, but it was without warmth. “You know, pet... if I thought I could keep you... I’d think about it. You make me feel that... strange. That wonderful. Some part of me would... love to feed from only you. I can’t understand why, but I would. I’d think about the unthinkable. But we both know better, don’t we.”

    Buffy swallowed.

    “Don’t we,” he pressed.

    “Yes.”

    His smile warmed. “We’ve been playing a lovely game this last week,” he said. “A truly beautiful one. And in some ways I thank you for it. But it’s getting real now. In’t it.”

    She looked down.

    “And real will never work, will it. I can’t kill you over and over and over, and bring you back to my arms, only to kill you again, no matter how much I wish it. And there’s not enough blood in you to begin to quench me. But there’s more than that, even. There’s something between us. And I don’t mean how this makes us feel, that fire, whatever it is. There’s some barrier. Like a private home. Even if you’re inviting me in.... And it’s not Drusilla, though I’d love to say that was it. It would be easy if it was. It would make sense if it was. But it’s not her. And it’s not even the killing, not by itself. There’s something... corrosive. It’s already eating me up. Just as certain sure as I’ve been eating you.”

    “I don’t mean to hurt you.”

    “I know that. And I don’t want to hurt you.” He chuckled. “And that’s where we are, pet. I don’t want to hurt you. That’s just...” He trailed off and looked away. “This whole thing is wrong. We both know it is. I can’t keep you either way. So what’s the point?”

    “I...” She didn’t know what to say. She’d been the one imprisoned and bitten and tormented, and in the end, it had messed him up as much as it had her. Why had this happened to them? Fate. Sick sense of humor.

    “So no, love,” Spike went on. “I’m going out. There’s no reason not to. Not even for you.”

    Buffy shook her head. “That’s the barrier,” she said. “It would have to be for you.”

    He laughed. “You’ve a lot more faith in me than I do, pet.”

    Buffy looked up at him, held him with her eyes. “I know I do.”

    He hesitated. “I was right,” he said. He came up and kissed her, very gently. “You are insane.” He stepped away, and out into the hall.
 

 

 SPIKE: A man can change.
BUFFY: You're not a man. You're a thing.
                    Smashed
 

 

    Spike was caught in the hall by his most intelligent minion. He was one Spike had created, to his own surprise. Danny had startled Spike with his history. Despite Danny's penchant for punk music, he’d worked as a librarian before he was turned, and still wore glasses, though when fully vamped he didn’t need them. Spike always liked keeping a brain around, if he could get one. The trick was finding one with enough brain to think, but a weak enough will to serve. “New guy just woke up,” Danny told him.

    Spike was startled. He’d almost forgotten that the world outside his lair existed. That there were plots and plans, slayers and minions, and a whole dark world beyond Sarah, and Drusilla, and the twisted confusion between them. “Good,” Spike said. “Let me see him.”

    He moved through the hall to one of the other flats, more dilapidated than most of the others. Not that anyone cared. Most vampires were slovens when they were first turned, and Spike had been no exception. He’d abandoned his gentleman’s roots and fallen into working-man’s attire and coarse language, dove into drink and depravity as much as he had blood and violence. Drusilla had found it amusing. She’d always had faith in him, for reasons he’d never understood in his early days. She’d been proven right, of course. Spike was now the slayer of a slayer, and a formidable Big Bad wherever they chose to lay their hats. Of course, Angelus hadn’t had much patience with Spike’s juvenile delinquency. He had nearly dusted him a dozen times, but always changed his mind, or allowed Dru to stay his hand.

    Spike himself was usually pretty forgiving. He demanded obedience, an appearance that wouldn’t draw the wrong kind of attention – so nothing too bloodstained or horrific – and that his minions kept their mess out of his section of the lair. After that, he knew they’d be leaving beer cans in piles and only changing their clothes when the cockroaches started to nibble on them from the filth. So long as their squalor didn’t start actual fires, he let them do as they wished.

    Usually, they didn’t wish much. There were actually enough separate flats in this lair for each of his minions to have their own human style dwelling. Instead, they nested in the corridor like rats, and used the flats sparingly, mostly for feeding or fucking – if they even bothered finding privacy for that sort of thing. Spike tended to have deep contempt for his minions. And for most other vampires, for that matter. Apart from Drusilla and the back-and-forth relationship he’d had with her sire, there were very few members of his own kind he had ever truly liked, or felt companionship for.

    The new minions were left to turn – or rot, if the change didn’t take – in a flat on the ground floor, filled with dumpster couches and piles of newspaper. A few rats scurried away as Spike entered. The newest vamp sat bewildered on the couch. He looked up as Spike entered with relief in his yellow eyes. “Hey, boss!” he said. “You’re boss, right.”

    Spike nodded.

    “I remember. It was.... Where are we?”

    “Still in the Bowery. This is home.”

    The vampire nodded. “Okay. Okay, yeah, okay.” He nodded to himself for a long moment. Then he looked up at Spike. “Is there anyone around to kill?”

    Spike smiled. “Yeah,” he said. “Plenty.”

    The newborn shivered with anticipation, and showed all his new fangs, growling in his excitement. Then he stood up. “I can’t wait! Where’s Margo?”

    Spike blinked. “Who?”

    “My girl. You took her too, right?”

    Spike was surprised he cared enough to remember. “Nope. She’s in the river.”

    The minion paused. “River.”

    “Yep. Don’t turn a lot of girls. She didn’t look tough enough.”

    “Oh.”

    Spike waited to see if this would be a problem for the guy. It usually wasn’t. Usually when he pulled a double assault like this, they only remembered the girl in passing. Every once in a while they’d become enraged, and attack. Spike actually sort of liked those guys – they tended to be loyal, as minions went – and after he beat them down, proving his superiority, he’d give them permission to find someone else if they wanted. They usually accepted that and settled down, and he’d only had a handful actually bother to go turn a new girl. Most figured out after their first kill that they could have whatever they wanted without being pussy-whipped.

    “So, you didn’t take her?”

    “Not more’n you saw.”

    “Oh.” The newborn considered this, and then started to laugh. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah!” He guffawed. “All that blood! Ha!” He came up and punched Spike in the shoulder. “You really took her good, didn’t you! You really know what you’re doin’! That scream she gave, that was great! What you did to her. Wow, man. They said they’ll let me out hunting. I can kill something, right? I can’t wait to kill something. You got something for me to kill, boss?”

    “You figure that out yourself, mate,” Spike said. “One of the older boys will take you, first time. Give you the rules. Mostly, don’t draw attention to the lair, and don’t get caught by cops. And CB’s is mine – you hunt elsewhere.”

    “Oh. Yeah, yeah, okay. I can do that, boss.”

    “Good boy,” Spike said. His face ached with the hard, dull look he always threw at his minions.

    “Can I take a girl, boss? I want a girl, like you, boss. Can I take one like you took Margo?” The newborn’s face was excited, his yellow eyes bright with both lust and blood lust, and he bounced a little in anticipation.

    He was a true demon. He knew what he wanted, and he wanted evil and death and depravity. It was very, very clear. He wanted to rape and kill and feed, and he was eager to get started.

    Spike had no idea why he did what he did next. In a fit of inexplicable rage he plunged his hand into the nearest wall, took hold of something – which turned out to be a lath – and ripped it out of the plaster. He kneed the newborn in the stomach, punched him to the ground, and stepped on his neck before he plunged the lath down. The newborn was dusted before he even knew what was happening.

    Danny frowned at him. “What was that about, boss?”

    Spike knelt on the floor, dust still covering his hands. He didn’t know. He had done it, he was satisfied with it, he had wasted a perfectly good minion and a lot of work and now he’d need to make another one, and he had no idea why he had done it. He stared into space, trembling with it, trying to understand. “I didn’t like the sound of his bloody voice,” he said roughly. It was as good an excuse as any.

    Danny looked confused. “But we saved him for you. Dragged him in here and everything. Trigger was gonna take him out and teach him to hunt.”

    “I didn’t like him,” Spike snarled.

    “Then why–”

    Spike launched to his feet and grabbed his chief minion, pointing the lath at Danny’s face. “You keep yammering and I might decide I don’t like your voice, either, mate.”

    “Yes, boss. I mean no, boss. S-sorry, I....” The minion stopped, realizing he was still talking.

    “Don’t question my actions,” Spike snarled. “I’d hate to have to hurt you.” He jammed Danny against the wall hard enough to crack the plaster.

    “No, boss.”

    Spike hit him anyway, hard, and then harder, and then even harder, and then stopped himself. Danny was his only minion with half a brain, and he needed him as an overseer for the others. Spike dropped him into the rubble and stepped back. He was breathing hard, but it wasn’t with exertion. He felt like he was in the middle of a fight for his life, rather than a stupid tussle with a couple of his own idiot weak-willed minions. He stopped himself from kicking Danny and left him there, pushing back through the hallway as if through an angry mob. He kicked or punched any of the boys who didn’t get out of the way fast enough. He retreated to his lair, leaving half a dozen of the boys clutching bruises or wounds, and slammed the door behind him.

    Sarah was at the bookshelf, a book of poetry in her hand. She was reading his bloody poetry! God, what was she doing to him? Fucking beautiful bitch, he should kill her immediately. Break her neck, rip her head off, drink from her bloody brainstem, she was more evil than he ever had been, tearing him up like this. He dropped the lath and went to her, catching her into his arms. Oh, god, yes. Her heat, her form, her tiny heartbeat, the sound of her breath catching as he pulled her against him, the taste of her skin as he kissed her face, squeezed her close, nibbled on her flesh. She filled him, filled him so completely, in ways he couldn’t begin to understand. God, what was he doing? Bloody impulsive. That was what he was. And he had to go with it, now, or he’d lose courage.

    “You’re back early.”

    “Get dressed,” he told her. He kissed her mouth tenderly, tasting her over and over and over again. “Get dressed, sweet thing. We’re going out.”

 

Concert link in end notes, if you want a soundtrack.

BUFFY: You don't ... have a soul! There is nothing good or clean in you! You are dead inside! You can't feel anything real! I could never ... be your girl!
                    Dead Things
 

    Buffy was again dressed in her leather skirt and her now even more tattered fishnets and her army boots. The shirt she’d worn the first night was beyond repair, even with all his safety pins, but the black one worked fine under Nikki’s leather bolero jacket. Spike carefully put his collar around her throat before they headed out, gently caressing her jawline as he did. The collar effectively covered her bite marks, though Buffy wondered if he was actually going to leash her if he thought she might run. He hadn’t taken her out before, unless you counted the roof. Not like Drusilla and her mad doll.

    He held her arm as he walked through the Bowery, taking her quickly through the derelict streets to the CBGB club. Buffy recognized the band tonight. It was Blondie. Early Blondie, of course, no record producer, totally mad and unchecked, and the club itself was packed. It was a long line to get in, and Spike held her tightly before him as they waited. She wondered if he was holding her to keep her from getting away, but he kept nibbling tenderly at her ear, and kissing her jaw just above the collar, so it could just have been fondness.

    Buffy was suspicious. “You’re not thinking of making me watch, are you?”

    Spike turned her in the line and kissed her. He kissed her sweetly, then let his lips travel along her face, kissing her skin, traveling up to her hairline, finally ending with a teasing peck on her nose. “I just want to take my girl out,” he whispered to her.

    Buffy heard way too many meanings in that phrase.

    Spike ordered a couple of beers and found a table in the crowded seating area. Someone else was sitting there already, and Spike picked him up, collected the jacket he had been using to “save the seat for his girlfriend” and dumped him over the low wall into the crowd around the stage. The patron decided it was not worth the argument as Spike sat Buffy down. Spike kissed her deeply – so deeply and so tenderly she was gasping when he’d finished – and then perched on his own chair, against the wall.

    The club was sweltering with the lights and the press of humanity. It was enough to take Buffy’s breath away even without the music blaring. They’d arrived halfway through the concert. Blondie was badly mic-ed, the acoustics crackling and blaring with feedback so bad that the audience actually complained, and the musicians kept checking in with the engineers to see if the sound could be improved. “Kinda loud,” Buffy said over her beer.

    “Not the best place to talk, no,” Spike called back. “This isn’t your music, is it.”

    “Not really, but I kinda like Blondie.”

    Spike raised an eyebrow.

    “My mom liked her. Or, them. Whatever.”

    Spike blinked. “Your mum’s pretty open-headed,” he said.

    Buffy remembered Blondie was not basically pop-oldies at this time, but cutting-edge, raw, and controversial. They’d never been on the radio. Her mother would never have played “Rapture” for her daughter to dance to at the age of five. Buffy was pretty sure that song hadn’t even been written yet. Buffy herself wouldn’t be born for another five years. “Yeah,” she said rather than get into any of that.

    Spike turned back and looked up at the stage. “I love this place,” he said then. “It’s small, but it’s wild, you know? Bit like you, pet.”

    Buffy chuckled. He had no idea. She’d been playing it so soft and so quiet this last week, it was starting to grate on her nerves. She was itching to have a stake in her hand again. She hated to admit it, but just like Spike, every once in a while she really had a need to kill something. She’d been under a lot of stress, and she’d only gotten to dust that one dumb fledgling this last week. It was strange, being a slayer. “It’s a funny thing,” Spike went on. “For such a small club. It seems so much bigger once you get in it. Kinda gets away from you.”

    Buffy shrugged.

    “It gets really crowded. And you’re right, it is bloody noisy. Easy to get lost in here.”

    “I’d noticed,” Buffy said, having to speak louder than she wanted to over Debbie Harry’s intense voice. The song ended, and there was a smattering of applause.

    In the relative quiet between songs, Spike continued, “There are so many people. You know, I think it’d be nearly impossible to find anyone in this crowd, if they didn’t want to be found.”

    “I think you could manage."

    Spike hesitated. “I think it would be easier to get lost here than you’d think,” he said. “Like, if you just stood up, walked through the crowd, you could disappear. Never be seen again.”

    Belatedly, Buffy realized what he was saying. Her lips parted, and she stared at him. He was looking at the table top, refusing to meet her eyes. She wondered if he expected her to jump up and run right then, and he didn’t want to see it. She was stunned. Spike never left victims alive. Never. Not at this stage. If he took someone, he meant to keep them, forever. He might feed slow, it might take days, but they were his. Every one of them gave him their lives, in one way or another. Some might escape, if he was interrupted, but he would never simply let a victim go.

    Beauty and the Beast. He’d just released her from her promise. He had offered her her freedom. He’d given her back her life. All her choices were hers. All she had to do was walk away.

    Buffy almost hated to scorn the gift. That he had come even this far was amazing. But she had to turn it down. There was in fact no life for her without Spike, without his blood, without returning where she belonged. As Blondie started up a softer song with a sixties style rolling rhythm, she stood up from her chair.

    Spike turned his head away, closing his eyes so he wouldn’t see her go. His hands were clenched, as if he was holding something down, and he trembled slightly. From his sudden gasp, he did not at all expect Buffy’s hand to touch his cheek, or caress the back of his neck as she turned him back to her, or her warm and inviting body creeping over his on the chair. She knew what she wanted to do. It had nothing to do with seducing him in his current form, nothing to do with wanting to go home. She just wanted him right then.

    “You... are so tender under all that rage,” she told him. “If anyone knew... who you really were...”

    Spike looked about to cry. “Don’t.”

    The word made Buffy gasp. Echos of an earlier time... or a later one. Buffy wondered if she was laying the groundwork for her own memories, twisting Spike in shapes he might not have gone to without her. If her original timeline still existed, the whole moment in the Bronze must have been incredibly heady for him, particularly as she’d said her line perfectly. It meant something different when he said it, of course. When Spike had seduced her in the Bronze, Buffy had been trying to hold on to something – dignity, maybe, or a false illusion about who she was and what she wanted. Right now, Spike was begging her to not to torture him. He wasn’t sure how long he could hold his resolve.

    Though maybe, the evil was an illusion he was holding on to, too.

    She was not Spike, though. She wasn’t actually trying to change him, or make him realize anything. She did not tell him to stop her if he really wanted her to stop. She just wanted to reward this gesture. It wasn’t completely selfless on his part, of course. If he let her go, he could hold on to her forever in a sense, hold on to the idea that she was out there somewhere. Still, she would have been out there, not his. Only her scars and the memento of his collar to show that he had once possessed her. He only told her not to touch him because he knew he’d never want it to end.

    It was still just as hot.

    Her hands went down to his jeans, and she undid his belt, slid down his zipper, and if he hadn’t been hard before, he was by the time she was done with that. He’d already ripped the crotch out of her fishnets, so it was easy to find him, draw him inside. He gasped. The coolness of his flesh was refreshing in the stuffy club. The trick was silence, and to keep all movement subtle. The rolling waltz style of Blondie’s current song was the perfect cover for their actions, and everyone’s eyes were on the singer. No one was paying attention to the vampire and his lover, in the chair in the shadows against the wall, rocking gently inside and against one another to the music. “Ooh’, darlin’ darlin’, watch out if I see you...”

