So remember the end of Buffy Season Nine #7? We get a confession from Spike about his feelings, our heroes are moving closer together...and a zompire comes out of nowhere to... Freeze. Fic begins. Which means, incidentally, that no revelations from the comics (up to and including the robotic ones and the ones deep in the fridge) exist past this point! Just what we've already learned.

This fic will be published in three parts, as quickly as I can write them. :)

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1.
One second.

That's all it takes, a single second, and then the arm that was holding her is gone and her mind goes blank, a dull howl in her ears somehow faint when she knows it shouldn't be. There's a coppery taste in her mouth, a spray of blood across her lips from the force of the mutilation, and she's suddenly very aware of her hands, of how heavy they are at her sides and how easily they move to stake the zompire and pull his prize from him.

And then her hands are moving again, holding on to the limb in question as they shift with her body to focus on him again. He's shouting, blood still pouring from the wound, and then he starts beating on the side of a wall with his remaining fist, bloodying it as mindless tears run from his eyes, and she pulls him away and sinks to the ground, he caught in her embrace, and salty droplets spill down into his hair, drying before they can touch the bloody stump at his shoulder.

She doesn’t feel anything other than aching pain, so sharp and angry that for a moment, she can’t remember who’s who and which of the two of them is the one who’s been injured, not when she’s connected so deeply with him that she can’t remember where she begins and he ends, and all she can do is weep.


2.
Waiting. She hates waiting, hates the false stillness of it, the deceptive calm before a storm that accompanies it. She doesn’t want to be sitting here in this house of death, staring at the double doors that lead into the actual hospital.

There are couches arrayed around the room, but she sits in a hard, poorly padded chair beside Dowling instead, back ramrod-straight and blessed discomfort keeping her from relaxing. She doesn’t want to relax, not until she knows that Spike is…

That Spike is…

What?

She shifts, agitated, struggling to keep her hands in place on her lap and failing miserably. She clenches them into each other, squeezes the plastic arms of the chair, nearly punches Dowling when he attempts to put a hand on hers, and stands with abrupt finality. “I’m going in.”

“He can’t be out of surgery from something like that already.” Dowling keeps his hands to himself this time, his eyes surveying her face warily instead. “It’s only been an hour.”

“I don’t care. What do they know about reattaching undead limbs? What can they do that I can’t help them with?” She closes her eyes, imagines Spike waking up alone. Imagines him reaching out for a smoke with a left arm that doesn’t exist anymore, him thrashing and shouting angry curses, and she nowhere near him to at least help him shoulder the brunt of his despair.

She’d gone from- her fingers trace the curve of her stomach for a moment, remembering fervent words from Spike she’d desperately craved even as she’d been terrified of them (and oh, she’d craved them so deeply for so long that she couldn’t wait afew damn minutes to bring it up, what the fuck what she thinking, how could she have distracted them both like that whywhywhy)- to this despair clawing its way out of her, this desperation to see him and to know that none of this is real, that he isn’t hurt, that she hasn’t lost him.

“Robert Dowling?” the nurse behind the desk calls, and Buffy suddenly knows why the desk is built into the wall, why there’s a sheet of plastic blocking the nurse from the room, because it takes all the willpower in the world for her not to grab him right then and demand answers, isheokaytellmetellmeTELLME-

“I need to go,” Dowling murmurs, and he walks past her, toward the doors that keep her from Spike. “She’s my partner.”

Buffy doesn’t respond. There’s a part of her, the part that used to be much stronger back before she’d seen Spike and all that blood, that understands, that wants Cheung to have made a full recovery from the zompire attack. But most of her can’t seem to muster up emotions for anyone but Spike, her best- vampire- possibly bleeding to drained levels a few rooms down.

“Hey.” A hand catches one of hers as it swings backward, and she’s suddenly being pulled into a hug, an embrace familiar enough that she can bury herself in her other best friend’s arms and find a temporary peace there. Xander pulls her to him tightly, pressing his cheek to the top of her head, and she whispers, ”You came.”

