“I live by saying what is in my heart, and it shall not be taken away; my heart is mine, and none shall be aggressive against it, no terror shall subdue me.” – The Book of Going Forth By Day


“Listen to me, Nibblet.” Spike’s voice was strained, partially from the throbbing pain of his cracked ribs and the barely closed knife wound, but more significantly from the glowing tear between dimensions that hung suspended in the air behind Dawn’s back. “It’s always about the blood. Do you understand?”

Dawn’s face was streaked with tears, wet trails that tore into the vampire. “But, then you’ll die,” she protested.

Lie, lie for all your worth!

“Already dead, ‘Bit,” he tried to smile encouragingly. “Planning on cheating the hell out of this thing.”

“But…” she started again.

“No buts. And don’t get stroppy with me. Hell, it might not work at all, and then we’ll both feel silly,” Spike paused in feigned thought. “Well, right up until your big sis’ stakes me.”

Dawn’s lips quirked into a tiny, lopsided smile. “Don’t say that. She wouldn’t stake you.”

Spike only shrugged, keeping his thoughts to himself. Buffy most certainly would stake him. That was the only realistic reaction she could have to him biting Dawn.

Biting Dawn.

He shuddered at the thought.

Biting Dawn seemed so wrong on so many levels, he couldn’t even begin to count them all, but it was also the only way Spike could think to save her as well.

Irony was a bitch.

Maybe if Buffy had been there, she would have come up with something stunningly obvious to save the day without mussing a single hair on her head. Perhaps Red would have conjured some amazing spell, fixing things up neatly with a flash and a bang. Hell, maybe the Whelp could have shown up with his big damn ball again, or the monks could have turned the Key into a drop of water in the Pacific Ocean. Glory would have had a fun time with that.

But Buffy was still below, fighting the hell goddess to a standstill, Willow was dealing with the crazed hoard that was keeping the cavalry from scaling the tower, the others were pinned down by the fighting, and the monks hadn’t had the foresight God gave house flies. They weren’t there, and thanks to a fortunate twist which sent his first fall from the tower careening to the tower’s rigging below, he was. Maybe too late to stop Doc from hurting one of his girls, but he was certainly able to do something now.

Giles had said that everything hinged on the girl’s blood, that once the portal was open, only her blood could close it. And there Spike stood, with a body designed to take blood from others and make it his own.

“You ready?” he asked, trying to keep his voice calm.

Dawn just nodded and stopped rubbing her wrists where Glory’s ropes had chaffed them raw.

Spike hissed a long breath through his teeth and took one of the girl’s wrists. The inside seemed too personal, and the outside wouldn’t bleed enough. The side it was then. He let his own demonic features shift into place. “This is gonna hurt,” he warned, avoiding telling her that if he didn’t make it hurt, she’d feel… well… something else, and that struck Spike as an even larger transgression that causing her a little pain.

“I’m ready,” she said weakly, putting on a brave face.

Hating himself, hating that this was the only solution he could think of, Spike struck.

In that instant, he knew that his desperate plan would work. Power flooded him, singing through the pathways of his veins and turning his vision green. After only a few mouths full, less than even a blood bank would have taken, he tore himself away.

Spike was dazed, taken off guard by the raw energy surging through his body, but he still managed to stand. His blurred vision landed on Dawn’s wincing face and guilt ate at the corners of his mind.

“Dawn,” he said, using her given name for once, “Tell your sis’ I’m sorry, and that I kept my promise.”

She opened her mouth to speak, but no words were forthcoming.

Without stopping to think, he tore past her, hurling himself into the air. Once again, he was falling, but this time it seemed to stretch out forever in pain and light.

*****

Day 41

Spike hadn’t been on a good bender in the last couple weeks. Considering the events of the last few days, it was only logical that he put considerable effort into remedying that fact.

Dawn had loved the damned shirt. The good news began and ended there.

Willow had managed to fix the ‘Bot’s charger with relative ease and had proceeded to call an official Scooby confab for the express purpose of haranguing Spike. He still wasn’t sure what had given him away, other than his glaringly obvious motive, but the witch had guessed that he had been the microwaving saboteur. She never got to finish her lecture though, because after the first few minutes of her condescending diatribe, he had exploded.

Spike still couldn’t remember everything he had said, the exact words were lost in the red haze of his anger, but he did recall enough bits and snatches to get the gist.

And the gist hadn’t been pretty.

The ‘Bot’s less than stellar fighting skills had been mentioned, as had Willow’s perpetually botched spells. He dimly recalled comparing the Scoobies to a cackling herd of bean counters who followed him around, taking notes and never lifting a finger to actually help. That had segued into his opinion on their general uselessness in a real fight. He had also pointed out that his method for dealing with the vampires was just as effective, and less incendiary, than the witch’s and that he saw no reason to coddle their stupid plan any longer. All this had been spiced liberally with profanities and detailed descriptions of exactly what kinds of objects they should stick in each others’ orifices.

