SPIKE: What can I say? Girl just needs a little monster in her man.
                As You Were


    “Ms. Summers,” said Bernard Crowley. “I’ve heard much of you.” He took Buffy’s hand and gave her a little nod of respect. The man was grey, haggard, with eyes a watery and bloodshot brown. He was well dressed, precise, much like Robin’s clean-cut figure. Buffy could see the influence the watcher had had in her old associate’s taste.  “You are indeed one of the most accomplished slayers in the annals of our history as watchers,” Crowley continued. “Indeed, you have outlived the legacy of the watchers, and changed the course of destiny. It is... an honor to look upon you.”

    “I’m just a girl,” Buffy said. She wasn’t sure she liked his tone.

    “I have been looking forward to your visit.” He paused. “And your companion?”

    “Waiting outside,” Buffy said. “He wasn’t sure you really wanted to meet him.”

    “I most assuredly do,” the watcher said with grim certainty. “Indeed, I wouldn’t begin to scorn a visit from your...” He stopped, swallowing. “I would very much like to look into the face of this William the Bloody,” he said instead.

    “I usually go by Spike,” Spike said, coming around the corner. He nodded a greeting. “Mr. Crowley.”

    Crowley looked Spike up and down with a cold appraisal. “So you are the creature who snapped Nikki’s neck.”

    Buffy blinked. That was direct.

    “Part of me is,” Spike said. He left it at that.

    There was a long and grim pause. “Well. I thank you for not trying to confuse matters by claiming to apologize.”

    “I thank you for realizing it would only be a confusion,” Spike said. “The past is what it is. There is no changing it.”

    “Indeed,” Crowley said. “Most true. There is no changing it at all. I suppose I need invite you to enter?”

    “If you wish,” Spike said. “I’m content enough to wait in the threshold, if that makes you more comfortable.” Buffy glanced at him. He was speaking as if he were on a job interview. She supposed at some level he was.

    “Oh, no, come in, come in,” Crowley said, wandering back into his apartment. “I don’t suppose you drink tea, either of you?”

    “That’s all right,” Spike said, entering with Buffy. “We’ll be on our way, shortly.”

    “No,” Crowley said, turning back to them. “There’s no need to hurry away. I have always wanted to look upon Nikki’s killer.” Spike was very stiff and still beside Buffy. She wanted to take his hand, but feared showing affection before Crowley would be adding insult to injury. Crowley already seemed weirded out by she and Spike working together. Make it clear it was more than that, and...

    Crowley frowned at Spike. “That coat...” he said.

    Spike’s head tilted. “It’s a replica, actually. But yeah. I do keep it in honor of Nikki.”

    “It’s your trophy,” Crowley accused.

    Spike frowned. “My mark,” he said instead. “I carry a mark from every slayer I’ve battled, whether I won or lost.” He indicated the scar above his eyebrow. “Xin Rong.” He touched the lapel of his coat. “Nikki.” He held up his arms and pulled up the sleeves of his coat to reveal the thin white scars that graced his forearms, testament to a battle he had lost dramatically. “Dana.”

    “And Ms. Summers?” Crowley asked.

    Spike almost smiled. “That one’s deep. A little harder to see,” he said.

    “Spike has a soul,” Buffy said, not feeling the need to be cryptic about it. “He’s used it to close the Hellmouth, and defeat the First Evil.”

    “I’ve, ah, read the reports of Mr. Giles,” Crowley said. “And heard Robin’s testimony.”

    “How is Robin?”

    “Well enough,” he said. “I understand he’s still the companion of your fellow slayer... Faith, was it? That they work together.”

    “Among other things,” Buffy laughed.

    Crowley did not look amused. “Yes. It does make sense. There has always been a certain... fascination with violence among the slayers.”

    Buffy blinked. “What is that supposed to mean?”

    “Robin took after his mother,” Crowley said. “Faith must find him most alluring. I could not deflect him from his interest in death.”

    “Were you trying to?” Buffy asked. “He said you trained him.”

    “He was going to get himself into trouble if I did not,” Crowley said, glancing at Spike. “He had a... fixation. On his mother’s killer.” Spike was dead faced,  pointedly ignoring this exchange. “I had to channel his impulses toward something healthy. I believe I succeeded. But it is not surprising that he and this Faith character have managed to forge a bond. Her instinctual need for a violent partner is likely fulfilled by him.”

