Nothing in Moderation

“Spike!” yelled Buffy. “Show your stupid face! I wanna talk to you!” She felt feverish, bright. The Sluggoth-slime made the tunnel zoom-spin, forming a cement-y vortex that went round and round and round and round –

What was she doing? Oh, yeah. “Spike! Spike! Spike!” Maybe three times would do the trick. Buffy didn’t remember little things like her father’s name or the existence of any siblings, but she still knew her 1980s Tim Burton movies, god dammit. “If you don’t get down here right now, I’ll exorcise your ass!”

Nothing.

Buffy stopped and swayed, waiting for Spike to materialize.

Her shoulder’s slumped. Maybe Jo was wrong, and he had taken off. No, no, Spike wouldn’t do that. She knew he wouldn’t do that. He could be inciting a riot somewhere, or picking his choice of haunting grounds, or maybe he was invisible and watching her.

Buffy rotated in a slow circle and glared into every shadow within a 360 degree radius, just in case Spike got confused and thought she didn’t loathe his ghostly guts.

Still no Spike. But of course! It wasn’t nearly as creepy and stalkery if she wanted him around. He watched her when she slept, right? Well, maybe she should pretend to be asleep! And then yell at him when he acted all pervert!

Buffy turned into a secluded tunnel, a lesser-traveled path that would, in a meandering fashion, take her back to Jo’s hole. Hee. Hole. She stopped and leaned against the wall.

The mucus had taken the edge off her physical pain, but siding through the tunnels with Jo had taken its toll. Plus, intimidating Slimey the Worm hadn’t been the best thing for her wrist. Her bandages was wet and coming loose, and a dim red glow pulsed around the base off her thumb. Squinting, Buffy plucked the demon larvae off her arm and threw it to the floor. She squished it with her heel, creating a glowy, globby streak.

From the corner of her eye, she caught light glancing off slitted pupils, the slow, feline lope of a large predator. Buffy grabbed her hunting knife from her belt and spun to face the tawny cat demon.

She stopped short, blinking blearily at nothing. There had been a cat! She would have sworn that she had seen a cat! Buffy frowned when the tunnel wall failed to produce a tail or whiskers. Oh. Okay, then. Just your run-of-the-mill hallucination.

Buffy did not want to hallucinate big cats. She wanted to yell at Spike, and for some dumb reason, he wasn’t obliging her. Here she was, all liquid-couraged up, (though maybe Sluggoth slime was more of a gel) and she didn’t have a ghost to – to – courage!

This was all Spike’s fault! If he hadn’t jumped out of an unexplained cardboard box all willy-nilly, and then been annoying, and then gotten her beaten up, she wouldn’t feel this crappy about her existence.

“Spike!”

Buffy’s ears popped. She clamped her hands over them, yelping when she put pressure on her fractured wrist bones.

“You called, Slayer?” Spike stood in front of her, his chest not two inches from her nose. Hey, girl with a personal bubble, here! Buffy stepped back. Her heel slipped, and her hands windmilled, her bandage trailing like a ribbon dancer’s ... ribbon.

Buffy landing hard on her butt. Giggles frothed from her throat.

“What the bloody hell are doing, Slayer? Seemed mad enough ‘bout that brawl, yet here you are, making yourself easy pickings.” Spike’s cheeks sucked in and his mouth stretched thin and hey! he kinda sparkled. Buffy batted at the pretty glowing green specks in the air.

She gave him a little wave with her fingers. “Hiya, Spike. Where you been?”

“Out for a walk. What the bloody hell do you care?”

“I hate you. That’s a kind of caring.”

“Is not.” Spike tilted his head and squinted. “Slayer, your eyes –”

She blinked a few times, just to make sure that her eyes were still there. The movement made the tunnel wink in and out, and then shift sideways. Buffy laughed. “I’m baked!”

Spike snorted. “Yeah, I can see that.” Buffy tried to tug on his coat, but she stuck her hand straight through his thigh. She waved her arm up and down, giggling.

With an exasperated huff, he sat down next to her.

Buffy nudged her elbow through his side. “You’ve been avoiding me. Or stalking me. I’m not clear on which. It’s creepy.”

A muscle jumped under the blade of his cheekbone. “Vamp. Ghost. Ghost of vamp.”

Buffy wanted to knock his head against the wall. She also wanted to lean her head against his shoulder, but of course, she’d only end up knocking her own head against the wall. “Where were you, really? When you weren’t being all stealth vamp, I mean.”

“Getting answers, since you can’t provide them. Though the whole ghostly invisible act opens less walls than you might imagine.”

