Note: Thanks to my betas MadRog and t_geyer for their unending patience, perseverance and support.
SECTION 5 - WELCOME TO MY NIGHTMARE

Welcome to my nightmare
I think you're gonna like it
I think you're gonna feel that you belong
We sweat laugh and scream here
'cuz life is just a dream here
You know inside you feel right at home here
Welcome to my nightmare
Welcome to my breakdown
Yeah

(Alice Cooper, Album - Welcome to my Nightmare)


Dedication: Thanks to Cherie for her five page email that got me out of my, "I've been setting this up for ages, but now it just seems to be the same as lots of other fics that are about" funk.

Chapter 5.02
Wednesday, May 15th, 2002


"No-o-o-o!" Buffy sat straight up, looking for the source of the scream that had brought her so abruptly back from the Land of Nod, only to realise that that the voice had to have been her own. Shoving her embarrassment to one side, she fumbled through her pockets until she found Spike's phone and opened it up to check the time. Quarter past six. If she had to guess, she would say that Anya would probably be up soon, if not already. Buffy had a feeling that she liked to eat breakfast with Xander, not realising that the carpenter more often than not had second helpings at Revello Drive, so long as he wasn't running late.

Rapidly processing her options, she tried the number in the directory for C & L. A childish voice answered, earnestly repeating the numbers she had dialled.

"Hi, Rosa. You sound as if you've been awake for hours. It's Auntie Buffy. Are you all having breakfast with your grandma?"

"Mommy's here and gramma's here, but Unker Clem's not up yet. Gramma says he's a lazybones."

"I guess your mom'll be leaving for work soon?"

"Uh huh. She likes to get there real early."

"Can I speak to your grandma, then?"

"Mm-hmm." Buffy could hear the sound of the child's footfalls as she dashed across the room with the telephone. "Gramma, Auntie Buffy wants to talk to you."

 

---

 

After several phone calls and a not inconsiderable amount of work on her and Wesley's part, the vampire was once more ensconced in Lily's spare room, the place Buffy judged least likely to be under any sort of surveillance. Wesley had managed to find the pair of cut-off jeans that the vampire had mentioned using for swimming trunks and had made a circuitous journey to Lily's leaving his bike outside Xander and Anya's to pick up the DeSoto and borrow the orbs again, then onto Revello to pick up the clothes that Dawn had picked out for her sister. Then, he had had to wait at the cemetery gates until Buffy came to meet him. After that, the pair had picked up the vampire and taken him across to Lily's.

A quick clean up had revealed various bruises on his back and the back of his head as well as the bleeding wound at his temple. At a guess, he'd grabbed that thing from behind, and it had managed to bash him into the wall a few times before he'd finally managed to snap its neck. The damage the walls had already taken had probably been compounded when the thing finally fell over, causing the rock fall. Now that Rosa had been temporarily packed off to her mother's apartment again in the company of her private tutor, Buffy and Wesley were preparing for what could only be termed an experiment.

Buffy paced the living room, phone in hand. "Angel, so help me, if I find out that you know more about this than you've said, I'll... well, I don't know what I'll do, but you won't like it."

"Buffy, you have my word. When Dru brought him back, they both said he didn't have any family. It's possible they were lying. I mean, back then, if they hadn't said they were already dead, I would probably have made him kill them."

"So you don't know anything about him siring his mother?"

"Siring his mother? No one sires their mother."

"In his dream you or Dru said he killed her twice over. The only way I can make sense of that would be if he sired her and then killed the vampire she became, but you say she was already dead.

What about a picture. Did he have any photographs of her?"

"Yes, he had one with the two of them together. That's right. I remember now. He said it was taken when she was first diagnosed. If you knew what you were looking for the first signs were already there, but she was still a striking woman."

"An-gel. Diagnosed with what?"

"Consumption. TB. In those days, it was incurable. Degenerative. It was a bad way to go. Drowning in your own blood."

"Did she look like mum?"

"What? No, I don't think so. She was like Spike, all planes and angles."

"What about colouring, and her hair? Did she have curly hair?"