    “You seem to have a lot of contempt for a slayer’s instincts,” Buffy said.

    Crowley raised his eyebrows at her. “On the contrary. I loved my Nikki. I understood her. I have great respect for a slayer’s inherent needs and desires. They can’t help themselves.”

    “Excuse me?” Buffy said, but Crowley wasn’t hearing her.

    “Robin’s father was himself... a bit unsavory,” he continued. “Violence calls to violence. I’m sure you understand it, Ms. Summers.” He glanced at Spike. “Most certain, in fact.”

    Buffy wanted to tell him flat out that was disgusting. So he wasn’t weirded out by her and Spike. He just thought she was... what? Unable to control herself? At the complete mercy of her instinctual whims? It seemed contemptuous to her. “I’ve had perfectly human partners,” she said flatly. She didn’t mention that even Riley had been a soldier, though.

    “Come, though. A slayer is no more human than your companion here.”

    “Buffy is human,” Spike said quickly.

    “She has a soul,” Crowley conceded. “Much like you... do. But they are inherent killers, and they are drawn to violence. Didn’t Robin’s Faith become a killer of men, as well as demons? All slayers are essentially the same kind of creature. I know the history of the slayers. I was the keeper of the slayer’s shadow box. She is as demonic, in her way, as you are.” He smiled then. Buffy did not like this smile. “As demonic as the creature you are seeking,” he added. “I believe this is the manuscript you were looking for,” Crowley said, handing Buffy a thick collection of ancient loose-leaf vellum in a modern leather folder. He turned back to Spike. “It should tell you... or rather you, Mr... Spike... how to track the Consecrated. Only a vampire can do it, you know.”

    “Yeah. So I heard.”

    “Do not think I do not approve of the concept of trophies,” he add to Spike, seemingly unconnected. “Nikki herself kept several from many of her kills. Would you like to see them?”

    “No, that’s okay,” Buffy said, beginning to be kind of weirded out herself.

    “Come, Ms. Summers. Have you never carried home a weapon from one of your demon foes? Or claimed a fallen amulet as your own? Or sliced off a horn or a head or a hoof, and displayed it proudly on your mantle?”

    “Can’t say I’ve done much of the last one,” Buffy said with distaste.

    “Well, I’m sure your companion will appreciate such keepsakes. Come. Please, I insist.”

    Buffy wanted to get out of there, but couldn’t figure out how to say so politely. Something about Crowley’s behavior seemed off, and her oh so vaunted instincts were actually telling her Get the hell out.

    She was about to say as much to Spike, but he had left her side, following Crowley to the room he had opened. It was done up as a study, but one wall held a great number of weapons and amulets, and yes, a certain number of gruesome mummified demon heads. Buffy trotted to catch him up, tell him what her instincts were saying, when she realized this was important to him. Nikki was important to him, and always had been.

    Spike regarded the wall of the fallen with silence, his head cocked thoughtfully, his eyes very distant. Buffy wasn’t sure whether to be proud or ashamed at what she was looking at. She’d never kept trophies like this. Never kept score, never gloried in the more gruesome aspects of the kills she’d made. She recognized many of the demons as creatures she had fought and destroyed at one time or another, but to keep the actual body parts, and display them at home disturbed her. One particular demon head bothered her a great deal. It looked like Clem. And at least two of those amulets were from vengeance demons, such as Anya had been.

    “Have you ever kept such a trophy room?” Crowley asked Spike with a smile. “I’ve heard serial killers often do.”

    “Not a serial killer. Vampire. For the most part, my victims became part of me,” Spike said. “Never needed trophies.”

    “And yet you keep this coat.”

    “Mark of respect,” Spike said again, looking at him very seriously. “A slayer’s not just a victim. It was an honor to fight Nikki. It would have been an honor to lose to her. I doubt most of these...” he indicated the various trophies with his hand, “recognized that about her, but I knew better.”

