Spike/William extras
This was my third prompt for slashfest in 2006, the same round that produced "Third Time's the Charm" and "A Helping Hand." This was for simple__man, who wanted time travel leading to Spike/William. The setup was easy: Spike gets thrown back in time during the final battle in Angel, and he runs into himself. Then they have to work together to get Spike back to his own time, and in the process they fight-representing Spike's internal struggle between his meek human self and the rebel persona he's adopted since becoming a vampire-and finally fall in love, or at least have sex a few times, representing the eventual reconciliation of those two selves into a healthy individual. William was going to go on into his future armed with the knowledge of himself and the impending apocalypse thanks to meeting Spike.
At first I thought I'd bitten off more than I could chew, but then I decided to set the whole thing during one long night instead of several weeks or months as I'd originally envisioned. They'd be cloistered in a warehouse, talking, arguing, fucking, and the next night-the night William would be turned into a vampire-they'd go to the party we saw in "Fool For Love" and the new-and-improved William-turned-Spike would go forward into an uncertain future while the Spike-we-know is whisked away-back to where he started, we're to assume. The end.
Well, this is as far as I got: some pretty polished stuff in the beginning, but I couldn't finish in time for the deadline, and of course once that passed, I couldn't quite manage to keep working on it. It didn't help that a lot of what was left was formless conversation, and without a structured sense of where I needed to be when, I foundered. There are some pacing problems I'd fix if I were to go back to this-lots of things happening too quickly-and sometimes Spike sounds too much like House, but otherwise I think it's pretty good.
Title: The Spike Effect
Fandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Angel the Series
Pairing: Spike/William
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 4,075
Warnings: Spoilers for the end of Angel. Also, please note the pairing.
Summary: After the events of "Not Fade Away," Spike gets thrown back in time, where he encounters himself the day before he became a vampire.
Spike hit the pavement hard-hip, shoulder, hand-rolled, and staggered to his feet yet again, raising his right arm to block the ogre's next blow and swinging his left (the one with the battle axe) to take care of the shrieking Orc-thing before it took care of him.
As he followed through on the arc and pivoted to take stock of what was headed his way next, he noticed several things in succession.
The ogre's blow hadn't come.
His axe had swished through air instead of flesh.
The army of darkness had vanished.
It was quiet.
And it was no longer pouring rain.
Frozen in his half-crouched, half-defensive pose, breathing hard (a human habit he'd never broken) and feeling oddly like an unlife-sized action figure, he shifted his eyes to both sides and took in the scene.
He was still standing in an alley, but it wasn't the same alley in which he'd been fighting a few moments ago. For one thing, this one was empty. For another, even though it was dark and rank and, as he'd already noticed, quiet, it wasn't Los Angeles dark and rank and quiet. Wherever he was, it was not lit by fluorescent street lamps, skyscrapers full of office windows or diffuse city light bounced back from smoggy storm clouds, but rather by a soft yellow-brown glow from beyond the open end of the alley, like gaslight.
The stink in the air, too, was different from your average rotting-dumpsters-and-Legions-of-Hell-gore; it was instead the reek of human waste and body odor and some kind of animal. Granted, not so different from L.A. in theory, but the overall composition and strength were off. He sniffed. There was a potent familiarity about it.
He looked down to find that he hadn't landed on rain- and blood-slick pavement, he'd hit packed dirt, some of which now clung to his wet arm and clothes. Then he looked up and found himself confronted with a few modest two-story buildings and a sky full of stars. He hadn't seen a night sky that clear since…well, probably since he'd gone to the Grove with Angel, but neither of them had been in a stargazing mood at the time. He certainly hadn't seen anything like this during his tenure in the light-polluted, metropolitan U.S. of A.
"I don't think we're in Kansas anymore," he murmured, apparently to himself. He wiped something green and sticky from his eye.
Body still surging with adrenaline, he forced himself to take a short, deep breath, take stock of his condition and decide what to do.
XXXX He was soaked from the now-absent downpour and further streaked with dried and still-dripping blood, sweat, dirt and fluids of varying colors and thicknesses from the demons they'd managed to wound or slay, and he was sliced up and bruised in a few places, but-he tested each of his limbs in turn-he was still functional. XXXX
It must have been some kind of teleportation spell. Now to determine where he'd been tossed and figure out how to teleport or whatall back to the action before he missed the opportunity to see Angel get his ass kicked some more before the world ended. Dammit, he wanted to be in the thick of the fight when things went down, not stuck here in-wherever the hell he was. His empty hand clenched into a fist.
He took another slow breath. He'd never been good at the patience thing. Time to make a move, see what he was dealing with. "This had better be Mexico and not some sodding demon dimension," he muttered.
Hefting his axe, he stepped out into the street.
* * *
He'd been right about the gaslight; the street was lined with wrought-iron lamps casting soft spotlights on the cobblestones. He was in a residential area of some sort, with somber three-story Victorian-style houses looming gloomily over both sides of the road. Strike Mexico, then. And strike the demon dimension, too, unless one of its inhabitants had visited his Earth a hundred and fifty years ago and decided to import contemporary English architectural style.
