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Forward to Time Past by Unbridled_Brunette
 
Chapter Forty-Eight
 
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Chapter Forty-Eight





He was hard between her lips, smooth against her tongue, and salty in a slow trickle down the back of her throat. Slick and throbbing, somewhat foreign. She had never done this for William, had never held him in her mouth; she’d been taking things so slowly with him, and there hadn’t been time. Yet, far beyond that first sharp edge, the taste of his flesh was the same, and she knew that if she had done it for William, then it would have been just like this.

Spike had just fed, and his skin was almost warm.

Buffy closed her eyes, but she could feel him shifting in his seat. His knees, flanking either side of her shoulders, were twitching. The restless fidgeting of his body against her own was a familiar feeling, and she liked it. She liked, too, the shudder of his skin beneath the caress of her hands and her mouth, the harsh panting that was the only sound in the room. She didn’t stop to ask herself why he seemed to have grown breathless, when he didn’t even need to breathe. She didn’t care. Because, it was all so familiar…and it was so easy to pretend.

She choked a little when he came. Not because she wasn’t expecting it, but because she had so little experience with these matters to begin with, and absolutely none without benefit of a condom. Once she remembered to swallow, she found the experience not a wholly unpleasant one. She liked how vulnerable it made him, the almost helpless way his boot heels dug into the dirty stone floor and his head dropped against the back of the chair, as one of his hands pressed lightly against the base of her skull. He was a vampire; even with the chip in his head, making him lose control could have led them down some very dark and violent paths. Instead, he reacted just as she’d longed for him to, just as he had reacted when she first touched him in the library a few months before.

No. It was over a century before, and this wasn’t William.

When he was finished, she started to lean back on her heels and wipe her mouth. However, before she could get that far, he suddenly flung his arms around her, pulling her up from the floor and onto his lap.

“Buffy—love—I—”

His voice had a raw edge to it, and his accent sounded odd. Certainly not like William, yet not exactly like Spike, either. He was clutching at her, stroking and kissing; and this time, she didn’t have to ask him to tell her he loved her. He whispered it ceaselessly, desperately, a thousand different ways. He might have called her Elizabeth.

She buried her face in his neck. His body was starting to cool now, and the throbbing vein she had once kissed in a moonlit garden was not in evidence. But his skin was just as soft as she remembered it, and it smelled just the same. Beneath the odor of leather and cigarettes, of blood and beer, he smelled just like William. Buffy breathed in that scent as she pushed her hands between their bodies, easing up the tail of his T-shirt so that she could slip her fingers beneath it. She traced the contours of his stomach with her fingertips—the smooth flesh of it made unfamiliar by hard lines of clearly defined abdominal muscle. But his reaction to her touch was the same erratic squirm—the same hoarse groan—it had always been. She raised her head to watch him, and for a moment, she thought she might cry.

With one hand splayed across his belly, making a slow crawl for his chest, Buffy lifted her other one to his head. That soft hair. Usually, Spike kept it slicked back, stiff with gel and completely devoid of its natural curl. However, his convalescence had left him weary and unconcerned with his appearance, and tonight his hair was a rumpled mess. It was shorter than William’s, and bleached that ungodly shade of white-blond…but it felt so similar that it could have been him. If she closed her eyes, it could have been William.

But she didn’t close her eyes, because she couldn’t stop looking into his.

I know I’m nothing special that you should care for me…

He had that same look in his eyes now—that very same look. William’s eyes in the shadows of a sleeping rose-tree: desperate and hungry, pleading with her. Hardly hopeful. How was it that Spike could so perfectly mimic that expression? Was he doing it on purpose? It didn’t feel like an act, but she couldn’t understand how something so wicked could look so beautiful, so soft. For a moment, she could almost believe—

“You’re all I think about,” he whispered now. Dilated eyes searching her own, ragged rise and fall of his chest; his voice trembling a bit as he added, “A hundred bloody years…over a hundred…with all the things I did…and you were all I could think about.”