In the light of all the little glowy things bustling around, Spike looked especially haggard. Buffy had no trouble seeing him for what he was – the ghost of walking corpse. Which made him, like, dead twice over. “What did you find out?”

“Less than I’d like. No one talks about anything but the bloody rats and cockroaches down here, and it’s chaos up there.” Spike lifted his eyes towards the ceiling.

“You went aboveground?” Buffy hadn’t ventured out of the Underground since, well, she’d arrived at the Underground. She vaguely recalled sunshine, blue skies and kitten-heeled pumps in storefront windows, but those memories felt hazier than the disappearing puma she’d hallucinated only minutes before.

Spike looked suspicious. “You haven’t? Thought you gave up your memories so the satellite signals wouldn’t blast into your noggin? What’s that matter if you stay where they can’t reach you?”

“There’s the butchers.”

“Your killer zombie-types? Yeah. There are at that.” Spike’s fingers twitched. “It was night when I made it out. Thought it was a wasteland at first, then a band of your butcher-types jumped me.” He waved a hand towards his face. “Senses aren’t what they used to be. Sight and hearing’s worse, and I can’t smell at all, so I didn’t know they were there. They’d have had me, if I’d been real enough to have.”

Buffy shuddered, picturing slathering mouths and wild, red-rimmed eyes in sunken faces. It had been awhile since she’d faced butchers, but they weren’t forgettable. Then again, she’d probably said the same about parts of her old life, back when she was living it.

“Didn’t know what they were eating at first. Not like there are any taco stands. Then, I saw them rip into one of their own. A lady. She was pregnant.”

Spike sounded disinterested. Buffy glanced at his human mouth and remembered that it hid fangs.

“Saw some vamps, too. Acted as bug-crazy as the humans.”

“Human minds are programmable; demons’ aren’t. You make some butchers, then you Turn them and send them to kill the other guy’s butchers without worrying that they’ll get reprogrammed.”

“The other guy’s? Who’s even fighting this war?”

“No one knows. Armies. Governments. Furries. Your pick.” Buffy closed her eyes against the spinning lights, which didn’t seem quite so fun as they had earlier. “They said the Tech made you immortal. One body wears out? You just download yourself into another one. But I think the guys who started this must be dead, and the satellite signals have just kept on going. If they were alive, why wouldn’t they stop? The world’s been conquered, already.”

Spike’s fingers tapped soundlessly against his thigh. “You’re telling me all the world’s governments have collapsed. The Watchers’ Council collapsed. The Slayers – if there are any left, aside from you – have been hijacked or turned into mindless killing zombies. And there’s no one fighting it.”

“There’s me and Jo,” Buffy said, stung.

“Glad to know such an illustrious team’s working to save the world through aimless wandering and recreational drug-use.” Spike sighed. “Not that I’m any good in this. A whole world where people shrug in and out of bodies like they’re wool coats, and I don’t have so much as a chain to rattle.”

“Marley would be a bad look on you.” Buffy frowned. “And where do you get off, saying I haven’t been trying? You haven’t been here. You don’t know what it’s been like.”

So, maybe she’d been more or less useless. But he had no right to judge her! He’d been lying dormant in a piece of jewelry for a hundred years!

Shadows sharpened the edges of his face. “You know how to stop this, then?”

“Well, not specifically.”

“You don’t. Not sure you even know how things went down in the first place. And you don’t know me.” He sounded emotionless, but exhaustion and sorrow were etched into the little lines around his eyes and mouth.

“I don’t remember you. There’s a difference. I’m just not sure I can trust what I know, especially since that whole thing with the Voorslag.” She leaned her good wrist on the wall and rose on unsteady legs.

Dark eyes flashed. “For the last time, I wasn’t trying to get you killed. Was trying to wake you the fuck up.”

She waved her wrapped wrist, the end of the bandage waving in lofty arcs. “The broken bones tell a different story.”

Spike winced.

“So, I’m not your Buffy. Fine. Well, guess what? The world you remember ended. The girl you remember died.”

Spike’s growled. “That would make it easier, wouldn’t it?”

“Easier!”

“Yeah, easier!” Spike flickered out of sight, then reappeared on his feet. “Not your failure if you’re not the same bloody person! Well, guess what, love? There’s more to a person than their memories.”

Buffy felt sick. “As a demon who stole someone’s brain and took all their memories, I guess you’d know!”

“There’s bones and blood and viscera, and that spark you call a soul. Or have you lost that, too?”