Not a soul in sight, though light shone through a few windows here and there among the homes and he heard faint music, talking and laughter inside them. Something about the setting, the smell, the sounds, niggled again at the back of his mind, as though he'd been here before. It was entirely possible. He'd seen a lot of Europe during his and Angelus' reign of terror.
Someone threw open a window in the house beside him and noise poured out into the night. Spike spun to face the potential threat, weapon at the ready, but there was only the music and laughter from before. Judging by the number of voices and shadows thrown against the lace curtains blocking his view, there was a sizeable party in progress.
The front door opened, and Spike melted back into the shadows. A man in an old-fashioned three-piece suit and top hat stepped out, holding his hand to help his companion over the threshhold. She wore a green taffeta dress and black shawl, her hair in an elaborate series of twists beneath a wide-brimmed green hat. Spike blinked. Costume party, maybe.
Whatever it was and whoever they were, they didn't look in the least bit threatening. The door had closed behind them and they began to make their way down the street toward him.
He stepped back out into the light.
"Oh!" the woman said, stopping short with a hand to her mouth.
"I say," said the man with a prim Oxbridge accent. "Are you all right?"
Spike tilted his head heavenward. It had to be sodding England. The world would be over before he got halfway across the Atlantic.
"Has there been an accident?" the man went on. "You're soaked to the bone, and you've some blood on your-" The man stopped and Spike felt the shock of his sudden fear. He followed the man's gaze down to the business end of his axe, still dripping with watery blood and ichor.
"No harm intended, friend," the man said shakily, raising his hands palm-out in front of him and shielding the woman with his body.
Spike couldn't help the thrill of joy he felt at being able to scare someone without moving or saying a word. Unfortunately, now was not the time to indulge. He stashed the axe behind his back. No sense intimidating the man so much he wouldn't be able to answer his questions.
"Quick and easy and you can go on your way," he said. "Answer one question: Where are we?"
"Oh. Er. Old Montague Street."
Oh, that was helpful. "No, you nitwit. What town is this?"
The man stared.
Spike made a motion as if to brandish the axe. The woman gasped.
"London," the man said quickly.
"Uh, don't think so, mate."
The woman was whispering in the man's ear that Spike was drunk, insane or possibly one of those horrible murderers she'd heard about who haunted the neighborhoods by the docks.
"Look, love, I'm not the one doing Victoria-and-Albert reenactments in whatever backwater town this is. Probably a hundred bloody miles from a serviceable airport. Are you gonna tell me where we really are, or would that be breaking character for you?"
Now they were both staring at him.
Spike blew a breath between his clenched teeth. "Figures I'd get the idiots. Look. You." He snapped his fingers a few times in front of the bloke's eyes. "Try and handle this one. What's the closest airport?"
The man looked confused, although Spike supposed it was possible that he was misinterpreting the expression what with the man's twitchy glances at Spike's arm behind his back.
"Airport. Air-port. Where the planes go? You know, planes-the things with wings and engines that fly in the air with hundreds of people crammed into narrow seats with no legroom and tiny packages of preheated food and far too little alcohol?"
The man watched his hand as he gestured, glanced at the sky when he pointed, looking utterly lost.
Behind them, the door opened again, this time discharging a knot of four people. Two couples, also dressed in period-style formal wear. His interrogation subjects began to inch away from him. "I'm sorry not to have been able to help you, sir," the man was saying, "but we really must be going. It's quite late." Before Spike could respond, he called to one of the others, "Pennington! Over here. We were about to walk home."
"Is that you, Featherly? We'll come with you to the corner and get a carriage, we're only waiting for William." Pennington called into the house. "Come along, William! We haven't got all night."
Spike squinted. He'd known a Pennington back when he'd been human. Hated the man. He'd been one of the first to go once Drusilla came along. This fellow sounded like him. Maybe a descendent. Or merely an unhappy coincidence.
Spike crossed the few feet to the party-goers, figuring he'd startle at least one of them into revealing some legitimate information. Unsurprisingly, he was greeted with a chorus of gasps and "Oh my"s and an oath or two.
"Don't let him get too close," cried the woman behind him.
Spike hardly heard her. He was too busy staring at one of the men in the group. "Pennington," he said. He was the spitting image of the man he'd known, and in this getup the effect was startling. He glanced at the others and found that he recognized most of them. It took a moment for names to come to him. "Amelia," he said to the redhead on the arm of the man who wasn't Pennington. "Leavenworth," he recalled. What in the name of the Slayer was this?
"I'm sorry, do I know you?" Pennington asked with the same infuriating condescension and disdainful scrutiny Spike remembered all too well.
"He's mad," the man from before piped up. "He claims this is not London and then he speaks of men traveling through the skies." He gave a nervous laugh.
Then came a breathless and very familiar voice from just beyond the doorway. "Sorry, sorry, I'm ready," the newcomer said as he walked into the middle of the scene without an inkling of what was going on, his gaze fastened on his hands as he finished buttoning his coat. Only when he was finished did he look up.
Spike stared at the man in front of him. At the mop of light brown, curly hair. Delicate wire-rimmed glasses. His eyes. His face. His body. Himself.
The question he ought to have been asking all this time, he now realized, was not where, but when.
"Oh, bloody hell."
