She awoke to find him writing. It was her postcard.


"I don't want you to send that."


"Oh no? You don't even know who I might send it to."


"I guess I do." She sprang up, sack-race style with her ankles bound, and tried to snatch it from him, but he was too quick. She lunged at him again, and this time he darted around her and into the bathroom.


By time she wrenched the door open—okay, off its hinges—he'd soaked the card so the writing was just a blue cloud. He tore it into bits and flushed it down the toilet.


"Happy now?"


"You're a jerk."


"Oh, that's very nice." He pushed past her, back into the room. All these little rooms, a succession of cells.


How long was this going to last? It was sort of incredible. She couldn't believe she was letting him keep her shackled. That she was letting him keep her at all.


"Would think you'd miss her," he said.


"Who?"


He stared.


"Oh, you mean Dawn."


His brow shot up at that. She felt a kind of pleasure in getting these reactions out of him.


"You keep wanting me to have these feelings that ... I don't have."


"Don't buy that."


"Whatever." She started to turn away, then paused. "If you write to her, what's that gonna do? She's not going to keep that card to herself. They'd all see it, and then they'd track us down. You know they would."


He pretended to shrug.


"Right. As usual, you never think anything through."


"Think through plenty. Don't get to be as old as I am without—"


"Whatever."


"Anyhow, you're the one keeps tellin' me to go back there. Think that would have a similar effect."


"What, that you'd tell them what happened to me? They might believe you. But whether they did or not, they'd blame you for me being gone, and they'd kill you."


It was only when the words were out, and she saw him slowly react to them, his face opening and shutting like a drowner's, that she grasped what she'd said. Somehow it was worse than her previous threats to stake him herself. Those threats were just ornery, angry—face it, they were the usual, and he knew how empty they were. (Were all her threats to him empty? Going way back to the very first ones? She shoved the idea away.) But this was telling him that no one cared about him, never had and never would, because he'd always been nothing.


It was: harsh.


Maybe too harsh.


"Yeah, well, we both know I was never goin' to go back to Sunnyhell."


He shoved past her, went to sit on the bed, reached for his flask. She waited a couple of beats, like that would be enough to change the tempo.


"I get that you still feel responsible for her. Dawn. That's ... that's good."


"Nothin' good about me, I thought."


"That isn't ... that isn't what I really believe."


