Huge thanks to Spikez_tart, who must have seen twenty drafts of this thing.

Along the Passage

“Are we there yet?” Buffy asked. She formed the middle of a three-person conga line, with Jo at the head and Spike at the tail. The tunnel they traveled through was level, even if the ground was slippery and squishy and the air smelled like fish and sulfur.

“No,” Jo said, without impatience. Her torch – greasy rat skins wrapped around the knobby end of a large femur, then set on fire – almost flickered out, then found some extra oxygen and flared back into furious being.

Unlike most of the tunnels in the Underground, this one was completely dark. Jo’s torch provided the only illumination.

Buffy trudged a few more steps. Her boots displaced the mud. Goopy ridges rise around her feet. “Are we close to being there?”

“No.”

Buffy pouted. She couldn’t handle much more walking. Whatever painkillers had been in Jo’s eau de ass had worn off, and visiting a techno-pagan was a far cry from Buffy’s usual post-Sluggoth activities, which involved snoozing a good twelve hours, then drinking hardtack crumbs half-dissolved in water.

Buffy could feel Spike’s eyes on the back of her neck. He was uncharacteristically silent (though why she thought his silence uncharacteristic, she couldn’t say, since hadn’t he stalked her for over a week without speaking?). His boots didn’t even squelch in the mud. Buffy wanted to look back at him, but she wouldn’t. Uh-uh. No way.

Did he get how far she was going for him? Techno-pagans made Buffy nervous. All that magicky power, and instead of blowing up satellites with their minds or creating shields against the signals, they had built a bunch of tunnels and created monsters to fill them. Buffy helped destroy the old world, but she’d done nothing to make the new one so miserable.

Techno-pagans were paid in more than hydra heads, too. Buffy didn’t want to be indebted to anyone, much less a techno-pagan, but she knew that payment would fall to her. As a ghost, Spike didn’t have anything to offer, and Jo wasn’t ponying up for a lifetime membership to his fan club anytime soon.

“Are you sure we’re not close?”

“Bloody hell! How many times does she have to say it!” Spike’s voice echoed through the tunnel.

The reverberations drove through Buffy’s skull. “I could just go back to Jo’s hovel. I don’t have to help you.”

“Hovel?” Jo turned around. “It’s almost like you’ve never seen Mount Pleasant.”

Buffy didn’t get a chance to reply.

“Crawl on home, then. I’m sure Snake Eyes can get me deader all on her lonesome.”

Spike wasn’t even talking about getting a body. Had he already given up on that idea? Was he just trying to make her feel bad? It wouldn’t work! She was a Slayer. She wasn’t supposed to care about vampires, no matter how much they pretended to know her.

Spike huddled. Crying. Opening up his shirt. Asking her to make it quick.

Spike talking to someone she can’t see. “Don’t make me remember. Make it so I forget again!”

Buffy stumbled forward and fell, crashing hard on her knees. Mud splattered. She saw her hands clawing at the mud, but the black looked red and the cold felt hot and her stomach cramped and clenched. Jo’s headache remedy surged up her esophagus and stung her mouth.

Buffy spat blood and vomit, then raised her eyes to see clean, black boots resting neatly on top of the ground. She sat back on her heels with a wet squish.

“Take it you just strolled down memory lane? What was it this time, love? Marky-Mark? Madonna’s cone bra?”

That wasn’t how it worked. Buffy remembered cone bras just fine.

Buffy wiped her mouth, smearing red-tinged bile across the back of her hand. She caught Spike’s eyes following the movement. Worry shaded his face.

“No. I remembered you crying and talking about how you wanted to forget stuff again. What was that? What did you want to forget?”

Spike took a step back and ducked his head. “Nothing that matters now.”

“The Hell it doesn’t! If this suicidal vamp thing is a pattern for you, I think I ought to know! And how can you be Mr. Judgey Pants about my memory loss when you gave up your memories, too?”

Jo waved her torch. “Guys, this isn’t the time or place.”

“I never did!” Spike bellowed. “I was fucking brainwashed. Turned into a bleeding weapon. And yeah, when I remembered what I’d been made to do, I wished I hadn’t.”

“Which was?”

“I’m a vampire. What do you think?”

“I think people who eat people don’t get to act disappointed with me!”

“Disappointed?! You’re unrecognizable! What did you think would happen when you forgot the people that kept you grounded, kept you fighting?”

“I don’t know! How would I know?!” Buffy gasped, bright-hot hurt flaring behind her eyelids. She whimpered and grabbed her head. The mud felt cool against her face, but everything else was hot and wrong, and it itched, and it scratched deep, deep, deep –

A dark room. Spike in chains.

She’s speaking. “You’re not alive because of hate or pain. You’re alive because I saw you change. Because I saw your penance.”

Spike lunges toward her, the chains stopping him short. “Window dressing.”


Buffy opened her eyes.

Spike withdrew into the shadows, where Jo’s torch light couldn’t reach him. He might as well have gone invisible, except for the tiniest glint of torch light reflected in his eyes. How did he reflect stuff anyway?