A hundred years.

All the things I did.

William the Bloody strikes again.

He earned his nickname by torturing his victims with railroad spikes.


“Oh, God.”

With a small, choking cry, Buffy pushed herself off him and stood up. He stared at her in confusion, for the moment too surprised to move or speak. Still slumped in the chair, with his jeans open and his shirt pushed up, his eyes were—

Not his eyes. Not him. And I just—

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

Spike looked bewildered. “You’re sor—what?” he faltered. He climbed to his feet and started toward her, but Buffy backed away from his approach. It seemed to her that both of them were moving unnaturally slow, as if they were caught in a dream. A nightmare.

“I’m sorry,” she said again, stumbling backward in the direction of the door. “I’m sorry—”

When she reached the exit, she turned and fled. She could hear him jogging behind her in clumsy pursuit, but he was fumbling with his zipper and cursing, moving too slowly to catch up. She darted across rows of headstones and shoved open the creaking iron gates at the main entrance. Her temples throbbed in rhythm to her pounding footsteps, and her throat ached with unshed tears. A single thought, cycling in her mind.

I’m sorry, William.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~





He lost sight of her midway through the cemetery. God damn his hands; he should have left the fucking zipper alone. He couldn’t understand what had happened. Granted, something had seemed off at first…the word “pretend”…but after that...

After that, you saw what you wanted to see, you bloody idiot. You felt what you wanted to feel…believed what you wanted to believe. And all along, she was just using you.

But that didn’t seem right either. If she were using him…would she have gone down on her knees? Seemed to him that he would have gotten more satisfaction out of that act than she would. And there was the way she kept looking at him…the expression in her eyes was something he hadn’t seen in anyone for over a hundred years. It was tender, appreciative of the tenderness in him…because, he could be tender. He could be gentle. He could be good.

Just. Not. Now.

A vampire was making its way across the cemetery toward him. It was a young man in a suit, his white shirt streaked with fresh mud—a newly risen fledgling. He smiled at Spike, instinctively recognizing the call of his own kind. Spike felt the bones in his face shift; rage so powerful it tinted the edges of his vision red.

“You picked the wrong fucking night,” he muttered to the vampire. And he started forward.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~





When Buffy burst through the front door of 1630 Revello Drive, Tara was sitting in the living room alone. There was a textbook in her lap and a highlighter in her hand; her legs were folded comfortably beneath her. When the heavy door banged back against the wall, she jumped, startled.

“Buffy—”

A quick dart of the eyes showed Buffy that no one else was in the room. The house was quiet and it was late. Willow and Dawn must be asleep, and the others had gone home. It was pure impulse borne out of desperation that made her say, without any preliminaries: “Send me back.”

The book slid from Tara’s grasp as she jumped to her feet. “Wh—what?”

“Send me back. I know that you can. You helped Willow send me there in the first place…you helped her bring me back here.”

“We brought you home.”

Home. Buffy felt like knocking her down. What did she know about home?

“I don’t want to be home,” she spat with a venom that made Tara wince. “I want to be there. Send me back.”

“Buffy, y—you know that I can’t do that—”

“Yes, you can!”

“I’m not talking about the skills needed…I’m talking about…about ethics. You don’t belong there. Sending you back could mess up the entire fabric of time…you could end up never existing at all.”

“I don’t care.”

“You have to care, Buffy. It doesn’t just affect you.” Stern though the words were, Tara’s eyes were soft and full of pity. She asked gently, “Angel was right, wasn’t he? You met someone there.”

Something in that tentative question broke down the last of Buffy’s self-control, and a sob escaped her. “You have to let me go back,” she insisted. “You have to send me—he’ll die without me—”

“Buffy, he died anyway. Whether you’d gone there at all or not, he—he would have died a long time ago—”

She tried to put her arm around Buffy, but the Slayer shoved her away. “You don’t get it,” she said. “You don’t understand. Something terrible will happen to him if I don’t go back to stop it—”

“How do you know—?”