    “Quite,” Crowley said with a small smile. “Nikki actually knew that about you. I presume you’d told her as much, in one of your early battles. You see here?” He opened a glass case and pulled out a wooden stake, which had been resting in place of pride on a velvet pillow. “Do you recognize it?”

    “Should I?”

    “Yes. You should,” Crowley said. “It is stained with your very blood. The very first of your battles – one you nearly lost. Do you recall it now?”

    “Yeah,” Spike said. “She aimed for my heart, and I deflected. Got my left arm instead. I booked it, to recuperate.”

    “She was most impressed by you,” Crowley said. “She had heard of you, of course. We knew you were in New York long before you knew our whereabouts. Nikki had read of Xin Rong, and knew better than to take your presence lightly. Here,” he came closer to Spike with the stake, and both Spike and Buffy were suddenly on guard, lest he suddenly attack Spike with it. But at the last moment he turned it, holding it out to the vampire butt first. “You kept her coat in honor of her. She kept this in honor of you.”

    “Was it honor, or fear?” Buffy asked.

    “Caution, perhaps,” Crowley said, still looking at Spike. “With Nikki, as you well know, William the Bloody... it was never fear.” He pushed the stake toward Spike again, pressing it into his hands.

    Spike’s eyes were heavy, but he took the stake rather than let it fall to the ground.

    The moment that Spike touched the stained wood, something strange happened. Buffy, standing beside him, saw Spike’s eyes close and his head reel back as he staggered. Buffy jumped forward, ready to fight Crowley, but Crowley was standing back, watching. Simply watching. The quintessential watcher.

    A form slowly pulled itself out of Spike’s fallen body, a panicked image of a living Spike, all but transparent, superimposed on the backdrop of the study. Buffy heard him scream. Terrified that Spike had just been desouled, Buffy leaped to catch him, and seemed to. An angry pull, a kind of psychic vacuum, was dragging Spike’s soul away from his unconscious body, and Buffy dragged it back from wherever it was being carried.

    It was heavy, and it pulled her own soul half out of her skin. She could feel her body collapsing as she clutched the incorporeal form, and everything stopped feeling tangible. She’d lived like this before, though. Weightless, timeless, she had basked in heaven without the weight of her body to drag around, and she instinctively knew how to do it again. Like a fish back in water, she swam out of her body, taking a firm hold of the Spike image. She knew it – she recognized it. She’d felt it at the hellmouth, caressing her being before he’d made her leave him. Twisting herself through the ether, she swung the soul back toward Spike’s fallen body, slammed it against him, and made it catch.

    It caught, fusing back to the body where it belonged, and Spike opened his eyes to Buffy’s transparent image just a few inches from his face. But as Buffy had released Spike, she found she had nothing left to hold onto. Her own body abandoned, and Spike’s soul restored, she found herself caught in the same vacuum that had caught him. Her intangible eyes wide, her spirit opened its mouth, reaching out to catch hold of him again...

    Only to be sucked into oblivion before his eyes.
 

***    

    It was only an extreme amount of self control that kept Spike from killing Bernard Crowley where he stood. Crowley even accused him of being about to. “I knew it. I knew you’d kill me. I did what I had to do.”

    “What do you mean, you knew I’d kill you?” Spike growled, his hand around Crowley’s throat. “What the hell have you done?”

    “It’s nothing I’ve done,” Crowley insisted. “I merely played the part destiny laid out for me. You said it yourself. The past is what it is. There is no changing it. I am merely its instrument.”

    “Instrument?” Spike snapped. “Instrument for what? What was that stake, what was that spell? Was that some bloody lame attempt of yours to cast vengeance on me?”

    “Not of mine,” Crowley gasped. “Of Robin’s.”

    Spike let go the watcher’s throat and let him sink heavily into a chair. “You’d better start spilling right quick, watcher, or some vampire is going to rend you limb from sodding limb, soul or not.”

    Crowley took a deep breath and swallowed, nervous, but glad to be released. He looked down at the unconscious form of Buffy on the floor, and smiled at the famous slayer. “She really is a most fetching creature,” Crowley said. “Lovely hair, very slender. I always thought so.”

    “What do you mean, you always thought so?” Spike said. “Start bloody singing.”

    Crowley looked up at Spike. “I’ve seen your slayer before,” he said. “More than thirty years ago, in fact.”