“You’re alive because I spared you. Because I believed in you. Why would I do that? What were you to me?” Buffy hated how lost she sounded.

The glint disappeared. “Someone who didn’t want to hurt you.”

Was that even supposed to make sense? Why didn’t he want to tell her? He had no problem bringing up sex, but Buffy wasn’t sure what she could believe. Plus, sex could mean all sorts of things. Hate and hormones. Booze and hormones. Hate and booze and hormones.

Did vampires have hormones?

“Yet, you keep on hurting her.” Jo sounded annoyed. She crouched next to Buffy, keeping her body suspended above the mud. “You’re bleeding.”

She cupped Buffy’s chin with her hand, and Buffy opened her mouth for Jo’s inspection. “Will I live?”

“Very funny. You bit your tongue, but I think that’s the worst of it.” Jo stood up. “Look, we’re about to leave the D.C. Underground and enter the most vile, disgusting pit this side of actual Hell. You two keep on shouting, and we might as well be a chum slick in demon shark-infested waters.”

“Oh, God.” Buffy swallowed and tasted blood. “Your techno-pagan lives in Virginia?”

She knew there was a reason that she had always avoided this tunnel. The dark, foul-smelling passage gave her the willies, and since power didn’t flow through it, she’d never had any reason to ignore her instincts. Which were, apparently, very, very good. The weight of the scythe slanted across her back and the knives in her belt might have brought her comfort, if she had more confidence in her ability to wield them.

“Thought Virginia is for lovers,” Spike said.

“It is! Especially if you love decapitation and disembowelment and nostril rape.” Maybe Spike did love those things. He was, as he kept on reminding her, a vampire, or the ghost of one.

With a soul.

Who had shown penance, whatever the Hell that meant.

Former Buffy said he’d changed. Spike had called it window dressing. That meant fake, right? But why would Spike insist that he was bad while in chains? Didn’t villain-y types usually wait to reveal their lies until after the hero released them?

“We’re not going too deep into NOVA, just to Rosslyn. I wasn’t planning group suicide.” Jo watched Buffy rub her bloody hand against her pants. “On second thought, do you need to go back? You look queasy, and I can handle this if you can’t.”

Actually, that idea sounded swell. Super-duper, even. Buffy would just go on to Hovelville, sleep off her headache and wake up to a new, ghost-free tomorrow.

“Push off, pet,” Spike said. “Soon as I’m corporeal or – that other thing – I’ll be out of your hair, and you can go back to doing whatever you were doing before I got here.”

Whatever she had been doing? Great. Buffy couldn’t wait to go back to wandering around in a hopeless daze and killing demons for hardtack without worrying about annoying ghosts starting brawls or sleeping beside her sans invitation.

So, why did the thought of Spike-less tunnels hurt? Maybe Jo was right, and Buffy wasn’t ready to reject the only link to her past.

Spike was the only person in existence who knew – knew! from personal experience! – that she hadn’t always been worthless.

Having him around reminded Buffy how far she’d fallen, and even if it hurt like Hell, it also reminded that she’d once had a long way to fall. It was comforting, in a horribly depressing way.

But wasn’t it Spike’s choice, too? His opinion was crystal – either he’d get a body or he’d pass on to the Great Blood Bank In The Sky. Either way, he left her.

She was going to lose him; that was a 100 percent hydra-back guarantee. But could she really turn her back on the one person who remembered the old Buffy? Could she let him die with no one there but a stranger who didn’t even like him?

Spike might be the only one who remembered her old self, but she was the only one who remembered anything at all about him.

Everyone else looked at him and saw an impotent ghost. Buffy knew there was more to him than invisibles and tinglies, even if she couldn’t remember the specifics, and Spike must see that knowledge in her. There was power in that. Responsibility, too. If Spike was anything like her, he’d want that familiarity, even if he said he didn’t.

Plus, if he was going to die, finally die, shouldn’t he go out seeing a kinda-familiar face?

“I can keep going,” Buffy said. She tried to stand, but her knees weren’t prepared to support her weight.

Jo offered her free hand. Buffy grabbed it. Her muddy fingers slipped, then held. Jo’s hand was calloused and bony, and while it wasn’t tunnel temperature, her skin felt cooler than human. It felt solid, too, unlike Spike’s ephemeral, electrical fingers.

Jo pulled Buffy to her feet.

“Don’t bother on account of me, Slayer. I know you can’t believe it, but I don’t want you hurt.” Spike switched tone abruptly, his face shifting into a vampiric sneer. “Let’s face it – if there’s a fight, you’ll get hurt.”

That stung. Besides, defending yourself against tunnel monsters wasn’t anything like inciting a brawl for the Hell of it. Buffy released Jo’s hand and hugged her arms around her chest. “There won’t be a fight unless you start one. But that’s you, isn’t it? I mean, you’re a demon. You can’t help but hurt people.”

“Gee, thanks,” said Jo.

“That wasn’t what I meant.” Buffy wiggled her boots, making the mud squelch up around the toes.