She can feel his nod against her. “Dawn wanted to, too, after we got your text.” She’d sent it out somewhere near the beginning of this hellish hour, back when all she’d wanted was to talk angrily, to blame herself, to blame Spike, to rant and hate and do anything but feel.

“Dawn’s here?” Dawn, who knows about what’s growing inside her, who doesn’t know what she’d decided about it, who doesn’t really talk to Spike at all anymore.

“No. I thought…I thought I could help a little.” He pulls away to gaze at her with his single eye, and she closes her own immediately, recalling the horror of that moment, after Caleb and everything had gone wrong and permanent, there’s no healing there, not when-

“I need to go to him.”

Xander shakes his head. “You’re panicked. You’re just going to agitate him now.”

"But it's Spike!" the words tear themselves from her throat with a raw desperation that forms a voice she doesn't recognize. "I need to-"

Xander's eye is sad. "I know. But he needs you to stay away when you're like this."

Like this, fingers scraping at the sides of her hands until they're raw and throbbing, eyes wild and darting around the emergency room, her heart pounding so violently that she can't breathe or move or stop, stop moving, stop thinking, stop drawing bloody pictures of his arm in her mind-

Stop. "It's Spike," she repeats helplessly, and she pushes past Xander, ignoring the nurse's shout and hurtling through double doors to the hallway beyond.


3.
"Buffy!" It's Dowling, of all people, Dowling who must have been the first one Spike had seen afterward, and the unfairness of that grates at her, has her words catch in her throat, has undeserved rage toward Dowling boiling up within her.

She stalks toward him, eyes narrowed. “Where is he?”

“He seems to have made it through alive. Or…undead, rather.” He chuckles with little mirth, oblivious to Buffy’s rapidly darkening face. “Cheung is also-“

“Where is he?”

“Ah…over there.” Dowling points to a door slightly ajar three rooms down, and she drops his shirt and swings toward it. “He’s still asleep, though. They’re going to move him into a recovery room after-“

She ducks into the room and closes the door, shutting out Dowling’s voice to blessed silence.

“Spike,” she whispers.

There are four beds in the room, nurses flitting around three of them and giving her reproachful but uncertain looks as she weaves around them to the final bed, up against the windowed wall (didn’t Dowling tell them that Spike’s a vampire?), where her vampire is lying flat on his back, staring blankly into space, a single arm folded over his body.

The other is gone, the stump of it wrapped in bandages, and her throat dries up instantly.

She doesn’t know what to say. “Dowling said you were asleep.” That isn’t it.

He doesn’t respond. His eyes don’t move, his chest doesn’t expand, and he’s never seemed more dead than right now, silent and still and completely closed off from the world.

She reaches out to touch him, her agitation fizzling in the face of his stillness, and only then does he shift, flinching away from her before she can put her hand on his remaining one. “I lost both my hands once,” he says, and hearing his voice again almost takes off the sting of rejection. “You know that?”

“I did.” Andrew had told her once, back when she so didn’t care about Spike because he was a jerk who’d rather she think he was dead then actually stop by to let her know otherwise. She’d cried too much for him already and she wasn’t going to cry again when he wasn’t worth it, and any tears that she’d shed that night had been for completely different reasons, of course.

“It was a clean cut. The evil lawyers had the science and the magic to fix me up all pretty.” He smiles, and it’s neither happy nor friendly. “Guess you and Angel took care of both of those, yeah?”

She doesn’t give him the satisfaction of her reacting to Angel’s name. “Stop.”

“Don’t want to hear it, hm? How s’another thing that’s all your fault? How you’ve destroyed another man who’d loved you?”

Her eyes ache, but she blinks away her misery furiously. “Stop. Getting me angry isn’t going to help you.”

He scowls. And he isn’t one to let her chasten him, so she shouldn’t be surprised when he mutters, “Liked it better when you were busy pitying yourself.”