The one memory of the entire affair that was as clear as day in his mind was how it had all ended.

He could see their faces, dead white in some cases, flaming red in others, all shocked into silence by his outburst, while the words none of them wanted to hear had dripped from his mouth like venom.

“She’s dead. We all bloody well failed her and now she’s dead and that bleeding heap of wreckage isn’t her, so stop pretending it is.”

For a long time, the only sound in the room had been his own heavy breathing.

Then Willow had started crying.

And then Spike had stormed out.

He was getting good at that: running away from his problems, especially the ones he had caused. That night, he had run far and fast, finally ending up in some nameless bar that tended to service a less demonic clientele than those he usually frequented. The waitress, a waifish, skittish thing, had tried to cut him off after what, for a human, would have been a dangerous number of drinks, but a fanged snarl had sent her scampering for another shot.

And another.

And another.

And after he had finally lost count, he had thrown a wad of cash, the meager loot he had filched from the few vampires he had managed to pat down before tossing them into Willow’s glitchy abyss, on the table and left without counting it. Either the waitress had been short changed, or she had found an insanely huge tip waiting for her in a pool of sticky, spilled whiskey, Spike didn’t really care all that much.

Drunk enough to throw the rest of his relearned and hard-won human morality to the wind, he had broken into a liquor store and relieved them of as many bottles of the strongest whiskey he could carry.

*****

Two days later, or was it three, he was still nursing the last of the stolen alcohol. Or he would have been, if he hadn’t been passed out on his recliner, smelling strongly of stale booze and angry grief.

The sound of his crypt’s door closing softly jerked Spike back to wakefulness. He glared over his shoulder and was surprised to find the watcher standing there, cheap canvas tote bag in hand. Whatever was in the sack, a freebie from the Sunnydale Public Library System if the logo on the front was to be believed, it clanked in a familiar manner. Spike blinked slowly, trying to clear his dry, bloodshot eyes and wondered fuzzily if this little visit was going to finish killing the last of his buzz.

“Scotch?” Giles asked abruptly, his voice dull.

Well, that certainly wasn’t what he had been expecting. Spike peered at him through the haze of alcohol before deciding that he really had heard the man correctly. “Cups’re over there,” he waved a hand towards the clutter of dishes and small appliances that served as his ‘kitchen.’

Giles made his way there, picking fastidiously around the piled drifts of empty junk food packages, recently smashed furniture, and other debris, even though his usually neat tweed looked as if he had been sleeping in it. Upon successfully traversing the toxic wasteland, he selected the two cleanest glasses in the lot and poured roughly equal amounts of amber liquid into them.

Never one to turn down a little ‘hair of the dog’ when faced with an impending hangover, Spike accepted a glass of his own when offered. The liquid hit his abused stomach with a pleasant burn. “To what do I owe the honor?” he asked in a slurred, sarcastic voice.

Giles swirled the glass, watching the liquid slosh around and catch the light. “I started over here with a stake,” he responded dryly.

Spike felt a pang of alarm, which quickly melted into a miasma of confusing thoughts. First and foremost was the memory that staking wouldn’t do anything past leaving yet another scar across his chest, he was getting quite the collection of failed staking scars after all, but his second realization really hit a nerve. Why did he care if the watcher wanted to dust him? Wasn’t he trying to find Anubis’ lost pet for the express purpose of bringing about his own dusting?

Didn’t he still want to die?

The vampire was so lost in his thoughts that he almost missed Giles’ next comment. “But then I remembered why that would no be very effective, and staking someone over bad manners seems ironically crass, so Scotch seemed the next best option.” He took another sip, letting the liquid rest on his tongue before swallowing, seemingly at peace with his skewed logic. “We, neither of us, are designed for denial.” He said quietly.

That sounded vaguely profound when screened through a sieve of alcohol, so Spike responded with an equally profound thought. “What the fuck are you on about, Rupes?”

The man continued, as if he had not even noticed the interruption. “The Council… The Council does everything it can to distance Watchers from their slayers. Makes it easier to bury so many if you only look at them as tools.” His words were bitter, cutting.

It wasn’t until that moment that Spike realized that Giles was intoxicated as well. A quick whiff confirmed it, but even without that empirical evidence, the man was bleeding the type of honesty that can only be found in the bottom of a bottle.

“Wasn’t so good at that part, but I still knew,” one long, bony finger extended from its hold on the glass and came to rest against Giles’ temple, “I knew that I’d have to put her in the ground at some point. Maybe not so soon… And you,” Giles’ eyes focused on Spike through the veil of cheap glass and Scotch, finger diverting from its course to point at the vampire instead, “I suppose that you have lived too long in the company of death to mistake it for anything else.”

In Spike’s current state of inebriation, Giles’ words were starting to verge into the kind of crazy that made too much sense for comfort. For once in his unlife, he just shut up, tipped back his glass, and listened.

