“Have to tell you, mate, pretty sure I’d rather not,” said Spike.  “Supposing you let me up and we talk about this over a beer first?”

“Pff, nonsense,” said Figg.  “Once the circle is started you have to finish it.  Everyone knows that.  It makes me tired, to do it.  I have to finish it or it will just wear me right out.  Then I wouldn’t be able to wait.  Might miss it if they came back. Can’t have that.”

Once the circle was started… oh, bugger.  Spike glanced around, and sure enough, he recognized some of the glyphs the Lapur had drawn.  Not all of them, but enough to know a binding ritual when he saw it. Now things were starting to make sense, but the picture Figg was painting looked nothing but ugly for Spike.

The ancient demon was going to bind Spike’s power to his own, and then siphon it off bit by bit. If he had to guess, other victims were probably what had kept Figg going long past his natural lifespan – and if Spike didn’t convince him to change his mind, before long he wouldn’t have the strength to keep from being next.  Because his strength would belong to Figg, and he’d be... probably not dead, not right away, but… hollowed out.  An empty shell with, at best, a mind trapped helplessly inside, unable to move or speak, possibly unable even to feel anything that happened to his effectively paralyzed body.

He might linger a while, if Figg thought to feed him occasionally, but even if he did… the spell was setting Spike up to be a battery powering Figg’s life, and eventually the battery would run dry.

Spike wondered if he’d be insane again by the time that happened.

“Listen, mate,” he tried, “the thing is, I don’t think it’s going to work.  Vampire, here; you’re wanting to use my life force or whatever, but ‘m already dead.”

“Oh, no,” said Figg, “that isn’t a problem.  Demons work much better for this.  Maybe because I’m a demon too.  Maybe because, well.  You know humans.  So fragile.”  He shook his shaggy head.  “They never last as long.”  He tipped his head for a moment.  “Or maybe it’s the soul that gets used up too quick.”

“Used up?” His soul was going to get used up?  Sodding hell.  “Souls don’t last as long?”

“That’s right,” said Figg.

“Well I’ve got a soul, so I’m no good for this,” said Spike frantically.  “You’ll need to find someone else to use in your circle.”

“Now,” Figg frowned, “you’re just complaining now.  That’s not nice.”

“No, ‘s true,” said Spike.  “Can’t you smell it, or see it?  Most demons can, you know.”

Figg squinted at him for a moment, then leaned in to sniff around Spike’s head.  Quick as he could, Spike swung his arms, trying to clip Figg on the back of his ancient head.

It didn’t work.

Figg startled, and Spike couldn’t tell if it was anger or just poor balance that shoved his fist straight into Spike’s ribcage, but it was like getting hit with a sledgehammer.  He felt bones break under the chains, and cried out at the sudden pain.

“That’s not nice!” shouted Figg.  “You’re not supposed to do things like that!”  Ribs slid and clicked in horrible ways as Figg yanked Spike’s arms up over his head.  He muttered under his breath angrily, and wrapped a loop of red cord around Spike’s thumbs…

…and just like that Spike’s arms were weighted down, impossible to move.  He tugged as hard as he could, gritting his teeth against the pain, but where his thumbs touched the earth they might as well have been bolted to the floor for all the good it did him.  He stretched his fingers, trying to catch the loop of cord, but it didn’t budge and only made his hands tingle whenever he managed to touch it.

“I’m trying to tell you, Figg,” Spike rasped, “it’s no good.  Ritual won’t work, I’m tellin’ you.”

“That’s not true,” said the old demon, moving to Spike’s feet.  “It will work.  It always works. You’ll see.”

Spike jerked his legs back out of Figg’s reach, hissing as the motion jarred his ribs.  “Your family – you’re waiting for them but they’re not going to come, Figg.  Figg, listen to me!”

“My family will come!” Figg growled.  “They’ll come, you’re wrong, they’re coming, I just need to –“

“Your family is dead!”

Figg shot to his feet, his bestial eyes rolling so the whites showed in his rage.  He gave a sort of bleating wail.

