Hold Her Tongue

Buffy groaned and snuggled into the rags on the couch, trying to ignore the discomfort slowly driving her body to wakefulness. Her throat stung. Her mouth tasted bad. A steady pain in her head told her she was better off sleeping another twelve or so hours.

“How long has she been out?”

“How am I supposed to know? Does it look like I carry a bloody wristwatch?”

The voices faded to muddle as Buffy did her best to tune them out. She hovered on the brink of sleep, her muscles limp and leaden.

Buffy felt cool fingers slide through her hair, then stop against the side of her neck. She sighed into the caress, keeping her eyes closed. “I don’t think the bear wants any CountryTime.”

A soft snort. “He’d be out of luck if he did.”

Buffy sat up. Her eyelids scraped painfully over dry eyes. She felt muddled. Foggy. Also, ow.

“Jo? Where’s Spike? Did he leave?”

“No, love.” Spike’s baritone rumbled from the other side of the room. “Still here. Still haunting you, like a good ghosty.”

Buffy stared at him like she’d seen a – a Spike.

He no longer shimmered or sparkled, and Buffy didn’t seen any green things floating around like fairy dust motes, so at least she wasn’t hallucinating anymore. He didn’t seem happy. He regarded her with narrow-eyed suspicion and held his arms across his chest, his white fingers rigid against black leather sleeves.

She remembered his brief, not-so-gloomy expression when he’d touched her hand. Why did he look so miserable now? She couldn’t have pissed him off in her sleep.

She took stock of her companions. Jo had perched herself on the edge of the bench, in the small space that Buffy had left unoccupied. Spike stood closer to the wall.

Jo forced a steaming stone bowl into her hands. “Here, drink this.”

It wasn’t unusual for Jo to play doctor, but she tended to let Buffy suffer through hangovers. Buffy sniffed the liquid. It smelled like violets, or what violets would smell like if they rotted for a week before an Odefal demon used them as toilet paper.

Still, if Jo had suddenly forgotten that she disproved of Sluggoth-licking, Buffy wasn’t going to question it. She took a sip and spluttered. “Blergh! What is this?”

“Hair of the dog,” Jo said. “Or of the dog-like creature, I should say.”

Buffy gagged on the thick liquid. There was a sort of wet-dog aftertaste, now that Jo mentioned it, but it was the rightnowtaste that worried her. “Hair from what part of the dog, exactly?”

“Buffy, you licked worm slime last night.”

Not wanting to address that accusation, Buffy tossed back the rest of yuck, then shuddered and made a face. She noticed a quirk to Spike’s lip. “What’s so funny?”

Spike shrugged with an odd, stiff movement. “You used to do that with liquor.”

“Make faces, you mean?” Jo asked. “That’s hard to believe. Buffy doesn’t drink; she inhales.”

Spike remained expressionless, but in that strained way that tells a bluff. “So I’ve seen.”

Great. So now Spike was getting all judgey about her drinking, too. So what if her past self didn’t drink too much? She could have eaten her vegetables and walked on rainbows and attracted small woodland creatures, too, and it wouldn’t have mattered.

Because that Buffy hadn’t saved the world. That Buffy didn’t have to lose her memories, or live in cramped tunnels where everyone was the enemy, or feel compelled to search and search without hope or reason. Buffy doubted she’d even had fleas.

“Like you wouldn’t drink, if you weren’t all Casperesque.” Buffy thrust the bowl back into Jo’s hands. Her head felt clearer, but it was probably the shock of the uber-gross hitting her system.

“Course I would. But that’s me, love. ‘Sides, that wasn’t booze you were drinking last night. Didn’t know Sluggoth slime could get you stoned.”

“It can’t,” Jo said. “There’s a splice that’s part Sluggoth, part Sonoran, among other things. It trades its slime for blood.” She took one of the rags from the couch and started wiping out the bowl.

Spike stepped forward and growled at Buffy. “You traded blood? Your blood? Slayer blood?!”

“No, I traded demon poodle blood. What kind of blood do you think I have?” Buffy moved to get off the bench and accidentally pushed against Jo. Jo put a calming hand on Buffy’s thigh. Buffy swatted it away. “And I didn’t trade. I beat the Sluggoth up and then licked it!”

Jo stilled. “You what? How much slime did you touch?”

“Bloody hell!” Spike shook his head. “Never thought I’d see you as pathetic as your ex.”

Pathetic? She was pathetic? Okay, so she’d lost some of her Slayer mojo over the past hundred years. That didn’t give Spike tunnel to talk! He was a ghost! He couldn’t do anything except follow her around and moan –

– and he wanted to die because of it.

One look at Spike told you he was a fighter. There was the stance, and the scar, and the sneer. Not being able to fight – not having anything to fight – must be killing his spirit, just like it had once killed hers. Give it a century, and he’d be just like her. Aimless. Hopeless. Destroyed.

Buffy didn’t want that for him. Maybe he was better off truly, finally dead.

“Letting some overgrown leech suck on you! What were you thinking, Buffy? What if it didn’t stop? Don’t you know how easy it is to take too much?”

So, she didn’t want his soul hollowed out and crushed. That didn’t mean she couldn’t get irritated with him, especially when he was telling her how to run her so-called life when he didn’t know the first thing about it.