* * *
"Oh," William exclaimed, sounding pathetically like the woman in green had a few minutes earlier. Spike watched his gaze skitter over the wounds and bloodstains and finally land on the axe. "You-and-oh dear."
"Yes, well put, William," said Pennington. Spike saw the swell of rage in his chest reflected in his doppelganger's eyes. "Now kindly let us pass, sir, or we shall be forced to ring the police."
Spike had an idea. "Never mind, gents, ladies, I've found what I came for," he said as he grabbed William by the arm and dragged him down the steps into the street.
"William!" cried Amelia.
"'S all right, love," Spike called over his shoulder. "We're relatives."
He'd pulled them down the street and around a corner before William stopped spluttering long enough to form a coherent sentence. "Unhand me, you ruffian," he demanded, trying to shake free.
Spike held on effortlessly. "What street is this?"
"Why should I tell you? You're abducting me."
Bypassing his stubborn companion, he tried to remember who'd lived in this neighborhood whose parties he may have attended with that horrific crowd. "Was that the Whitmores' house?"
William's struggles lessened a bit. "Do you know them?"
"Friend of a friend of my mother's."
"Oh. Mine as well."
He calculated where that put them and where he could go to avoid notice and sunlight while he figured out what to do now that the situation had changed. Bloody fucking hell. England, a hundred and some-odd years ago. Geographic and chronologic hurdles to leap to get home. Speaking of which: "What's the date?"
"I refuse to tell you anything until-"
"Axe," Spike reminded him.
A pause, and then: "Friday the fourteenth. Well, it's likely Saturday by now."
"The whole date," he pressed, tugging him around another corner. "Month and year."
"May, 1880. Same as yesterday." He sounded out of breath.
Now Spike stopped. "May 14, 1880?"
"Yes."
"You're going to the Addamses' party tomorrow night? Tonight? Whenever Saturday is?"
"Yes. How do you-?"
"Oh, this is just perfect." He started moving again. There was a run-down warehouse a mile or two from here he'd briefly used with Angelus, Dru and Darla that should do as a hideout for the night and the following day if necessary.
"What's perfect?" William stumbled but kept up. "What's going on? Where are we going? Who are you and why are you covered in blood? Are you one of those docklands murderers from the papers?"
"Nothing, I'm trying to figure that out, to a safe place, I'll tell you when we get there, and no."
"I'm not going anywhere with you," William declared archly. "I don't even know who you are. I demand that you let me go."
"Right, that's it," Spike said, stopping again. God, had he really been that much of a prissy nonce as a human? He let go of the man's sleeve and shifted the axe to his right hand. "Sorry, mate."
William's bespectacled gaze was locked on the weapon. "Sorry for what?"
Spike struck hard and fast with his left fist, knocking William out cold. He snatched him up from the ground, hefted him over his shoulder, retrieved his fallen glasses, and continued on his way toward the river.
"For that," he said to his unconscious burden.
* * *
After he'd located and broken into the warehouse, put down his axe and the glasses, dropped William onto a makeshift bed of crates, lit enough lanterns to comfortably illuminate their corner, and barricaded the door from within, Spike went in search of the water tanks he remembered being somewhere along the far wall. He found them with less difficulty than expected. He opened the valve a little and scrubbed his face, hair and hands under the cool stream.
Now that the immediate danger had passed, he was beginning to feel his injuries. As he washed, he noticed that the cut under his left eye stung and itched; one of the fluids he'd been sprayed with had left parts of his cheek and jaw numb on the right side; he'd pulled a muscle or two (or ten) straining against the heavy blows from hellspawn several times his size; his ribs hurt; and his arms, chest, back and legs ached with unseen bruises.
He stripped off his coat and t-shirt and examined himself in the dimness as he continued his improvised shower. As he'd thought: angry splotches of varying sizes and shades of purplish-red pockmarked his arms and chest. He could feel them pulsing as he regarded them. He didn't have a mirror, but he could imagine that his back was in a similar state, plus a bonus slash right around-he hissed as his questing fingers found it-the last couple of ribs on his right side. His stomach, however, seemed to have escaped unscathed.
Spike shut off the valve and shook himself as dry as he could. No towels or clean clothes, given the surroundings, so he gathered up his damp shirt and coat and carried them back to base camp for when was ready to put them back on.
He'd known the shirt had been torn in a few places, but it wasn't until he laid out his clothes to dry on a couple of crates that he discovered the slash across the back of his jacket. "Oh…bollocks," he swore. He should have expected it, since he'd been cut in the same place, but still. "I liked that coat."
William stirred at the noise. Spike patted the leather in mourning and hopped up onto a double-stack of crates between his clothes and his captive-himself, though it was easier to keep thinking of him as a different person-, kicking his heels against the boards. "Wake up, little Susie," he called.
William gave a feeble moan and felt his cheek and jaw. "Ow."
Spike rolled his eyes. "Be a man about it," he said. "You'll be used to worse than that soon. Hell, you'll even like it."
With another, quieter moan, William pushed himself up with the hand that wasn't pressed to his face. He blinked blearily at Spike. "Are you threatening me? I'll have you know that-"
"And I'll have you know that I've barricaded the door with something you'll never be able to move, so you're stuck in here with me until I say so and you'll do what I tell you."
