I almost kissed her.

She almost kissed me.

But she stopped.

Well yeah, but it was because of the Bit.

What if it wasn’t?

She said we’d talk about it later.

That’s a convenient way out.

I bet she still tastes like raspberries.

I might never know.

“Spike.”

What if it was all cold comfort? She’s worried about the watcher, and she still has the recently dead thing goin’ on.

No, I saw it. In her eyes. She was there with me.

How would I know? In over a century, I’ve only ever played second fiddle.

No, it was different. She was different. I could tell.

With my amazing powers of deduction? Face it, I’ll never figure her out. It’s half her charm.

She let me touch her. She didn’t flinch away like I had the plague.

Until someone saw us. Then she was right quick to get my hands off her.

She was just protecting her little sis.

Maybe.

Even so, she’s the slayer, and I don’t even have a soul to sugar-coat the sun allergy.

As if I would want one. Damn thing’s like to turn me into the prancing nit, redux.

“Spike!”

What if she was thinkin’ about him?

Not going there.

Dru did.

Dru’s crazy.

And the slayer’s known for her cool rationality.

Not the same, like comparin’ Byron to Brandi.

Gotta stop letting Bite Size pick the radio station.

“Spike!!!”

Bet I could make her scream like that if she gave me half a chance. Wait…

“Huh?” the vampire shook himself back into the present.

“The light’s been green for, like, ever,” Buffy glared at him from the passenger’s seat until he stomped on the gas and sent them careening down Saratoga Avenue. “And are you sure Xander’s okay with us borrowing his car?”

Spike glanced down at the coatl, coiled in the slayer’s lap, but for once the little terror held her tongue. Then again, maybe Buffy really was sticking to her no-prying promise. “Carpenter’s settled for the evening, and more than willing to help the cause,” he smirked. Assumin’ I had asked him before swiping the keys. “Why?”

“Never mind,” she looked out of the window. “You were off in Spike-land there for a sec. What were you thinking about?”

“Nothing important,” the vampire replied casually, but his knuckles stretched bone-white from where he was gripping the steering wheel.

I almost kissed her…

*****

“Okay, that?” Buffy gestured broadly with the working end of her flashlight. “Is of the bad.”

Spike’s dark scowl seconded her appraisal of the situation. In general, a trashed room full of open, empty coffins could only be described as ‘of the bad.’

“How the bloody hell did we miss this?” Spike growled, more in disgust with himself than with any irritation at the slayer.

She shrugged. “Dunno. How thick d’you think those walls were?” She stopped fiddling with her flashlight and kicked a football sized chunk of rubble. It went skittering across the floor.

The vampire looked around the room, trying to mentally fit the broken chunks of stone back together into a complete picture. “Two, three feet. No excuse though. Still should’ve smelled ‘em.” His hands were thrust deep in his pockets, shoulders hunched forward in a defensive sulk.

“Hey,” Buffy poked him in the arm with the butt-end of her flashlight. When he glared at her out of the corner of his eyes, she gave him a little half-smile. “I thought you said this place reeked of magic gone wonky and hair gel. Don’t worry about it.”

Spike snorted in amusement before he could catch himself. Buffy’s eyebrow crept a little higher, and she quirked her lips in a crooked smile as Spike looked on in disbelief. There was no way she had just made a joke at the Great Poof’s expense. Was there?

“C’mon,” she tossed her hair over her shoulder and nodded towards the far side of the room. “Let’s see what Meret’s been trying to pry off that coffin.”

Spike let his muscles relax and glanced over his shoulder. Sure enough, the coatl was twisting herself in knots, trying to find purchase on the smooth, hanging lid of one of the coffins. Buffy turned the flashlight beam on the floor and picked her way through the rubble to the coatl. When she neared, the serpent turned unblinking eyes on her and rustled her wings in impatience.

The slayer coaxed Meret into her hand. “Hey, Spike, look at this.”