She shouldn’t be upset, either, not when she knows what he’s doing. How he’s pushing her away so he doesn’t have to see the compassion in her eyes, so he doesn’t have to talk about what happened. She shouldn’t be upset, and she shouldn’t call his bluff, but she does, anyway. “Fine. So I’ll leave.” She turns on her heel, teeth grinding together loudly enough that she knows he can hear it when she peeks back at him.

He’s stubbornly silent, his single arm stiffening, and she feels instantly guilty and sits down instead of walking away. “Are you…do vampires regenerate limbs?”

Spike turns his head to face her. “Suppose we’ll find out, eh? We can do a study. I’ll be a celebrity. ‘Spike, the Magnificent Armless Vampire. Think Harmony’d have me on her show?”

“Spike…”

“My back turned out all right. And I don’t even need a wheelchair this time ‘round!” The words are cold and mockingly cruel, but they’re directed inward instead of at her. She nearly throws herself into his line of fire right then rather than let him continue, but when she turns around, a security guard is approaching with an apologetic Xander and it’s time to go.

She leans down to brush her lips against his forehead, and ignores the way he pulls away from her at once. “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” she murmurs. “I don’t know what else-“ Tears are close to spilling again, and she flees.


4.
When she returns the next morning, it’s with the approval of the front desk and to a quiet side room in the step down unit. She has a warmed thermos of blood that she’d had the bugs help her prepare (and they’d been eager, if puzzled by Spike’s need for more medical care after the loss of a limb) and a customary gift tucked under one arm.

She pauses at the doorway to his room, watching as he flirts shamelessly with the nurse changing his wrappings. And she can’t help but smile (under burning jealousy), because any Spike is better than the sullen, self-loathing one from yesterday, and could he really be beginning the healing process already?

This is good. Spike adapts, he always adapts, and even now he’s going to handle this. So I can, too. She takes a deep breath and steps into the room, plastering a grin on her face as Spike gestures animatedly toward the window with his right hand, winking at the woman with him.

She blushes prettily, setting down her clipboard and pulling the cord to open the drapes.

Buffy doesn’t think, doesn’t shout a warning or stop, but the thermos and the gift are on the floor in an instant. She acts on pure instinct, throwing herself at the hospital bed, catching Spike and rolling off of it to the space between bed and window, pinning him down with so much force that he lets out a howl of pain and grabs hold of his armless shoulder.

“Are you stupid?” she demands of the nurse, who’s staring at them both with rounded, fearful eyes. “Don’t you know that he can’t be in the sunlight? Doesn’t it say anything on that clipboard?”

The nurse draws back. “I didn’t think- He asked me to do it!”

Buffy stares at her, uncomprehending, her anger fading into a less familiar does not compute. “What?”

“He asked me to open the drapes! He said he wanted some natural light in the room. I was just trying to help!” The nurse twitches nervously. “It’s my first week here, I’ve never met a vampire before, and he told me!”

“Just go,” Buffy says wearily, turning back to Spike.

He’s still sprawled underneath her, hand on his shoulder and eyes defiant. And she knows immediately that the nurse isn’t lying, and that Spike hasn’t forgotten about the sunlight for a moment. “Why?” The words are voiceless and fear is masking her face into something dark and accusing, and she can’t seem to stop because not Spike, not now, how could he, not Spike-

She knows the moment that he reaches breaking point, his body tense against her and his muscles suddenly taut. "Get off of me!" he snarls, shoving her. She flies backward, more out of surprise than genuine injury, and lands in a crouch at the foot of his bed, her heart pounding with the rush of hurt at his rejection. The floor is cool and hard linoleum beneath her bare knee, but it's nowhere near the discomfort of those angry, helpless eyes on her.

“Why?” she demands again, and he’s staggering to his feet, pulling himself up with a harsh yank of his right hand, straightening until he’s standing over her.