    Spike’s eyes gazed into her, staring with awe, and even though this wasn’t why Buffy was doing this, she suddenly realized she had him. She’d reached inside him, torn him asunder to find the place his soul should have been, and touched it. He was hers, now. Completely and utterly hers. So long as she did nothing to shatter this dream, he’d give her what she needed, do whatever she asked for. All she had to do was walk softly. He hadn’t expected her to stay with him. He had let her go, and she hadn’t gone. No one had ever done that, she knew. His whole life was one of rejection and dismissal, until he’d been cursed with a demon and learned to take what he wanted, break what he couldn’t have, kill before he could be hurt. The vampire in him made him sing with rage, but the man in him was always alone, still crying alone in that alley where Drusilla had murdered him. Until this moment... when Buffy had found him there, buried in the evil and the cold, and brought him inside where it was warm. “Warm and soft, In the flesh. Ooh, close and hot....”

    He surged gently under her, most of their movements invisible to the outside observer, and as the music changed to something harsher, Spike let it take him. He took hold of her hips and pushed her down harder, and Buffy squeezed him, wishing she still had slayer strength and control. He bit his lip, grunting so softly that only Buffy could hear him. Blondie’s mad musical ranting on the stage powered through them. “We sat in the night, with my hands cuffed at my side...”  Buffy kissed him, hard, and he bit at her tongue, her lips, grinding her down atop his swollen flesh. “I know you wouldn’t go. You’d watch my heart burst, then you’d step in.”

    It flared, flowing through them, and he clenched at her hips, bruising them with his vampire strength. He could have broken her bones, but he made himself stop. Buffy leaned closer to him, rubbing her clit firmly against him, her breath heavy and hot in his ear. She couldn’t bite back the cry that rose in her throat, and was glad it got buried in the clash of the music.

    She sat back and gazed down at him. He gazed up at her, his blue eyes blinking in the dim light, such love and such despair. “Now go,” he whispered to her.

    Buffy shook her head, and she felt his cock twitch beneath her again. “I can’t,” she said. She leaned forward again and whispered in his ear. What she said next was over the top, but it currently had the benefit of actually being true. “There’s nothing out there for me. There’s no life without you. Without your flesh, your blood, your heart, there’s nothing. I might as well be dead.”

    She couldn’t see his expression, but she could hear his teeth were clenched as he hissed against her hair. “You will be.”

    She looked into his eyes. “I know it,” she said. She kissed him again, and tried to make him understand. “I knew it before you ever touched me.”

    He closed his eyes and tilted his head to the ceiling in emotional torment. “Why won’t you go?” He kissed her, holding her head to his as if he could somehow bind her there. Then he glared at her. “I could hate you for it,” he said. “I could kill you right now.”

    “Then do it,” Buffy said. “But I’m not leaving you.”

    Spike lifted his hands and placed them on her throat, over her collar. She knew he could snap her neck, strangle the life from her, probably rip her head right off. Instead, he kissed her again. “Damn you, bitch,” he whispered when he was done. He pulled her close and buried his head in her shoulder, her hair, and held her tightly. “Damn it to hell.”

    Buffy just held him, all the way through the next song. He was breathing hard, like he was in a fight. She kept her arms beneath his jacket, rubbing at his back, holding him close. His scent was so familiar. It was time. “You trust me enough to let me go,” she finally whispered in his ear. “I could go to the cops, I could set fire to the lair...”

    “Yeah,” he said quietly.

    She pulled away and looked down at him. “Spike,” she said, holding his eyes with hers. “Please. Couldn’t you trust me enough to–”

    “Boss?”

    “Bloody hell!” Spike tensed under her as one of his minions appeared less than a foot from them in the thick of the crowd. His hand shot out past Buffy and grabbed hold of the boy. Buffy didn’t recognize him, his game face off and looking human, but he had to be a minion. “I told you wankers never to come in here!” he snarled.

    “Yeah,” the minion said. “Unless we found out.”

    “What?” Spike’s tension no longer seemed enraged. A flare of energy seemed to have charged him – suddenly he seemed anxious.

    “Her name’s Nikki. Nikki Wood. And we have her apartment.”

    Spike stood up, spilling Buffy to the floor. Spike caught her before she fell, and arranged himself, making sure he was zipped. “Spike?” Buffy began.

    “No time,” he said. He plunged into the crowd, pulling Buffy behind him as if her arm really was a leash. When he burst out of CB’s, he turned and faced down his minion. “Danny, take the girl back to the lair. My lair. Treat her like a lady, mate. And this is important, if she’s harmed in any way–”

    “Yeah, yeah, I know. I’m dusted,” Danny said.

    Spike closed in on him. “No,” he said evenly. “If this girl gets so much as dirty while in your care, I’ll hang you from the ceiling in the corridor... and give you to Drusilla. To play with.”

    The vampire’s eyes went wide, and he gulped. “Absolutely, boss, not a scratch. I swear it.”

    Spike half zipped his jacket as he looked up at the sky. “Give me the address, quick.”

    The minion rattled it off. It was accurate; Buffy recognized it. “Spike–”

    “Gotta go, love,” he said low. He kissed her warmly, but did not linger.

    “Spike!”

    He was already off. Buffy watched him go, striding quickly off into the night, on the prowl.

    The music drifted out the door, and Buffy clenched her fists. She wished it would stop. Spike was such a poet. He’d brought her here to complete the circle. CBGB was to be the beginning and the end, a closed chapter in his life, and instead death had reared its ugly head and gotten in between them, again. She had been so close. So god damned close! He could have taken her out back, and she’d have been home within the hour. “Sick at heart and lonely, deep in dark despair,” Debbie Harry sang relentlessly. “When you want her only, tell me where is she where?”

    Was this it? Was Spike about to kill Nikki? Was there anything she could do? She already knew there wasn’t. A few drops of rain started to fall. Buffy stamped her foot. God bloody damn it! And if he came back hot from killing a slayer, he would not be in a generous mood. He’d be in his heartless, soulless, I’m-a-god mode, and she’d be back to fucking square one trying to reach him. She cursed under her breath.

    “Are you – ah – ready to go, ma’am?” Spike’s minion asked.

    Buffy glanced at him. He looked incredulous, as if he’d been asked to treat a Chihuahua with deference, but he was obeying. Buffy thought about just leaving him and following Spike. God dammit, causality and morality and nature were all tangled. She knew she couldn’t save Nikki. She knew she couldn’t even keep up with Spike in her current form. Even if she took off, Spike would get to Nikki first, so she couldn’t even warn the slayer. And as far as the timeline went... she knew she shouldn’t. “Fine,” she muttered. She turned and headed back toward the vampire’s lair. “And I know, if I could have her back again, I would never make her sad,” Blondie sang behind her as the rain started to fall in earnest.  “I got a heart full of soul. I got a heart full of soul...”

 

Chapter End Notes: The actual Blondie concert, on April fourth 1977, in all its gritty reality of crappy acoustics, unruly audience, and unimpressive wardrobe, can actually be seen in its entirety on YouTube – so if you want to witness in real time the concert Spike and Buffy are having a couple of important moments in the middle of, the link is below.  The three songs mentioned are In the Flesh, (S)Ex Offender, and Heart Full of Soul.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bkJKhs8Ln0

Warning: violence

SPIKE: You always hurt ... the one you love, pet.
                    Dead Things

    Buffy was shown with due deference back to Spike’s lair. The voluntary prisoner once again. It was more exhausting than anything else. She feared she’d have to work on drawing out Spike’s humanity all over again. It might be easier this time, since he loved her – or seemed to think he did – but he’d be elated and totally high on the evil if he had killed a slayer. He wouldn’t need Buffy to make him feel good, and she was running out of time. She had no more than four or five more days in this form before her spirit would start to lose its grip on it. And then she’d be fading away...

    She could tell him everything. He’d help her, then. Probably. But god, would that muck with their timeline. The First Evil... what else could have defeated it but their five year insane relationship of enemy, ally, adversary, helpmate, antagonist, devotee, friend, confidant, lover, betrayer, rescuer, supporter, and finally soulmate? Nothing. Any idea that eventually Buffy would completely embrace him as her partner would shatter all that sacrifice and forgiveness. This one intense week of sex and acceptance in the midst of murderous abuse wasn’t powerful enough. Not for that level of evil.

    Then she wondered for the first time if what she was doing to Spike now, even without foreknowledge, might be altering Spike in ways she hadn’t anticipated. He’d considered considering stopping killing. It sounded like lame double think, but Buffy knew that was major stuff. There were other vampires who had done it, even without souls, but Spike called them “suckers” for a reason.

    Maybe she should try and find a way of just knocking him out. Or maybe get him to chain himself up for a sexual thrill, and then take what she needed. She felt disgusted with herself even having the thought. It would have been the ultimate betrayal of his fragile trust.... She wondered if he’d recover from it. And what would that do to his redemptive timeline?

    It was moot, anyway. He probably wouldn’t trust her enough for that. He’d trust her with his blood before he trusted her with his body. Wouldn’t he? Ugh, her thoughts were going in circles. She wanted to stake the minion at her side, but he was only a messenger. He didn’t know he had been interrupting a fragile moment where timelines crossed and at least two lives, if not the planet, hung in the balance... and wouldn’t have cared if he did, being a brutal vampire, and wildly unlikely to ever reach Spike’s level of moral maturity, given that it had pretty much never happened before in recorded history.

    Two of the minions were feeding off a homeless man in the corridor. Buffy wanted to feel righteous anger and have to fight off the illogical impulse to save him, but all she felt was hopeless. It was just sad. Maybe this was Sarah. Maybe the junkie’s hopeless despair was staring to seep in around Buffy’s consciousness. She’d already felt more instinctual terror this last week than she was used to feeling in her own slayer’s form.

    The rest of the minions eyed her covetously as she was led through the corridor. Instinctive nervousness... there was no way she could fight off that many, if they all decided to go for her. Even as a slayer, it would have taken some real effort, even if they were all newborns. Spike’s dominance here was the only thing keeping her alive.

    The minion opened the door to Spike’s lair and nodded her in. Buffy felt considerable relief once she had crossed the threshold and the pack of minions was closed away behind her.

    Drusilla was still singing in her room when Buffy took off her bolero jacket and slid it into her closet. She was reaching up for one of the pillows when the singing stopped. She had only just gotten one down when a cool hand gripped her shoulder. Buffy gasped. Drusilla. How the hell Drusilla had gotten from the bedroom to standing right there by the closet in the time since she had stopped singing, Buffy had no idea. Some terrified thought in her head envisioned the vampiress skittering across the floor like a spider. “Naughty... good... little girl...” Drusilla said quietly. “Such a pretty face.”

    Buffy licked dry lips. “Can I help you?”

    “Are you going to help me?” Dru said, turning Buffy to face her. “Saracen all twisted away. Such a pretty pretty.”

    Buffy had no idea what to do. She did not know the best way to handle the mad vampire. Everything Spike had ever told her contradicted with itself, for the most part. With Spike there, Buffy sort of thought that Dru wouldn’t kill her accidentally, or for nothing. By herself, the creature was utterly unpredictable. “Drusilla,” Buffy said, hoping that the sound of her name might soften her a bit. “Is there anything I can do for you?”

    Drusilla cocked her head and looked into Buffy’s eyes. “You can never be born.”

    “I’ll get right on that,” Buffy said. She tried to pull her arm away from Drusilla’s grip, but she was not letting go. Buffy tried another tack. “Spike...” she swallowed. “Spike’s found the slayer. He... he should be back soon.”

    “Spike’s found the slayer,” Drusilla said.

    “Yes. He went... after her. For you.”

    “Spike’s found the slayer,” Dru said again. She stared deep into Buffy, and her body began to sway. “Yes,” she said with a bit of a smile. “So he has....”

    
    ***
 

    Buffy figured she’d gotten off easy. So far, all Dru had done once she’d overpowered her was tie Buffy to a chair, and strip her clothes off. There was nothing sexual in the gesture – she had the air of preparing a canvas. She’d gone into her room and come back out with a folded white garment. She’d wrapped a ribbon blindfold around Buffy’s eyes, just as Spike had, saying something about don’t look, don’t make them see, eyes like needles. She partially untied her, and dressed her in the white gown. “Can I help you instead?” Buffy said, not protesting the dressing too much. She had no desire to stand naked. “Can I–”

    “Wearing my clothes,” Drusilla said, forcing Buffy’s hands back into her bonds. “Dancing my pretty dances. Singing my little songs. All so far away and away and away....” Drusilla put her hand on Buffy’s chest, just over her heart, and whispered in her ear. “I used to be here,” she said slowly. “You took someone’s heart.” She dug her nails into Buffy’s flesh and twisted, carving a circle in Buffy’s breast. “I’ll just take yours.”

    She meant that literally. Buffy cried out, struggling, but the ribbon was too tight around her wrists to fight, and Dru had her pushed against the wall. Then her nails met rib, and she stopped. Buffy moaned and gasped, tears of pain leaking out from under the blindfold. She was pretty sure that Drusilla had an intimation of the truth. And not just one truth – all of them. That Buffy was a slayer from the future, and Spike’s lover then as well as now. “I didn’t – mean...” she gasped.

    “Mean,” Dru said. “Mean. You’re all so very mean. Mean means tiny,” she added. “Tiny ways and means and modes. Step by step by step, until the grave, and the crypt, and the fire, and the ash.” Buffy made another move to escape, but Dru caught her and lifted her. Then she’d carried Buffy, still bound and blindfolded, into her bedroom, and set her on the bed. Buffy tried to roll off several times, but each time Dru caught her. Buffy stopped when she realized that each time Dru caught her, she gouged Buffy’s wrists with her nails. Her hands were wet with blood behind her back.

    So. Dru meant to kill her, Buffy was pretty damn sure. Spike was... god knew where, doing god knew what with a slayer he would probably kill. If he was high enough off the death, he might not even care what happened to Buffy. But, Drusilla had a sense of ritual, Buffy knew that, and for some reason, Dru was fluttering around the bed. It took Buffy a while to realize she was collecting her dolls and setting them artistically around her. “Sit there, sister. Come, sisters,” she muttered. Sometimes she sang snatches of old songs. There was an odd smell. After a bit, Buffy realized that all the songs were hymns. Was she...?

    “Eyes like needles,” Drusilla muttered. “Come, come, coming, coming my Angel. Killing is so merciful in the end, isn’t it? Pain is ended. And to everything there is a season. A time to kill, a time to die, a time to be born.” Buffy was not comforted by Ecclesiastes. For one thing, she thought it went the other way around, birth coming first... unless you were a vampire....

    Drusilla had dressed Buffy in white, most carefully. She couldn’t be reliving the night she was turned, could she? The convent and the torture and Angel murdering everyone. And after what Spike had said the night before, wanting to turn her.... If Dru had some idea in her head that Spike wanted Buffy turned... what would that do, if she was? Sarah’s body would become a vampire, but whose mind would it have? Buffy herself was pretty much just a soul right now. Would Buffy’s soul be lost or stolen or whatever happened to vampire’s souls when they were turned? Or would Sarah’s mind reassert itself? Would Buffy be trapped in a vampire’s body, without any control over it? And if she just became a vampire, the same as if she had been Buffy... Drusilla’s offspring. Not just a vampire, but likely a tortured one. Also, if she were an evil Buffy, wouldn’t she then do everything in her power to see to it that Spike never was redeemed? It wouldn’t be hard. It was her goodness that had helped redeem him. The possibilities where myriad, and Buffy didn’t like any of them. And... she realized she had no idea how to leave this body now she was in it.

    Either way, she was sure Dru meant to kill her. This was too ceremonial to not be something important to the mad vampire. She had to get out of this. Buffy worked on her binds, cursing basic human strength over and over and over again. She had no idea how long she had been there – long enough. More than long enough. The wetness of the blood appeared to work to her advantage. Her hands went painfully numb, as she cut the circulation off. Finally, after working on the ribbon so hard both hands felt about to be pinched off, she slid one hand up until the ribbon grew taut, and then slipped over the blooded flesh. Buffy took off her blindfold in preparation to attack or defend.

    And instantly wished she hadn’t. Buffy knew what the smell was, now. It was hanging from the ceiling. Dru’s doll might have been evil, and wretched, and horrible, and enjoyed watching children murdered.

    He still didn’t deserve that.

    Buffy’s only consolation was, most of it seemed to have happened to him after he was already dead. Buffy wondered how long things had been like this in this room. All evening while Drusilla sang? She hated to think that Spike could have brought Drusilla her evening rat with that hanging in the corner and made no comment at all. Blood and murder was one thing, and evil enough. This... was sick.