The vampire took the final steps to join the slayer and glanced over her shoulder. Across the coffin’s shiny, black lid was a silver plaque. Buffy managed to convince Meret to scale her arm and coil across her shoulders. Unencumbered again, she brushed cautious fingers across the metal, revealing a name. Marcus Morelock. The three of them shared a long, silent look before moving on to the next coffin, and the next. Each had a similar plaque, some engraved with decorative scrollwork, some stark and plain. Each with a name. Opal Morelock. Calvin Morelock. Xavier Morelock. Each darkening the trio’s mood just that much more. Matthew Morelock. Alice Morelock. Nathaniel Morelock. Thomas Morelock. They kept looking. Mary Morelock. Alexandria Morelock. Christopher Morelock. Jonathan Morelock.

“She’s not here,” Buffy whispered, saying aloud what Spike had been thinking.

Elaine Morelock.

“Didn’t the Bit say that the Morelocks were all necromancers?” he asked, already knowing the answer.

Buffy nodded wordlessly.

“And didn’t Anya say that our resident possessed watcher was stockin’ up on crap to run some major resurrection spells?” his voice continued on, flat and emotionless.

The slayer just nodded again, looking dejected.

Spike couldn’t blame her.

One necromancer was bad enough, but thirteen?

Spike’s skin was crawling with the thought, and even if his nose told him they were still alone. His senses had betrayed him before in this very room. The vampire allowed his demonic features to come to the fore, golden eyes piercing the darkness. The wrecked walls, the other coffins, their rope hanging from the hole in the ceiling, nothing was out of place. Well, in so much as that could be said about anything in the room. It was only when Spike’s eyes fell on the patch of floor near the excess coils of rope that he stiffened.

He nudged Buffy, who was staring into the last open coffin they had searched. “Slayer, look at the floor.” When she didn’t respond, he looked back at her, golden eyes flashing in the semi-darkness. “Slayer?”

She plucked at the dingy lining of the coffin, it’s once white color stained yellow by time and decay. “Is this what mine looked like? I couldn’t see…” she trailed off quietly.

It took the vampire a moment to figure out what she was asking, and when he did, he was at her side before he consciously thought of moving, his features shifting and realigning until he looked human again. His hand hovered over hers before settling on the rim of the coffin. “No,” his voice was soft, more cautious that usual. “Yours was silver.” He knew how important his words were; even if he wasn’t sure he was saying the right thing. “Dawn picked it out.”

Buffy nodded, slender fingers skimming over the fabric. “And yours?”

Spike blinked in surprise. “Pine,” he said abruptly. “I think Drusilla stole it and buried me herself.” He wasn’t about to elaborate further. His own experience, waking up in the pitch black darkness of his own grave, was not something he thought the slayer needed to hear just then.

In the ensuing silence, the vampire thought about the night he had risen.

The transition from death to unlife had been abrupt. In the flash of an eye, he had exploded back into his own body with no memory of where he was or how he had gotten there. His lungs hadn’t worked, at least not like they had before. They had burned, and his nose was filled with the scent of things long dead. He had panicked, clawing frantically at the bare, rough wood above him.

Something had changed, he would learn later that it was his demonic nature pushing its way to the surface, and suddenly the wood gave way beneath his pounding fists. Soil had poured into the simple pine box, filling his mouth and nose, forcing its way into his ears and under his eyelids. The snarl had risen in his throat, primal and defiant. Pure terror had turned into unadulterated rage, and he had lashed out as he never had in life. In a way, he had met himself that night, six feet under the ground. For the very first time, William the Bloody Awful Poet had stood his ground and fought back.

He had torn his way out of his grave, growling and struggling with every gained inch, and collapsed on his back upon reaching the surface, clothed in the torn remnants of his best brown suit and smeared with the dirt of his own grave. He had known then, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that everything had changed. The old William would have still been trapped in the coffin below, lacking the strength necessary to free himself from such a prison. The old William would have probably fainted from fright, and he certainly wouldn’t have sprawled on the cold ground of a graveyard, gasping unneeded breaths and awestruck by the way the stars above him seemed brighter than they ever had before. His eyes had drunk in every aspect of the night sky, details fascinating him with their beauty in the same way water tasted uniquely exquisite to a man who was dying of thirst.

William really hadn’t known what Drusilla had offered him that night in the alley, hadn’t even known that she was a vampire. Perhaps if he had truly understood, he would have been better prepared. Perhaps not, but the fledgling that would become Spike was less than concerned with the ifs and maybes of his situation in that moment. All that mattered was the torn grass beneath him, which bore next to no resemblance to the hard pine boards below, and the feel of the crisp night air on his face.

