Conversation

"They're animals," Riley says dismissively, and Buffy is about to agree with him when she sees the half-hidden smile on Spike's face.

"What, you're not offended?" she asks him, and his smirk widens, darkens: sharpens into that dangerous expression he still wears sometimes, the one that can almost make her forget that he's chipped and harmless.

"Why should I be?" he asks. "Your soldier-boys are finished, Slayer, and Captain Cardboard here just proved it to me. I'm thinkin' a few celebratory pints wouldn't go amiss at the moment."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Riley demands, as Giles glances up from his book.

Spike looks at Riley, and his eyes are flat out scary. He does this every so often - gives them all a glimpse at what he used to be: what he would be still without the electronic leash in his brain holding him back. The expression on his face makes her remember that she used to be scared of him, that his voice at the other end of a phone line had given her one of the worst moments of her life.

"Underestimating your enemy is the most fatal mistake there is," he says, killer's smile still lingering at the corners of his mouth. "The only reason I'm telling you this now, mate, is that even if you believe me - which you won't - the brass won't believe you." He pats his pockets down absently, locates his cigarettes, and shakes one out of the pack.

"You think of us as animals," Spike continues, retrieving his lighter from another pocket and setting flame to tobacco, "call us hostile-whatever and give us a number, an' tell yourselves that's that. It's not," he says, looking straight at Riley for the second time. "The Slayer here, she gets it. So do the Watcher and the hangers-on. We're not hostile sub-terrestrials, or whatever precious military acronym you wankers have hung on us this week." He exhales. Giles is watching Spike with growing interest, and doesn't bother telling him to put out his cigarette.

"You really don't get it, do you?" Spike continues. "I'm a vampire. Not one of those pathetic, half-feral fledges you stake by the dozen in the cemeteries, but the real thing, with more than a century under my belt. You think Buffy is tough? I took this scar from the first Slayer I killed, and my coat from the second." His voice darkens, smooths out into velvet death.

"I am what goes bump in the night, the stuff human nightmares have been made of since the first of you woke in fear, heart pounding in the dark. You may have leashed me for now, but I'll outlive your little tinker-toy. And you can rest uneasy with the certainty that when this chip in my head sputters into obscurity, you - or your children, or their children - will learn exactly what it means to let go of the tiger's tail. Did the Watcher ever tell you where I got my name? I earned it with the sharp end of a railroad spike." He tilts his head to the side, looking at Riley through heavy-lidded eyes. "Of course, they called me William the Bloody before that. Called me that even before I died, though, so you might say I got a head start on things." He exhales sharply.

"Still, that wasn't my point. My point is, boy, that you're going to lose because you don't understand what you're fighting, and when that day comes, I'll bathe in your blood."

He stubs the cigarette out into his mug with a violent gesture and gets to his feet so quickly that Buffy takes an instinctive step forward before she realizes what she's doing. Spike's sudden smile is for once genuine, but that doesn't make the expression a pleasant one. He passes her, too close, in a rush of leather and trailing the sharp smell of tobacco. She can't quite repress a shiver as the door closes behind him, shutting out the night.

~Fin~


*****

Author's Notes: Because it never pays to underestimate the power of the mystical. Someone really should have given this lecture to Maggie Walsh. Should have given her the Evil Overlord's list, too. I can't think of any specific violations at the moment, but the general tone of the thing might have kept her from meddling with 'ye diverse powers of darknesse which man comprehendeth notte', or at least from doing so without taking the proper precautions.

I know that most people think the Initiative was the least effective of the seasonal big bads, and I agree that they were the most ineffectively used -- still, at least to me, the idea of the Initiative is much scarier than the idea of any of the other horrible things that Buffy & Co. had to fight off, even the apocalyptic ones and the creepy dream clown (which, by the way? majorly, majorly creepy). My main issue with them was and will always be Spike's chip, which was in my opinion a terrible thing to do to anyone. Death would have been kinder. (The Clockwork Orange has always terrified me.) As for the rest of it, I'm not sure if it's the victory of the mundane over the darker, more interesting parts of life that bothers me the most, or if it's simply the idea of the government getting its hands on supernatural powers. Either is a truly frightening proposition.