    “More than thirty years ago, she wasn’t even a twinkle in her daddy’s eye,” Spike snapped. “Start making sense, or I start making crunching noises.”

    “The spell that Robin cast,” Crowley said. “When Robin was twenty or so, he returned home from college with a most esoteric book. I think I have a copy around somewhere... or maybe I gave it to the watcher’s council. It matters little – it’s of no use to us now. He believed that he could summon the vampire that killed his mother by using the essence of his blood, on that stake I gave you to hold.”

    Spike looked down at the stake on the floor. His body had dropped it when his spirit had been ripped away. He could still feel the hollow emptiness of it, like the memory of the few months he spent as a ghost, bound to L.A. and the Wolfram and Hart building. “So, kid tried to summon me. What of it?”

    “Well, the spell failed, of course,” Crowley said. “I suspect he read some of it backwards, or twisted a sigil from future to past. In any case, Robin’s own spirit was summoned to the demon, instead. From what he tells me, he had a very precise image of you, and his mother, grappling against the wall of a building, the very moment when her strike slipped, and your arm was injured by that stake. His spirit had been drawn to the blood you shed. Fortunately, he had consulted me before he’d attempted this summoning. I’d told him it was risky, and I’d attached a spiritual tether to his bodily form. When Robin’s spirit vanished, I pulled him back to this time, and his corporeal form.”

    “Lovely story. So what the bloody hell happened to Buffy!”

    “Well, I must confess, as I say, that I recognized your slayer. I knew that something of this kind had to come to pass. When I heard from Robin that the... companion of the slayer Buffy Summers was the vampire that had slaughtered Nikki, I knew the time had come. The spell that Robin had cast was bound to your blood – I knew that once your demonic form touched the residue on this stake that the spell would be activated again. I spun out a false trail of demon sightings, using the legend of the Consecrated. I knew the only recourse was to use a vampire to hunt such a demon. Since you were the only vampire I knew who would be likely to cooperate, I knew that you and Ms. Summers would most likely come in person to hunt it. I must confess, the Codex of the Consecrated is a complete fabrication, as are the incantations enclosed therein. But seen in a positive light, at least there is no demon to stalk, either.”

    “You set us up,” Spike said. “You bloody set us up for this.”

    “I only brought you here,” Crowley said. “The spell was not mine. The circumstances were not mine. After all, you’re the monster exploiting that poor child’s needs for your own sordid ends. I only did what I had to do to protect the timeline as I knew it.”

    “Buffy’s no child, and that’s rubbish. She doesn’t need me for anything. We work together.”

    “I’m not such a fool as that,” Crowley said. “Nor is Robin. He knew, the moment he saw the two of you together. He was disgusted. He still is, though he covers it well.”

    “So the two of you cooked up this as vengeance against me? What did Buffy ever do to either of you! Nikki’s never coming back, do you get that? I could torture myself, cut off my limbs, walk into the sun, it still won’t bring her back for you!”

    “Robin did nothing but pour the power of his grief into a failed spell a dozen years ago. I called you here. And I know that Nikki is dead,” Crowley said. “I know that all the vengeance in the world won’t rectify that. But when I heard you were in love with the slayer, I also knew that the circumstances I had witnessed were indeed poetic.”

    Spike narrowed his eyes. “And what is so poetic about rending the soul from a good and powerful slayer?”

    “You took the slayer I loved as a daughter from me, and from her son. Circumstances as I had seen meant that the slayer you loved had been taken from you.” He smiled. “All I needed to do was bring you here. The lines of destiny had already been set. Ms. Summer’s spirit has been drawn to the moment of your injury. And there her spirit will remain, until it dissipates, like smoke in the wind. She will witness the full horror of your vampire existence, all the blood and death and depravity, without any soulful lies to temper it. She will grieve, and she will fade, and she will never be heard from again.” Crowley laughed, confirming the man’s madness in Spike’s mind, at least. “I’ve done it, Nikki!” he said, mostly to himself.  “It’s done.”

    Spike’s fist plunged furiously toward the watcher’s half mad face. It took all his self control to shift the blow at the last second, and simply punch a hole through his chair.