"That so?" The TV came on. "How would you know, bein' a monster yourself?"






~~~





The next morning, when they stopped at another roadside motel, she got him to take off the shackle again, so she could bathe, and afterwards, he didn't put it back on. She paced around the room, wide-stanced, long strides, thinking maybe he'd just forgotten, and this way she would taunt him into remembering, at which point she fully intended to fight it out with him. She yearned for exercise, felt like a caged cougar, days of confinement to the car, to small rooms, and whatever she was now, she still wasn't someone who could sit still for long.


Spike, supine on the bed, watched TV right through her.


Even when she transformed her strides into actual tumbles, cartwheeling across the room—which was only big enough for about one and a half cartwheels, and on the second round trip she miscalculated and almost put a foot through the plasterboard door—he didn't acknowledge her.


Finally she couldn't keep quiet. "What do vampires do all day? What did they do before TV was invented?"


"Sleep. Read. Write their memoirs. Fuck."


Well, she shouldn't have asked.


Not that he was asking either. He was still staring at the TV, his trusty silver flask cradled on his chest. She waited a few moments, but he didn't say anything else.

She realized she'd been waiting all this time for him to touch her, but he never did. He kept a wide expanse of seat between them. Days they were together in different rented rooms, but always with two beds. And it didn't feel like he was trying to hold off, like he was restraining himself.


He didn't act like a dog in the manger.


And yet she knew that he'd cried again, on at least a couple of separate occasions, in the shower, where he must've imagined she couldn't hear him, which was stupid because he ought to know she could hear everything now. And what was he crying about, if not how she was treating him?


He'd cried when she kicked him to the curb. When Buffy did.


She stood on her head, scissored her legs. It didn't really help.








A couple hours later, he was asleep.


She opened the motel room door. Outside the sky was cloudy, she could smell the sea a couple of miles away, and seventeen-hundred types of vegetation, some of it alive and some of it rotting, and she could smell the rain coming, and people.


She could smell people.


Resting her forehead against the door jamb, she breathed them in, they just perfumed the air, tantalizing as gingerbread baking, and sort of hoped Spike would wake up.


He didn't, and the hot wet air wrapped around her like a sweaty fist. She didn't sweat, though. Apparently her days of sweating were over.


The sky began to sweat though, a few big drops splotching down hard against the hood of the car, against the dusty tarmac in front of the motel, and then more and more.


Buffy fled out into the downpour.


Not running, flying—she wasn't ready for her own speed, for how instantaneously the motel was gone and she was somewhere else, so fast she couldn't make out what was all around her.


The body in her arms—where had it come from—flailed and struggled, but like some little animal, weak and chanceless, just stirring up its own odor, beating up its pulse, making itself delicious to her. The aroma was overpowering, funk of hair and flesh, musty fabric and the high salty needful reek of blood. She couldn't even see what she'd gotten hold of, she was already sunk in, tight against the lean jaw, the flesh parting around her fangs like string, her mouth filling with liquid heat.


Eyes wide open, but she still couldn't really see—the rain so heavy it flattened the hot day around her, glued her hair to her skin to her clothes. Glued her to her prey.


She swallowed, and sucked and swallowed again.


Then she just couldn't go on doing it. It wasn't even a decision. She just let go. Dropped it, stepped back, trembling—


She didn't know why. Didn't get either how she could tremble, when her heart was stopped, or why her knees should give way beneath her.


" ¡Huye ahorita! ¡Huye!"


The prey—only now did she grasp whom she'd grasped, a boy of eleven or twelve in dirty clothes—was already scrambling up from the mud. He ran and was gone.


Spike offered his hand to her.


"Knew you wouldn't do it."


"I did."


"But you stopped in plenty of time. Saw you."


"How much did you see?"


"Enough. You proved out my theory 'bout you. C'mon, Slayer."


She let him tug her up. Her haunches were caked in mud.


He let go of her.


The rain came down on her like a beating. She wished he'd put an arm around her, shelter from herself somehow, but he wasn't doing that. When had she ever remotely let him do that?


"Let's go," he said. "Could clear up fast, we'd get stuck."


"Spike—"


He looked at her. He was soaked too, eyes scrunched up against the downpour, the flipped-up collar of his leather futile.


Being so patient.


"I was hungry." That didn't begin to explain it. Spike seemed to understand that it wasn't what she meant—that she didn't know what she meant. He nodded.


"I just ... " She gestured uselessly, towards the smear in the mud left by the boy. "I don't know what to do with myself." She was still trembling. Why couldn't she stop it?


He had the good grace not to say anything.


They started back, picking their way like normal bipeds, mud sucking at their feet. Spike led the way. Lost, she followed.


When she reached out and caught his arm, he let her keep it. She walked just one step behind him, her hand threaded through his elbow, and after a while he squeezed it against his side. The rain let up, then stopped. They hurried faster. The sky was brightening as they sprinted the last few hundred yards, coming to an abrupt stop at their door, beneath a dripping overhang. The storm left the air just as hot and choked as it was before.


Spike unlocked the door and handed her through.


"Gonna stay out here a bit, have a smoke."


She peeled out of her sodden clothes, dropped them in the bathtub, wrapped herself in a towel. Went back to the still-open door. Spike leaned against the upright, his extended foot a few inches from the dividing line between shade and glare.


"Can I?" She plucked the cigarette from his hand, inhaled the smoke deep into her lungs. It tasted rich and good, and didn't make her cough. As she let it out in a stream, she glanced at him. He was watching her intently, his face blank, but he couldn't blank his eyes.


"What would you have done if I hadn't let go of the kid?"


"Doesn't matter. Never doubted you would. You're no killer."


That was when something inside her cracked, and the tears flooded out.