    As was Drusilla. Buffy had to get out of there. She caught up several of Dru’s porcelain dolls and flung one at her head. Drusilla hissed, her arms arching up very much like an attacking spider, and began to circle the bed, Buffy on one side, Dru on the other. “Put down the children.”

    “Or what?” Buffy snapped. “What if I drop another one?”

    “Leave my dollies alone!”

    “If you treat them like you treated that one, they’d rather stay and have tea with me,” Buffy said. She wondered if entering into the fantasy would help at all.

    It didn’t. Dru launched herself over the bed with full vampire strength and attacked. Buffy lost her grip on the dolls and landed several feet away, in a puddle of mixed substances she would rather not consider, with a fresh cut on her breast. She had the wind knocked out of her. Things were going grey. Drusilla grabbed her by the hair and pulled at her, dragging her back to the bed. Buffy kicked out at her, but Dru grabbed her foot and cut new gouges into her ankle. Buffy yanked at the back of her skirt, trying to throw her off balance. It worked, but not well enough to topple her. Dru staggered, and turned, stomping down on the back of Buffy’s neck with her pretty, blood sticky, black satin slippers. “We’re not going to have tea,” Drusilla said, “or bread, or crumpets. Or angels or demons or spirits or slayers. We have happy, happy times ahead. So much blood. So, so happy!” She genuinely sounded delighted.

    Buffy could hear her own heartbeat, heavy in her ears, a sort of ringing white-noise with a pulse in it. Dru’s voice was fading beneath it. The exertion had not been good for her stressed system, and her hands... good god. How much blood had she lost from her wrists? She hadn’t looked...

    She could feel the foot on her neck, pushing her down into the viscera soaking the carpet. Her thoughts were starting to come scattered, murky. She couldn’t think of the next fighting move...

    “God dammit, Dru!” Buffy could barely hear the voice, and half wondered if she’d just imagined it, until she heard the next words. She wouldn’t have imagined those. “Couldn’t you have turned him before you ripped him apart? Dust is so much easier to clean up.”

    “The blood makes pretty colors,” Dru said dreamily.

    Buffy gagged as Dru’s foot ground her head deeper into the gory carpeting.

    “Did Danny bri – What the... Bloody hell!” Spike darted forward and pushed Dru off, so hard she hit the wall. “What in the hell are you doing?”

    “She didn’t want to play,” Dru said.

    “Too right she didn’t!” Spike said. He knelt down on the floor and lifted Buffy’s head. “You all right, love?” he whispered. She couldn’t make herself answer.

    Drusilla turned and glared at him. “She broke my dollies.”

    “This one was mine, bitch! I thought Danny was a git and she’d run– What the hell were you after?”

    “Pretty sisters dancing all in a row. Your puppy bit me,” Drusilla said. “You told me she was trained.”

    “God damn it, Dru, what did you expect? I told you this one had teeth! As if you’d heard a damned word I’ve said in the last bleeding century, woman!” He picked Buffy up and tried to wipe some of the gore from her face.

    “I hear everything you ever say,” Dru said. “Ever.”

    “Well, you weren’t bloody listening. I’ve worked hard on this one, and now you just want to break her for one of your bloody games? I let you keep your dolls, you can bloody well do the same for me!”

    “I didn’t think it could matter,” Dru said. “She’s almost spent, this one, anyway.”

    “What matters is, I don’t go around breaking your toys,” Spike snapped. He glared at the dripping thing hanging from the ceiling. “You seem perfectly capable of doing that yourself.”

    “She’s not your toy, that one,” Dru said. “She’s your poison. She’s already staked your heart, and you can’t even see it.”

    “I see her just fine!” Spike snapped.

    “She’ll see you burned,” Drusilla said. “She’ll see you bled. She’ll see you broken. She’ll see you, and you, and you.”

    Spike ignored her, and looked Buffy over. “Bloody hell, you’ve cut her.”

    “It won’t matter for long,” Drusilla said.

    “Not with what you’ve done to her!” Spike roared. He left Buffy and turned on her. “I was saving this one! She’s a treasure, not one of your sodding monsters.”

    “Jealous, Spike?” she asked.

    “You know damn straight I am!” Spike yelled at her. “You don’t want to be here, and you’re doing everything you bloody can to punish me!”

    “I don’t punish you, Spike,” Drusilla said. “You punish you.” She turned and stood against him. “You know what we are. You like to play, just as I do. You like to pretend different, like we’re poor players on the stage, nothing but darkness in the wings. Why do you play that we’re living together? We’re dead together.”

    “So you try to kill my pet, because she makes me feel alive?”

    “It isn’t what we are!” Drusilla wailed.

    “Who cares! You already have all I am, and all I ever was, why the hell do you want more?” Spike demanded. “You treat me like one of your sodding dolls. Can’t I even pretend I’m my own man for a week without losing in one of your games?”

    Buffy felt very ill. “Spike...” she tried to get his attention, but Dru stole it violently. She began to squeal, her arms and legs shaking.

    “Dru, love... don’t....” He tried to go to her.

    Dru’s squeal crescendoed, and she howled at him. “You were supposed to kill her!”

    “I...”

    “You walked away to the fire from the rain, to catch up Joan of Arc. While Guenevere languishes in the tower, burning her hair!” She tried to yank her own hair out by the roots.

    Spike reached for her, but she lunged at him her nails raised. He took a step back, hands up, half defensive, half beseeching. “Hey, Dru, take it easy.”

    “I see you!” Dru cried. “Breaking hearts for bleeding hearts. Trade a slayer for a slayer, till we do what we must, and we slay her–” She launched herself at Buffy.

    Spike shifted and caught her mid leap, staggering under her momentum. Dru fought him, crying out, her sharp talons raised in anger. Buffy heard a terrible rending sound as she tried to rip Spike open from throat to crotch. He pulled away, shoving Dru's arms down until she couldn’t attack. Spike pushed Drusilla down on the bed and grabbed the chains from the bedposts. Buffy had seen the doll chained up with them before. She hadn’t realized they were strong enough to hold a vampire. “God damn it, I didn’t want to have to do this. You’ve been a very... bad... girl,” Spike said through his teeth, as he struggled to snap a chain on her wrist. “And you’re going... to have... to be... punished.”

    “You’re not my daddy!” Dru screamed at him.

    “I don’t – want – to hurt you – love!” he growled, struggling with her. She kept fighting, and he hit her, back handed. He used the moment of her shock to chain her other hand. “Now be good,” he snarled at her. “You stay here and think about what you’ve done.”

    “I hate you!” she screamed back.

    “And tomorrow you’ll love me again,” Spike said. He grabbed one of her silk ribbons and forced it down over her mouth, tying the gag tightly. “I haven’t been strong enough for you, lately, have I. Sorry, love. Most apologetic and all that. I’ll fix it from tonight. Now stay there until you’re ready to be a good girl, or Daddy will show you what it really means to be punished.” He tossed himself off the bed, leaving Drusilla squealing and straining against her bonds.

Spike:  The last Slayer I killed... she begged for her life. You don't strike me as the begging kind.
            School Hard

 

    Buffy stared in dazed shock at what Spike had done. He bent and scooped Buffy up, and carried her out of the bedroom, kicking the door shut with his foot. “What did you do?” Buffy asked, her voice weak.

    Spike ignored her and shouldered open the door to the bathroom.

    “Spike, what did you just do?”

    “Nothing,” he said.

    “She’s... are you two...? I can’t come between you...” She felt delirious. She’d been about to say why, and made herself stop talking.

    “You didn’t, she’s just being Dru,” Spike said, though his face was hard. He set her down and tore the blooded dress off her, leaving it in a pile on the floor. “God, these cuts,” he said. He lifted her chin and gazed into her face, one finger on her pulse, examining her.

    “Nikki...”

    Spike blinked. “What?”

    “You kill her?”

    Spike looked impassive. “Let’s get you cleaned up, pet.” He turned on the water in the shower.

    “Did you...?”

    “Not... yet,” Spike said. He said it very softly.

    Buffy started to shiver. She was finding it hard to catch her breath. He’d set his pet free, he’d turned on Dru, he hadn’t killed the slayer.... What part of this was the evil Spike? “What have I done to you?” she whispered. Her vision went grey with the thought, and Spike caught her as she fell, wet leather from his motorcycle jacket chafing her skin.

    “You’ve lost too much blood,” he told her.

    That thought hadn’t occurred to her in a while... she’d forgotten. “Twenty percent,” Buffy murmured, trying to remember everything she’d learned about blood loss. Approximately twenty percent was how much blood you could lose quickly before organs started to fail. She knew a lot about that kind of trauma, but her head was muddled. That was a symptom, wasn’t it? She was sweating. Was that another one? Spike put her in the shower, and she found she couldn’t stand. Her feet were numb. He let her curl up on the floor of the shower and cupped warm water over her bloody skin, cleaning the remains of the doll off her. He kept trying to pour warm water into her mouth, but she was finding it hard to swallow...

    Buffy felt half asleep, and her ears were ringing. The cuts hurt, stinging, though the warm water soothed her a bit. Spike held pressure on the worst of the wounds. “It hurts,” Buffy said. She felt addled, almost childlike in her confusion. “Can you make it stop?”

    “It would make you bleed more,” Spike said.

    Buffy found herself sobbing. She couldn’t help it. She felt like an idiot. She was the slayer. She had strength and ingenuity and cunning. She had power and agility and supernatural instincts. She was the defender of humanity, the destroyer of monsters, the master of her own self, and the leader of those around her.

    And she was weak and tired and overwhelmed and dizzy, sliced up and bitten and blooded and in pain, and all she could do was cry. Spike ignored his clothes, already wet from the rain outside, and got into the shower with her. Buffy touched his chest, which shone through the spiked black leather like a white brand. “She ripped your coat.”

    “I can get another one,” he said.

    “Oh, god,” Buffy whispered. Fate twisting in on itself. Her sobs redoubled.

    He pulled her close, letting her sob against his chest. “I’ve got you, love. I’m here, I’ve got you.”

    “Spike,” she whispered. “I need to get out of here. I’m not gonna make it much longer.”

    “I tried, you stupid bint, you wouldn’t go,” Spike said into her hair. He sounded close to tears.

    “Please,” Buffy said. She sank against him. “I can’t take much more. Please.”

    “Bloody hell,” Spike said. He checked her wounds and then lifted her from the shower. He set a towel on the floor and let her curl up against the wall as he dried her with another one. He yanked out the drawer with the bandages in it, so roughly that it fell. Cursing, he bent down to collect what he needed to treat her.

    The full length mirror on the door of the bathroom was spotted and stained with fingerprints. The vampires had ignored it, it having come with the apartment. She looked over his back. Spike should have been blocking her view of herself, but as a vampire, his reflection was invisible – even his clothes were missing, his demonic aura shielding them, just as they’d turn to dust along with him if he were staked. So Buffy had nothing to impede her vision of the body she was currently trapped in.

    Though the blood and viscera of Dru’s doll had been washed away, the girl in the mirror looked like a corpse already. Her eyes were hollow and haunted, shadowed in a deathly pale face. Her lips and her fingernails were blue with blood loss. Sarah’s lovely brown hair was wet and lank, trailing in rats tails down around her pale shoulders. Her neck was dark amid the sallow flesh, a mass of scabs and bruises. Her arms were thin as reeds, and she was bruised all over, from sparring, from straining, from Spike’s strong hands. There were marks on her hands from the binds, slices on her wrists and chest from Dru’s cuts. Her whole body was studded with bite marks she hadn’t felt in days, on her arms, her breasts, trailing on her inner thighs. Spike had taken the pain away so often, and she’d been so tired, she’d forgotten to look. Sarah was not seductive, now. Not even a lost little girl. She looked like a victim. A completely tortured victim.

    In all her life, no matter what had happened to her, no matter how she’d been bound or beaten or attacked, Buffy had never really felt like a victim before.

    Spike finally got the bandages together and went for the fresh cuts on Buffy’s wrists and ankles. His hands shook as he tried to wrap her wrist. “It’s all right, love,” he said. “We’ll patch you up. It’s all right.”

    “Look at me, Spike,” she whispered, staring past and through him to her image in the mirror. “Look at me properly.”

    Spike sat back and stared at her. “It’ll be all right. You look beautiful.”

    Buffy actually smiled, her bloodless lips cracking in a near laugh. “Liar.”

    Spike swallowed, and then shook his head, sagging in defeat. “I haven’t seen you for days, now,” he said. “You just... turned into you, it didn’t matter what you looked like.”

    “Spike....” Her head sank, woozy with blood loss.

    “God. I should... a hospital could....”

    “Don’t... don’t take me there,” Buffy said. “I don’t wanna die there.”

    “You’re not going to die!”

    She looked up at him. “You’ve changed your tune,” she said quietly. She started to laugh, and the world went grey with it.

    She was only dimly aware of him finishing the bandages on her new cuts, but she woke when he scooped her up. He’d taken off his own torn and sodden clothes, leaving them in a puddle on the floor, and he carried her to the bed.

    Drusilla’s muffled screams had faded, and with the door firmly closed, Buffy could almost forget the horror in the other room. Spike pulled her against him and kissed her damp hair, caressing her bruised arms, holding her so close. She was so tired. So very, very tired.

    She gave up.

    “Just kill me,” she whispered.

    “What?”

    “Just let it end. I can’t take anymore,” she said.

    “Oh, pet.”

    “Please. I’m done. You gave me a choice... at the beginning,” she said, and as she said it, she realized he had. In his own twisted way, even soulless, he’d asked for her consent. And she was probably the first one who’d actually given it freely. “I’m making it. Please. Kill me now.”

    “I can’t,” he whispered.

    “We both know that’s a lie.”

    Spike drew in a breath and held her tightly, bruising her again. She didn’t protest. Perhaps he meant to kill her like that, break her to pieces. She didn’t care anymore. There wasn’t enough blood or mind or will in her to care anymore. “Bloody hell,” he murmured into her throat. Then the rage cut through him. “God dammit!” He lifted his hand off her, his fist clenched, and she knew he’d just prevented himself from breaking her arm in frustration.

    “It’s okay, Spike,” she said. “I want it. Just take it away.” She sighed and snuggled against him. “Please. Just take it all away.”

    There was no bite in her system, no demonic drug addling her senses. She wasn’t enraged, there was no punishment or denial in her request. She just wanted to be close to him, wanted him to take this life away from her. He made a sound that was almost a sob, longing and torment and the pain of bitter irony. It was what he always wanted, the completely willing victim, to be seen as the angel with the coming gift of death... and he didn’t want it at all.

    There was a long, long moment when all he did was hold her. Then he took a deep breath. She half expected him to bend for her throat again, make one final bite, take her away. His soul would never know what he had done to her. Never know that he himself had taken her away from him. That would be for the best. Still, she’d get to die beside him – or part of him. A part, she realized now, she could love, after all.

    Maybe she always had.

    You stupid cow. Quit feeling sorry for yourself. It was her own mind, using Spike’s voice. You never did before, slayer. I’m not gonna let you start, now.

    “How much did you need?”

    It took her a moment to realize that the last voice had been real.

    “What?”

    “The blood. How much.”

    Buffy swallowed, afraid to hope. “Enough to make a circle around me.”

    He paused. “And you still can’t tell me why.”

    Buffy found herself crying again.

    “It’s all right, love. It’s a small thing to ask for, really.”

    “I thought you said you’d never give it away. Not for what you couldn’t understand,” she said. “You said blood was life.”

    “Like I said. Small thing to ask... for what you’ve given me.”

    “All I’ve given you is me.”

    “And pain. And heartache. And some serious work taming Dru down.”

    “But it was only ever just me,” she said. “You take people all the time.”

    “I take them,” he said. “They aren’t given to me freely.” He kissed her. “Just give me till the dawn.”

    “I’m all yours,” Buffy said. “You already know that.”

    “Not if I force you into it,” he said. “You taught me that.”

    Buffy looked up at him. “Till dawn is yours,” she said. “Then please. Help me, or kill me. I almost don’t care which you choose.” She looked down. “Though you might.”

    “I love you,” he whispered.

    Buffy smiled. “Well,” she said. “I care about that.” She lifted her head and kissed him. “I love you,” she said in return. “Maybe one day, you’ll even understand how much.”

    “I think I understand now,” he said.

    She chuckled, tired, weak, happy even in the hope that he’d given her. “You can’t even begin to, my love,” she said into his mouth. “Not yet.” She kissed him, and then groaned. “Oh. I wish I could wrestle you across this room, hold you down, and make you scream for me. I wish I could hit you hard enough your blood would sing with it. I wish I could make you happy. And I can barely move.” She started to cry again. “I’m sorry.”