"Mother's expecting me home soon. When I don't arrive, she'll have the police looking for me."
"Bollocks to your mother. She never gave a toss about you," Spike said before he could help himself.
"I beg your pardon? My mother loves me, and I her. Fervently."
Spike sighed. "Yeah. Yeah, I know. Sorry. Personal demons."
"What do you know of my mother, anyhow?"
"Oh, don't tell me you haven't figured it out yet."
"I'm sure I have no idea what you're talking about."
"No way was I ever that slow." Spike slid off his perch, crossed the few steps between them and leaned in. William drew away, eyeing his captor's shirtlessness and bruises nervously, his neck at a clearly awkward angle. "Look at me. Look at you."
Spike was closer, cleaner, and better-lit than he'd been on the street. Now William's eyes widened. "You…You look like…"
"By George, I think he's gonna get it."
"Are you-are you some sort of cousin I don't know about?"
"Oh, for-I'm you, genius."
"How…What…?"
"And I definitely never sounded like Xander. Hell."
"You don't talk like me; your accent is all wrong and you use filthy language. Your hair is different. As are your clothes. And you aren't wearing glasses."
"Person changes in a century and a half. In our case, I'd say for the better."
"A century and a-You're not making any sense at all." He sounded petulant.
"Okay, then, let's put this simply, since I was apparently a tad less bright than I remember. I'm you, and I'm here from the future. The year 2004, to be precise."
"That's impossible," William scoffed.
"That I'm you, or that I'm from the future? I know you have a better imagination than that. You read The Time Machine." He frowned. "No, wait, that hasn't been written yet."
"I know what time travel is. It's merely a fiction. And even if it were real, and you truly are me"-this with a once-over reminiscent of Pennington but lacking its confidence-"I couldn't possibly be alive that long from now." William straightened and lifted his chin. "I know what's happening here. You are a madman who happens to look like me. Well, I won't share in your delusion." He crossed his arms.
"You're right about one thing: you're not exactly alive that long from now." With that, he morphed into his game face.
William cried out and scrabbled backwards. Since he'd been lying on a single row of crates, there was no room to accommodate the movement, and he tumbled to the floor.
Spike leapt up onto the crates, grinning, and made a fake lunge that elicited another girly cry and flinch from the man on the floor.
He let his human face slide back into place. "How's that for fiction?"
William stared up at him. "What…?"
"You're a vampire. Well, will be. Sooner than you think."
"Vampire," he echoed weakly.
"Undead creature of the night. Fangs, eternal youth, super powers, the works. Guilty conscience optional."
"And you're from 2004. And you're me."
"Give the man a medal!" Spike jumped down and offered his hand.
William slid back a few feet on his rump, raising a hand to his bruised face as if afraid Spike were going to lash out again. "I can get up on my own, thank you," he said, and proceeded to prove it.
"Hey, I was teasing about the axe and the biting. If I killed you, I'd probably wink out of existence." Spike frowned. "But if I didn't exist, then I couldn't have killed you.…God, I hate time travel paradoxes." He shook his head and returned to his earlier perch, this time sitting Indian-style atop the box.
William took a seat as well, crossing one leg primly over the other. "How did you-I-you-get here? From, er, from the future."
"Uh, not sure, actually," he admitted. "I was in the middle of an apocalypse, and poof. One minute I was fightin' these enormous uglies, all horns and red eyes and brimstone, and the next I got dumped in the alley next to the Whitmores'."
"If you don't know how it happened, then how will you return?"
"Dunno yet."
"Do you have a plan?"
Spike sighed. "Workin' on it. More a man of action than tactics these days."
"Physical activity has its benefits. However, I believe that the cultivation of the intellect is the highest of all pursuits."
Spike gave him an incredulous look. "I'm finding it suddenly ironic that your name is Pratt."
"It's your name as well, then, isn't it?"
"Shut up." Spike scowled. "If you're so brainy, why don't you come up with a brilliant plan to put me in the fray again before the world ends for good this time?"
"The world-ends?"
"Yup. Book of Revelation, 'Darkness,' The Last Man, reign of demons and the slaughter of mankind, all that fun stuff. Really gets irritating after the first few times."
William was definitely starting to look overwhelmed. "The world is going to end in the year 2004?"
"Okay, let's forget about that bit for now and concentrate on getting me back to the future." He smacked his forehead. "I can't believe I actually said that."
"Said what?"
"Nothing." He thought for a moment. "All right, here's what I figure. We've got till tomorrow night."
"Why? What happens then?" William sat up straighter, alarmed. "Are you going to bring that…that…medieval weapon to the party?"
"No, I told you, that was from the fight. Tonight happens to be one of the most important nights of your life."
"Why?"
Spike morphed again, briefly. "Remember this?"
William flinched. "Yes, quite well, thank you very much."
"May 15, 1880." Spike looked at him, one eyebrow raised, until comprehension spread over the other man's face.
"You became…I'm going to become a-a vampire, tonight?"
"Very good," he said in his best patronizing Watcher-voice. Then he continued, mostly to himself, "Looks like the Powers That Be sent me here, now, for a reason. And it's not to score touchdowns."