Was that supposed to hurt her? Well, no way was it working. “So what if I have? The tech doesn’t exchange souls. You stick an evil mind in a good person’s body? They don’t pick up the harp and start soup kitchens for orphans. They kill everything in sight. I can’t think of anything that matters less than a soul!”

“It matters,” Spike said, and Buffy could see it on him. A dim-bulb glow. Great, now she was hallucinating vampire souls. Why couldn’t she see beetles eating her flesh like a normal person?

Except, she had known, hadn’t she? She couldn’t help but know him. It was the how, when and why that escaped her.

She stopped breathing.

The pain slammed against her skull.

A church. Dark. Spike’s face half-hid in shadows. “Shame on you, Buffy ...”

A bedroom and an older man she doesn’t recognize. She’s explaining something, something important –

– that Spike can be a good man.

Buffy opened her eyes and found herself breathless, weak and leaning against the wall. Spike stood in front of her. She glanced down and saw that his hands were shaking. He quickly stuffed them in his pockets.

She closed her eyes. If it were true, if Spike was a good man, there was no place for him, not here. Then again, Buffy wasn’t so sure she believed in good men anymore. “You say you want me awake? You say you want me fighting to save the world? Maybe you should stop worrying about me and take a good look at yourself, Mister. Because I don’t see you doing anything useful.”

“Ghost, remember?”

Buffy’s eyes popped open. Green glowies fell through the air like snow, dusting Spike’s hair and shoulders. “You’re haunting me! It’s hard to forget!”

“You called me, Buffy. Thrice.” He held up three fingers in demonstration. Huh. So the three-times thing really did work.

She scrunched up her face. “Like I even needed to! First lesson in How Not to be a Creepy Stalker 101 – ask before you crawl into bed with somebody!”

Spike’s lip twisted. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

“And another thing – you should believe me when I tell you things. And not die. Not dying is very important.”

“Believe you when you tell me what, exactly? You haven’t told me a damned thing!” Spike cocked his head. “And what was that about dying? Can you at least try to stick to a bleeding script?”

Impulsively, Buffy reached for his hand. Her fingers clasped through his. Heat seared between their palms, and she thought she saw a blue flicker. His hand didn’t feel like a hand, exactly, more like a pulsating-vibrating-static-electric-field-thing.

She jerked away. Was she somehow hallucinating his touch? Well, not unless she was hallucinating Spike, too, because he was staring at his hand with wide eyes, his mouth working like a fish. A really, really surprised fish.

“What the bloody hell?”

Buffy bit her lip and slowly, hesitantly extended her fingers. The tips of her fingers brushed his hand, and the force of him leapt up her arm.

“Oh, God, Buffy.” Spike’s eyes rounded in awe. “I feel you. I feel.”

She had wanted to feel, and she had said so, right before –

Fire.

Pain surged once again. Buffy’s stomach lurched. Acid rushed up her throat and she vomited, bile spraying through Spike to hit the wall.

Spike dropped his hand, stepped back and looked at her in astonishment.

“That was your fault,” Buffy spluttered, red-faced. “You made me.”

“Right.” Spike wiped off ghostly clothes that didn’t and would never need wiping. “Running hot and cold. Guess the old Buffy’s not so dead after all.”

Buffy stomped her foot. The ground shifted beneath her, causing her to stumble forward. She stopped just short of going through him. “You did this to me. You and your appearing act. And then the disappearing one.”

“Been here less than three weeks, and I’m responsible for the last hundred years and you losing your bleeding mind?” He looked at the fingers that had touched her. Or that she had touched. Whichever.

“Yes! No!” Buffy rubbed the back of her head. “The mind-thing’s probably the Sluggoth slime I swallowed. Because of you!”

Spike raised an eyebrow, waiting.

“Because you’re different.” It wasn’t what Buffy had thought she was going to say. “You’re clean, and your hair’s dyed, and that coat’s not demon leather. You look hungry, but it’s because you’re a vampire, not because you’re starving. I haven’t seen anything like you in decades.”

Spike made a strangled noise.

She couldn’t stand him looking at the dirty brown hair she chopped short, the slight pooch of her starvation-chic belly. She stepped into shadows. The little green lights followed her like a multifaceted spotlight. Maybe she’d been too hasty to protect her mind. If she could be wiped, she could just step outside and let the signal carry her into oblivion.

She walked deeper into the tunnel, moving towards the pit she shared with Jo. “You look at me like you expect me to fix things, but I can’t. The Buffy you remember failed. She was better than me, stronger, and she didn’t stop this. I can’t do what she couldn’t. It’s over.”

“Then why am I here?” Buffy heard Spike’s voice echo from a distance, but when she turned around, he was only two feet away. Blue flames danced behind his eyes, and the ground rippled like water.