Even over the phone she could hear Angel sigh. "Buffy, it was a black and white photograph that I probably saw half a dozen times, if that, and in those days women her age always wore their hair up in public. I think she might have been fairish, but I really couldn't say for sure. Why are you asking all this, and more to the point, why aren't you asking Spike?"

"It's complicated. Why don't we explain in person next time we're down?"

"Buffy..."

"Angel, it's between us. I'm not going to go into things with you when I haven't had a chance to speak to him."

"What's going on, Buffy?"

"Back. Off. Angel. I'm not going to discuss it over the phone, but I need to speak to your guy, Leon, too."

"It's Lorne."

"Lorne, fine. Put him on the phone... Please?"

"I'll patch you through to his room. Can't guarantee he'll pick up, though."

"He will if I keep calling until he does." Angel shook his head as he transferred the call. His grandchilde was rubbing off on Buffy in the worst possible way.

 

---

 

"Did you get them?" Buffy asked as a rather stubbly Wesley made his way into the apartment's family room.

"We've got half a dozen different ones we can try. All signed for, but so long as we don't break them Anya says she won't charge us. She was also able to suggest a few incenses we might try. And she didn't bat an eyelid when I gave her the note rather than explaining aloud."

"Just so long as she didn't palm you off with any slug candles." Buffy's response was accompanied by the smallest of teasing smiles.

"So? Are we any farther ahead than we were before I left?" Wesley asked as he sipped at the extra strong black coffee Lily had made for him.

"I'm not sure. Angel says he thought Spike's mother died of TB before Spike was turned, but that maybe she was alive and Spike lied to protect her, but he said in the photo Spike used to have that you could see the signs if you knew what you were looking for. Lorne said he and Spike talked about the claim while they were both prisoners. Nothing specific, though. Just some stuff about how there's a similar sort of thing empaths do where he comes from.

Apparently, it's not all that popular because it quite often ends up with one half of the couple killing the other, or them both going mad or just hating each other. As to specifics with me and Spike, all Spike apparently ever said was that it didn't matter if Dru carved chunks out of his flesh until the scars were gone it wouldn't make a difference. He said even if we had to do the ritual all over again, we would, because neither of us were going to let the other go. So how he got from there to where he is now, I don't have a clue." Buffy shook her head.

"There are doubts and fears in everyone's subconscious that they may not even admit to their waking selves let alone to any others. There's also an old saying, 'Love makes cowards of us all.'"

"Sounds like Shakespeare."

"Probably is," answered the former watcher with a shrug.

"Spike would know." Buffy replaced her own coffee cup back on the counter untouched. "I'd best get changed, and then I'll get him sorted out. I'll come get you when I'm ready."

 

---

 

Buffy knew that the way she pulled the quilt up over Spike's bare torso was pointless. Without a warm body cradled against him, quilt or no quilt he would just get to room temperature and stay there. Somehow, though, it would have been wrong to leave him uncovered. She surveyed her own reflection in the mirror. Dawn had raided her exercise gear, finding a matching crop top style sports bra and skimpy cotton jersey shorts. Buffy figured it was about the best compromise between maximum skin contact and not giving Wesley an eyeful that she was going to get. She'd managed to manhandle Spike into the cut-off denims. At the foot of the bed, she'd laid out the crystals Anya had sent on top of a silk scarf Lily had provided. A couple of incense cones burned in two small saucers to either side. The pillows from the bed were scattered to one side of the fabric square. It was time to fetch the watcher.

 

---

 

Wesley sat cross-legged on the floor, to one side of the square whilst Buffy knelt opposite him with the pillows positioned to cushion her fall if as they hoped she fell unconscious. Lily had also come through to the bedroom and she sat perched on the bed stroking Spike's hair as she would for a poorly or fretful child.

"Okay, Wes. Do your watcher thing..."

"Alright, I suggest we start with this one. It's purported to be useful in cleansing one's aura, so it may facilitate our efforts to free Spike from the more troublesome elements of his subconscious."

"Can't hurt."