"What are touchdowns?"
"You know, it's not as much fun when nobody else gets your pop culture references." He ruffled his drying hair so it wouldn't stick to his scalp. "Point is, this can't have been a coincidence. I disappear from the middle of an epic battle and reappear a few feet away from myself on the day before I become a vampire. This has to have been orchestrated. There's something important about the transformation. They gave me 24 hours. One day, to do…what?"
Just as well that it was a rhetorical question, because William didn't seem to have been listening. "How does it happen?" he asked at last, quietly.
"Tonight, you are going to literally run into the first real love of your life. Aside from your mum, of course."
"Cecily?"
"Better than Cecily."
"Nonsense."
"All right, maybe not, but you'll decide for yourself soon enough."
William visibly swallowed. "Does that mean we have a plan now?"
"We wait here so I can stay out of the sunlight and keep an eye on you until nightfall tomorrow. You'll go to the party like you're supposed to. I'll come with you. And then it'll be showtime. Whatever that means."
"And what happens then? Will there be two of us, or will you be sent back?"
"Dunno."
"So we wait?"
"We wait."
* * *
Notes:
"What's it like? Becoming…a vampire?"
* * *
"'She Walks in Beauty.'"
"Sentimental tripe, overused by lovestruck teenage girls."
"Byron was a genius."
"Byron was a twat."
"If you're really me, then you love Byron and you know it, and there's no point to this argument."
* * *
"Let me tell you a story."
* * *
"Three basic theories of time travel. First says I won't be able to alter events no matter how hard I try, because history finds ways to preserve itself. But I've got you here, and you're supposed to be at home taking care of Mum and going to bed, so that one can't be right."
"What's the second?"
"Whatever I do causes cascading ripples into the future. The tiniest of changes-even me being here at all-could cause huge alterations in future reality as I know it. Only I might not even realize it because my memory of the past could be constantly modified as I go."
"Do you remember doing this? That is, I mean, being here, with yourself?"
"No."
"What's the third?"
"That every time I take an action I create an alternate timeline into the future. Which means whatever we do here can change history. Well, my history."
arm across his shoulders
"What are you doing? Take your hands off me."
"Bloody hell. I'm sorry."
"Don't touch me!" He swiped at his wet cheeks.
Like doing it to himself, only further away. He'd had more than a hundred years of practice.
"Oh…Oh!"
William was sleeping again. Spike watched him and tried to absorb the knowledge that he'd just, in essence, had sex with himself.
He reached into his coat pocket and fished out a damp and dented pack of smokes and his lighter. The cigarettes had survived but the lighter wouldn't flick on, so he chucked it to the side and lit up in one of the lanterns.
"That one poem, you know? 'My soul is wrapped in harsh repose, / Midnight descends in raven-colored clothes…' Big hit among the California elite in the twenty-first century."
"Honestly?"
"We were a genius before our time, mate."
"I'm messed up. Irrevocable. Unfixable. But you-you're malleable. There's hope for you. You can fix things."
"You're William the Bloody!"
"Cecily," they breathed in unison.
"This is my cousin Spike from America."
Somewhere behind him, Spike heard a man mutter, "America-that explains last night."
Spike held out his hand. "Howdy, ma'am."
"Oh," said the woman, blushing. "Are you a cowboy? How interesting!"
The battle replayed itself in his head. Gunn had been the first to go down, hampered by his gut wound. He'd fought like a fiend first, though. Spike hadn't seen it, only knew what had happened by the kamikaze battle cry followed by the grunt and then the wet thud of half the kid's torso landing in front of him. Spike had ducked and managed to snatch up his axe to balance out the sword he'd nicked off one of the cowled, clawed creeps.
His Highness the dark hero and martyr and savior of all mankind, of course, had gone for the Hollywood stuff. With his eyes set on his bloody dragon he'd taken on four or five of the ork-things at once. Wanker only needed a shield and a poofier hairdo (as if that were possible) and he could've passed for Aragorn.
And Blue. She'd sliced through limb after limb, taking hits she couldn't block like they were nothing, though he knew they had to have hurt like a bitch. He'd only caught glimpses-having been enmeshed in his own heroics at the time-but he'd happened to be facing her when she'd been stabbed, three times almost simultaneously, hit her knees and collapsed without a sound, just an expression that was half sneer and half raw despair. The orchestration had been balletic.
Then it had been him and Angel on their own, fighting back-to-back for a spell.
"Just like the old days, eh, William?" Angel had said, slipping into his long-lost brogue.
"Except we'd've been on their side, Angelus," he'd retorted.
Now, he was…here, and Angel was left-will be left-will have been left-to save the day. Of bloody course. Angel could shanshu his way right down to hell again for all Spike cared, but damn if it didn't always have to be him alone in the end. Bleedin' spotlight hog.
At first I thought I'd bitten off more than I could chew, but then I decided to set the whole thing during one long night instead of several weeks or months as I'd originally envisioned. They'd be cloistered in a warehouse, talking, arguing, fucking, and the next night-the night William would be turned into a vampire-they'd go to the party we saw in "Fool For Love" and the new-and-improved William-turned-Spike would go forward into an uncertain future while the Spike-we-know is whisked away-back to where he started, we're to assume. The end.
