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.