Author’s Note: Thanks as always to my beta, Kar and to Liliaeth
for the challenge! Thank you as well to everyone's who is
reading. Feedback is very much appreciated.


Chapter Three

The room was empty when Buffy returned. The hotel, however, was not. After dispatching the few hapless stragglers dumb enough to return to the place, she made her way up the stairs and flung herself down on the bed. It would be sunrise in a few hours, and she still hadn't tracked down Spike. Or not Spike, but... yes, actually it was Spike, she had to keep reminding herself.

Crying, she reminded herself sternly, wasn't going to help anything. She couldn't be mad at him either, that he was out there doing something to try to stop her from making him dust. It would be easier if she could work herself into some sort of righteous fit over his desire to survive at the cost of thousands of people that he was now planning on effectively killing twice. Or maybe she was dooming the whole world by dusting him.

She really hated time travel.

Maybe the reason he wasn't back at the hotel wasn't because he was understandably avoiding her, maybe it was because he was already gone somehow. Maybe he'd poofed out of existence when she wasn't even watching. That thought jarred her so badly that she almost didn't catch the stake before it plunged into her chest.

Palms clamped over the hand of her attacker, she looked into the brown eyes of her assailant. Buffy felt the young woman's hand jerk as she felt the pulse in her intended victim’s fingers.

"You're not a vampire."

"No, I'm not."

Nikki Wood let go of the stake and backed up against the rickety dresser. "Saw you with him, taking out his competition. What kinda demon are you?"

Buffy felt an involuntary smirk quirk her lips. "The same kind as you," she said quietly. "And I'm not with him. At least, not with the him you mean."

"You're not saying there's two of them?" Nikki flashed her a suspicious look. "Twins or something? Because that would explain a lot."

Buffy sat forward a bit. "How's that?"

"My watcher said William the Bloody busted into his store tonight, ransacked his books, and told him to keep me off the subway. But I know it wasn't him because I was tailing him."

Buffy smiled to herself. "That sounds about right. But the other one," she started, realizing suddenly from Nikki's statement that 'the other one' must have been following her around all night. She had no idea what, if anything, that meant for her Spike that she’d been sighted. "He's going to try to kill you."

Nikki shrugged. "Lots of vampires try to kill me."

Buffy stood and took a few steps closer to Nikki. "Your watcher's done his research, right? He's told you William the Bloody did it once before, then." She scanned the woman's face. "And you're tired. Slaying, it wears you out, sucks you dry. And you have all these other responsibilities. Your little boy." Buffy could tell she was getting through and took a step closer. "You have so much to handle, and all of it alone, or close enough to alone. There's a part of you, isn't there, that wouldn't mind so much, that might even welcome the rest?"

Nikki's eyes went wide and she scrambled back. "What do you know about it?"

"Too much," Buffy replied.

The other slayer narrowed her eyes. "Look, lady, I don't know what you are, but I know you're not like me. There's only one of me at a time." She crossed her arms, the leather of her jacket creaking a bit. "I'm gonna let you go," she huffed, "mostly because I don't know how to kill whatever you are."

Buffy didn't know what else to say. "Nikki. The subways. Stay away from them. At least for the next few days."

Nikki lifted a brow. "Gotta do my job," she insisted, "if you have any idea what that's like."

"Yeah, I really do."

The other slayer rolled her eyes and turned on her heel to slink on the door, sending her horribly familiar black coat swooshing around her calves. Behind the curtains, the sky was pinking up. She'd failed. Nikki was alive, but for how long? Spike had been right about her. Something was going to get her, sooner than later, even if it wasn’t him. So was there even any point in trying to save her?

Her brain hurt.

Buffy curled herself on the tattered bedspread and waited for Spike to come back until she finally fell asleep alone. She woke up the same way.

**************

He wasn’t sure how he’d expected such an auspicious day to begin, but Spike had certainly never expected a slayer to wake him by bashing a pillow across his face. He rolled out of the bed to stand across from her. She waited with inexplicable patience for him to get his bearings.