    Spike kissed her tears. “Don’t, love,” he breathed. “Just let me enjoy you.” He leaned up on his elbow and began to run his hand down her damp skin, dancing gently over the places where there were wounds or bruises. It was so very gentle, so very sensuous, and Buffy sank under it. She tilted her head back, sighing with pleasure, still humming with residual pain. He very lightly touched her throat, just one finger, tenderly caressing her.

    The dawn came slowly. It wasn’t far away – an hour or two – but it felt like ages. Buffy slept... or passed out. She faded in and out of the greyness, opening her eyes to Spike’s clear blue ones, sinking back under again, over and over. He never bit her once. He did not try to make love to her. True to form, Spike felt holding her, gazing into her being, watching her sleep was more intimate, more important for these last hours. God, Buffy realized, what a soul must have done for him. To take this purely physical and mental closeness that he ached for even by itself, and make it spiritual....

    Though of course, this night was filled with pain.

    She did not feel better when she opened her eyes to find the windows had lightened. Spike was warm beside her, but Buffy could feel that her heart rate was too high. She very much feared she was dying. “Spike... I don’t have much time.”

    Spike touched her face. “I know it,” he said. “Not unless.... Are you sure you don’t want me to take you to a hospital?”

    “Sun’s up. You can’t.”

    “I could call them in.”

    “Here?” Buffy laughed. “Bring the cops in to look at the corpses in the corridor, the blood on the floor, the vampiress chained to the bed? You want to explain how I look to the EMTs?”

    Spike gazed at her. “There is another option. You’re nearly there already.” He swallowed. “You’d only have to take it in.”

    Buffy looked up at him. “And if there was still anything left of me inside that demon... I’d walk into the sun the moment I opened my eyes.”

    Spike sighed. “You and Dru.”

    “What?”

    Spike shrugged. “She has visions. She was pure. She could have been a saint. And Angelus... he pretty much told me if he hadn’t driven her mad, she’d never have survived as a vampire. She’d have killed herself before she took her first victim. There are those who do. Only a few, but it’s happened. Drusilla... she was too good. ”

    “And you weren’t?” Buffy asked.

    Spike shook his head. “No. I’ve always been bad.” He touched her face. “I always will be.”

    “So why isn’t Nikki dead?”

    Spike looked away.

    “Spike?”

    “She nearly got me,” he said quietly. “She’s good. She’s better than the last slayer I fought.”

    “And?”

    He stared at the ceiling, and then rolled his eyes. “Dru can take care of herself. For the most part. She might live like an animal at times, but she’d survive without me.”

    “So?”

    He hesitated. “If I had died last night... if I’d lost to the slayer... then you would have been left....” He stopped. “Are you sure you don’t want me to call an ambulance? We’d be fine, I’ve escape routes, we can bolt. You–”

    “You wanted me to live,” Buffy said.

    “And if that isn’t the stupidest damned thing I’ve ever heard,” Spike said with contempt. “I want someone to live. Sad bloody sucker, aren’t I.”

    “No,” Buffy said, and she kissed his cheek. “You’re a rebel.”
 

***

    When he finally cut his wrist, and let the blood pour into a wavery circle on the floor, the whole ceremony was just awkward. There were no words, no incantations, no magical mumbo-jumbo to mojo up the spell. Buffy kissed his cheek, stepped into the circle, and stared at him, waiting to go home.

    A minute later she had to sit down, still suffering from the blood loss. She felt like an idiot.

    Nothing was happening at all.
 

Spike: I've seen things you couldn't imagine, and done things I prefer you didn't.
        Touched

    “What’s wrong?” Spike asked as Buffy started to cry.

    “It’s not working.”

    “Why not?”

    “I don’t know!” Everything was still grey, she still couldn’t think clearly. What could be going wrong? Did Crowley lie? Was the whole thing futile? Or was she just doing something wrong? Was she missing a step? Did it need some kind of catalyst, or incantation? Buffy wished she could ask Nikki, and knew for a fact she couldn’t. Every part of her hurt. Bits inside of her were starting to hurt, her upper abdomen, her chest, and she felt nauseated. She knew it was organ failure. She sobbed. She couldn’t help herself. After everything she’d gone through, everything she’d put Spike through, and Drusilla – intimations of her future that were probably not pleasant to her – all the hell and the torment and the emotional torture they’d all gone through, and it all appeared to have been for nothing.

    Spike caught her in his arms and stroked her face, brushing the hair back from her eyes. “Sarah, pet, talk to me. What can I do?”

    “I don’t know! I don’t know, I don’t know!”

    Spike’s jaw clenched. “Oh, god, love. It hurts to see you like this.”

    Buffy chuckled with bleak, black humor. “Meet empathy,” she said quietly.

    He dropped a single laugh and pressed his forehead to hers. “It’s a spell. Are you getting the mojo wrong? What do you have to...?”

    “The spell’s been cast,” Buffy said. “It’s not my own magic. I was told... it should just happen, the moment I’m completely inside the circle. Like a rebound.”

    “Would more help?” he asked. “If we filled in the circle?”

    Buffy shrugged. “It might. I don’t know what’s going wrong.”

    He lifted her out and cut his wrist again, until the blood pooled, and a lurid red spot shone in the middle of the floor. God, that was a lot of blood. Buffy staggered as she tried to crawl back into the circle, careful not to let the blood soak through her jeans to any of her cuts. She sat in the circle of demonic blood and held her legs, rocking back and forth, waiting for the vortex to drag her home. She tried placing her hands in the blood for skin contact. Still nothing. She buried her head in her knees and wept.

    “Still not working, is it,” Spike said.

    Buffy shook her head, refusing to look at him.

    “What’s supposed to happen?”

    Buffy groaned. “Don’t,” she whispered.

    “Don’t?” he said. “You’ve been saying nothing but don’t to me all damn week. How the hell am I supposed to help you when I don’t know how?” The anger in his voice was tinged with pain. She didn’t answer. “Sarah bloody MacArthur, talk to me! In the devil’s name, what the hell are you trying to do?”

    Buffy hesitated, but the truth slipped through her tears. “Leave,” she whispered.

    Spike sat back.

    “I’m sorry,” Buffy said, finally looking up at him. She reached for him, took hold of his arms, all but crawled back into his lap. “I’m sorry. I don’t...” She sank her head onto his chest, overcome with emotions she couldn’t even name.

    Spike sat still. He didn’t push her away, but he didn’t embrace her, either. “All this time you wanted...”

    Buffy sobbed and burrowed deeper into him. “I love you. I do.”

    He was silent for a long moment. “I believe you do,” his voice very low. “Where are you trying to go?”

    She didn’t answer.

    “Who are you trying to go to?” he finally asked.

    Buffy looked up. Spike was gazing down at her, his eyes heavy. “I’ve gotten to know you pretty well this last week,” he said. “I’ve tasted you. I feel I’ve tasted your soul along with your blood. With all we’ve put you through.... If this was all just for you... you wouldn’t have done any of it. I think you might have found a way to kill me, before I killed anyone else. Or you’d have just let yourself die, one way or another. You’re too brave, you’re too good. And this has been too hard. You’re not scared of death. Not for yourself. Whatever you’re after, it’s not for you. You’re trying to save someone.”

    Buffy couldn’t answer.

    “Your lover?” he finally said.

    Buffy’s head sank. Spike chuckled, sure of his guess. “That man who nearly raped you. The man I killed. The man who made your voice tremble, like it’s never done for me. He’s inside me. You’ve a link to him through my blood. And you’re trying to save his soul.”

    It was all true, and she knew he had the wrong view of it. “It’s... more complicated than that.”

    “It always is.”

    “No, Spike.” She looked up and kissed him. He did not kiss her back. “Don’t. God, don’t close off again, please. I really do love you. You. I do, I’m not lying.”

    “And this man inside me, you keep trying to find? This man you cry for as I make love to you? This man you miss? You love him too?”

    Buffy couldn’t wrap her head around how to say anything. She was so foggy, she could barely think, let alone talk. “I love you,” whispered. “I love you.”

    “And yet you want to leave.”

    “It doesn’t even matter,” Buffy said. “I can’t.”

    “Can’t you?”

    Buffy swallowed. “I’m stuck. I’ll never find...” She let her head sink, and she buried her head in his chest. Her ears rang. She wouldn’t get back to Spike in the future. This body was dying now. Spike would be there, alone. The self-sacrificing champion, soulful, tormented, left struggling for redemption with a lifetime of blood on his shoulders, all entirely on his own. Her life’s partner, her kindred soul, the spirit that had caressed hers at the hellmouth, that she had caught and returned to his body, leaving her trapped here, with only half of him. She’d never get back to him after all. And if she went back to heaven, he might never join her there. This was all of him that she’d ever see again, and she was about to tear him completely asunder, dying on him yet again... or for the first time.

    “Oh, god, this wasn’t worth it.” She gripped him as strongly as her dying body could. “I’m so sorry,” she cried out, and it came out mostly a whimper. “I should never have done this, never come to find you. I should have just let myself die. I’m sorry. I didn’t want to hurt you. I didn’t mean to make you love me so, I didn’t know I’d love you. Not like this. It would have been worth it if... god, it wasn’t worth all this. I’m so sorry. I tried.” She sobbed. “I really tried.”

    “So did I,” Spike said. He reached down and lifted her chin, gazing down at her. His ice blue eyes were as warm as they could be, without a soul to fire them. “I love you,” he whispered, and his voice caught. “I do love you, you poisonous thing.”

    “I love you, too,” Buffy said. “I didn’t know I could love you this much, even now.”

    “Even now,” he said. Spike touched her face, ran his fingertips over her eyebrow, traced his thumb along her blue lips, caressed her under the chin. He kissed her very sweetly, so ardently that her weakened heart pounded with it. “My love,” he whispered. “My pet.” Then he kissed her forehead, kissed her temple, nuzzled against her ear. He kissed her jawline, kissed her throat, held her tenderly, breathing in her scent. Then he bit her so deeply with his fangs that she actually screamed.

    She thought at first that he was angry. She thought it was rage. But then he drew her down, sending her to sleep, and she knew it wasn’t. It was despair. He wasn’t killing her. He was killing everything, all she represented, the love and the kindness and the empathy and the self-sacrifice. He couldn’t give her what she needed, so he took everything else away. He took away her pain along with her blood and her life. Dead, she could need nothing.

    She let her arms go around him and held him as tight as she could until the darkness took her, and she couldn’t hold on anymore.
 

***

    Buffy felt Sarah’s heart stop. This death had been so peaceful, compared to the others, so much a gift. Death was Spike’s gift in that moment. The Master’s bite had hurt, and then knocked her down, feeling like a black door had slammed shut, a blow from an enemy. Glory’s hell rift had torn her soul out of her, a rending, as if she were ripped apart at the seams and her spirit had fallen into heaven like a seed out of its shell. This was simply sleep. She was kissed to death as an infant would be rocked on its parent’s breast, and she embraced it with perfect acceptance. In her heart she knew, this was the only way this could have ended.

    But she couldn’t keep the death. As with all the other times, it was stolen from her – this time instantly, as Sarah’s body shunted her away and kept the death for itself, unwilling to share it with the spirit that had borrowed her.

     The death jolted Buffy out of Sarah so quickly it was like being slapped. She was tossed backward from the dying flesh, wafting like the ghost she was away from the tableau on the floor – the vampire and his victim. Spike’s eyes were closed as he continued to drain the young woman of her still-warm blood. He couldn’t bear to look. The tension in his demonic face was pure agony.

    Oh, god. That look was so wrong for a vampire. Death was their joy. Even with a soul, they would enjoy it, though they might not want to. There was nothing but pain in him now. She’d had no right to do this to him. Buffy had reached inside him, touched his heart, made his soullessness ache for her, and in the end, it must have felt like betrayal. She’d wounded him as surely as if she had been Angel, trying to torture him into madness. Killing Sarah was like killing himself. And it was all for nothing.

    What had she done to him? She had to make it better. She hadn’t been able to think straight trapped inside that dying body, hadn’t been able to wrap her spirit around the best way of saying what was needed. Things were clearer now that she was only herself. Would this destroy the man she knew, already? Preserving the future was fruitless, anyway – she had no way of knowing what would or wouldn’t destroy the world. That minion she’d killed might have made a difference. The fact that Nikki was still alive – maybe he never would kill her. Just as she’d told Nikki, second guessing herself was pointless, and Sarah’s death was going to hurt Spike more than she could bear. Hurt him twice. Her own Spike would be back in her own time, mourning her empty body, waiting for a soul that would never return to him. Why had she been so selfish as to make him grieve for her again?

    She wanted to tell him the truth. To tell him that he could be better than he was. That there was still hope – at least for him. She was dying – she was turning fuzzy again, like she had before she’d found Sarah, her spirit losing cohesion. But he still had a future. He could find her again. She had to tell him. “Spike,” Buffy whispered, stepping across the blood to go to him, to reach him, before her spirit faded, no longer bound to flesh, held to this time that was not hers.

    She saw him cringe, but it was the only reaction she had time to see before her spirit was caught by the blood it stood over, sucked down as if by a wind. It dragged her down through the floor, down through the blood, and out of this time to which she had never belonged.

***

    Unseen by Buffy, Spike drained the victim dry of every drop of her weakened blood, drawing it out of her long after her heart stopped, long after every spasm had ended, until the blood refused to flow and there was nothing resembling life inside the shell. He felt nothing. He would let himself feel nothing. He’d heard the anguished whisper after the girl had died. Not really Sarah’s voice at all, but he knew it was her. Her soul....

    When he could draw no more blood from her veins he shook her, squeezing her hard to shake the last of the blood into his mouth. Pieces cracked inside her, bones splintering, her spine severing. The body collapsed beneath his strength. The sounds were beautiful, in their way. They echoed in him over and over and over again.

    There was nothing more he could take from her. He released her. He let the corpse of his beloved pet fall lifeless from his arms. She flopped onto the floor, ungainly and obscene, her eyes open and staring without expression... not even accusation. There was nothing inside her. She was gone. The only pure thing he had ever known. The only true gift he’d ever been given. He did not lay her out with respect. He did not gaze upon her with any kind of love or affection. He did not cry. He was stone. He stared into nothingness, as dead-eyed as she was, heated through with her, a spot of blood on his lip. Two soulless dead bodies.

    After a long moment Spike took up the knife stained with his own blood, and went back into his mad lover’s gore-soaked bedroom, to torture her into loving him again.
 

***

    “I am perfectly capable of torturing you, mate,” Spike’s voice growled. “So come up with a few more ideas.”

    “There are none,” Crowley said. He had pulled out several books at Spike’s insistence, regarding time travel and astral projection and spiritual transference, but he maintained the inevitability of Buffy’s spiritual demise. Spike had tried to pick up the stake again, to follow Buffy wherever she had gone, but Robin’s spell had evidently run its course. The power was gone.

    Crowley was not his only recourse, of course. If he got nothing from the retired watcher he meant to call in Willow, and Giles, and Robin, since he’d cast the damn spell in the first place, and the whole sodding slayer army to try and drag Buffy back from wherever she’d gone before her body began to die without her spirit. Or at least send Spike to follow her. But given that Crowley had started this, Spike suspected the watcher could end it.

    Spike picked Crowley up, again, and glared at him. “I’m getting very, very impatient, friend. It seems a shame to kill you now when I spared you thirty years ago, but I’m starting to think it would have been wiser to kill indiscriminately.”

    “Do it!” Crowley snapped. “I knew that soul was nothing more than stage dressing.”

    The empty body that Spike had laid on the couch stirred. It had done that a few times, purely physical reactions to stimulus, just as the lower brain function had continued – breathing, heart beat, reflexes. Spike released the watcher roughly, and he fell to his knees before the couch. “If we can’t get her back,” Spike growled, “you are going to wish you’d died with Nikki.”

    The watcher shook his hoary head. “I always wished that,” he said quietly.

    It was the only thing he could have said which could have stayed Spike’s rage. Spike wondered if he’d known that, and that was why he’d said it. “Then how could you kill her fellow slayer?”

    “How could you kill your fellow man?” Crowley asked.

    “I didn’t,” Spike said. “They weren’t my fellows when I did. But I know that I’m a monster. What’s your excuse?”

    Crowley looked over at Buffy. “The mission,” he said. “That’s what matters. She had to go back. I had no choice! It had happened, it had to happen. I knew! I knew what had to happen.”

    “You mean this?” Buffy asked suddenly, and her fist flared out to bash Crowley in the face. She jumped up, her eyes open wide, and she hit Crowley again, so hard he was shunted across the room. “Oh, man, that really had to happen!” Buffy stretched, laughing with relief, flexing her muscles as if she’d been down for days, as opposed to a little under an hour.

    “Buffy?”

    Buffy looked up at him. “Spike!” She ran to him and kissed him fiercely, so fiercely it felt like being bitten, as if she were feeding on his flesh, and it made his blood sing. “Oh, god, I love you so much.” She bit at his lips again, then she stepped back. “Excuse me, honey,” she said. “But I really, really have to do this. You'll understand.” She hit him. She hit him so hard he went flying across the room and smashed into the wall of trophies. “Oh god yes!”

