The weirdness-while-jogging happened the first time she went outside, maybe three or four days after she’d come back to the States.  Buffy had spent those first days adjusting and settling in, getting back on US time and trying to set herself up in her new life – one that was an easy commute from the Hellmouth instead of right on top of it.

During her nights she tossed and turned, still off-schedule, and irritated herself with the tears and the hugging her pillow and the ache in her heart that wouldn’t go away, that pain of missing someone she’d thought dead for a year. Tried to get herself over her rage at Giles.  Failed spectacularly, only making herself angrier whenever she thought about the – the shit he’d pulled.

She liked the days better.  She could distract herself from all that during the days.

The second time Buffy went out, to pick up shampoo and a few groceries, the store manager approached her and told her, “He needs your help.”  Only when she looked at him in confusion, all he did was blink at her and say, “Can I help you find anything?” with that tone that implied, I’ve said this to you already but you weren’t paying attention, you ditz you.

The third day she stayed home and watched a little TV, only it seemed that every show she clicked on had someone in it saying “he needs you” or “go to him” or some other variation on the theme.  Over a bowl of ice cream, she idly wondered if there was really some kind of mystical message there for her, or if it was just kind of like buying a mini-van – you know, that thing that happens where you never really notice them on the road until you own one yourself, and then suddenly it seems like they’re everywhere? Maybe it was like that.

That night she dreamed.

She was out jogging again, and Spike was beside her in the sun, wearing these powder-blue sweats that looked kinda dippy on him, only when she went to tell him so he dropped out of sight.  She went back a couple steps and found him, in his regular black outfit, hands in his pockets, looking up at her from a hole in the sidewalk.  She found she was kneeling, so she reached a hand down to pull him out again, and nearly got her hand taken off by the bars that slammed across the opening out of nowhere.

“It’s all right,” said Giles, standing next to her.  “He isn’t really there, you know.”

Buffy looked down at the hole in the sidewalk.  Spike certainly was there, reaching for her through the bars, just barely able to poke his fingers through.  His mouth moved but she couldn’t hear what he was saying, and then his fingers slipped away and he sank under the water – or maybe she did – and then she was waking up to an annoyingly cheerful bird singing outside her window.

Buffy yawned and padded her way to the shower, frowning.  It was one of those dreams where she couldn’t quite tell if it was Slayer-y weird or just regular weird; unusually vivid, sure, but there had been nothing involving an apocalypse that she could see.  Maybe she’d talk about it with Xander when he got home from work.

In the meantime she needed to get around for her first day driving into Cleveland; she wasn’t due to start working at the “Slayer Center,” or whatever they were really calling it, until next week, but she wanted to stop in anyway and get her bearings, maybe feel out the rest of the staff a little.

She could have sworn she saw a black De Soto, just like Spike’s old car, along I-80 as she was looking for her exit.

It hurt.

---

 
There’s something most people don’t know about vampires.

Among those few humans who know that they’re real, it’s generally accepted that the vampire is a type of demon that animates and preserves a human corpse. The enhanced strength and speed, the uncanny hearing and eyesight, those are pretty much common knowledge, too.  But there’s something the vampires don’t like mortals to know about, a potential weakness they have that can be summed up in three simple words:

The body remembers.

Sure, the body is dead, technically.  There’s no pulse, no need to breathe, no actual digestion of the blood a vampire eats (you ever heard of a vampire scarpering off to visit the loo, mate? Didn’t think so).  The demon handles all that so the body doesn’t have to.

But the body remembers, in a way, what it was like to be alive.  The demon preserves it at its exact state at the moment of death – give a vamp a haircut and the hair will grow back, but never past the length it was when the vampire was first sired.  Same thing with injuries – even broken bones don’t have to be set right in order to eventually grow straight, although the healing certainly goes easier and quicker if you do.  A vampire’s body will never age past the point when it died, never become ill, never have to cope with a wound getting infected before it can heal.  The demon can ignore drugging and poisons, or choose to allow them to affect the body – otherwise it would be impossible to get drunk no matter how many bottles of tequila a vampire bloke might choose to knock back. 