"Okay, I want you to look into the crystal. Try to find any flaws any impuritites, anything that makes it unique..." Wesley's voice was a soft, deliberate monotone as he tried to get Buffy to slip into a hypnotic trance, so that he might be able to exert some sort of conscious influence over both how soon she fell into a REM state and hopefully also the content of her dreams.

Two hours later, you didn't have to be an empath to sense Buffy's frustration. They had tried using every crystal Wesley had brought back, in combination with three different varieties of incense, the last of which Wesley suspected was probably illegal except under doctor's orders and still Buffy couldn't seem to concentrate enough to go under.

"We all should take break," Lily announced. "Rosa and her teacher come down soon for lunch. I make tea for us now, get snacks, so Rosa no need see William like this."

Buffy sighed. "She's probably right. We don't seem to be getting anywhere." She straightened up, stretching muscles tired from sitting so long in one position.

She slid onto the bed, sitting up against the headboard with her legs stretched out in front of her, her hand moving automatically to caress the other figure on the bed. "So, was this a stupid idea?" she looked at Wes. "Maybe I should just have got Willow to do her dream-walking thing like she did with me? Come to that, Willow reckoned the Spike approach involved slapping me silly? We haven't tried that, yet."

"I don't think physical violence is the answer, somehow. And I doubt Spike would be overjoyed at Willow getting an insight into his innermost psyche. Nor would she be able to allay his fears. Perhaps once we've had a break, you should just try to sleep normally. You said you had only managed a few hours sleep."

"I'm the slayer, Wes. Three, four hours sleep is as much as my body needs. Any extra is a bonus, and it's not really the most restful situation in the world." The pair lapsed into silence, punctuated only by the rasp of Buffy's fingers running through Spike's hair and the rattle of china from the kitchen.

Buffy's attention was so focussed on the blond next to her that she didn't notice the slight shake of her head that Lily gave Wes as she passed him the first cup from the teapot.

"Is herbal blend. Best to drink while hot," the old demon told the slayer. Buffy took the china cup and saucer, and after a small sip decided that Lily's tea-making skills were roughly on a par with her cooking skills in general. She decided she really didn't want to find out what it was like once it cooled if Lily thought it was worse, so she drank the rest of it down as quickly as possible. She placed the cup and saucer down on the bedside cabinet and returned her attention to the sleeping figure next to her.

"At least," she thought, "he doesn't seem to be dreaming all the time." Spike seemed once again to be sleeping normally, though she was only assuming that his eyes would move beneath the lids, since any other time he'd been dreaming she had also been asleep, and this morning it had been too dark when she awoke for her to check. As her eyes started to drift shut, she peeled them open just enough to give the Quarnoth demon a suspicious look.

"What did you put in my tea?"

"Is not tea. Is dried fungus. I take sometimes when no can sleep. No so much as this. Slayer take many doses to make sleep."

"Fungus? You gave me a fungus overdose?"

Wesley sniffed at his own cup. "Mushrooms, Buffy. Skullcap mushrooms if I'm not mistaken."

"Skullcap? That name's supposed to reassure me?"

"It's only fatal in relatively large doses. And as you were saying, you're the slayer. Now just concentrate on soothing thoughts." This time as Wes's voice made its gentle suggestions Buffy seemed to drift off into a gentle sleep. "Try to think nice thoughts about Spike. Remember how happy you were at the ice-rink, how the pair of you were holding hands all the time, that first time you were in LA, how he even lit his cigarette with one hand so he didn't have to let go, how he carried you down the stairs last night over his shoulder. Remember talking about how well he knew your mother. Remember all the times he's made you smile, or laugh. Remember the look on his face when you touched his cheek, back at the Hyperion. Remember how happy he looked with Rosa and how much she loves him..."

As he talked the watcher scooped her up in his arms to lay her on top of the cushions on the floor. They didn't know if it would work, but they were hoping if they could avoid physical contact between the couple until Buffy entered a REM state then she would be in her own dream landscape. Then, if Wes moved them so that they were in contact once more, they hoped Spike would be drawn into her dreams. There were no guarantees, but it was the best shot they had. Between that and the physical contact that would allow her to read his emotions Buffy was going to try to bring him home.