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SPIKE
Death is on your heels, baby, and sooner or later it's gonna catch you. And part of you wants it... not only to stop the fear and uncertainty, but because you're just a little bit in love with it.
                    Fool For Love

    The Bowery in 1977 was, according to Nikki, skid row. As Buffy made her way through the streets, she saw Nikki wasn’t just being over dramatic. Drunken winos shuffled through the streets, and broken bottles lined the gutters. People were stepping over inebriated and even expired bodies which she knew weren’t victims of vampires, but of poverty, addiction, despair, and basic crime. She saw two muggings just as she walked to the club Nikki had told her was Spike’s primary hunting ground, a punk and new-wave music club set in the midst of the Bowery because no other place wanted to deal with the rockers.

    The weather was cool, and Buffy was grateful for the leather bolero jacket Nikki had given her. Nikki was quite a bit larger and more muscular than Sarah was, so the sleeves touched Buffy’s knuckles as she walked. She was grateful for the free movement, at the same time telling herself she wasn’t supposed to fight. Sarah’s body – Buffy could tell – had been on its last legs before the girl had finally burned out her mind and let her soul flee. And now it was recovering from bed rest. It was not up to fighting, barely up to running, and even the walk from the subway was making Buffy a little weary. For a girl used to preternatural strength, agility, and stamina, being only human – and a somewhat fragile human at that – was going to be a test of endurance.

    Nikki had said to be on her guard as she walked there, but that apart from the vampire himself, CBGB was relatively safe. Most of the muggers were used to picking on their usual prey of the winos and indigents, who never fought back, and the police never protected. The punks and rockers who didn’t live in the area tended to be ignored.

    There was a line outside CBGB when she arrived, and Buffy joined it. The awning above the club read “CBGB” followed by “OMFUG” in slightly smaller letters. She had no idea what either of them meant. “What the hell?” she asked the guy she had to pay the cover to. “What’s an omfug?”

    “Other music for uplifting gormandizers,” he laughed. “Hilly’s got some weird ideas.”

    “Who?”

    “Owner,” he said. “CBGB is country, bluegrass, and blues.”

    “And punk, apparently,” Buffy said.

    “Hey, Hilly’s up for anything. Band gets the cover, we keep the bar. The punkers are popular. Not what Hilly meant to draw in, but hell. He meant for poetry readings, too.” He said it with a slight air of scorn.

    Buffy knew exactly why Spike had been drawn here.

    “What’s playing tonight?” she asked as the line pushed her past.

    “Dead Boys!” the guy shouted over his shoulder.

    “How fitting,” Buffy muttered.

    More fitting than she’d expected, as she slid into the club, amongst the breathing throng of people. The singer on the stage was screaming into his microphone, “Would ya feel right if I did you tonight, and put the bite on?

    CBGB was not the Bronze. The Bronze had been large and clear and open, with pool tables and places to sit, two levels, a respectable bar, some decent “pub grub” as Spike called it, and an obvious dance floor. CBGB was, in Buffy’s opinion, a hole. It was long and narrow, a corridor more than a club. The walls were graffitied and dingy, with posters stuck all anyhow. The floor was made from crudely planed wooden planks. The house lights were pretty much non-existent, at least while the music was playing. The stage was low, abutted right up to the audience, who thronged without a space between them, a tight sweaty knot of people, singing along and dancing where they stood, each of them enthralled by the band, rather than using the music as a background for a night out. There were bundles of chairs and tables along one side of the long narrow club, across from the bar, but they were crowded so close together people all but had to crawl over each other to get to any of them. The place stank of sweat and stale cigarettes and spilled beer. Buffy was afraid of what she’d find if she asked where the bathroom was.

    The Dead Boys were screaming their own name, now. “You know I’m just a dead boy! I wanna be a dead boy! I’ll die for you, if you want me to!

    And Buffy had thought “Dingos Ate My Baby” was a kind of macabre band. She could see why Spike had been drawn to this type of music. It sounded like a brawl was about to break out any second. In fact, it sounded a bit like one had already broken out on the stage. Every pound of the drums and strike on the guitars sounded as if half the band had just been thrown down a flight of stairs, it was so violent.