“They’re dead, Figg,” panted Spike. “I’m sorry but it’s true –“

“—no, no, no—“

“—the fire, you said there was a fire, they’re not coming back because they’re all dead—”

“They’re not!”

“They’re dead and you’re meant to be too!”

Figg wailed again and tossed his head back and forth.  He dropped to his knees and slammed his forehead into Spike’s bent knees, an angry ram butting furiously against his opponent.

Bone snapped, and Spike screamed.

He still hadn’t gotten his breath back by the time the old demon finished tying a loop of red cord between his big toes, another impossibly heavy anchor, pinning his legs in place.

Oh, bugger.

That was the beginning.  Figg’s ritual, wherever he’d gotten it, was bloody thorough; covered all four elements, and his demon, and his soul.  Spike had no idea how he might manage to break it long enough to escape.

First was earth: red silken cord wound around not only his thumbs and toes, but also woven through the barbed wire on his ankles and wrists, again around his upper arms and thighs, and finally around his waist.  When it was done he couldn’t move a muscle from his neck down, not even to turn his head.  Didn’t offer any resistance, couldn’t, when Figg took a pair of heavy pruning shears and cut his clothes off him, piece by bloody piece.  That big rusty chain was just shoved up and down his body whenever Figg needed to get at a different spot.  Murder on his ribs, and Spike thought he might cry when the heavy coils landed across his broken kneecap.

Figg wasn’t listening to a word he said anymore.  Didn’t even react to his shouts and curses of pain; he was in another place altogether, focused entirely on completing the ritual and rendering Spike helpless.

As if that wasn’t enough, the bloody runes Figg had mentioned hurt for much longer than the “just a minute” he’d promised, being as they were carved into him with the hooked knife Figg had brought down off the wall earlier.  For earth, the carving started on his shins and forearms, and then Figg just worked his way inward for each element after that.  After binding Spike with one element, the spell was sealed into his naked sodding flesh, and as the words were spoken the sigils would glow for an instant and Spike’s skin would ignite in searing pain.  The burn was magical rather than physical, but it still hurt so much that he kept expecting to see or smell smoke rising from the marks Figg made.

Air came next, and Spike discovered why Figg claimed that his victims “changed their minds”, and stopped complaining once he’d spoken the words – because Figg wrapped red cord loosely about his throat, spoke the words, and just like that Spike could no longer breathe.  It wasn’t that the air was gone so much as his lungs and throat were frozen – he couldn’t inhale, couldn’t exhale, couldn’t move any air at all to try and speak.

Spike was screaming on the inside, when Figg carved the sigils across Spike’s upper arms and thighs; but on the outside, though his eyes were wide with pain and horror, he was utterly silent.

For fire, Figg pried Spike’s mouth open and somehow managed to wind cord around his sodding tongue; another length ended up tied around his cock, of all places, and Spike shuddered inwardly at the violation – though he couldn’t decide whether the John Thomas was worse than the hideous intimacy of someone messing about with his tongue.  Apparently demons were connected to fire, because after that Figg pulled black cord from his workbench, and used it to bind the vampire within him.  Black cord stretched from one shoulder, down his torso along both front and back, to crisscross between his legs and come up to the other shoulder.

Spike couldn’t have brought his game face up anyway, being paralyzed, but now he could feel the demon quail within him, cowering away from the cord and the runes that ran along his center from throat to groin.  He was reminded of the time that cowardly bastard Robin Wood had used the First Evil’s trigger to force his demon to come out and play, only now Figg was forcing it somehow deeper in, and the sensation made his skin crawl.

Where demons were associated with fire, it seemed that the soul was associated with water.  Figg used white cord for that, wrapping it about his chest three times and finishing it with an elaborate knot tied directly over his heart.  The carving this time wrapped across his chest just above his nipples and around his sides to meet in the middle of his back.  Figg just rolled him from one side to the other, heedless of his ribs, and kept on cutting.  Christ, it hurt, more than all the rest put together.  Tears leaked from Spike’s eyes and his body twitched involuntarily in agony.