She peered into his face. “What?”

“Take it you didn’t put in for a mail-order ghost, and I sure as Hell didn’t sign up for this. Someone sent me to you. Why?”

Bile moved up her throat. She forced it back down. “I don’t know.”

“Couldn’t get a bead on anyone who can corporealize ghosts. I’m not even sure where to start.” Spike walked past Buffy, moving deeper into the tunnel. “Haven’t seen a public library as of yet, so I doubt there’s any books. Got any old guardian-of-lore types? Shamans might do in a pinch, or seers.”

Buffy struggled to keep up. “Lore? We’re burrowed in deserted metro tunnels. Does that sound like the kind of place that has lore?”

“Got to be someone who can figure out why I am. Would guess I’m here to lend you a hand, ‘cept –” he turned his head over his shoulder and wiggled his fingers “– I’m not exactly useful in a fight, am I?”

Buffy stopped and leaned against the wall, holding her stomach. “Ever think that maybe you’re just a mistake? Your box said ‘2003’ on it. If you were meant to do anything, you’re a hundred years too late.”

Spike faced her, his expression closed. “Better to know if I am. Either way, I need to find a way to fix it. Get a body or move – move on.”

Buffy froze. Her feet seemed very far away, and the floor felt shifty. “Move on?”

Spike shot her an annoyed look. “Know you’ve embraced meandering about all glaze-eyed, but I can’t live like this.” His voice became rough. “Hate being useless. Being nothing.”

Buffy’s mouth felt like it had been stuffed with Barry-fur. Her forehead and upper lip beaded with sweat. Words burned in her chest, then rushed out in an unintendedwhoosh. “You’re not nothing.”

He snorted. “Can’t smell or taste. Can’t affect anything. Can’t even drink myself unconscious. So, yeah, Slayer, I want to move on, whether that means getting a body or no.”

Her stomach clenched. Buffy leaned forward and threw up on her shoes. She could make out little pieces of undigested hardtack suspended in the filmy liquid. She groaned. Hardtack wasn’t cheap, and neither were boots.

Buffy coughed and spit, wiping vomit from her mouth with the filthy end of her bandage. A tingle touched her cheek, and she turned her head, and there was Spike. He frowned, little tics working in his forehead and jaw, then straightened with a frustrated sigh. “Best get you to your hovel before some nasty finds you in this sorry state.”

He had tried to touch her face, Buffy realized. Only he hadn’t managed more than a fleeting vibration before his fingers sunk right through her skin.

“Sorry,” she whispered, then leaned over to hack some more. The little green dots still moved through the air, but they looked dull and used, now.

“Don’t apologize. Makes me feel like a couple Hells just opened ice rinks.” He waited for her to finish coughing. “Can you walk?”

Buffy felt wobbly. “Sure. In another few hours. My feet feel all fuzzy.” She gestured at the offending appendages.

“Fuzzy feet will have to do you, pet. Can’t carry you.”

“I know,” Buffy said quickly, before he could elaborate on all the other things he couldn’t do. Did he think he had the monopoly on uselessness? Hello! She’d been useless way longer than he had!

Spike wrapped his arms around himself in a defensive slouch, and Buffy didn’t really want to fight with him anymore.

“Techo-pagans,” she said.

“What?”

“Jo knows a few. Maybe they can help you.”

Spike ducked his head. “Okay, then.” He started walking. Buffy followed him.

Jo’s door was a long time coming, even though the distance wasn’t far. Spike sauntered straight through the concrete slab leaving Buffy to push it aside. She did so one-handed, then stumbled towards the bench.

Buffy sat down, then bent forward to put her head between her knees. From the corner of her eye, she saw Spike’s denim-clad legs approaching the bench. He sat down next to her. She sat back up, and blood rushed from her skull too quickly, making her dizzy.

It hurt to look at the green lights. She wanted them gone.

Spike’s hand inched forward, then retracted, like he wanted to touch her, but couldn’t stand another failure. Buffy moved her own hand, skimming it over his upper thigh, then placing it across the tips of his fingers. Light crackled where she touched him.

Spike went rigid.

“If you’re nothing, and I can touch you, does that make me nothing, too?” Buffy asked.

Spike lifted his fingers a fraction of an inch, bringing their hands into greater contact. He watched, fascinated, as his fingers pressed against her skin. “Don’t know, love. Maybe it means we’re something.”

Buffy wasn’t convinced, but Spike’s expression looked a tad brighter, and for some bizarro reason, she didn’t want to dim it. “Yeah. Maybe it does.”

***