Well, this is as far as I got: some pretty polished stuff in the beginning, but I couldn't finish in time for the deadline, and of course once that passed, I couldn't quite manage to keep working on it. It didn't help that a lot of what was left was formless conversation, and without a structured sense of where I needed to be when, I foundered. There are some pacing problems I'd fix if I were to go back to this-lots of things happening too quickly-and sometimes Spike sounds too much like House, but otherwise I think it's pretty good.
Title: The Spike Effect
Fandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Angel the Series
Pairing: Spike/William
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 4,075
Warnings: Spoilers for the end of Angel. Also, please note the pairing.
Summary: After the events of "Not Fade Away," Spike gets thrown back in time, where he encounters himself the day before he became a vampire.
Spike hit the pavement hard-hip, shoulder, hand-rolled, and staggered to his feet yet again, raising his right arm to block the ogre's next blow and swinging his left (the one with the battle axe) to take care of the shrieking Orc-thing before it took care of him.
As he followed through on the arc and pivoted to take stock of what was headed his way next, he noticed several things in succession.
The ogre's blow hadn't come.
His axe had swished through air instead of flesh.
The army of darkness had vanished.
It was quiet.
And it was no longer pouring rain.
Frozen in his half-crouched, half-defensive pose, breathing hard (a human habit he'd never broken) and feeling oddly like an unlife-sized action figure, he shifted his eyes to both sides and took in the scene.
He was still standing in an alley, but it wasn't the same alley in which he'd been fighting a few moments ago. For one thing, this one was empty. For another, even though it was dark and rank and, as he'd already noticed, quiet, it wasn't Los Angeles dark and rank and quiet. Wherever he was, it was not lit by fluorescent street lamps, skyscrapers full of office windows or diffuse city light bounced back from smoggy storm clouds, but rather by a soft yellow-brown glow from beyond the open end of the alley, like gaslight.
The stink in the air, too, was different from your average rotting-dumpsters-and-Legions-of-Hell-gore; it was instead the reek of human waste and body odor and some kind of animal. Granted, not so different from L.A. in theory, but the overall composition and strength were off. He sniffed. There was a potent familiarity about it.
He looked down to find that he hadn't landed on rain- and blood-slick pavement, he'd hit packed dirt, some of which now clung to his wet arm and clothes. Then he looked up and found himself confronted with a few modest two-story buildings and a sky full of stars. He hadn't seen a night sky that clear since…well, probably since he'd gone to the Grove with Angel, but neither of them had been in a stargazing mood at the time. He certainly hadn't seen anything like this during his tenure in the light-polluted, metropolitan U.S. of A.
"I don't think we're in Kansas anymore," he murmured, apparently to himself. He wiped something green and sticky from his eye.
Body still surging with adrenaline, he forced himself to take a short, deep breath, take stock of his condition and decide what to do.
XXXX He was soaked from the now-absent downpour and further streaked with dried and still-dripping blood, sweat, dirt and fluids of varying colors and thicknesses from the demons they'd managed to wound or slay, and he was sliced up and bruised in a few places, but-he tested each of his limbs in turn-he was still functional. XXXX
It must have been some kind of teleportation spell. Now to determine where he'd been tossed and figure out how to teleport or whatall back to the action before he missed the opportunity to see Angel get his ass kicked some more before the world ended. Dammit, he wanted to be in the thick of the fight when things went down, not stuck here in-wherever the hell he was. His empty hand clenched into a fist.
He took another slow breath. He'd never been good at the patience thing. Time to make a move, see what he was dealing with. "This had better be Mexico and not some sodding demon dimension," he muttered.
Hefting his axe, he stepped out into the street.
* * *
He'd been right about the gaslight; the street was lined with wrought-iron lamps casting soft spotlights on the cobblestones. He was in a residential area of some sort, with somber three-story Victorian-style houses looming gloomily over both sides of the road. Strike Mexico, then. And strike the demon dimension, too, unless one of its inhabitants had visited his Earth a hundred and fifty years ago and decided to import contemporary English architectural style.
Not a soul in sight, though light shone through a few windows here and there among the homes and he heard faint music, talking and laughter inside them. Something about the setting, the smell, the sounds, niggled again at the back of his mind, as though he'd been here before. It was entirely possible. He'd seen a lot of Europe during his and Angelus' reign of terror.
Someone threw open a window in the house beside him and noise poured out into the night. Spike spun to face the potential threat, weapon at the ready, but there was only the music and laughter from before. Judging by the number of voices and shadows thrown against the lace curtains blocking his view, there was a sizeable party in progress.
The front door opened, and Spike melted back into the shadows. A man in an old-fashioned three-piece suit and top hat stepped out, holding his hand to help his companion over the threshhold. She wore a green taffeta dress and black shawl, her hair in an elaborate series of twists beneath a wide-brimmed green hat. Spike blinked. Costume party, maybe.
Whatever it was and whoever they were, they didn't look in the least bit threatening. The door had closed behind them and they began to make their way down the street toward him.
He stepped back out into the light.
"Oh!" the woman said, stopping short with a hand to her mouth.
"I say," said the man with a prim Oxbridge accent. "Are you all right?"