“But the others… they’re too young. Haven’t seen the things we have.” Giles paused long enough to drain and refill his cup. “Too young, so for them, denial is as good a coping mechanism as any, I suppose. At least they haven’t slipped into bargaining yet,” he chuckled, as if he had made a fine joke.

Spike didn’t find it funny in the slightest. What could a powerful witch, one who had proven herself perfectly willing to delve into black magic, do if she could not accept the slayer’s death? A former Vengeance demon whose boyfriend was sunk deep in depression? A Key, who had tried her hand at necromancy once before? The mere thought sent a shot of cold fear, or was it hope, down the vampire’s spine.

Giles continued, oblivious to the frightening seed he had just planted, “The ‘Bot really isn’t a bad idea you know, especially now that Willow has fixed the problem with the portal spell.” He raised a hand to forestall the snarl rising in Spike’s throat. “You have yourself to blame for that. If you had not tampered with the charging device, it is very likely that she would have never thought to increase its efficiency, thus allowing for the increased energy needed to power the spell.”

Only a Watcher could’ve squeezed out that sentence, dead drunk, and not miss a beat.

Despite that humorous thought, Spike still slumped deeper into his seat. Whenever one of the Scoobies started talking like this, it was never long before their words could be distilled into a command for the vampire to assume the position.

“We need it,” Giles said thinly, the barest hint of a slur entering his voice, “As a decoy to scare other demons away, as a front for Child and Family Services, but as much as I hate to admit it, you had quite a few legitimate points among the more… colorful… accusations you leveled against us.” The man’s flinty eyes pinned Spike to his chair.

How a man half his true age and pissed out of his gourd could still look at Spike and make him feel like an errant teenager was beyond his abilities to comprehend. Instead of his usual defensive sneer, he took an inordinate amount of interest in the way the crypt’s guttering candle light reflected on the surface of the last of the Scotch in his glass. Much to his surprise, Giles took that as a prompt to splash more of the liquid into his cup.

At his quizzical glance, because Spike had never known Giles to be so free with his precious Scotch, the man had smiled tightly. “I have decided that I need to cut back, and you seem to be an adequate disposal system.”

That earned a wry snort.

“Where was I?” Giles settled back into his chair. “Ah, yes… the robot…” Statement to the contrary apparently forgotten, the watcher downed his glass as well. “Willow assures me that it has a great deal of programming dedicated to learning and adapting to its environment. I have agreed to train it, if that is even the right word for something that records everything with which it is confronted. I am confidant that we can get it to the point that it will be able to patrol alone on regular nights.”

Spike had stopped breathing, stopped blinking, stopped doing any of the tiny, involuntary things that were left over from his human life. It was a predator’s instinct, this heightened focus when faced with potential prey or danger, that vampires had simply taken to the next level. In this case, it was prompted by shock.

Giles refilled his glass and kept talking. “So it patrols, maybe you still patrol,” that was partnered with a pointed glare, a look that spread the guilt on just a bit thicker, “And that leaves the rest of us able to dedicate more time to this latest mystery.”

A sliver of guilt gnawed at the back of Spike’s mind. The others still had no idea what was keeping vampires from dusting, while he sat there, knowing the answer, but keeping it to himself. Why was that again?

Oh yeah…

Spike narrowed his eyes, there were no godly reflections in the booze, or anywhere else this time, before turning his gaze on the watcher. Even though he had seemingly slipped his lead for the time being, any unsolicited Scooby-aid had to be handled with some level of discretion. Seeing that Giles had relapsed into a dour silence and a focused fascination with the bottom of his cup, Spike saw his lead in. “Rupes, you’re drunk,” he said bluntly.

That prompted a hot response. “I most certainly am not!”

“Yes, you are. Seen you like this a couple of times when I was crashin’ on your couch. S’okay. So am I. That’s a good excuse for misbehavior in case anyone makes an issue of it, yeah?” The vampire cast a sarcastic gaze heavenward, just in case someone was watching, and levered himself up into a weaving stance. “C’mon, got some thoughts need sharin’ and you’re in need of an escort out of the land of the dead now the sun’s down.”

“What exactly are you intimating?” Hostility was emanating of the watcher in waves, but Spike just ignored it. The truth was it had been a long time since he had wanted to see any of the Scoobies, watcher and Whelp included, dead. If that meant showing a little veiled solicitude and offering a little unpaid aid, well, that was just the way of things.

“On your feet, Rupes,” suiting actions with words, the vampire dragged Giles out of the chair while discreetly nudging the canvas bag with the other bottles of Scotch behind the chair and out of sight with a booted toe. “Been payin’ attention to the ghost issue in town?”

“No, why?” the man asked, allowing himself to be lead towards the door.

Definitely pissed, the both of us.

“Well, if I was a bettin’ vamp, which, incidentally, I am, I’d guess that you have a little problem with souls and the like not being able to cross over…”