    With mummified demon heads scattered about him, he looked up in shocked bewilderment. That had really hurt! “Bloody hell, slayer!”

    “Bear with me,” Buffy said. She hoisted him up and hit him with her other fist. Then she attacked him with some evidently extremely satisfying body blows, once, twice, three times, one more for good measure, and just as he was about to lose his temper and hit her back, she fell against him and held him so hard and so passionately and with such obvious desperation that all he could do was hold her in return.

    “I got you,” he whispered. “I got you, I’m here.”

    Buffy groaned with relief.

    “What’s the matter, love?”

    “Just hold me,” Buffy said against his chest. “Please, god, just hold me.”

    Spike looked over at Crowley, who was slowly, somewhat nervously, picking himself up. “What about him?” he asked.

    “Don’t worry about him,” Buffy said. “So not worth it. Just get me out of here, and do not let go.”

    As they headed out the door, Crowley called after her. “You know I had to do it!” he said. “You know it!”

    Buffy gave him a suggestion for an act he was unlikely to be physically capable of performing, and she and Spike left.

 

SPIKE: I will know your blood, Slayer. I will make your neck my chalice ... and drink deep.
    Out Of My Mind
 

 

    Buffy allowed Spike to let go of her for long enough to hail a taxi, and order them back to the hotel. It was clear it would be best to just pay for yet another day, rather than check out. Buffy clung to him in the taxi, and wouldn’t reply to any of his pleas for information. “Just hold me,” was all she’d say. “Not yet. Just hold me.”

    When they got back to the hotel room, Spike held her away from him and stared at her. “Buffy. Talk to me. What the bloody hell is going on?”

    Buffy stared into his eyes. “Look at me.”

    “I am.”

    “No, look at me!” she said earnestly. “I need to see your eyes.” She stared into him as if trying to see right through him. She held his cheek, looking like she was about to cry. “Tell me you love me.”

    “Buffy... you know I love you more than life itself.”

    Buffy sighed as if with relief. “Say that again.”

    “I love you.”

    “No, say my name.”

    He frowned. “Buffy?”

    She kissed him. “Say it again.”

    “Buffy,” he said. He squeezed her tightly and whispered in her ear. “Buffy. Buffy, love.” Buffy seemed almost satisfied, and he pulled back to look at her again. “All right, tell me what’s happened to you. Crowley said you were going to die.”

    “What else did he say?” Buffy asked.

    Spike shook his head. “Most of it was bollocks, he was ranting about your spirit being drawn back to Nikki, and something about dissipating, or your soul vanishing or something. What happened to you?”

    “He was telling the truth,” Buffy said. “I was drawn back to the moment you were injured, when Nikki caught you with that stake. I was a ghost for a day or so – like you were after the hellmouth. I was there, in 1977, but I couldn’t touch anything.”

    “You were there?” Spike asked.

    “Yeah. You didn’t see me. And Nikki didn’t chase you, because she was too busy dealing with me.”

    Spike blinked at her. “You met Nikki?” he asked. His voice was very quiet. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that.

    “Yeah. She took me to Crowley, who said my spirit couldn’t hold together in that time, because I wasn’t supposed to exist yet. But Nikki....” Buffy sighed. “It’s a really long story, Spike. But yes, I was in 1977. And I had to... I had to work really hard... really very hard... to get back.”

    She looked about to cry again. He came forward to hold her, and Buffy pushed him back. “Buffy–”

    “Just, try to stop me, okay?” she asked.

    “What?”

    Buffy wrestled him onto the bed, and Spike pushed back as hard as he could. She was not holding back, not remotely, and his shoulders creaked. They lost the bed quickly, and broke one of the bedside tables, and ended up denting a wall. Spike lost – inevitably. She really was stronger than he was. Eventually their rolling and wrestling ended with her on top, and Spike gasping. “What is going on?” he asked.

    “It must have really sucked when that chip kept you from hitting me,” Buffy panted.

    Spike blinked up at her. “Yeah. Why?”

    “The balance of power,” she said. “It’s horrible when it’s not equal.”

    She sounded so desperate about it, he was really getting worried. “Buffy. Talk to me already.”

    She rolled off him and sat in the center of the bed, gazing at him. “I was there,” she said, “in 1977.”

    He sat up. “With Nikki.”

    “Partly,” she said. “But in order to get back, I had to go to you.”

    He got up and joined her. “To me?” he asked, confused. He’d never been haunted, as far as he knew. “I never saw you back then.”

    “No,” Buffy said evenly. “You wouldn’t have.” She swallowed. “I had to wear... another body.”

    “W...” He pursed his lips to ask what the hell she was talking about when the truth of the matter clicked in his head. His eyes went wide as the realization bled through him. “Sarah,” he said slowly. There was no question in it at all. “You were Sarah.”

    Buffy hesitated, and then nodded, her head bowing as if in shame, or shy. “I was.”

    A thousand images of those few torrid days flickered through his head like a flip book, and Spike suddenly felt nauseous. “Oh, god,” he breathed. He stood up, backing away from her. “Oh god. Oh god!” He covered his face with his hand, and Buffy bounded up, not letting him run away. “Oh, god, Buffy!” He made a sound as if he’d just been staked and staggered backward, nearly tripping over the coffee table.

    “Hey, hey, look at me. Look at me, Spike, I’m all right.” She took hold of his shoulders and sat him down. “Look at me.”

    Spike couldn’t help himself. Tears streamed down his face. “No... no, god! The things I did... The things I nearly did! You! And what I... what you had to...!” His voice died mid-word, and he gagged. He crumpled, burying his head in his hands, crying as hard as he had when Buffy had died.

    It was, in fact, as if she had died just then. Or as if Sarah had. All his grief for Sarah that he had never let himself respond to had been tickling in the back of his psyche since he’d returned to New York. He’d become as stone, and tried to put the chapter behind him, and now the pain of it raised its ugly, guilt-soaked head and beat him as if with a truncheon.

    “It’s all right,” Buffy said, wrapping her arms around him. She nestled her face into his leather-clad shoulder. “Its done now.”

    “It’s never done.” His voice cracked. “It never stops, it’s always there, inside me, happening over and over again. All the things I did. The things I let happen.” He sat up and stared at her, his face tragic. “How can you stand to look at me? My god, Buffy. How the hell can you stand to touch me?”

    Buffy had wondered that herself, a thousand times in the last week. And the answer was, she could. The how and the why and the whether didn’t matter. She was what she was. And what she was loved what he was. “I’ve always known what you were, Spike.” She shook her head. “I’ve always known the kinds of things you’ve done.”

    “You weren’t supposed to have to see it,” Spike said. He sounded as if he were being flayed. “Let alone live through it.” He buried his face in his hands again and tried like hell to compose himself. It was an uphill battle. From the moment he’d set foot in New York, he’d been trying to forget. He’d been trying not to think about Sarah, not to think about what he’d done, what she had done to him. He’d let Buffy know about his repentance over Nikki, but he had deflected every possible thought away from his murdered pet. He’d turned to Buffy for comfort from the memory, discussed his guilt tangentially the night before, and he had had no idea that the memory weighing on his mind was one that, twenty four hours later, she would share. “Oh, god,” he said, pulling his hands down, turning his face to the ceiling. “Of all the things...” His head sank again. “Of all the chapters in my life, why did you have to be saddled with that one?”

    “It’s just fate, Spike,” Buffy said, with the same flat acceptance she had over being a slayer. She didn’t have to like it, but it was true anyway.

    “No, that was not fate. That was me... as a monster.”

    “Only part of you,” Buffy said.

    “You shouldn’t have had to live to through that. No one should have to see all that.”

    “Not even you,” Buffy said. She sat back and gazed at him. “I am sorry you have all that in your head. It’s okay, Spike. I knew what I had to do... and I did it.” She laid her head on his lap.

    He wasn’t having that. “Get up, slayer. Good god, get up. You’re not my pet.” He picked her up and carried her to the bed, kneeling at her feet like a supplicant.

    “And you’re not a monster. Not anymore. Come up here.” Spike let her lift him and set him onto the bed beside her again.

    Spike shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Buffy, I’m so sorry. Sarah...” He covered his eyes with his hand again. “You have no idea how much I’ve wanted to tell you... to tell her... how sorry I was.” He started to cry again. “That wasn’t how I wanted it to end. I didn’t mean....”

    Things were always worse for Spike when he didn’t mean to be so evil. It was the fact that he hadn’t meant to which had spurred him to get his soul in the first place. “It’s okay,” Buffy said.

    “It’s not okay,” Spike said. “I murdered someone I loved, it was never going to be okay.” He swallowed, trying to find himself in the sudden outpouring of grief. Grief which was, apparently, unfounded, since Sarah was... Buffy was... right there in front of him, her warm hands holding his.

    “Drusilla had to take some blame for that, Spike.”

    “I left you unguarded,” Spike said. “I left you weak with bloodloss, imprisoned and alone with a mad murderess, who had reason to hate you. I can’t just hand the guilt to Dru and walk away. That was me. And I knew better, and I still went off, I went off to kill, and left you, even though I loved you...” He crumpled again. Buffy pushed herself against his chest, and Spike held her, squeezing her tightly, his nose buried in her hair. “I loved you, and I let it hap... Oh, god, Buffy, I love you so much,” he whispered. He sobbed. “I loved you then, and I didn’t even know why.”

    Buffy pulled away. “Don’t you dare,” she said. “Don’t you dare tell me you fell in love with me because I reminded you of Sarah.”

    Spike blinked, her annoyance shocking some of the grief out of his system. “God, no.” Spike wiped his face. “Buffy, I fell in love with Sarah because you’re the kind of person I fall in love with. I never once put you and Sarah together in my head before.”

    Buffy took a deep breath and sighed. “Well, good.”

    Spike frowned. “Were you just jealous of yourself?”

    “No,” Buffy said, a little amused by the idea. She could have been, she realized. A little. “Not exactly. I was afraid... always afraid that I would let too much slip. That you would end up with some idea about who I was, and it would mess up... this.” She indicated the space between them. “We needed all of it, the pain and the hate and the betrayal and the forgiveness. There had to be redemption. Our love couldn’t be tainted with a past affair, even one in a different body. It would have mucked it up. It....”

    “It might not have defeated the First,” Spike said. “No, I get it. I... oh, god!” He tilted his head up in realization. “That was why you couldn’t tell me. Not how you knew me, or what the blood was f.... That was driving me to distraction, that you wouldn’t tell me! It didn’t make sense, you were so honest about everything else.” He shook his head. “But Buffy, you never once reminded me of Sarah. Actually, if anyone ever reminded me of Sarah, it was Dawn.”

    Buffy blinked. “Dawn?”

    “Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t the same kind of feeling,” Spike said quickly. “I had too much grief in it for it to ever have been sexual again, anyway. By that last day it had gone far past that. But you were always so strong, pet. Dawn was always so much the Bitty Buffy. She always spoke and thought a lot like you, but she was young and scared and needed my protection. And her hair wasn’t far different.”

    “I guess that makes sense.”

    “No, god, Buffy. You are... Sarah was my pet. I loved her, but she wasn’t my equal, let alone my superior. I felt... hunger for her, and protective of her, not like.... Buffy, lets be honest, I’d have been your willing slave.” He shook his head in contempt of himself. “I’m happier as your companion, but all vampires, no matter how strong, still have a bit of the minion in them. If they find someone worthy.” He smiled at her, a little shyly. “You’ve always made me want to be both your master and your servant. I never had that impulse with Sarah. I just wanted to keep her.” He closed his eyes. “And an abysmal job I did of it, too.”

    “It’s all right.”

    “No,” Spike said. “It’s not.” He swallowed. “I killed you.”

    Buffy had been so relieved to be free of that prison of a body, so happy to be finally drawn back to her own time, that it hadn’t occurred to her what a betrayal it must have seemed like to Spike. She wanted to flippantly tell him that he’d freed her, and she was thrilled, because it had sent her back. But the look on his face told her that it wasn’t going to be that easy. The practical effect of the act was less important than what it had meant to him. “Why did you?” she asked gently.

    “I didn’t know what else to do,” he said. “I knew your body... that body... Sarah’s... body. I could hear your heart rate, an inch from cardiac arrest. I could smell you were dying, there were toxins in your sweat. Your fingertips and toes were already dead, you’d have gotten gangrene. There wouldn’t even have been time if we had gotten you to a hospital, not to save you. They could only have prolonged the inevitable for a few days, maybe weeks at the most. You’d have needed organ transplants on top of blood transfusions, and I could tell you were in pain... and afraid.” He was trembling as he spoke. “And the spell wasn’t working, and there was nothing I could do about that, either. You had told me... you’d begged me to kill you earlier. Kill you, or help you, and I had helped you and it hadn’t helped. I didn’t want... you didn’t want me... to turn you. I’d had that go wrong before. I understood. I loved you too much to do that against your will. But you were going to die. You were in such pain....”

    “So it wasn’t...?”

    “What?”

    “You weren’t... jealous of yourself, were you?”

    “Jealous of a dead man, with Dru chained up in the other room?” Spike asked. “Like I had any rights at that stage.”

    “But I wanted to leave. That must have hurt.”

    “Well, now I know why,” he said. “But I wasn’t even that hurt then. I just felt... I did believe you loved me. I just felt like I wasn’t enough. You deserved everything you ever wanted, and I wasn’t enough. Sort of like... I had realized during that week with you that Drusilla... wasn’t really enough. She was my love, but she was too mad and distant to ever be my companion, and you made me long for that. No. If anything the idea that you loved someone I’d killed just made what I’d already done to you that much worse.” He stopped. “Is that really how you feel about it? The soul?” he asked. “Like I killed myself?”

    “You were certainly okay with that being the outcome,” Buffy said, “given how hard it was to do. You came back drastically changed.” Buffy shrugged. “It’s complicated, but... yeah. You killed the beast you were to become the man you are. In the same way as Dru killed you, and you became a vampire. It’s still you, but... yeah.”

    “I don’t know if I feel that way about it,” he said. “But jealousy... no, that wasn’t why I took Sarah. I just... I couldn’t bear to let you die, and not to own it,” he said. “It sounds sel – no, it was selfish. A vampire is a selfish creature, and even a selfish lover. I’d wanted to kill you from the moment I met you. I couldn’t let that slow death take you, when I was right there, and you still had any blood left in you. So I...” He choked, but he made himself keep going. “I took her.” His teeth were clenched, it was so hard to say. “I kissed her away, and made her part of me. I had to take her death for myself.”

    He swallowed. “And when I say this now, it sounds so... sickening. I know you won’t understand, but... it seemed beautiful at the time. It hurt like dying, but it was beautiful. Then you were gone... and I could no longer fail you.” He started to cry again. “God, I am sorry.” He looked up at Buffy. “Please. You have to believe me, it was only because I loved you so much, it tore me to shreds. To see you like that, when I could stop it...!”

    “I know,” she said. “Spike, look at me. It was beautiful. I was hurting, and I had told you to end it. I was done living like that. And if you hadn’t done it, I wouldn’t have gotten back.” Spike was startled. She was glad? “Sarah’s body held me, and I didn’t know how to leave it. You broke that... prison of flesh I was in, and let my spirit loose, to travel back through your blood. Back to you.” She touched his face. “I had asked you to end it.”

    “Cold comfort,” he said. “It doesn’t excuse it. You have no idea how many times I nearly killed you before that moment.”

    Buffy shrugged. “Then you’d never have known,” she said. “I just... wouldn’t have come back.”

    “I suppose that would have been its own punishment,” Spike said. His head sank. “Not that there’s a punishment big enough for any of it.”

    “Spike–”

    “Don’t you dare forgive me,” he said. “Don’t you dare. I chained you and beat you and bit you and left you in mortal danger.” He shook his head. “I never wanted you to know that side of me.”

    “Spike, there was nothing... well, almost nothing, that you did to me then that I don’t ask you to do to me now.”

    Spike glared at her. “Not when you can’t tell me to stop,” he said. “Not when your life is actually in danger, not when I’m not in control of myself.”

    Buffy stared at him. “But you were.”

    Spike scoffed in contempt of himself.

    “No, Spike. You were. Not all the time, but.... I went to you, knowing what you were, knowing what you had been. Hell, I went knowing you had said you’d killed every single one of your pets. It was a slim chance, but I thought I could reach you. And I did! Every once in a while, hiding under all that sin, crying beneath the rage. It had to look hard for it sometimes, but I knew you were in there; the poet who had to keep his eyes closed inside the horror. You didn’t know you were fighting, you didn’t know why you were fighting, but you fought your demon, and came to me to hide from it all, just like you do now. I recognized it. I knew you were in there. Your behavior was... evil, but you didn’t shock me. I already knew what you were like when you when you had no soul.”