“I just know!”

She was almost shouting, but Tara didn’t follow suit. She didn’t say anything, and for a long moment, there was silence. Finally, she whispered gently, “I’m sorry.”

Buffy said nothing.

“What—what, uh, was his name?”

“William.” Her voice was husky, clogged with tears. She added a bit more clearly, “His name was William.”

Tara started to say something else, something comforting. But just as she parted her lips, another voice spoke.

“You selfish little fool.”

Both girls startled and turned to the door. Giles was standing just outside of the room, his face grim. Although his voice was low, his tone was harsh with anger. His hands were clenched into fists at his sides.

Buffy stared at him, stricken with shock. “What—?” she whispered.

He crossed the room in an instant, one fist opening to reveal a piece of crumpled newsprint—a picture. Buffy’s face paled.

It was William’s picture.

“Where did you get that?”

“Where did you get it?” he snapped. “No—don’t speak. I already know. You broke into the Magic Box and stole the book from my collection.”

“I didn’t steal it—”

“No? Then, explain to me how it was that I found this in your bedroom.”

“You’ve been in my bedroom?” She was outraged. “You had no right—!”

“I had every right! You are my charge! You have been hiding the truth from all of us since your return, and I, for one, am growing weary of it. Had it not been for Angel—”

Tara was looking from one angry face to the other. “I—I don’t understand—” she stammered. Giles spun on her.

“I’ll tell you, then. The man Buffy just spoke of—the man to whom she wants you to return her—is Spike.”

Stunned, Tara shifted her glance to her still-distraught friend. “You—”

“It wasn’t Spike!” Buffy said shrilly. “He wasn’t Spike—”

“No,” retorted Giles. “He became Spike after you left. And we’re damn lucky he did—”

“Lucky!”

“He has a destiny to fulfill, Buffy!” he shouted. “Perhaps it is an existence of the worst kind—the existence of a parasite. Yet, it is necessary! By altering his past, you might have altered all of ours, as well.”

“Well, I didn’t. Are you happy? Nothing has changed since I first left. I didn’t prevent anything, and I didn’t cause anything—that’s how much I affected his past and yours!”

His voice dropped low again. “And yet…you wish to be sent back.”

Buffy met his eyes squarely. “Yes,” she said. “I do.”

“You have no concern for the rest of us—for the rest of the world—apparently.”

“And how would it make the world worse if I prevented Spike from killing a few thousand people?”

“Time is like a set of dominoes, Buffy…you change just one piece and the rest don’t fall, or they fall in different order. Who is to say that history would be the better for it? Who is to say you would even become a slayer?”

“Well, that’s the best news I’ve heard all day! Do you think I like being the Slayer? I didn’t choose this life—it chose me. And I would trade it in for a normal one any day of the week.”

“At the expense of those who need you.”

She shrugged carelessly. “If I weren’t around, someone else would have picked up that mantle. The world would keep spinning without me…some other poor idiot’s life wrecked, because a bunch of cowardly old men in England want the war won and are too afraid to fight the battles themselves.”

“May I remind you that your ‘battles’ have saved this world from going to hell? More than once.”

“Yeah—for the rest of you. For me, this is hell. I’m like the Greek guy chained to the rock, having the fun of being eaten by an eagle every day. No end in sight until I’m dead.”

“And you would prefer to live in a place where women are given no consideration at all? Perhaps, you feel constrained by your calling here, but I can tell you that you would feel no freer had you stayed in the past.”

“How would you know? You don’t know anything about it, or about what it was like for me.”

“I know history. Perhaps William was kind to you and treated you well, but had you stayed, you would have become his property. Figuratively and legally. Would you have enjoyed that? Not being allowed to make your own decisions unless he gave you permission? Not being allowed out of your house alone? The only position you could maintain in society was as a wife and mother.”