“Because I’m immortal, you bloody child!” he shouts. “Do you have any concept of what that means? I'm trapped in this bloodyworld as a bloody cripple with bloody nothing to change it till the end of time! Missing limbs don't mend! Nothing will change...will change..." He stops, fingers clutching at his shoulder, palm curved around air. "Oh," he whispers. It's dazed, shaken, and there's so much finality in his voice that she can't stop a shudder from wracking her body.

He looks down at her, quiet and suddenly resigned. "You see?"

"I see you," she whispers. He doesn't react, instead sidling around her to sit down on the visitor's chair beside the bed.

She settles down on the bed, cross-legged, gingerly avoiding the bloodstains on the left side of the sheets and struggling desperately to think of something to lighten the mood. "Oh!" she remembers. "I brought you...stuff."

"Stuff?" He cocks an eyebrow, his face smoothing in an instant, the outburst forgotten. And there’s a part of her that’s filled with dismay at the fact that he can conceal himself so easily.

"Blood," she amends. "I didn't know if they had anything for you here, and I figured the blood loss would have you all sallow and shrunken."

"Oi!" He thrusts out his chest belligerently. "This look shrunken to you?" He makes as though to slide his hands further downward, and she swallows and stares at the bed fixedly as he stops, remembers himself, and falls silent. "They've been giving it to me directly," he murmurs, subdued.

She glances at the IV tube hanging down next to the bed where she'd dislodged it when she'd thrown Spike to the ground. "Oh. Um...do you need it now?"

He shakes his head. "I didn't need even that. But if you've got fresh blood..."

"Fresh as in from-your-fridge fresh?" She hops off his bed, retrieving the thermos from where it's rolled under the empty bed at the front of the room. "Sebastian heated it up for me. It still feels pretty warm."

He pulls the top and guzzles, drinking the whole container in one enormous gulp. She watches doubtfully. "Don't need any more blood, huh?"

Abrupt response, changing the topic. Of course. "Did you say Sebastian? You slept on the ship last night?"

She squirmed, suddenly uncomfortable under his smiling gaze. "I didn't have anywhere else to go. And you said that I could stay with you. The floor's not that hard," she lies. She hadn't slept on the floor. There'd been bug arms there and that was way gross. Instead she'd huddled in blankets on a bed that smelled of stale beer and cigarettes and focused on anything but Spike. Or...the other issue.

He catches both of the things she isn't saying, because that's just how aggravating he is. "No woman is sleeping on my floor," he mutters, licking the edges of the thermos mouth. "'specially not with..." He pauses to stare significantly at her stomach. "Speaking of which, did you...?"

She laughs. It sounds false even to her own ears. "When? When I was breaking into your hospital room? Or when I was trying to get a good night's sleep?" She'd thrown up twice when she'd tried to heat up Spike's blood. One of the bugs had tried to eat it.

"Are you going today?" Spike persists.

"Without you?" Her fingers draw patterns on her thigh, rapid-fire and sloppy. "I can't- prezzie!" she announces, catching sight of the potential change of topic in the doorway.

"Buffy..."

She hurries back to the doorway to retrieve the gift she'd found for him. “I got this for you. It’s expected, right? Everyone needs one or they revoke your hospital card.” She bobs her head up and down. Pretense: achieved. We’re not discussing it anymore.

He waits until she sets it down on his bedside table before he retrieves it. “You got me…a teddy bear.” There’s something that’s almost the start of a smile curling his lips upward, and she tries to force a grin onto her own face. “And…you drew fangs on it?”

She climbs back onto the bed. “I wanted to get you a vampire bear. But all they had were vampy cats and Harmony Bears.” She makes a face. “They had unicorns on their stomachs.”

He laughs, harsh and quick, and even that soothes frayed nerves. “Sounds like that chit’s idea of marketing.” He traces the lines of the fangs with his thumb. “You were going to do this for our cake topper. Yeah?”