The hunger had come a short time later, when Drusilla had arrived with Charles Montgomery, one of his many tormentors, in tow. She had tossed the battered man at his feet and teasingly whispered broken, disjointed endearments and instructions while her creation had made his first kill. That had been a revelation as well. The rich, fear and adrenaline-laced flavor, sweetened further still by the taste of revenge, temporarily drove all other thoughts from his mind.

Of course, Buffy didn’t need to hear any of those things.

They had both dug their ways out of their own graves, and the additional burdens on the slayer: her memory of heaven, her still very human psyche, even basic things like her need to breathe, had ensured that the horror they had both felt upon awakening had persisted in Buffy for months. Spike hadn’t been completely immune either. Being buried alive, trapped and helpless, seemed to be a shared horror for almost every sentient species, good or evil, souled or not.

Some fledglings shook off the experience as soon as they reached the surface, others, like Spike, didn’t. The first few months of his unlife, nightmares had plagued his days, dreams in which he hadn’t been strong enough to free himself from the coffin, trapped and starving in darkness that even his demonically enhanced vision could not pierce. He had hidden them away from his new family, having quickly learned the price of any perceived weakness, behind layers of bravado and reckless behavior.

They had faded with time, but the dreams would occasionally resurface, once during his imprisonment on that damned sub during World War II, a few times in his cell at the Initiative. Hell, even once or twice in Giles’ bathtub and Xander’s basement. If there was something that Spike simply could not abide, it was a cage.

Buffy’s voice shook him from his dark thoughts. “Spike, are you okay?” Meret, though still draped across the slayer’s shoulders, was stretched towards him, feathers folded tight against her neck, tongue flickering in worry.

He snorted. “Should be askin’ you that.”

His rueful smirk met her hesitant smile. She quickly opened her mouth to answer, but apparently changed her mind and instead said quietly, “I will be.” She looked over her shoulder. “What did you see?”

“Right,” his words were brisk again, plowing back into the present. “Look at the floor, near the rope.”

The slayer turned the flashlight beam where he indicated and hissed through her teeth at what she saw. In the yellow circle of light, they could both see an arcane symbol, black and partially hidden by the rubble.

Spike walked to the far side of the symbol, skirting the edge carefully even though they had been walking over it for the last hour to no ill effect. Buffy stepped up to the near side, cocking her head to the side in an attempt to figure out which way was up. “It looks burned,” she commented.

The vampire crouched low and brushed aside some of the debris covering the pattern. The symbol did indeed look like it had been charred into the floor. “Red and Glinda need to see this,” he mumbled to himself. He fished around in his pocket and came up with an old receipt, a lengthy bar tab from Willy’s. “Hey, slayer, you got a pencil or something stashed somewhere in those pants?”

Buffy pursed her lips and eyed him in irritation, standing with her arms crossed and one hip kicked out to the side. It was a petulant stance that he had seen many different times, from two, or okay, three, different sources before. He grinned. She and Dawn had their differences, but when it came down to brass tacks, they were more similar than either would have ever admitted.

The Summers attitude was in their blood.

Finally discarding her imperious glare, the slayer fished around in her pocket and came up with a lip gloss wand. Spike caught her underhand toss and looked at it dubiously before unscrewing the cap and setting to work. After a moment, he had sketched out a pretty decent replica of the symbol. No magic prickled his fingertips from the drawing, but the vampire wasn’t really expecting it. No mystical powers worth their weight in spit would respond to a summons using Very Berry Glitter Gloss.

Buffy had been poking around the perimeter of the symbol while he worked. When he straightened with the little drawing in hand, she held up a burned sprig of some kind of plant. “Think this is important?”

Spike walked over to her and took the twig between two careful fingers. It was charred and brittle, but when he held it to his nose, he caught a familiar smell. Juniper. “Maybe.”

Buffy nodded distractedly and glanced around the room one more time.

Nothing leapt out of the shadows at them, no hidden attacker or spiritual guide. With a final gusty sigh, she stepped forward onto the symbol and grabbed the rope. “Let’s go.”

He had no argument to that.