    “No. No, you didn’t.”

    “Yes, I did,” Buffy insisted. “I knew you back in Sunnydale. I very nearly loved you. I let you penetrate me – my self, not just my body. I let you take me over completely. I knew I could do that again, and even enjoy it. If I could get past the beginning, that instinct you had to kill, I knew it would be fine. I knew you.”

    “No, Buffy. I keep telling you, you never met the real me. The hard me. That beast, that creature that you met in New York was....” He stopped, and his head tilted. “Very different,” he continued, “from the Spike you met in Sunnydale.”

    He was staring at her in wonder. Buffy couldn’t understand. “What?”

    “Sarah...” Spike said. “Sarah did things to me. Things I never recovered from. She changed me.”

    Buffy frowned. “I didn’t... see much difference. I mean, between then and now, yeah, but not between then and back then.”

    “There were things... even Sarah never saw,” Spike said. “You had some intimations of them, but you never saw. You think that night you said no was bad?” Spike shook his head. “That was nothing compared to things I sometimes did. But you... Sarah wormed her way inside me, filed off a lot of the spikes and bristles. Took away some of the rage and filled it up with pain. I loved her. That was real. I don’t know... do you remember how I used to describe being in love with you?”

    “Something about wrecking everything that was you,” Buffy said, “until there was nothing left but me in an empty shell.”

    Spike nodded. “Yeah. Sarah slid inside me, too. Slipped in with the blood. God, Buffy, of course she was you.” He bowed his head. “She changed me.”

    “How?”

    Spike took in a breath. “You did a very... very important thing one night. That night. That night when you finally said no.”

    “By saying no?”

    Spike shook his head. “No, I had no conscience, that wouldn’t have mattered if I hadn’t loved you. No. You asked me what I wanted.”

    Buffy’s brow furrowed, questioning.

    “You made me realize what I was doing. Not that it was wrong, or evil. I didn’t care about that. You just... pointed out that it wasn’t what I wanted.”

    “What wasn’t?”

    He swallowed. “Rape,” he said, as if the word were a piece of gravel. He took in a deep breath and held it before he could speak again. “It’s a complicated thing, because when I was young... sex and rape were really seen as the same thing. Outside of marriage, if woman was with a man, she had lost her virtue, it didn’t matter if she’d wanted it or not. If a man had taken a woman, of course she just shouldn’t have been there to be taken. Sex was so taboo... and rape was just a part of that. So bedding a woman who wasn’t willing... well. The differences didn’t... flare out at me once I’d been turned. I was sinning just as surely with Drusilla, who literally begged for it at times.

    “As for rape itself, I really only started doing it to impress Angel. That’s no excuse – I chose to do it, I let him egg me on. But when you asked me what it was that I really wanted, told me not to just fall under the evil, but to think about it... I realized it wasn’t. Wasn’t what I wanted at all.” He looked down. “What I always wanted was to be wanted. Yeah, it was fun to kiss away the tears and horror of a terrified victim, but... that didn’t make me wanted. Even when I... was pulling those poor girls into death after Angel tortured them... I was just the lesser of the two evils, they didn’t want me, either. And when you asked me that....” He shook his head. “It changed me.”

    “You mean you never...?”

    “I wish I could say yes, never again. But it wasn’t that fast. I mean, it wasn’t a moral decision. I just... realized I didn’t enjoy it that much. Not compared to having someone beneath me who wanted me there. Not compared to you....” He swallowed. He was about to cry again, and made himself stop. “Eventually I did stop it completely. I mean, come on. Would I have put up with Harmony if I could get my rocks off from my victims?” He took in a breath. “But, the thing is, I only just realized... that if I hadn’t met Sarah... if you hadn’t worked on me for that week way back when... I probably would have taken you when you were unconscious.”

    Buffy blinked. “What?”

    “Do you remember what I was like when I first fell for you, pet? Really.”

    “Well, you seemed insane.”

    “Yeah,” Spike said with a heartfelt nod. “I didn’t know how to handle it. I was terrified by it, and I had no idea what to do. If you... if Sarah hadn’t made it so clear that rape... was not normal, that people were not vampires, and that no human being would ever be okay with being violated like that... and if you hadn’t pointed out to me that I could think about what I wanted, rather than going by default evil...” He shook his head. “You remember how I thought chaining you up and laying my kill at your feet in a ritual sacrifice was romantic? Imagine what else I might have found romantic.” He looked down. “I was a monster, Buffy.”

    “No,” Buffy said. “You were like a child. You didn’t know any better.”

    “Yes I did!”

    “No. After living with you for a week, without even a chip holding you back? I know what you were. Spike I saw the surprise on your face when I said no. Surprise. Not dismissal. You really didn’t know. You needed to be taught.”

    “Well,” he said. “Most vampires wouldn’t have cared, even if they had been. Hell, most would have...”

    “Been Angel. I know. They’d have gotten off on it. But not you, not about someone you love.” Buffy smiled. “You just needed your eyes opened.”

    Spike regarded her. “Well, I guess it took. ‘Cause I didn’t drug you, or chain you down, or lock you up. And I could have, Buffy. The chip didn’t hold me back that much. And I’m not thick enough to believe even you, Miss I-believe-in-redemption could ever have forgiven me for that. If we hadn’t been together as Sarah, you and I would never be together as Buffy.”

    Buffy stared. “Are you saying this was... destiny?”

    Spike looked disgusted. “Oh, bugger that. Are you going to start playing Angel’s prophecy games on me? All I know is what happened. I don’t pretend for one second we were always meant to be together. I love you, we work well together, and we’re happy. That’s as far I’m going with that bollocks.”

    “But when we start jumping through time...”

    “Time isn’t fixed. Illyria taught me that. One day we might be destined to be together, the next, not so much. Stop thinkin’ on it. We’re here. Just step on.”

    “But Drusilla... she saw the future.”

    “Drusilla also once told me I was about to turn into a duck. She saw a lot of futures, Buffy. Some came true. Some didn’t. You and I?” He shook his head. “Miracle. Not destiny.”

    Buffy chuckled. “So I managed to teach you better, huh?”

    “Long slayer debates on the nature of evil? Yeah, pet. I might be thick, but you can knock through it all eventually.” He touched her face. “I’m glad you did. I wasn’t at the time, I hated your memory as much as I loved you. Or... well. I guess I was hating myself, really. Couldn’t see it that way then. I tried to bury it – not as deep as I did my mum, but I wouldn’t let myself think on it.You hurt me like hell, bitch! But now... I’m glad you did.” He caressed her hair. “God, I’m always grieving for you, aren’t I. Even after only a few days.... God, I missed you.”

    “I didn’t have much time with you. I’m glad I could heal the evil even a little.”

    “Oh, you did a lot. I never kept a pet again, either. Truth to tell, I was scared to. Didn’t want to go through all that again. You’re not supposed to love your victims. Not like that, anyway. I also started killing Dru’s dolls. She had a few temper tantrums, then got over it. I gave her twenty-four hours, and then she had to eat them, or I ended it.” Spike sighed. “Sarah never left me. She... you... god, this is going to be confusing!” He brushed Buffy’s hair back from her face. “Who was she? How did you come to be... her?”

    “She was a junkie. Her soul had already fled from an overdose. Nikki and I found her.”

    “Nikki,” Spike said.

    “Yeah. Nikki agreed to help me, in exchange for telling her about Robin. Well, actually, she probably would have helped me anyway. Slayer to slayer. We found Sarah brain dead, in a hospital.”

    Spike felt twisted inside. “Nikki helped you.”

    “Yes,” Buffy said. “I would have faded away in a day without a body to hang on to. And even once I found one, Nikki told me I wouldn’t survive in it for more than ten or twelve days. She offered to catch you for me, bleed you so I could get home, but... I believed I’d have a better chance just... trusting you wouldn’t kill me too quickly. It was my mission to get me home, not hers. And... well, understandably, I wanted her far away from you for as long as possible.”

    Spike couldn’t speak for a long moment. When he finally could, all he said again, was, “Nikki.”

    “Yes,” Buffy said. “She guessed, you know.”

    Spike looked up. “Guessed?”

     Buffy nodded. “Nikki guessed that I was working with you. That that was how I got pulled back, through the blood. She thought it something more like our first truce, not... like this. But she guessed. She thought you were the kind of vampire who might make a deal with a slayer. She’d studied you. She knew where you were, and what you were doing, and she left you there, in the Bowery, because you made her job easier.”

    “What?”

    “You were taking out other vamps. Weren’t you?”

    “I always did that,” Spike said. “Cities get over hunted if you don’t.”

    “Well, she said you’d probably saved her life. There were so many vampires in New York, she was overwhelmed before you showed up. She said the vampire nests you took out would have taken more victims than you and Drusilla and your minions combined. So Nikki left you there. She avoided you, and she left you there.”

    “She left me....” He looked up at Buffy. “She decided not to slay me?”

    “Yes. Well, she decided not to hunt you. She wasn’t trying to keep you alive or anything when you showed up on her doorstep.” Buffy touched Spike’s cheek. “But in the way of an adversary... she said she loved you.”

    Spike closed his eyes. He felt like he’d been punched in the stomach. “I don’t think I can take much more of this,” he said. His victim had saved his lover, and his lover had been turned into his victim.... The savior and the fallen and the tortured were all twisting together until he didn’t know which was which. He swallowed. “You mean Nikki knew she wasn’t going to survive that fight?”

    “I don’t know what she knew,” Buffy said. “But she knew she wasn’t going to see Robin grow up. And she had guessed... that you had survived it.”

    Spike put his hand over his eyes and gulped. He didn’t know how he felt. It was too tangled, too powerful. Nikki Wood... his prey for over a year – for decades, if he counted all the years he had tried to track down another slayer. His second slayer, his proof that he was more than his fellows, and more than a single lucky day. His strength. His armor. His second skin. And she’d known all along....

    “Spike? Are you okay?”

    Spike shook his head. “First you tell me that you’re Sarah, and now you tell me that Nikki most likely knew that I would kill her. Two of the most profound and life changing experiences I’ve ever gone through have just been twisted out of my past, tangled into knots, and dropped in my lap. I don’t know what I’m feeling.”

    “They were already tangled together,” Buffy said. “Remember what you told me, told Sarah? That you’d walked away from the fight... because you knew I wouldn’t be taken care of if you were killed.”

    Spike looked up. “I did do that, didn’t I.” He touched Buffy’s cheek again. “She was such a little, helpless thing, Sarah. I couldn’t leave her to Dru.”

    “You got back just in time, too,” Buffy said. “I felt like an idiot. I should have been able to fight her.”

    “In a human body, suffering severe blood loss, after playing my willing victim for a week? Buffy, what do you expect of yourself!”

    “I’m a slayer.”

    “Balls. You were human. Besides, anyone can hit people. Slayer strength is more than your good right arm. Real strength is walking into the darkness and staying there, trying like hell to shed light.” He looked down. “While I did all I bloody could to quench it.”

    “No, you didn’t.”

    “Don’t you remember what you looked like, at the end? God, Buffy. What I did to you.”

    “It’s okay. I know what is to have a human lover. It’s hard not to break them. Like making love to porcelain.”

    Spike shook his head. “No, love. That would have been easy. It’s like making love to sugar candy. Yeah, you might break them, but that’s the least of your worries.” He kissed her hungrily, briefly. “And you kept acting so strong! I reacted to it as if you were. And you... weren’t.”

    “I am now,” Buffy said. She took hold of his arms and pushed him down onto the bed. “I’m stronger than you.”

    “In every possible way,” Spike whispered.

    Buffy held him down, straddled him and kissed him fiercely, forcing his arms into the mattress. She kissed him as if he were water, and she had been living in a desert. She kissed him as if she’d devour his soul. “God, I missed you!” she whispered, and she kissed him again.

    Spike knew she had. She’d told him as much, out of Sarah’s low, soft voice. And he’d thought she was just addled from his bite.

    A second later he revised his opinion, thinking maybe he’d been right, and Buffy was completely addled anyway. “Bite me,” Buffy told him.

    Spike was startled. “What?”

    “Bite me. I need you to bite me.”

    “No, Buffy...”

    Buffy glared down at him. “Was I asking, Spike?” She sat up and dragged him after her by his shirt. “You know what you did to me,” she growled into his mouth. “You know exactly what you did to me. You fed from me every day.” She kissed him desperately, as if she couldn’t hold back, and then forced herself away again. “And it was always you,” she whispered. She kissed him again and again. “You got to pick.” She kissed him, and bit his lip so hard he was afraid she might draw blood. She let go when he pulled his head back, and he wasn’t bleeding, but there was a firm dent in his lip. “My turn, you jerk.”

    “I fed from you yesterday,” Spike said. “It’s not safe.”

    Buffy laughed. “You kept me alive for a freakin’ week, you idiot! And I was weak and human and tiny, and I don’t believe you.”

    “You weren’t very healthy by the end there, pet,” he said, but the despair had left his tone. She was starting to excite him. Despite all the horror, Spike was charged. Buffy was Sarah. Sarah was Buffy. And he hadn’t destroyed Sarah after all... and now she was strong... and beautiful... and – and Buffy. She didn’t feel he had betrayed her. And... she loved him. “I’d turned you into a victim.”

    “Yeah. And then you fucking killed me,” Buffy said. She climbed back onto his lap, straddling him as she had in her closet. Spike groaned as the memory jolted through him. Confusing, and erotic, and painful, and evocative, and wildly overwhelming. She kissed him on the mouth, just a peck, just enough to tease. “Now prove to me you won’t do it again.”

    Spike pulled his head back. “Do you really think I...?”

    “No,” she said. “But I’m telling you to prove it, anyway.” She flipped backwards and pulled him down atop of her, holding him hard enough she actually bruised him. She smiled at his grunt of pain. “Take me deep,” she whispered, seductive. “Take me hard. Take me far away until I lose everything, this whole damn life, in you.”

    Spike knew what was happening. “Buffy. You’re in a different body. It’s only psychological, the addiction isn’t–”

    Buffy pushed him off until they were lying side by side, and she held him down with one hand, hard.“It was thirty years ago for you!” she snapped. “It was an hour ago for me, do you get that? It’s still hot and here and... God! You don’t know what that did to me. I just gave, and gave, and gave, and I didn’t have to hold back, because I was dying anyway. I was terrified, yeah, but I was so fucking free. It was... wanton. Like that music that kept blaring from that club of yours, wild and violent and passionate, and the risk didn’t matter. But it wasn’t mine. I want it, here, now. I need it to be mine. Now you do what I tell you!”

    “Buffy–”

    “I won’t ask after today,” Buffy said. “Not outside of the usual. But don’t you dare tell me no. Not after this week. You don’t have the right.”

    Spike grinned up at her. “And this is my punishment, I take it?”

    “One of them,” Buffy said. “Now, are you going to bite me, or do I have to get a collar and chains?”

    Spike slid into his fangs. “I guess I can endure being slayer-whipped for a bit.”

    “If you don’t get down to it, Bloody William, this will soon be a fact.”

    Spike kissed her, feeling her tongue slide over his fangs, the strength of her hand squeezing the back of his neck. The passion of it, the power surged through him, and his blood sang, racing through him – no pulse, but the constant rushing surge of demonic power that charged him when he hunted. It hadn’t been like this with Buffy before. He hadn’t let it. He let his hand travel down her body, sliding up under her shirt, his knee reaching between her legs as he prepared to...

    “Skip the fucking pre-show and bite me already!” Buffy snapped.

    He’d have laughed if he was any less fired. He let loose a growl and attacked, piercing her throat without finesse, without care, without any doubt at all. She screamed, but it was not, in any way, a protest. He made himself release her flesh before he bit a chunk out of her, and the blood pooled into his mouth.

    It was not, of course, at all like biting Sarah. Sarah had been weak, and tainted. He’d fed on her for days, and her blood had been thin and watery. She’d started impure, neglect and ill diet and a life of hardship she’d ultimately used drugs to escape from. And she wasn’t a slayer.

    Buffy, as always, was potent as a drug herself. Spike had never taken this much from her, had never fed from her two days in a row, never had more than a snack. Angel, he knew, had feasted upon her once. Filled his belly, and only barely brought her to the hospital in time, gotten her a transfusion, and kept her alive. Spike had never taken near that much from her. He refused to do that, now. But even so, carefully giving back as much as he could, he let her blood flow through him, course inside him, more and more and more, until every fiber of him sang with it.

    His first alarm went off inside him, the one that usually told him that was enough to take from Buffy. He willfully ignored it and gave her more, took more, gave her more. She was humming with the pleasure of it, her hard squeezing fists barely starting to weaken. He meant to take her down, as far as she needed to feel her ordeal was over.