Cake topper? The memory comes back to her at once, thoughts of a day spent in Giles’s house torturing him with talk of weddings and love, and she laughs aloud, delighted. “The engagement! But that wasn’t real! I would never have-“

His face is carved from stone suddenly, impassive, the walls back up and higher than ever before. She swallows her words and reaches out to stroke the bear, careful not to make contact with his hand. “It was nice, though,” she confesses. “Easy. Better.” There had been a false sort of clarity that had cut through the haze of the engagement spell, an ease to the love and dedication to her lover, and now that they’re closer yet and still so distant, she craves the simplicity more than ever.

Watching as his thumb brushes against her skin for a single instant before drawing away, she thinks that he might, too.


5.
She hadn’t wanted to leave that day, not after what she’d walked into in the morning. “Promise me you aren’t going to do anything I wouldn’t want you to,” she’d demanded when the nurses had come to check for visitors.

He’d shrugged noncommittally, and she’d felt anger rise in her, hot and frustrated and helpless. “I swear, if you hurt yourself-“

He’d sneered. “You’ll what? Cripple me?”

“Please, Spike.” She hadn’t had anything more convincing to say, so she’d told the truth instead. “I can’t lose you.”

His head had jerked around so he could stare at her, and she’d flushed and gotten up to go, suddenly certain that he’d be okay for the night. It had seemed in bad taste to use her emotions against his wishes, but she still can’t convince herself that it had been wrong.

She’d watched from the hall as a nurse had helped him back into his bed, as the vampire who’d fought at her side just a day ago struggled to sit up with the support of three other people.


6.
“We had to leave,” Margaret tells her apologetically. Or Buffy thinks it’s apologetic. Lots of clicking sounds accompany the bug’s words, and there was some kind of weird arm-bendy action that seemed like it might be conveying a message. She assumes it’s apologetic because she’s been waiting for the ship to return to the field where she’d left it for nearly an hour and if she doesn’t get an apology, she might get pissed. I will not take out my Spike frustrations on his bugs. No matter how obtuse they are.

Margaret is still speaking. “We detected an intruder.”

“In the ship?”

“Outside it. Some human.” She widens her mandibles in what Buffy guesses is a shrug. Or possibly the opening salvo to A Slayer is Eaten by Bugs, the Musical. What do giant bugs eat, anyway? Each other? Their absent captain’s guest?

She shakes away thoughts of Margaret feasting on poor dead Colin. “Um. How did he look? Or she? Any weapons? A camera? Oh wait, was it Dowling?” She’d meant to check in on Detective Cheung while she was in the hospital, maybe try being friendly. Dammit.

Margaret clicks impatiently. “I don’t know any of that. You humans all look the same. Fuzz on the head, soft shell on the body. Master Spike is coming back?”

“I don’t know. There are all these therapies he’s supposed to be doing to get used to using only one hand for things. It might be a week or two.” She stares at her own hand for a moment, settles it on her stomach thoughtfully. “I don’t know.”

“You misunderstand.” Margeret’s doing the arm-bendy thing again, and Buffy takes a step back before she’s elbowed by reversible arm segments. “He’s here.”

“Here?”

The ship lands back on the ground with a thump, and then Margaret’s pushing past her to hit the button that opens the door. “He is easy to identify, at least. He wears the flattened white crown of fur on his head. Not like that ugly yellow you have.”

“At least mine is real!” she throws out as the hatch lowers.

“Right, and it’s magically lightened since I first met you.” Spike smirks, sliding around her to step onto his ship. “All that sun exposure in the Doublemeat Palace, of course. Or the dumpster outside it?” He waggles his eyebrows, the sullenness from earlier forgotten. In favor of unfiltered incorrigibility, apparently. 

She scowls. “Don’t be gross. And don’t even pretend that the hospital let you out already. What are you doing here?”