    She pushed her way through the crowd, avoiding or ignoring the occasional grope on her tits or ass, which, given the size and unruliness of the crowd, might or might not have been intentional on anyone’s part. Her jacket quickly became too warm to wear, but she didn’t dare take it off. There was nowhere to put it, and it would have vanished in a minute if she’d tried to carry it. The music was loud. Damn, was it loud, hurting her ears, pounding into her head, making her heart vibrate in her chest. She endured half a dozen songs looking around the crowded hall for a bleached haired vampire in a punk club. She couldn’t believe she was doing this. And Sarah’s shoulders were already aching, just from standing and walking. Stupid human body. You had better be bloody worth it, Spike, she thought to his as-yet-disembodied soul. I could just go on back up to heaven, and leave you and everyone else to your fate. Perfect opportunity here!

    Yet... the tenderness in his embrace... the soulful devotion in his eyes... the power in his love.... No. She didn’t really want to die yet. And Spike’s was the one soul she cared about (apart from Angel)  which might not get the chance to join her in heaven upon his own death. He was never sure he’d done enough good to balance out his century of evil. And she loved him so hard. She didn’t want to take away his strongest reason to try....

    But god, she hated this music. She’d grown used to it, as Spike still listened to this kind of stuff on occasion, but usually she tuned it out, and he pretty much respected that it wasn’t her cup of tea. Half the lyrics were unintelligible, blurred and screamed out of all recognition.

    One line was so loud she couldn’t miss it, though. “I don’t need no cook, girl. I need LUNCH.

    And how fitting that was the moment she actually found him.

    There he was. Spike. She couldn’t miss him. He hadn’t changed that much. Lurking just at the edge of the audience, where the crowd thinned out barely enough to dance, in a disorganized manner; there he was with his hands on the hips of some girl, moving with her to the music. Probably, Buffy realized, his own lunch.

    Spike had on one of his customary black t-shirts, but it was ripped in several places, missing sleeves, and held together with safety pins.  His bleached hair was spiked up in this time, and rather than his neat black jeans, the pair he wore were baggy, acid washed, ripped, and stained. His belt had metal studs on it. The boots were the same style she knew, though. His left arm had a studded leather strap wrapped around the wound Nikki had inflicted on him, probably concealing a bandage.

    His face was hard. Even playing a seduction game on this girl – this victim, Buffy knew it instantly – his face was much harder than she was used to seeing it. She cast her mind back to when she’d first known him, and couldn’t remember if he was this hard at the first. It was difficult to tell – usually he had been completely vamped up when he was fighting her in the beginning.

    The Dead Boys reached the crescendo on their song, the lead singer shouting out “FEED ME!” at the top of his voice, and Buffy’s head rang. Her eyes were drawn to the screaming singer, who arched himself backwards on the stage in a desperate attempt to seem outrageous. This punk music was mad, violent, brutal. The songs were short and kind of murky, without the crisp clarity she’d grown used to from the Indy bands at the Bronze. Also, the seventies acoustics were nowhere near as clean, and feedback punctuated song after song. The singer was now dangling his microphone between his legs in an unsubtle crassness she was unimpressed by. She closed her eyes, cringing as her ears rang with it, and turned back. She’d lost track of Spike. Damn!

    Buffy pushed through to where she’d seen him last as the band switched to another song – they all sounded pretty much alike to her, just a white noise of drums and guitar. This time the singer was complaining he had nothing to do. She was half tempted to tell him to get a job, if he was that bored. Anything other than scream this stuff he dared to try and call music. Ugh. Suddenly, she felt like Giles. When did she grow up? And where the hell was Spike?

    For half a song, she couldn’t find him anywhere. Then she spotted him through the crowd. He was against the wall, with the girl he’d been dancing with before. She sank beneath him, her face clear with vapid ecstacy, as he appeared to kiss her throat in a firm but sensuous dance to the music. Buffy knew he was feeding, and she was too late to even think about saving this girl. She shouldn’t do that anyway, she knew. She was risking the timeline enough as it was. Life... death... those were not her choices to make. Not in this decade. “I just wanna get out on the street fights,” the singer announced.

    The feeding took a long time. Buffy had never just sat back and watched someone be eaten before. A vampire could kill someone with a single bite, but she knew – Spike had told her – that that was a terrible waste of a beating heart. The best way to feed was to take your time. Either painfully or not, enjoying their screams or making them melt in your arms, it was best to let the victim’s heart pulse the blood into you, keeping them alive until all the blood was spent. You got more that way, the blood stayed heated, didn’t clot, and you didn’t have to suck so hard to draw it from the vein. Let their own life kill them for you.