    Her hands moved, reaching under his coat and tearing at his clothes. They ripped with a furious rending sound, and Spike grunted, distracted from the blood. Now she wanted his body, along with his bite! Couldn’t she have let him get ready first? But no, she wasn’t thinking. There was no plan in this. His bite made her want to be close, and she was so charged, she wanted him close as possible. She scrabbled at his belt, and he lifted his hips to give her access. She broke his zipper. The metal popped under her hand rather than slide down. She ripped her own trousers, tearing the seam down the side, and grabbed hold of his cock, forcing it down past her underwear, deep inside her, all the while pushing her throat up against his mouth.

    Another alarm went off. He’d taken over a pint by now, enough that he could feel her in his belly, enough that he knew he’d be humming with her for days. Human blood made him feel powerful, like he could do anything, without risk or consequence. It was a high for him, too. Slayer’s blood... Buffy’s blood... made him feel like a god.

    He took more, the hot blood pulsing over his tongue, as she pulsed beneath him, grinding up into him, squealing and grunting like a wild animal. More, more, taking her down, giving back almost every mouthful before he took it in again to swallow. His tongue was aching from feeding the blood back, but he kept on her, so long as she was still conscious. She forced herself against him, thrusting upward, holding him tight to her. She felt so... damn... good.

    Sarah was Buffy. Sarah had accepted the pain he caused her, and forgiven the degradation he inflicted, and given herself willingly to his evil, while still remaining good. Sarah had washed him clean of his sins, and beaten his eyes open to see his shortcomings, and given him the freedom to grant freedom. Soulless, violent, trying his best to be heartless, she had reached out and found him in the dark. Sarah had been his beloved pet, his love, his pain. And Sarah was Buffy. He had killed her. He had owned her and taken that life inside him, and it was beautiful, and terrible, and it tore him apart. Buffy’s humming and moaning voice beneath him stopped, quite suddenly, but it wasn’t a bad thing. She’d just come so hard her throat had closed, her breath frozen. He could feel her muscles cording, and her blood surged in him. It threw him over the edge.

    If he had still been evil, if he hadn’t had a soul, if he had no morals to hold him in check, he’d likely have killed in that moment. He’d have bitten through her throat like it was a rare steak, snapped her bones beneath his hands, roared his pleasure into her dying meat as he let her blood gush from an arterial tear, so fast he couldn’t even have swallowed it. Instead, he made himself freeze as the orgasm passed through him, ricocheting around his feeding, fucking body, like he was a marble statue. He lost his seal on her throat, and blood dripped down her skin, staining the sheets. He was usually more careful than that. But then, it usually wasn’t so intense as this.

    He stayed in her as it faded, coming back to life as the heat of her warmed him even more. Buffy moaned, her throat opening as her own pleasure cooled, and she went soft under him, the passion fading. A third alarm went off, and Spike slowed his feeding, lapping at her wound, giving... giving... giving... there. She was out. Spike pulled away quickly and sealed the wounds with his fingers – his thumb was not going to be adequate. He held the blood inside her as she breathed peacefully, waiting for her slayer’s healing to at least make the bleeding stop. He took a deep breath and swallowed the remaining taste in his mouth. Oh, Buffy had no idea how much of a trick that was. Any more, and she would have needed a transfusion. As it was, she would be okay, but he couldn’t risk this again.

    He felt her inside him, enough for his stomach to actually feel the weight of the blood, something he hadn’t allowed with her before, ever. He was breathing hard, shaking in his tattered clothes, inside his replica of Nikki’s coat. This was more human blood than he’d taken in years. He was going to have be very careful of his impulses for the next few days. For one, he really wanted to go kill Crowley just then. Kill him slowly. Listening to him scream. He couldn’t let that side of him have control, and the human blood was telling him that was all okay, and there would be no consequence. He’d have to keep himself under control. When Buffy woke up, he’d tell her to keep an eye on him, too.

    When Buffy woke up. Spike let his head sink onto hers, kissing her forehead. She was pale, but she was mostly passed out from the anesthetic more than blood loss. She was going to wake up. She wasn’t dead on the floor of the kitchen, an empty corpse, torn and tattered beyond all human recognition. She was alive and vital and powerful and perfect. She was going to wake up, and love him, and be Buffy. Spike slid himself tightly around her, in case she woke up still high on the bite, needing to be close to him. “I love you, pet,” he whispered. “I love you so much.”

 

BUFFY: Bell. Neck. Look into it.
SPIKE: Come with a nice leather collar, does it?
            All The Way
 

    Buffy woke to full sunlight, alone in the bed. She hadn’t expected that. She was tired, and weak – most likely from blood loss – but she felt content, too. The blankets were tucked securely around her, and she felt languid and satisfied in the warm sun.

    She was alone in the bed, but everything felt perfect. The room, bright through her closed eyes, peaceful and separate from the madness of her last week; her body, still aching deliciously from the night before, stretched out on the soft bed; the scent of demonic incense heavy in the air; no fear of what was about to happen next from long dead slayers or unpredictable soulless vampires or...

    Buffy opened her eyes in the bright sun. Demonic incense, slightly sweet. That was the smell of a burning vampire.

    She sat up in a panic, terrified that her experience had just pushed Spike over the edge, and in a fit of guilt he’d opened the curtains to his death. “Spike!”

    “Here, love,” Spike said quietly.

    Buffy looked about the bright room, flooded in sunlight. Spike had gone over the edge a bit, it seemed, but not as direly as the scent and the sunlight seemed to have indicated. He sat cross-legged in the center of the room on the carpet, in a shadow, just out of the reach of the sun. He wore only his jeans. His coat lay beside him, folded neatly. Gentle wisps of smoke graced the air above his head, and as Buffy watched, he moved his hand just barely into the light, his fingertips smoldering. He traced delicate patterns with the smoke and watched as they drifted into the air, before pulling his fingers back again.

    “Spike...?” Buffy said carefully. “Everything okay?”

    “Yeah,” Spike said, sounding kind of distant. “Everything’s great.”

    “You’re scaring me,” she said, without further preamble. “Why are you doing that?”

    “I’m enjoying the view,” Spike said.

    Buffy finally did look out the window at the glittering sea of glass and steel that was New York. Their hotel had a pretty good view during the day. He moved his hand and picked up a cigarette from a cup by his side, adding its distinctive puff of tobacco to the smoke already drifting through the air. He must have disabled the smoke alarm. “You okay, love?” he asked. He hadn’t really looked at her.

    “I felt great until I saw you doing that,” she said. “Will you let me close the curtains?”

    “Let me enjoy the sunshine, slayer,” Spike said, with a strange and distant smile on his face. “I don’t spend much time in any room with a view.”

    Buffy climbed out of bed. She felt shaky, a little weak, but she’d felt that way before. This wasn’t the first time she’d lost a lot of blood. She still wanted to be close to Spike, and she wasn’t sure if she was still under the effect of his bite, or if she was just really, really glad to be back. She dropped her ripped clothes and came up to him. Spike had ordered her a meal. Feeding her again. It sat on the table by the door, a big bottle of fruit juice quite prominent. She ignored it and went to him instead, sliding onto his lap. He blinked at her with a strange little smile on his face, and slid his hands around her hips as she straddled him. “Good morning, slayer,” he whispered.

    “Is it morning?” The sun didn’t look right.

    “Mid afternoon, actually,” Spike said. He sounded odd. Truthfully, he sounded drunk, but happily so.

    “I wish you’d let me draw the curtains,” Buffy said. “You’re kind of creeping me out.”

    His smiled broadened. “How so?”

    “You sound weird,” she said. “And you’re behaving somewhat suicidally.”

    “Just a little impulsive,” he whispered. He leaned forward and breathed in her scent before leaning back to smile at her again.

    Buffy glanced up at the smoke above their heads. “Is that what you call the smoke-off?” She picked up one of his hands and examined the blisters on his fingertips. They were deep, and there were some on his palms and the backs of his hands as well. “You’re hurting yourself.”

    “Don’t even feel it,” he said, gazing at her fondly.

    “What’s going on?”

    Spike chuckled. “How are you feeling, now I’ve taken you down?” he asked, his voice a barely audible whisper.

    “Sleepy, a little shaky, and a bit scared, but that’s only since I smelled the smoke. I thought... you were so horrified last night by everything, I thought you might have....”

    “Indulged in a morning’s immolation?” He shook his head. “No. I’m just enjoying the sunshine.”

    Buffy caressed his face. “It always worries me how vulnerable you are.”

    “Vulnerable?”

    “Yeah.”

    He looked amused. “Vulnerable?”

    “Shut up, I’m a slayer,” Buffy said. “Of course I see you as vulnerable.”

    “You see me as vulnerable.”

    “Mere sunshine could take you from me,” Buffy said. “A fire that would only give me a burn can turn you into ash in seconds. A stray wooden stake and you’re dust.” She ran her finger along his cheek. “All I’d have to do is find a discarded chopstick.”

    Spike chuckled and bent his head to her throat, nuzzling at the scab he’d left the night before. “Mm... your scent,” he breathed. He kissed her throat and caressed her back and shoulders, finally just holding her, his head resting on her shoulder. “I really should have guessed you were a slayer. You fought like one.”

    “Yeah, well, I didn’t taste like one, did I.”

    “No. I still should have known.” He smiled at her. “It’s strange. I’m digging up all these memories of Sarah, and now you’re like... superimposed over a lot of them. I can’t believe I didn’t see it before. Up on that roof... you dance the same. You kiss the same. The way you stroke my hair, touch my cheek.” He smiled. “And a few other things.”

    “We did a lot of... other things.”

    “Well, you were trying to strip me down to my core, right? When’s a man at his most vulnerable? Manipulative little bitch.” He sounded very fond.

    “You left me pretty vulnerable, too,” Buffy said.

    He looked grave. “I know.”

    “I didn’t mean physically. Or... well, sort of. Some of those blood games...”

    He still looked grave. “I was afraid of that.”

    “I’m not addicted. Despite last night, that’s not what I meant. Not jonesing, swear. I meant, just... tissue damage aside, that was hot.”

    “Well, it was a way to have complete power over you, wasn’t it,” he said. He fondled a tendril of her hair. “And that was what I was trying to do.”

    “Shame we can’t do that now.”

    He laughed. “No. And I’m not going to kill you, either!” He sounded giddy.

    Buffy regarded him. “You really are acting oddly.”

    “I’m still a little high, love,” he whispered against her skin. “Or have you forgotten what a slayer’s blood can do?”

    She had, actually. She had gotten so used to being Sarah, whose blood was weak and tainted and ordinary. “Just a little impulsive,” she recalled.

    “Just don’t let me kill anyone, we’ll be fine,” he said. He kissed her neck a few times.

    “Who would you kill?”

    “Well, Crowley, for one. And he doesn’t quite deserve it, though he’s reaching for it.”

    “Anyone else?”

    “Whoever would dare,” Spike said. “That part of me isn’t very picky right now.” He slid his hands down her buttocks and pulled her closer to his hips. “God, I love you, slayer.” He kissed her, and kissed her, and kissed her. Then he pulled away and gazed at her. “Are you all right?” he asked seriously.

    “I’m fine,” she said. “A little thirsty. You knew when to stop.”

    “That wasn’t what I meant, though I’m glad. I meant... this thing you went through... we went through. Are you sure it didn’t damage anything?”

    Buffy took a deep breath and tried to think back. “It was... bits of it were traumatic,” she said. “Mostly I spent the whole time wishing I could fight. Properly. But Sarah’s body was so weak, and I wasn’t allowed to save anyone. That was the worst part – that I wasn’t allowed to stop you.”

    “That night... with the doll....”

    “That was the hardest night,” Buffy said. “That girl.”

    Spike winced. “I’m sorry.”

    “I think I had to see it,” she said. “I think I had to know what you’re fighting every day. The depth of what’s in your head, what it is that weighs so on your soul. I know you say I didn’t see all of it, but I saw enough to know. I mean, Spike... you lived through it too, and worse, and all of that’s in your head like it is in mine. And now when you look at it... I mean... you’re helpless inside it. The same way I was.”

    “I wasn’t the victim, Buffy. I was the perpetrator.”

    “But you were still there. And in a lot of ways, you really didn’t want to be.”

    “I did want to be. I don’t want to have been.” He shook his head. “It’s complicated. It was me, but I’ve changed. That’s all.”

    “But it horrifies you now.”

    “Yes,” he said. “Every second of it.”

    “It haunts you.”

    “What are you driving at?”

    Buffy didn’t say it. She knew he’d dismiss it if she called him as much a victim of his crimes as his prey was. He couldn’t see it that way – just as she couldn’t see herself as his victim when she was locked in that closet. If he saw it that way, it would break him, just as being the victim would have broken her. Still. She’d seen him. She knew it. She’d seen him staring at her in confused supplication and curling up just after his crimes, as if he was the one who’d been assaulted. She’d seen him all but weeping as she washed away the blood and slime, and for once gave him something pure. And all of that without a soul. She knew. That was all that mattered.

    “You were what you were,” was all she said. “You are what you are.”

    “And Drusilla?”

    “What?”

    “I gave you... to her.”

    “You shared me with her,” Buffy said. “Like you shared everything. When she tried to take me outright, you took me back.” She caressed the side of his neck. “It was strange at first, but... she’s part of you, you know. I’ve always known that. And she... there really is a bit of the holy sister left in her, isn’t there?”

    “A little,” he said. “If there wasn’t, I don’t know if she’d have been as crazy as she was.”

    “I knew, when I came to you... that if I came to you at that time I’d have to share you with her. You couldn’t just rid yourself of her. Just as you knew she couldn’t rid herself of Angel.” She swallowed then. “Why didn’t you ever tell me, before? About Angel?”

    Spike looked up. “What about him?”

    “About what he did to you.”

    Spike rolled his eyes. “Oh, god. I’d forgot I told Sarah about that. I’m sorry, kitten. You shouldn’t have had to hear that.”

    “Hear what? That a man had –? Spike, I know you’ve had male victims, I’m not a teenage kid. You wouldn’t have to be ashamed–”

    “No, it wasn’t that,” Spike said. “Honestly, Buffy, out of my history, you think that would be the thing to make me curl up with shame? Victorian ideals aside, Oscar Wilde didn’t come out of nothing.”

    “So why? Spike, we share everything. We don’t always go into details, for obvious reasons, but that’s... kind of a big thing.”

    “Yeah. But it’s kind of a big thing about Angel.”

    “And?”

    “And I didn’t tell you, ‘cause it wouldn’t be fair to you.”

    “What do you mean? I can take the dark stories, Spike.”

    “It’s not that it was dark,” Spike said. “It’s that it was Angel.”

    “And?”

    Spike looked at her, teasing. “And you love him.”

    Buffy was annoyed. “I do not.”

    “Yes, you do.”

    “I love you.”

    “Yes, you do. But you love him, too. Just as I still love Dru. He’s not right for you, as she’s not right for me anymore, but it doesn’t just go away. Some part of you will always love him.”

    Buffy looked down. He wasn’t entirely wrong, but there were things she could never really forgive Angel for, either. “He’s hurt me a lot. I...”

    “It’s okay, pet. I get it. He’s in you. He’s in me, too, you know. I would never have hated him so much if he wasn’t. I was utterly devoted to him for decades. You and I love each other, so I tell you the horrible things I’ve done. It’s not my place to tell you his.”

    “But that happened to you,” Buffy said.

    “It still wouldn’t have been fair to you,” Spike said. “We were vampires. We were cruel to each other. He was better at it than I was, that doesn’t make me any more moral.”

    “But you were his victim.”

    Spike shrugged. “In a way. But I’m not ashamed of it. Not of having been Angel’s victim, or his lover – and technically, I’ve been both, at one time or another.”

    “I’m sorry.”

    “He’s been my victim too,” Spike said. “At various times. I mean, we both know what happened. We’re both... I’m not gonna say different people, but we’re older now. We kinda joke about it. I mean some of our banter is... why do you think I call him a poof all the time? I don’t think either of us are actually ashamed of it, not about each other. But I don’t want to say or do anything that would make you feel like you would have be ashamed.” He kissed her. “Besides, I’ve much more terrible things to be ashamed of.”

    “And hurt by?”

    Spike shrugged. “I have hurt, and been hurt by everyone I’ve ever loved,” he said. “I kind of expect it.”

    “I know,” Buffy whispered. “And I’m sorry.”

    “You’re not–”

    “For all of it,” Buffy interrupted. “Not just for me. For all of what you’ve endured.”

    “I’ve committed a lot of crimes, Buffy. As far as you’re concerned, I just committed a lot of them on you.”

    “That doesn’t mean you deserved abuse,” Buffy said. “Drusilla’s doll was an evil, evil creature. He didn’t deserve what she did to him, either.”