Spike tilted his head heavenward. It had to be sodding England. The world would be over before he got halfway across the Atlantic.
"Has there been an accident?" the man went on. "You're soaked to the bone, and you've some blood on your-" The man stopped and Spike felt the shock of his sudden fear. He followed the man's gaze down to the business end of his axe, still dripping with watery blood and ichor.
"No harm intended, friend," the man said shakily, raising his hands palm-out in front of him and shielding the woman with his body.
Spike couldn't help the thrill of joy he felt at being able to scare someone without moving or saying a word. Unfortunately, now was not the time to indulge. He stashed the axe behind his back. No sense intimidating the man so much he wouldn't be able to answer his questions.
"Quick and easy and you can go on your way," he said. "Answer one question: Where are we?"
"Oh. Er. Old Montague Street."
Oh, that was helpful. "No, you nitwit. What town is this?"
The man stared.
Spike made a motion as if to brandish the axe. The woman gasped.
"London," the man said quickly.
"Uh, don't think so, mate."
The woman was whispering in the man's ear that Spike was drunk, insane or possibly one of those horrible murderers she'd heard about who haunted the neighborhoods by the docks.
"Look, love, I'm not the one doing Victoria-and-Albert reenactments in whatever backwater town this is. Probably a hundred bloody miles from a serviceable airport. Are you gonna tell me where we really are, or would that be breaking character for you?"
Now they were both staring at him.
Spike blew a breath between his clenched teeth. "Figures I'd get the idiots. Look. You." He snapped his fingers a few times in front of the bloke's eyes. "Try and handle this one. What's the closest airport?"
The man looked confused, although Spike supposed it was possible that he was misinterpreting the expression what with the man's twitchy glances at Spike's arm behind his back.
"Airport. Air-port. Where the planes go? You know, planes-the things with wings and engines that fly in the air with hundreds of people crammed into narrow seats with no legroom and tiny packages of preheated food and far too little alcohol?"
The man watched his hand as he gestured, glanced at the sky when he pointed, looking utterly lost.
Behind them, the door opened again, this time discharging a knot of four people. Two couples, also dressed in period-style formal wear. His interrogation subjects began to inch away from him. "I'm sorry not to have been able to help you, sir," the man was saying, "but we really must be going. It's quite late." Before Spike could respond, he called to one of the others, "Pennington! Over here. We were about to walk home."
"Is that you, Featherly? We'll come with you to the corner and get a carriage, we're only waiting for William." Pennington called into the house. "Come along, William! We haven't got all night."
Spike squinted. He'd known a Pennington back when he'd been human. Hated the man. He'd been one of the first to go once Drusilla came along. This fellow sounded like him. Maybe a descendent. Or merely an unhappy coincidence.
Spike crossed the few feet to the party-goers, figuring he'd startle at least one of them into revealing some legitimate information. Unsurprisingly, he was greeted with a chorus of gasps and "Oh my"s and an oath or two.
"Don't let him get too close," cried the woman behind him.
Spike hardly heard her. He was too busy staring at one of the men in the group. "Pennington," he said. He was the spitting image of the man he'd known, and in this getup the effect was startling. He glanced at the others and found that he recognized most of them. It took a moment for names to come to him. "Amelia," he said to the redhead on the arm of the man who wasn't Pennington. "Leavenworth," he recalled. What in the name of the Slayer was this?
"I'm sorry, do I know you?" Pennington asked with the same infuriating condescension and disdainful scrutiny Spike remembered all too well.
"He's mad," the man from before piped up. "He claims this is not London and then he speaks of men traveling through the skies." He gave a nervous laugh.
Then came a breathless and very familiar voice from just beyond the doorway. "Sorry, sorry, I'm ready," the newcomer said as he walked into the middle of the scene without an inkling of what was going on, his gaze fastened on his hands as he finished buttoning his coat. Only when he was finished did he look up.
Spike stared at the man in front of him. At the mop of light brown, curly hair. Delicate wire-rimmed glasses. His eyes. His face. His body. Himself.
The question he ought to have been asking all this time, he now realized, was not where, but when.
"Oh, bloody hell."
* * *
"Oh," William exclaimed, sounding pathetically like the woman in green had a few minutes earlier. Spike watched his gaze skitter over the wounds and bloodstains and finally land on the axe. "You-and-oh dear."
"Yes, well put, William," said Pennington. Spike saw the swell of rage in his chest reflected in his doppelganger's eyes. "Now kindly let us pass, sir, or we shall be forced to ring the police."
Spike had an idea. "Never mind, gents, ladies, I've found what I came for," he said as he grabbed William by the arm and dragged him down the steps into the street.
"William!" cried Amelia.
"'S all right, love," Spike called over his shoulder. "We're relatives."
He'd pulled them down the street and around a corner before William stopped spluttering long enough to form a coherent sentence. "Unhand me, you ruffian," he demanded, trying to shake free.
Spike held on effortlessly. "What street is this?"
"Why should I tell you? You're abducting me."
Bypassing his stubborn companion, he tried to remember who'd lived in this neighborhood whose parties he may have attended with that horrific crowd. "Was that the Whitmores' house?"
William's struggles lessened a bit. "Do you know them?"