    The drums beat louder than her own heart, but she could feel it pulsing in her chest as she watched, horrified by the sight, but unable to look away, lest she lose track of him again. She wanted to throw up. She wished she could fight. She wished she had the strength for it. But she was not the slayer, now. She was a half-dead junkie called Sarah MacArthur, fit only to wait for her own demise. And Spike... Spike was alone in this. Evil and empty, there was nothing she could do to save his soul. Not for decades. That poor girl... Buffy had to keep telling herself this wasn’t her time, or she’d have jumped forward and dragged Spike off her.

    Or tried to. And had her neck broken for her pains.

    It must have taken a quarter of an hour for Spike to finish his meal. The Dead Boys had squealed neatly into their finale, fast paced and terrible. “Ain’t got time to make no apology. Soul radiation in the dead of night. Love in the middle of a fire fight.” Spike picked the girl up with one arm, as if she were merely drunk, and led her – carried her corpse – through the crowd. “Honey gotta strike me blind. Somebody gotta save my soul, Baby penetrate my mind.

    Buffy followed him out of the club, trying to lurk in the corner of the doorway. He carried the body nonchalantly to the sidewalk and hailed a taxi. A specific taxi, Buffy noted, dented, and driven by a yellow eyed driver – a minion, too young or stupid to feel comfortable in human form. Spike set the corpse gently in the back seat and gave his minion some instructions on where to dump her. “If you’re peckish, grab someone else while you’re there, but someone off the radar, yeah?” he said, pulling a motorcycle jacket out of the front seat of the taxi, clearly stashed there before. “Hooker, homeless, someone no one’ll miss. We don’t want too much attention.”

    “Right, boss.”

    He shrugged the jacket on. “See you back at the lair. No junkies! Not on anything, anyway. You come back high, I’ll stake you bloody quick.”

    “Right, boss.”

    The taxi pulled off down the street, and Spike glanced around him, seemingly enjoying the fetid city air. He stretched and started to saunter down the sidewalk alone, ready to call it a night.

    “I’m the world’s forgotten boy,” the Dead Boys sang through the door behind her. “The one who’s searchin’, searchin’ to destroy.

    Buffy followed at a discrete distance. She wanted to know where his lair was before she tried to contact him.

    She had no trouble tailing Spike. His silhouette was a little off with the motorcycle jacket instead of his – Nikki’s– long black coat, but it was still Spike’s walk. As if every step declared his ownership of the territory. Spike walked like a king, his blond hair spiked up like a crown at the moment, instead of slicked back and neat. He strolled, and sauntered, looking up at the halo of the streetlights in the drizzle, glancing about him in proprietary disdain, not wariness.

    Buffy hadn’t seen him moving quite like this since she’d first met him, not unless they were on an active hunt. There was more of the predator in his movements, less of the man. Before he’d gotten his soul, even before the microchip in his head had forced him into a form of submission, Spike had been a powerful figure. Then Buffy had, as he put it, epically kicked his ass in the incident at the church. Spike’s natural hubris had been severely curtailed when he was injured by fire and a falling church organ. He’d been confined to a wheelchair for several months, and in the meantime found himself again under the thrall of his grandsire Angel – a dominant vampire which at this point in his life, he hadn’t had to deal with for seventy years. He had been lord and master ever since Angel had been ensouled, and took to the role of Biggest Bad in the pack like a natural.

    He looked dangerous, and he knew he did.

    He was dangerous. And Buffy knew he was.

    He turned a corner, and Buffy came up slowly, so as not to appear to be obviously following him. They’d gone several blocks from CBGB, and she’d stopped blending in with the punk scene, instead standing out like a sore thumb among the mostly male derelicts and winos. When she finally got to the corner, Spike was nowhere to be seen. Damn! Still, there hadn’t been time for him to get to the next street, not unless he was running – and he’d had no reason to suddenly run. There didn’t appear to be any alleys or escape routes, so Spike’s lair was probably somewhere on this street. She looked up and down the old spray-painted wrecks of buildings. She’d have to make a systematic search to figure out which ones were mere flophouses, and which one was a vampire’s lair.