    “It’s all right, love,” Spike said. “I don’t feel abused. Not now.” He touched her face. “In fact, I feel amazing.”

    “High on a slayer. What every vampire longs for.”

    Spike chuckled. “Sort of.” He frowned at her. “You know... I didn’t feed on Nikki.”

    Buffy frowned back. “You didn’t?” She’d read that Nikki Wood had had her neck broken, but she’d just assumed the tissue damage hadn’t been written down. The records of slayer deaths were not, in her opinion, adequately recorded.

    Spike shook his head. “I’d killed Sarah just a few days before. Her blood was weak, full of toxins, really nothing fabulous about it at all. Still, I didn’t feed for two weeks.”

    Buffy stared at him. He’d have been suffering heavy withdrawal by that point. “Why not?”

    Spike shrugged. “Not morals or anything,” he said. “I just didn’t want her taste washed away.” He fondled Buffy’s hair. “I mourned you. Do you know strange that is, for a vampire? To mourn his own victim?” He shook his head. “Nikki... that fight with Nikki. I’d always been trying to prove something, but... with that fight... I was trying to prove it to myself. I was the big bad. I had remind myself. I had to either kill her, or die. There was no middle ground. I was a vampire, hard, a murderer, made from sin itself, nothing soft or kind or generous about me. Or I was dead.” He shook his head. “A couple times she nearly got me, and it felt so good, to have all that pain beaten into my flesh. Nikki nearly took my head off, pushed me out the window of that subway car, and I screamed with joy at how close to death I was. Right before I killed her, there was a moment when she had me down, and I nearly let her get me....” He trailed off, and Buffy could see Sarah’s memory heavy in his eyes.

    He shook his head. “Well, the demon won against the slayer in the end.”

    “Then what?”

    “Hm? Oh. Well, I took Dru to London. She knew it, she liked London. We found an old Edwardian flat for a lair. Joined up with the punk scene ‘cross the pond. We didn’t even clean up the flat in New York. I just dusted most of the minions, and we took off. Set the place on fire.” His eyes were distant. “Sarah’s body was still on the kitchen floor.”

    “You...?”

    “I couldn’t bear to touch it,” Spike said quietly. “I loved you so hard.” He kissed her cheek softly. “You were so much more than just a pet, pet.”

    Buffy looked up at him. “So, all this time you’ve been calling me pet, was that because you used to...?”

    Spike shook his head. “Other way around,” he said. “I called everyone I might like in my bed pet. I called Dru pet too, if you didn’t notice. She even called me her dolly sometimes.” He shrugged. “They were bound victims undergoing psychological and sexual torture as well as being eaten. It didn’t matter what we called them.”

    “You didn’t torture me, Spike.”

    Spike regarded her. “Only because you don’t think of it that way,” he said. “If you did, it would be. And after sharing you with Drusilla...” He shook his head. “I tortured you.”

    “Dru attacked me, at the end,” Buffy said. “But before that...” She felt uncomfortable, but she had to tell someone, someday. Spike was as good a person as any. “The Drusilla thing was complicated. I mean, you loved her, and that... did a lot of it, I think. But... it was actually kinda hot. Up on the roof, I was...” She swallowed. “Yeah. I wasn’t faking that.”

    “Ooh. I’d almost forgotten that.” He paused. “How, I have no idea,” he added, as Buffy felt his cock twitch beneath her. He’d found it hot, too.

    “Well, it was a long time ago, and you were trying not to think about it.”

    He smirked. “Point.”

    “Anyway. I realized something this last week, with the two of you. Do you remember what it was like, when I first started sleeping with you?”

    Several expressions passed across Spike’s face, from incredulity, to amusement, to bewilderment, to distress, and finally back to amusement again. “Well, yes,” he finally said.

    Buffy chuckled. “I mean what I was like. And I don’t mean the depression thing. But like I’d just... let go of something that I’d been clamping down on?”

    “Yeah.”

    “Well, I finally figured it out. I have this thing for vampires.”

    Spike looked at her blankly. “You figure this out just now, did you?”

    “Well, yeah. Because I don’t like evil. I really don’t, not in the sense of wanting to bask in it or anything. I want to get rid of it. And those two things have always kind of mixed me up about it all, the evil, and the vampireness. But you... and Angel... and even Dru. You kind of turn me on. Even her.” She wasn’t being very coherent, she knew. She was still trying to work it out in her head. “And I love you now, I mean you Spike, for who you are. But all this time I’ve been telling myself that it wasn’t that you were vampires. That it was Angel and his hopeless search for redemption, or my depression and how I really needed you – and I did – or how I’m a slayer and plain human men are breakable, but... none of that’s it. I just really like vampires.”

    Spike nodded for a moment. “You figure this out just now, did you,” he said again.

    “I’m serious!”

    “I know, but... I knew this all along, slayer.”

    “Well... I didn’t. I wasn’t seeing the group as whole, I kept seeing the individuals. Which is what you should do in the end, and what I had to do, because the group as a whole usually has this whole evil killing innocents thing, and that’s not something anyone with a conscience can easily get around. But it really bugged me that I still wanted you, even back then, even in that really breakable human body. ‘Cause most of the things I love about you were like totally gone, and I still really wanted you. I mean, that... that was not an act.”

    “I could tell,” Spike said.

    “Well, I realized that it was something about me, and who I am. I mean, you were talking to me back then – don’t know if you remember – about whether or not you have choice about loving someone. And we don’t, not really. We can choose what we do about it, but not how we feel. I was thinking a lot about choice and consent and who gets to choose what. And – well, Willow’s probably not the best example, ‘cause she’s kinda bi, what with Oz and everything, but – if you’d gone to, say, Tara, and told her, ‘You can’t be interested in girls anymore’ I mean, no matter how many times you say it, she’d still want girls. And... I think that’s what I am. I think I’m like Tara.”

    “Lesbian?”

    “Very funny.”

    “Well, you said the Dru thing.”

    “That wasn’t what I meant!” She knew he was teasing her. “Not girls. But... vampires. I’ve been trying to tell myself that vampires are like, take ‘em or leave ‘em, and it’s all individual. And in the end, it is, just like with Tara and Willow. I mean, Tara wasn’t jumping every girl on the street. But, I... have this preference. I mean, I can like men. I have. But for me... really... vampires.”

    “Are you telling me you’re a vamprsexual?’

    Buffy hit him playfully. “I’m being serious.”

    “So am I,” Spike said. “It doesn’t really have a name, does it?”

    “Shut up, this was a really big revelation for me!”

    Spike sat back and smirked. “So it’s a thing, then.”

    “Yeah. I think Tara really did have the right of it, back then. When I told her I wasn’t ready to tell anyone about you, she said I wasn’t ready to ‘come out.’”

    Spike nodded. He was still smirking. “So. This is what you’re doing now, is it? You’re coming out to your vampire lover about being a vampire-lover.”

    “Stop teasing me,” Buffy pleaded. “This is a really big deal.”

    “And it’s really cute,” Spike said. “Go on.”

    Buffy sighed. “I’ve lost my train of thought.”

    “Sorry. Didn’t mean to derail you.”

    Buffy shook her head. “The thing is, I spent a lot of time just... well, sitting in that closet, thinking about why I’d still want you when you were being absolutely evil. And had locked me in a closet. I mean, I gotta tell you, Spike, this shoulda killed it. Honest, knowing what you were and seeing what you were were just wildly different.”

    Spike gazed at her. “I’ve been trying to tell you that for years.”

    “I know,” Buffy said. “But, even if I’d been able to put all that aside and just think of you as you are now; as you were then you shouldn’t have affected me the way you did. And you did. And it really wasn’t the evil, because that disgusted me. And it wasn’t the danger, because that’s just kind of there.  And it wasn’t even because it was you, Spike, although I knew you so well, because it was really only half of you, and I love all of you. And I love you for the person you are – I’d still love you now even if you... well, ended up dropped in another body.” He chuckled. “But a vampire is just... who I really want to be with.”

    Spike’s smile came back, softened from its knowing smirk. “I’m more than happy to oblige, slayer.”

    “It’s weird,” Buffy said. “It used to bug me. I thought something was wrong with me. I thought I was only attracted to wicked energy, and that meant that I was... kind of wicked. And that made me really sick. But now I’ve seen it close up, and... no. It really, really isn’t the wicked evil stuff. And then I thought it was all tied up with being the slayer and the violence and the superpowers thing. I thought that was what did it. But without those, I still wanted my vampire. As a vampire. Is that weird?”

    Spike shrugged. “It’s not real common, but I’ve seen it before.”

    Buffy blinked. “Really?”

    “Oh, yeah, loads of times. Those who get turned on by vampires? All over the place. Hell, Dru’s doll was one. It’s just you’re really righteous, Buffy, and they’re usually more... grey about the evil thing. A lot want to be turned. And most become blood junkies really damn fast. Hence why I’ve been worried about you, pet. They tend to die young. For obvious reasons.”

    “You mean most die?”

    “It’s a dangerous predilection. But it’s not unheard of. Hell, given what Dru did to me when I first saw her, I probably was one. Though I dunno, maybe I just get off on things that’ll kill me, ‘cause...” he caressed her bottom, “I like slayers, now.”

    “So... this is a real thing?”

    He looked very amused. “Buffy... I’ve actually brought this up before. I knew this about you, love.”

    He had. The first time they’d ever slept together, he’d brought it up. “Well,” she said, chagrined. “I guess I didn’t. But I realized it was actually real. And I don’t really have a choice about it. But I guess it doesn’t make me evil, and I don’t have to like the evil. So long as I make good choices about who I’m with after accepting this.... preference. And... well, I think I have. With you. But like Tara, that’s just who I am. It doesn’t mean I’m wrong, just that I’m different.” She shrugged. “And I guess that’s okay.”

    “And you finally figured this out.”

    “Well, I didn’t have it sorted before. I don’t... really think a lot about the way I feel about things.”

    Spike shook his head. “No. No, I guess you don’t.”

     “It got painful. But I didn’t have much else to do this last week. And I really couldn’t understand why I wanted you so badly, when I really, really didn’t want to love you. Not just as Sarah, but even when we first got together.”

    He brushed her hair back. “So, when you first came to me in that abandoned house... you were all released because you’d stopped repressing your vamprisexual urges.”

    “You are really gonna get hung up on that word, aren’t you.”

    Spike shook his head. “No, it makes sense: Buffy, releasing a repressed alternative sexuality. Since you couldn’t love me.”

    “But I could,” Buffy said. “I couldn’t then, in Sunnydale – I was broken. But I could.” She snuggled up to him, nuzzling his neck. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I loved you back then, too, when I was Sarah. I hated the evil you did. I couldn’t have stood it for long. But even without the soul... I wasn’t loving just future you. I loved you.”

    “I thought you just said it was only half of me, and you love all of me.”

    “I do love all of you,” Buffy said. “Every half of you. All three of them.”

    “Three halves?”

    “The man, the demon, and what you made out of the two,” Buffy said. “So, okay, third, whatever. I’m still a little woozy.”

    “I’m not sure I really follow you down this yellow brick road, slayer, but I absolutely adore you.”

    Buffy sat up and gazed at him. “I adore you too,” Buffy said. “Because if I’m right, and I really couldn’t love anyone but a vampire properly... my god I lucked out with you.”

    Spike smiled. “Boy, you are really driving this home, aren’t you.”

    “Driving what home?”

    “Oh, I just realized something last night,” he said casually. “This thing, that happened between us. This one week... it’s changed a lot. I mean it’s... it shouldn’t have, we shouldn’t have needed it. Everything was great before. But now... last night,” he said with a smile. “As I held you, I realized something. Well, two somethings.”

    “What?”

    “I don’t want to kill you.”

    Buffy frowned. “I knew that.”

    “No.” Spike shook his head. “I don’t want to kill you at all. There’s no desire. None. Nothing I’m suppressing, or ignoring, or quietly logicing myself out of. There’s just no impulse. It’s...” he shook his head. “It’s bloody human, is what it is. It’s actually weird.”

    “Weird? Weird to not want to kill me?”

    “To not want to kill you, yeah. I have never been with anyone when I could hear their heartbeat, and not want to stop it. Dru, Harmony, other vampires, they’re already dead, and my psyche knows that. But that heartbeat... that beautiful heartbeat, that draws me and catches me and makes me want to dance with it, that sound that makes me salivate, I always want to stop. Until last night.” He reached out and placed two fingers on her throat, feeling her pulse. “It’s like I’ve been wrestling with a fishing line. I remember, when we were first together and everything was so violent, that was digging into me all the time, trying to drag me into killing you. I had to fight it really hard, then. And then, once I got the soul, it was like I had more strength to fight it, and it didn’t drag on me so hard. But it was still there. It was always there. Buffy... it’s not there. It’s gone.”

    His eyes were very soft as he looked on her. “Last night, I held you, and I had drained you... quite a bit more than usual. I was all charged with slayers blood, I’m still – keep an eye on me – still ready to kill just about anything that steps a toe wrong. And I have no desire to kill you whatsoever.”

    Buffy frowned at him. “Because you already have?”

    “I think so?” Spike said, as questioning as she was. “I think that might be it.” Then he shook his head. “There’s another possibility, which... less likely, but the thought’s there.”

    “What?”

    “There was something else I realized as I held you.” He leaned back on the edge of the bed and gazed down at her. “You love me.”

    “Well... yes. I thought you figured that out a while ago.”

    “Oh, I did. Well. Most of me did.” He held her jaw and caressed her lips with his thumb. “But there’s always been some part of me that doubts... some heartbroken and crying young man who honestly believes I am beneath you. It was one of the reasons I ultimately didn’t seek you out after the Hellmouth. And even yesterday, if anyone had asked me... and I’d really answered honestly... there would have been a lot of... stipulation. Don’t interrupt,” he said.

    “I’ve have said we were happy enough together,” he went on. “That we work well together, we fight well together. I’d have said you enjoyed my company, and we had the same goals. I’d have said we trusted each other, completely. I’d have said you wanted me. My body and my bite. I might even have said you wanted to love me. And in truth, all of that is as near to love as makes no odds, and as much as I ever needed. Because I love you, Buffy... completely. Without reservation, without rhyme or reason, without need for reciprocation. I will always love you... even, it turns out, when you have a completely different face and I’m totally evil and have no idea who the hell you are.”

    She chuckled.

    “But there was a thought,” he went on, “that occurred to me, just before I bit Sarah. You... she told me she loved me... and I believed she did, at some level. But I’d always known she was looking for something in me, that I didn’t have. I thought, just at the end there, it was because I’d killed her lover, and that she was trying to find him in me. It’s not an outrageous thing for a witch to do – and I assumed she was a witch, or had some gift like Drusilla. You remember, I told you a skilled witch could mojo up anyone I’d ever fed from if they had my blood.” He shook his head. “And I remember thinking... as I watched her crying, knowing she couldn’t leave, that she couldn’t get to that man, watching her... agony in that moment... I remember thinking, no one’s ever going to love me like that.”

    Buffy regarded him. Spike reached up and caressed her chin with his thumb. “Tell me you love me,” he asked.

    “I love you,” Buffy whispered.

    “Yeah,” he whispered back through a fond grin. “You do.” He kissed her tenderly, still unable to stop smiling.

    Buffy shook her head when they parted. “You’d think it wouldn’t have had to take all that for you to finally believe me.”

    Spike shrugged. “What can I say, love, I’m insecure.” He cocked his head. “Would you like to secure me?”

    “Huh?” Buffy was confused.

    He chuckled. “I got you a gift,” he said. He reached under his coat and pulled it out. “It’s not an exact copy, I had to settle for what the concierge could find at the pet store. But I think it’ll do.”

    A large black leather spiked collar. Buffy pursed her lips and glared at him. “This had better be some kind of joke.”

    “Nope,” Spike said. “Deadly serious.” He placed the collar in her hands, and then lifted them to put it around his throat. He tilted his chin. “How does it look?”

    She buckled it gleefully. Actually, it looked really hot on him. Really, really hot. No wonder he’d said she looked lovely in hers. Buffy laughed. “Well?” he asked.

    Buffy grinned at him. “It looks... like you’re all mine, pet.”
 

 

Chapter End Notes:

Thank you everyone for your enthusiasm and excitement for this story! Special thanks again to Spuffy Luvr for her excellent beta work -- if this story didn't totally squick you out, that's thanks to Spuffy Luvr. Thanks to solstice and pfeifferpack and Gaia all my other adoring fans, far too many to mention at this point, for reviewing and giving me happy dopamine surges every time I see that they've read and enjoyed my first foray into novel-length fanfic, and thus my first paranormal romance. One more nod to everyone online who kept such meticulous records of the CBGB club so that my silly smutty vampire fic had the whiff of verisimilitude. And my acknowledgements (and apologies?) to Joss, James, and everyone else involved in Buffy for letting me play in their sandbox.