Those are the strengths that come with the body’s memory, and again, most people who study vampires know about them.  But there’s more to it than that, another side to that memory, which never occurs to most of those people.

For example, yeah, a fledgling vampire can eventually learn to ignore pain once it figures out how much more quickly the body heals, but a broken leg still hurts just as much for an undead vamp as it does for a living human.  No, a corpse has no need to exchange oxygen for carbon dioxide, but air has to move in order for the vamp to speak – so the body remembers how to breathe, and here’s the kicker, it also remembers the need to do so in times of stress.

The body remembers sex, and the good old fight or flight instincts.  The heart will beat for both, though only for moments at a time – oi, how else is a man supposed to get hard when he’s a vamp, yeah? – and it’s usually bloody painful to feel that fist-sized dead muscle suddenly start squeezing in the middle of your chest when it’s been sitting quiet as a mouse for months on end.

A vampire’s body remembers, and right at the moment, Spike’s body was remembering what it felt like to drown.

Water isn’t meant to be inside living lungs, and it bloody well hurts when it gets in there and doesn’t come back out again.  With his body held so completely paralyzed, Spike couldn’t cough or choke the water out, couldn’t thrash in his chains, couldn’t even try to inhale, to get air, to make the feeling bloody stop.  He could only hang suspended in a welter of agony and instinctual terror, the spasms of his panicked heart the only motion he was capable of.

The worst part was that the feeling had been going on forever, without knocking him unconscious – didn’t actually need to breathe, after all, couldn’t really drown – and without letting up in its intensity.  The body remembered drowning and remembered the need to escape, and the body was sodding trapped in an endless loop as it tried to cope with the sensations.

Spike thought he might have been drowning for days.

It was a shock, then, when he felt someone grab and lift him up out of the water and fling him onto solid ground.  Whoever it was dragged him across grit and gravel until he was clear of the cistern.  Then they shoved powerful, callused hands into his stomach and his broken ribs, and along with the pain of bone grating against bone he felt water gushing out of his nose and mouth.  The relief was immense. 

Granted, it still felt like he was suffocating since he couldn’t actually draw breath, but getting the water out helped all the same. 

Distantly, underneath the layers of the binding spell on him, Spike thought he might almost feel hope.  Perhaps he was being rescued?

Whoever it was did something inside his mouth – Spike faintly remembered the cord wrapped around his tongue – and out of nowhere his hunger came roaring to life.  Instantly, he needed blood, craved it with a raging intensity he hadn’t suffered since he was first fledged.  If he were able to speak he’d have begged for it in that moment.  He was famished, starving, shriveled with hunger, someone please bring him somebody to eat, please, blood by the quart, anything, he didn’t care, he had to –

Something was pushed into his mouth.  His tongue thrust forward, his jaw working desperately as he bit down and suckled –

A plastic bag.  Blood inside.  Cold, rancid, stale.  Didn’t bloody care.

Spike drank it all, gulping and swallowing convulsively, trying to take it all in as fast as he could, and when it was gone he nearly wept in desperation.  It wasn’t enough.  He needed more, had to have more, needed it now.  He was rescued.  Someone had found him and was caring for him, they’d take the chains off any second now, surely his saviors would bring him more to eat, would see how badly he needed it?

It felt like a hand caressed his cheek.  He’d have leaned into it if he could have.  Instead, though, the hand opened his mouth for him again, and he stuck out his tongue and licked, desperately hoping to feel more blood sliding down his throat – but no.  Oh, no.

There was cord, winding around his tongue again.  Spike tried to bite down, to pull away, to swallow but the ability to move his mouth disappeared again as the binding settled back into place.  His hunger vanished as well, fading off into some distant place that was unimportant wherever Spike was.  It just… didn’t matter anymore.

Hands at his armpits dragged him back across the floor.  Hands at his shoulders rolled him sideways, and then he was falling again.  Spike felt the splash and the cold, once again felt air bubble out of his hollow chest as water trickled in and his weighted corpse sank into the muck.  Felt himself begin to drown, again.  His heart lurched inside its cage of bone; once, twice.

It hurt.