When he was done, though, Spike realized he was feeling strangely detached from what was happening to him.  He knew he should be angry, but that faded as the demon was bound; should be afraid, but with the soul wound about in words and white silk, he discovered it was surprisingly difficult to make himself care at all.

The last red cord went around Spike’s head across his eyes, and sound and sight vanished.

Not the pain, though.  He could still feel.  He could feel the incised runes burning in his skin, and his own blood trickling into the dirt, especially clearly.

Felt it when Figg brought Spike’s arms down from over his head; felt it when he began shoving the chain around again, spreading it out so that it coiled now from ankle to neck, pinning his legs together and holding his arms fast to his sides. Definitely felt the final portion of the binding ritual, where Figg carved large, elaborate sigils into the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet, each one leaving Spike weaker and more distant from his body.  The pain was so excruciating, again, that he managed to twitch against his bonds once or twice, but he was incapable of doing more.

Spike felt it, too, when Figg dragged him across the dirt floor and rolled him into the cistern in the corner of the potting shed.  Felt himself falling, felt the splash and the cold rise up to cover his head, felt the air bubbling out as the water trickled into his mouth, his nose, his lungs; felt the heavy chain pull him down into slime and decay, finally to rest half-buried in the oozing muck creeping between his toes and fingers, into his hair and ears and teeth.

He felt the stirred-up mud settle into stillness around him.  He felt nothing else for a very long time.

---

 
It took the better part of a week for Buffy to get past her jetlag, which turned out to be a mixed blessing.  On the one hand her body was finally back on an American schedule instead of being stuck somewhere over the Atlantic whenever it came time to eat or sleep; on the other, she’d been using the stress on her system as a convenient excuse for all the weepy-Buffy she’d been showing around Xander’s place since – well, since the minute she got off the plane, as far as she could tell.

Case in point – the night she arrived, Xander had taken her suitcase and shown her to the room he’d set aside for her, and she’d nearly  burst into tears all over again because… it was empty.

“No, no, it’s a good thing,” she insisted. “You know how every hotel room you go to always has these paintings and, and curtains and everything, and it’s nice but you can never forget that it isn’t really yours?”  She tossed her jacket on the bed.  “This – this room doesn’t belong to anyone else. This looks like it could be mine, if I let it.” She looked over her shoulder to where Xander waited in the doorway.  “It’s been so long since I’ve had a space that belonged to just me, I can’t even remember having a real home since Sunnydale.  You know?”

And he did.  Just smiled and handed her a set of clean towels and a spare set of bed sheets, and asked her not to hog the fabric softener whenever she got around to doing her laundry.  Buffy could have kissed him – she settled for another bear hug.

During the days after that, Xander seemed to be completely understanding about everything she said, everything she did or seemed to be feeling – which was kind of a new look on him, when Buffy stopped to think about it.  Whether it was the grief he’d gone through himself over losing Anya, or maybe all the quiet time he’d had on his own while traveling across Africa, she didn’t know, but something had happened to profoundly change Xander’s worldview.  Or, maybe it would be more accurate to say something had brought out the understanding, empathetic friend she’d always had, and finally shut down the close-minded, angry, jealous guy that used to get in the way.

All Buffy knew was that right now, he was exactly the friend she needed.  She was in mourning all over again, and the pain left her just barely in shape to stand on her own; she sure as hell didn’t have the strength to justify herself to everyone she ran into, every time she turned around.  Xander didn’t make any demands on her, and she was profoundly grateful.  He just made room for her to be herself, no matter how weird she got.

Which was good, because things around her started getting pretty weird, right around the first time she set foot outside Xander’s house.  She decided to go for an early-morning jog, and this random stranger walking his dog looked her dead in the face and said “go to him” like she’d have any idea what he was talking about.

“Huh?” she said, squinting at him in the sunlight.

“Uh – good morning?” said the guy.  “Sorry.”  Followed his little yappy dog down the sidewalk.

Buffy kept going, and when she got to the park, there were some kids playing around the drinking fountain where she stopped to catch her breath.  One of them said “go to him” before skipping off with his friends, and another giggled and said “he needs you”, with water from the fountain dripping off her chin.

Weird.