“I still don’t know what the right thing is to do about you,” she announced quietly.

She seemed completely calm for a girl standing two feet away from a monster. Nothing in her posture implied that she was frightened of him in the least. Her demeanor implied that she’d swat him aside as easily as a mosquito.

He was entirely fascinated.

“I don’t know what happens if I kill you. If you’re not there in twenty-five years, if I’m not there in twenty-five years, I don’t know what happens. Maybe nothing. Maybe the world ends.” She closed her eyes for a moment. “You are such a pain in the ass. Do you have any idea how much time travel makes my head hurt?”

He couldn’t think of a cogent response to any of that, and his stomach rumbled at the nearness of her. Underneath that skin was something better than anything the average girl could sniff or shoot into his supper.

“I’m going to make you a deal.”

He laughed. “Is that right? You in the habit of making deals with the devil.”

A wry smile crept across her face. “I’ve thought about it, trying to balance out everything you’re going to do. And maybe I am just being unbelievably selfish, but I don’t want to find out what happens to me or the world if you’re not there. So leave her alone.”

“Think it’s as simple as that, do you, girl?” he asked, amazed and amused at her presumption. “What’s in it for me?”

“I let you go,” she said solemnly. “You let her go and I let you go. Even if that maybe changes everything. In which case, I probably should kill you.”

“Awfully sure of yourself, aren’t you, pet? What makes you think you’re leaving this room?”

No sooner were the words out of his mouth than he was pinned face down on the carpet with her knee in his spine and a pointy piece of wood pressed against his back. “It’s a little harder to hit the heart from here,” she told him calmly, “but I have good aim and a lot of practice.”

Her voice was cold, detached. But there’s the slightest tremor in her hands. She didn’t want to kill him. “And what is it I’ve done to earn this benevolence?”

She stepped back. He spun around and watched her turn the door knob behind her. “Let her go, and you’ll find out,” she replied firmly before letting herself out.

He waited for the sunset and considered the offer, skin still afire from having her warm, humming body pressed against it. Certainly, if he wanted to take this one on it would have to wait until she was younger—she wasn’t wrong about the headaches either. In the meantime, he had a date to keep.


**********


Spike lit a cigarette and sighed. Slayers oft times ignored the sagest counsel. Nikki Wood marched right past him, leather slapping briskly against her legs. Spike knew all too well how this would go. Indeed, seconds later he emerged from a crowd and followed the slayer down the stairs. It was odd, seeing such a deeply familiar scene from the outside. No matter the changes he'd been through in thirty years, he remembered the details of this night with cursed clarity.

But then Buffy went bustling after the Other into the station. That certainly wasn't on the old reel. He had spent most of night following Nikki Wood at a distance, waiting for the crowd to thin so they could be alone. His determined little sweetheart was throwing it all into chaos. Not that he could fault her.

Ought to be angry with her, he supposed, but it wasn’t possible. Buffy wouldn’t be the girl he adored if she was willing to just give him a pass.

Spike kept a few paces distance as he followed her following them. Buffy passed through a door into another car, but when he tried to turn the door, he found it jammed. Of course, he realized, she was going to fight him in Nikki's place.

Her grim little face appeared briefly in the window. There were tears standing in her eyes.

"I love you," she mouthed from behind the glass before she turned to face the other. It was wildly disconcerting. He seemed to be saying something like ‘I’ve reconsidered, and I’ll take your offer.’ Spike couldn’t see Nikki Wood at all. Buffy was on her own against the Slayer of Slayers.

Spike pounded the door, screaming her name. The other passengers on the car gave him odd looks and shuffled away. He kept banging away, determined to get to her before the Other did. He grasped the sides of the door. The metal began to shudder and shriek in his hands as he tried to wrench it from the frame.

White light flooded his brain, and then there was nothing but the blinding bright.


*************