Buffy swung her legs over the side of the bench. “Actually, seeing as how I’m not an evil bloodsucking vampire, I don’t!”

Jo dropped the rag into the bowl, sank onto the bench and pinched the bridge of her nose.

Spike stalked towards the bench, stopping a few feet in front of her. “You’ve always had a death wish, Slayer, but I thought you’d go for another big blaze of glory. You’re just begging something to off you. What? Too heroic to do the job yourself?”

What big blaze of glory? He was probably referring to something she couldn’t possibly know, if he wasn’t just making stuff up, and that wasn’t fair!

“You mean I should go out like you did? By standing around and wearing a necklace?”

“Otherwise known as using your soul to power up an ancient, Hellmouth-destroying amulet? Yeah. Can think of worse ways to go! Least I was fighting for something. Saving people. Hell, I saved you.”

The disdain in his eyes, coupled with the reminder of her failure struck so hard, so deep, that something inside Buffy cracked. She cried out, launched forward and threw a hard punch to his face.

Her fist met his nose for a split second, then went straight through his head. Buffy froze at the sight of her arm bisecting his face. Spike moved to the side, off her fist, and looked at her with disgust.

Shakily, she brought her hand to her side.

Jo raised the scaly, burnt thing that had once been an eyebrow. “You think Buffy’s being irresponsible, so you goad her into committing suicide? That sounds almost as good as your Get-Buffy-to-Live plan.”

Buffy spoke before he could. “Besides, Spike’s the one who wants to die.”

“I’m not goading!”

Jo rolled her human eye ceiling-ward.

Spike looked down at his hands with a miserable expression, like he had already known that last night was a fluke, and that Buffy would be back to hating him in the morning. “Said I can’t stay a ghost. Whatever that means for me.”

She remembered the tiny glimmer of, well, not happiness, but some related emotion, in his eyes, when they had sat together on the bench. Buffy hadn’t wanted to hurt him then, but now, she couldn’t help it.

Why should she? He hurt her, too. Besides, she didn’t want him getting the wrong idea about ... stuff. She didn’t like him. They weren’t friends. They weren’t anything.

Maybe it means we’re something.

Buffy ignored her rising guilt. Arguing was easier, and probably less painful, than trying to look at her feelings too closely. “Your exact phrase was ‘Move on.’ Sorry, but it didn’t sound like you wanted to rent a U-haul.”

Buffy turned to Jo. “I said I’d help. Know any qualified techno-pagans?”

Jo’s red eye flashed in irritation. Hre human eye didn’t look much friendlier. “Let’s make sure I understand him, first.”

“There’s not much to understand.” Spike sounded annoyed. “Don’t care what I am – corporeal or dead – so long as I’m not this.”

“I do know a techno-pagan. But I don’t know what help she’ll be. Mediums are the ones that help ghosts pass through this world, but I don’t know any, and I’m not sure you’re even a ghost. I told you before, ghosts are cold. You’re room temperature.”

“I died. I came back, only I can’t feel a thing and can walk through walls. Tell me, what else could I be?”

Oh, God. Buffy, I can feel you.

Buffy flushed and glared at her boots. A piece of hardtack, encrusted in dried bile, was stuck on the right toe.

Jo picked up the rag she had dropped and resumed wiping out the stone bowl with quick, determined strokes. “Spike, can you leave us for a minute? I need to speak to Buffy. ”

Spike looked at Buffy in question.

“What are you waiting for?”

He grumbled something under his breath – Buffy caught “bloody” and “bitch” – and faded from sight.

Buffy swallowed hard, his disappearance doing odd things to her still-sensitive guts. “What happened? Is he really gone?”

“He’s elsewhere. Buffy, what do you want to happen, here?”

Buffy tried to say that she didn’t care what happened to Spike, but she couldn’t manage the words. Finally: “I thought you didn’t want me to trust him.”

Jo stopped wiping the bowl. “I don’t want him hurting you, and I don’t want you using him to hurt yourself.”

“How would I do that? Slit my wrists on his non-existant fangs?”

“Buffy, you do it every time you push him away. At first, I thought it was better that you keep your distance, but first the fight, and now this thing with the Sluggoth ... I don’t like how you’ve been acting since he arrived.”

“He keeps acting like I’m someone else, then getting mad when I’m not. How am I supposed to react?”

Deep in her throat, Jo’s tongue clicked in warning. “You two are connected, Buffy, whether you want it or not.”

“There has been no connecting! No connecting whatsoever!”

“I know being around him is hard, but I’m not sure you’re ready or willing to sever the only link to your past.”

Deep down, Buffy didn’t like the idea of severing Spike. But hadn’t she seen how miserable he was? She’d lived this life just under a century; he spent a month and decided he’d rather have stayed dead than stick around her, the pathetic failure that had replaced his Buffy. She even couldn’t blame him.

She deserved to be confronted daily with her own uselessness. Spike didn’t.

He had died to save the world. That sacrifice meant something, even if the world hadn’t stayed saved for even a decade.

“It doesn’t matter what I want.”

Jo’s tongue flickered past her lips. “Okay, then. Call your ghost.”

***