    “Now if this were a horror flick...,” Buffy said, but she couldn’t see any shadows where a vampire might be lurking, and she had no sense of being stalked. She turned the corner. Suddenly hard, cold arms dragged her backwards against a firm body. At the same instant, she remembered she didn’t have slayer spidey senses anymore, and that Spike could climb. He’d probably been on the wall of the building right above her stupid human head, clinging to a window ledge or something.

    Terror bolted through Sarah’s body, freezing Buffy like a rabbit, and she couldn’t even try to struggle. "Following me was not your brightest move, pet,” Spike murmured against her ear in his accented English. Buffy already felt herself lucky he hadn’t just snapped her neck right then. “Thought I'd have a purse you could pick? If you thought all the chains and spikes were just for show," Spike said, "then you were sadly mistaken, platelet. You just found the truth about what lurks in dark alleys."

    She could already feel his breath on her throat, his fangs as he opened to bite her... "Spike!" she shrieked in a panic.

    Spike froze, his hand still on her throat. Buffy turned her head to look at him. He was vamped, his eyes yellow in the street lights, and he looked at her with his fangs still bared. "You think you know me?"

    She hadn’t meant to go this route, but it was too late now. She quickly reworked her plan in her head. She’d planned something more subtle, more secretive, but she’d let on she knew him now. She hadn’t been able to help it – he really had been about to kill her. Now she’d just have to go with it. It would probably even be easier this way, though it might make things complicated down the line. "Spike," she said. "Don't... don't kill me. Not yet, I need to talk to you."

    “Don’t kill you,” he said. “That’s what I do.” Spike’s head tilted to the side, his look of wonder and confusion, and he shifted his grip to turn her, so he could look at her properly. "How do you know my name? I don’t know you.”

    “No. No, it’s–”

    "Then how the hell do you know me?" he snarled.

    Buffy stared at him. Any lie she came up with sounded ridiculous in her head. Spike didn’t have a reputation for being a long thinker, but he was intuitive and inventive, and lies did not impress him. He’d always been able to read through her lies, anyway – at least, he had when she was Buffy. Even the ones she had told herself. If she had still been a slayer, she’d have had the strength to overpower him and take what she wanted. As she was, Buffy had already decided there was only one way she might get what she needed from Spike, and it was going to take time. She’d planned on just being helpless and available. Now she was helpless, available, and a serious mystery. It was going to make it more dangerous, but it would make things faster, and that was probably good. This was going to be difficult to pull off, whatever she did.  "I need your help."

    Spike raised his eyebrow. "My help,” he said. “A Sunday joint just came to me for help.” He laughed through his fangs. “That's a first.”
 

***

    There was no way he was going to listen to her. Not as he was. Not as she was. Buffy had realized that. Her spirit fading, her chances limited, no slayer strength or allies beyond Nikki – whom she had to keep away from Spike as long as possible – Buffy realized there was only one way to get close enough to Spike to get his blood. He was too strong. She couldn’t take it by force. But there was a chance, a slim chance, that he might give it to her.

    If he liked her enough.

    Buffy remembered an early conversation they’d had, just after they’d started regulating their blood games into something controlled. Buffy had remembered Spike’s scorn of Riley, and the vampires who had granted him those “suck jobs” and she made some comment to that effect. "You know, for a guy who claims he hates blood junkies, you sure enjoy me."

    "I do hate blood junkies."

    "Yeah, but I mean, you're good at it. You never take too much."

    "I've messed up. Just not in like fifty years. I got pretty good at it after a while."

    Buffy looked up at him, confused. "Whoa, wait, what? I thought you didn't like leaving victims alive. I mean, beyond a single night, anyway."

    "Well, I didn't, but you're not my victim, for one. And neither were they, exactly. At least, not right then.”

    “You... are you telling me you were a sucker?"

    “Not for money!” he said, insulted. “It’s...” Spike looked down at her. "Are you really in the mood for more disturbing Spike history?" he asked. Sometimes, neither of them wanted to think about it. Sometimes, however, Buffy felt it was important to hear it. She had to accept him both as he was, and as he had been, and he had to trust that she could. If both of those things didn't hold up, their relationship was doomed.

    "Yeah," Buffy said.

    "Dru had this... hobby. She would pick up long-term victims to torture, sometimes. Little dollies, she'd call them. Blood dolls. And she’d.... well.”

    “Play blood games?”

    “Among other things,” Spike said. “Actually, she'd do all kinds of things to them, usually claiming she'd change them, gift them with eternal life if they played her slaves."

    "Did she?"