Jo was a human – a one-time Slayer – with demony parts mixed in, because she couldn’t have survived any other way. Spike was a demon with a human soul, and Buffy knew from first-hand experience that souls didn’t do much against bloodlust. She ... cared about Spike. Kinda. Sometimes. But she wasn’t stupid enough to forget what he was.

Spike giggled. “I’m the one who hurts people? Okay, I did. Vampire. But as low and disgusting as I am, I’ve nothing on you, Slayer. Didn’t really know pain and suffering ‘til I met you.”

“Hello? Slayer. You probably deserved it.”

“Well, yeah. I was a bad, bad man. Doesn’t change what you did to me.”

What she had done to him? Spike made it sound like she forced him to skinny dip in a holy water sauna, but no way was that the truth. The old Buffy had hit him, of course, but what were a few punches to a vampire? He wasn’t dust, so she couldn’t have hurt him too bad. Unless he was talking about the Hellmouth?

Ugh! Why was she even thinking about this?

“What’s that supposed to mean? I don’t know you, Spike. The few memories I have of you aren’t exactly heartwarming. So, why don’t you tell me what you mean instead of being all Vague-y the Vampire?”

“Not the best idea, Buffy” Jo said. “We’re not any safer than we were the first time I told you guys to keep quiet, and explaining things could trigger another attack. Save it for later.”

Oh, right. Asking Spike to explain the past? A good way to die of memory-induced aneurysm. Which meant that he could insinuate stupid things until the roaches came home, and she couldn’t demand he come clean without making her mind melt.

“You mean save it until after I’ve shucked off this ghostly coil?” Spike’s yellow eyes caught the torchlight. “That’s convenient.”

“Nothing about you is convenient, Spike.” Jo looked calm, but a slight hiss followed her words. “We need to get going.”

“Yeah, yeah. Let’s get me deader. But first, I wanna know why you don’t want me airing some dirty laundry. Buffy deserves to know who she was, warts and all.”

“I didn’t have warts! I don’t have warts now.”

“You think you’re the best one to clear the air?” The scales on Jo’s forehead flickered in the firelight, like molten specks were burning on her skin. “Buffy’s amnesia is not an opportunity to cast yourself in a better light, William.”

Spike’s sneered at Jo. “I haven’t lied to her.”

Jo’s nostrils flared. “Lied? Maybe not. But I doubt you’ve shared all the nitty gritty details about your history with her. Why would you, when it’s so much easier to drop hints and talk about how much you want to die?”

Spike’s features transformed into a hard, human smirk. “Thought anything but vague hints would give Our Dear Follower a migraine.”

Jo’s neck bulged. “Telling her she hurt you? That sounds like an awfully one-sided story. It’s emotional manipulation, and I’m sick of it.”

Emotional manipulation? To what end? Buffy had only agreed to help Spike after seeing his kicked puppy face. Was he using her confused feelings toward him to get what he wanted?

No, it wasn’t anything that complicated. Spike was pissed off, ergo Spike ran his mouth.

So, Spike was an ass. Nothing new, there.

“Yeah. I keep manipulating her to try and punch me in the face.” Spike jerked his chin toward Buffy. “I’m not using you, Slayer. Said I’d tell you things once, didn’t I? You didn’t want to hear it.”

“Um, because it hurts like Hell? Besides, I told you before; I lost my memories for a reason.”

“A reason that makes no sense! You’re underground! The signals can’t reach you!”

“Underground voice, Spike.” Jo pointed her torch at Spike. The flame streaked as she shook it, like a scarier version of a wagging finger. “If we’re going to have this conversation, we need to have it somewhere else. I don’t want to die because you couldn’t keep your mouth shut.”

“Buffy’s half-dead already! I know this Slayer better than anyone. She was the best, and it wasn’t because her technique was spot-on. She had people who kept her grounded, kept her fighting. Without them, she’s a shell. If she remembered them, even a little, she might get some of the old fire back.”

“You weren’t telling her about them,” Jo said. “You were telling her she’s disgusting. In any case, remembering dead people isn’t going to cheer her up.”

“The shell’s right here.” Apparently, Buffy had become invisible. She couldn’t say she appreciated the feeling.

“I’m the one person in all the world who knows her. Think she deserves whatever I can give her before I go.” Spike sounded less angry, now. His voice was low. Firm.

Huh. That would have sounded nice, if Spike’s generosity wasn’t guaranteed to make brain goo run from Buffy’s ears.

“I’m the one person who knows her,” Jo said. “You know some dead
girl from a hundred years ago.”

Buffy shrank back. She struggled to breathe, like she’d taken a troll hammer to the diaphragm.

It was true. Buffy had proclaimed her old self dead many, many times, but hearing it from someone else made it worse. Especially when that someone else was Jo.

Jo never spoke so harshly. If anything, all that cold, reptilian blood made her unerringly calm. She didn’t snap, at least not around Buffy.

“Now, I believe you wanted me to find you a techno-pagan. I think I’m going to choose that over letting some nasty pick me off while I argue with a ghost.” Jo strode off. Her torch hissed in the damp air.

Buffy followed the light as it moved deeper into the tunnel, doing her best to ignore the silent phantom at her heels.

Ghosts were better off left alone.

So was Buffy.


***