“It’s better than this. Right now, my only option is to be a killer.”

“A hero.”

She shot him a withering glance—“Same difference”—and then pushed past him.

“Buffy—”

“I’m tired of talking about this,” she said. “I’m going to bed.”

Giles moved around to the edge of the doorway, watching as Buffy climbed the stairs. The expression in his eyes was a mixture of concern, disappointment, and anger.

“Your problems will still be here tomorrow morning, Buffy. You have a destiny as surely as Spike—as surely as the rest of us. You can’t escape that just because you feel it is an unfair one.”

But she didn’t even glance back.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~





That night, she dreamed of him. Not really a dream, but a memory. A recollection made sharp and clear…like a filmstrip that played in her mind as she slept. One so precious that if she could have slept forever, she would have.

They had just left the music hall and were driving through the late afternoon sunshine, and for a while, it seemed to Buffy that they were heading back home. But shortly before they reached the house, they pulled onto a narrow, cobbled side street that Buffy had never noticed before. It ran in a wide U shape around what appeared to be a small park. They passed underneath the narrow, wrought-iron archway, and William drove into the thick stand of snowy trees just beyond it. He stopped in the middle of the pathway and twisted his head around to look at Buffy, who lowered the carriage glass so she could hear him.

“The horses will stand. Would you like to go for a walk?”

“I would love to go for a walk with you,” she said. And he smiled.

They left the carriage behind and walked along a brick path almost completely blanketed in snow. There was nothing around them except skeletal trees, their bare, white-dusted branches blocking out much of the winter sunshine. The whole place seemed gray and cold, and lonely; Buffy couldn’t imagine why William would have brought her here. Then, the pathway opened up before them, and suddenly Buffy found herself standing before a stone fountain surrounded by shrubbery and wrought iron benches. The fountain’s spray was frozen solid and unmoving in the cold air. Buffy stopped to look at it, and William almost ran into her.

“It’s beautiful!” she whispered. But the words sounded inadequate even to her own ears. In the tangerine-tinted evening light, the icy arc was backlit, made into a prism so that a rainbow array of colors showed in its depths. She glanced over her shoulder at William, and realized with a start that he was only inches from her.

“It is even lovelier in the spring.” His breath tickled the nape of her neck as he spoke. “Then, all of the shrubs and flowering trees are in bloom, and the fallen blossoms are drifting on top of the water. It’s like a piece of art.”

She looked around them. Silence and not a soul in sight. “It’s so empty here.”

“It always is. No one ever seems to come here. I don’t see why.”

“You come.”

“I like it,” he said. “The quiet and the separateness of it. It is a nice place to be when one wants to think.”

Buffy turned slightly, and he was right there against her, face to face and torso to torso. She nuzzled at his temple, one hand lifting to stroke his hair. He drew a shuddering breath and closed his eyes.

“You brought me here,” she murmured into his skin. “Doesn’t that make it less separate?”

“I don’t want to be separate from you.”

He reached out as if to hold her, but Buffy slipped away and walked closer to the fountain. Just to see if he would follow her.

He did.

"What’s that?” She pointed to a wide inscription on the fountain’s side, words etched deep into the marble and surrounded by an ornate border.

William drew up behind her, and this time, it was he who initiated the first touch, his arms sliding around her shoulders, drawing her close to his chest. She reached up to stroke his swollen knuckles, the blood that was just beginning to dry on them.

“It is a memorial,” he said softly, in answer to her question. “A local man—he lived near us, actually—when his wife died, he had this park built in memory of her. The fountain has her name on it, and a poem.”

“The man who built it…he never comes here?”

“He passed away as well, shortly after his wife. Grief, I suppose.”

“That’s so sad. No wonder no one comes.”

He gazed over her shoulder at the fountain, shaking his head ever so slightly. “I don’t think it is a sad place. It’s beautiful.”

“What is?”

“The idea that love can transcend death.”


~*~ ~*~ ~*~




 
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