    "Sometimes. But they all died, and usually I dusted them if she did change them. They were usually pretty nasty characters to start with – only bastards want a free licence to kill. They made terrible minions, on the whole, and once she was through with them, she didn't care. They weren’t... well, like me. She’d made me for a reason. They were just toys."

    "But you?"

    Spike shrugged. "I'd get jealous. I'd pick up some girl, keep her as a pet. We'd play with them for a week or two, and then get rid of them."

    "I thought you two were... kind of exclusive. I mean, you were so hurt when you found her with that chaos demon."

    "She wasn’t as exclusive as I would have liked. Ever,” Spike said. “Besides, humans didn't count.”

    "Didn't they?"

    Spike shrugged. "There was no way to keep her from doing it. It was easier to just say humans didn't count, and leave it at that. I mean, we'd feed from them. Not something you usually do with another demon." He stroked Buffy's hair. "I mean, sometimes feeding is... very sexual in its way, and..." He seemed to be having trouble.

    "You mean sometimes feeding involves rape," Buffy said. "I've noticed."

    "Yeah. Well, it was like that, and we both knew that didn't count. These dolls, these pets... they were only meant to be playthings. It was just a really prolonged feeding. I didn't like her doing it, but I loved her. And for the most part, the pets took the edge off the pain of that.”

    “Was she trying to hurt you with them?”

    “Sometimes, I think so. I was a doll to her too, in my way. Some part of me always sort of knew that. A very special doll, one she loved, family, but still a doll. But I couldn't leave her. She needed me, and...." His voice sounded sad, and wistful. "I loved her. Without her, I was nothing."

    "I'm sorry."

    Spike shrugged. "It was what it was. She was very damaged. She loved me in her way. I loved her in mine."

    "So these pets of yours...?"

    "Human victims. Blood junkies, I guess, but they paid for it with their lives, eventually. I mean, they never walked away. They belonged to me."

    "Were they willing?"

    "Many of them were, to various extents. Coerced, maybe. Felt they had no choice. Anyone who wasn’t willing tended not to be a ‘pet’, just a plaything or a toy. Dru often picked up the sadistic. She liked to feed on joy, and who would take joy in death but the sadistic? I was always more fond of power. I took those who made me feel powerful. My pets were... usually broken to start with. I'd pick up the helpless, the homeless. The ones who didn't care what I did to them, so long as I fed them and didn't make them scream too loud." He shook his head. "Some of them had been with humans who treated them even worse." He smiled grimly. "A few of them agreed to anything I wanted so long as I killed their exes for them."

    "You'd kill their ex boyfriends?"

    "Their ex-boyfriends, their step fathers, their abusive uncles. It was kind of fun, actually. Not that taking vengeance really helped them any, but my pet's horrified satisfaction tended to taste good afterwards."

    Buffy stared into the darkness, silent.

    “Too much for you?” he asked.

    “No. I was just... considering. I mean.... that's kind of... sadistically sweet."

    “Taking vengeance for them?”

    “Yeah.” She looked up at him. “Did you care about them?”

    He shook his head. “I can’t have, really. I mean, I guess I did in the way you can care for a pet pig you intend to put on the table. But no matter how much fun they were to play with, I was slowly killing them, wasn’t I.” He shrugged. “No matter how sweet the game was, it was a game of death. I ate them, after all.”

    "All of them?"

    "Yeah," Spike said. "Though I usually did it gentle."

    Buffy had found the whole thing very sad, when he’d mentioned it. So had he. He’d curled up with his head on her stomach and let her caress his hair until they’d both fallen asleep, and they could think about less traumatic things. Now, it was the only hope she had. A way into his lair, close enough to him to catch his blood. A sweet game, and a slow death – if a gentle one.

    She didn’t have time to come up with a less dangerous plan.


_______


Chapter End Notes:

Chapter notes:
If anyone deeply loves CBGB, or punk rock in general, please be aware all statements are BUFFY’S opinion of both, not my own. I couldn’t study something in this much detail without holding respect for it at some level.
Again, here’s the link to the Dead Boy’s concert. This might not be the one from April the 29th, but it is from 1977, and honestly, I really had been getting WAY too invested in making a silly vampire fanfiction historically accurate.

The songs mentioned are Sonic Reducer, I Need Lunch, Ain’t Nothin’ to Do, and Search and Destroy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOHOM1hVM-M

 
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