“Vampire, remember?” He puffs out his chest and stalks toward the inner door to the ship. “I go where I please, and I don’t need to be coddled. ‘ve dealt with worse than this before.”

There’s a part of her that’s all too aware of how this conversation is going to end the moment she sees the tiny jerk of his left shoulder to the door handle, all too conscious of the barely discernable slump of his shoulders the moment he realizes what he’s done. She wants to say something, to make this all fine and easy and normal somehow, but there’s nothing left, not when he’s spinning around to fix a suddenly dull gaze on her and mumble. “Said I’d be there with you. Wasn’ going to break that promise.” She’s close enough that he can reach out with one hand to brush her stomach, but instead he ghosts fingers over it, millimeters away and distant all the same.

“I’d rather you get what you need,” she retorts, itching to move forward and make contact, to end the phantom touch where it’s drawing invisible lines across her skin, setting her on fire.

He turns away, his right hand grasping the door and yanking it open. “I need to be here,” he says, and he shuts the door behind him. It feels like a blow to her gut.


7.
He’s been tearing open packets of blood with his teeth for years, fangs doing a much better job of ripping them open than his hands ever would have. And he’s always had a penchant for absolute destruction, and he’s taken to the plastic of the blood bag with unfettered glee in the past.

Until today, when he isn’t alone and the woman he loves is perched on his bed across the room, examining a box of cereal with dubious distaste. “This looks gross,” she decides, dropping it and reaching for his stash of chocolate.

“That’s mine!” he protests, but he regrets speaking the moment that her eyes turn to him, the instant she sees what a pathetic mess he’s become, fumbling with a knife as the packet of blood slides away from him against the other end of the couch. He grits his teeth, lifts a foot to hold it in place-

And then it’s snatched from its place in the next moment, and Buffy’s holding it out to him, one hand supporting the bottom, the other keeping it upright.

She doesn’t speak, and he doesn’t let frustration and fury directed inward flood his expression when he mumbles, “Nah, ‘m not hungry.”

“Spike…” He makes the mistake of glancing up, and the compassion in her eyes is the greatest blow since this nightmarish new existence has begun. “Please.”

Not this time. She spends far too much time yanking him around with those sorrowful eyes, turning him into a willing slave who’d even promise her an eternity of misery when she asks, and he’s incapable of saying no. But not today, while the last shreds of his pride are hanging in front of him in a sealed plastic bag. It’s all he has left now.

“Don’t we have somewhere to be now?” he asks curtly, and there’s a cold kind of satisfaction in the way her expression is suddenly strained. “We should get a move on, or the sun’ll be too high in the sky for me to come along, yeah?”

She doesn’t respond, just turns around and stalks to the door. There’s a tremble in her step, and when he can stop focusing on the humiliation of his basic existence and the gnawing hunger in his belly, he wonders about it.

Then it’s back to noticing the sensation of a left arm swinging at his side, brushing up against his belt loop, feeling the air rushing past it, a thousand moments of awareness of an arm that no longer exists. Back to the pain that’s still eating away at his upper arm and the pressure of the bandages that are forcing whatever little blood is remaining within him to stay put. Back to the constant reminders of the fact that he’s nothing at all anymore, nothing but- cripple.

And when they finally step into the clinic and the girl behind the front desk invites Buffy in to talk about her options, he doesn’t even look up, not until Buffy seizes his hand. “I…I need Spike to come in with me.”

The girl glances at him, her forehead creasing. Spike glares back sullenly, wondering what she sees. Deadbeat boyfriend without an arm, I’ll wager. “Sorry, it’s policy. Just you.”

“I can’t.” It’s so low that Spike doesn’t react at first. “I can’t…I can’t do this.” Buffy’s voice wavers, then reaches a tearful pitch he’s barely ever heard from her before. He smells the salty wetness of tears and turns sharply.

“I need to go,” Buffy says at once, and she runs from the office, leaving Spike and the girl to stare at each other as the door bangs closed behind her.