"Friend of a friend of my mother's."
"Oh. Mine as well."
He calculated where that put them and where he could go to avoid notice and sunlight while he figured out what to do now that the situation had changed. Bloody fucking hell. England, a hundred and some-odd years ago. Geographic and chronologic hurdles to leap to get home. Speaking of which: "What's the date?"
"I refuse to tell you anything until-"
"Axe," Spike reminded him.
A pause, and then: "Friday the fourteenth. Well, it's likely Saturday by now."
"The whole date," he pressed, tugging him around another corner. "Month and year."
"May, 1880. Same as yesterday." He sounded out of breath.
Now Spike stopped. "May 14, 1880?"
"Yes."
"You're going to the Addamses' party tomorrow night? Tonight? Whenever Saturday is?"
"Yes. How do you-?"
"Oh, this is just perfect." He started moving again. There was a run-down warehouse a mile or two from here he'd briefly used with Angelus, Dru and Darla that should do as a hideout for the night and the following day if necessary.
"What's perfect?" William stumbled but kept up. "What's going on? Where are we going? Who are you and why are you covered in blood? Are you one of those docklands murderers from the papers?"
"Nothing, I'm trying to figure that out, to a safe place, I'll tell you when we get there, and no."
"I'm not going anywhere with you," William declared archly. "I don't even know who you are. I demand that you let me go."
"Right, that's it," Spike said, stopping again. God, had he really been that much of a prissy nonce as a human? He let go of the man's sleeve and shifted the axe to his right hand. "Sorry, mate."
William's bespectacled gaze was locked on the weapon. "Sorry for what?"
Spike struck hard and fast with his left fist, knocking William out cold. He snatched him up from the ground, hefted him over his shoulder, retrieved his fallen glasses, and continued on his way toward the river.
"For that," he said to his unconscious burden.
* * *
After he'd located and broken into the warehouse, put down his axe and the glasses, dropped William onto a makeshift bed of crates, lit enough lanterns to comfortably illuminate their corner, and barricaded the door from within, Spike went in search of the water tanks he remembered being somewhere along the far wall. He found them with less difficulty than expected. He opened the valve a little and scrubbed his face, hair and hands under the cool stream.
Now that the immediate danger had passed, he was beginning to feel his injuries. As he washed, he noticed that the cut under his left eye stung and itched; one of the fluids he'd been sprayed with had left parts of his cheek and jaw numb on the right side; he'd pulled a muscle or two (or ten) straining against the heavy blows from hellspawn several times his size; his ribs hurt; and his arms, chest, back and legs ached with unseen bruises.
He stripped off his coat and t-shirt and examined himself in the dimness as he continued his improvised shower. As he'd thought: angry splotches of varying sizes and shades of purplish-red pockmarked his arms and chest. He could feel them pulsing as he regarded them. He didn't have a mirror, but he could imagine that his back was in a similar state, plus a bonus slash right around-he hissed as his questing fingers found it-the last couple of ribs on his right side. His stomach, however, seemed to have escaped unscathed.
Spike shut off the valve and shook himself as dry as he could. No towels or clean clothes, given the surroundings, so he gathered up his damp shirt and coat and carried them back to base camp for when was ready to put them back on.
He'd known the shirt had been torn in a few places, but it wasn't until he laid out his clothes to dry on a couple of crates that he discovered the slash across the back of his jacket. "Oh…bollocks," he swore. He should have expected it, since he'd been cut in the same place, but still. "I liked that coat."
William stirred at the noise. Spike patted the leather in mourning and hopped up onto a double-stack of crates between his clothes and his captive-himself, though it was easier to keep thinking of him as a different person-, kicking his heels against the boards. "Wake up, little Susie," he called.
William gave a feeble moan and felt his cheek and jaw. "Ow."
Spike rolled his eyes. "Be a man about it," he said. "You'll be used to worse than that soon. Hell, you'll even like it."
With another, quieter moan, William pushed himself up with the hand that wasn't pressed to his face. He blinked blearily at Spike. "Are you threatening me? I'll have you know that-"
"And I'll have you know that I've barricaded the door with something you'll never be able to move, so you're stuck in here with me until I say so and you'll do what I tell you."
"Mother's expecting me home soon. When I don't arrive, she'll have the police looking for me."
"Bollocks to your mother. She never gave a toss about you," Spike said before he could help himself.
"I beg your pardon? My mother loves me, and I her. Fervently."
Spike sighed. "Yeah. Yeah, I know. Sorry. Personal demons."
"What do you know of my mother, anyhow?"
"Oh, don't tell me you haven't figured it out yet."
"I'm sure I have no idea what you're talking about."
"No way was I ever that slow." Spike slid off his perch, crossed the few steps between them and leaned in. William drew away, eyeing his captor's shirtlessness and bruises nervously, his neck at a clearly awkward angle. "Look at me. Look at you."
Spike was closer, cleaner, and better-lit than he'd been on the street. Now William's eyes widened. "You…You look like…"
"By George, I think he's gonna get it."
"Are you-are you some sort of cousin I don't know about?"
"Oh, for-I'm you, genius."
"How…What…?"
"And I definitely never sounded like Xander. Hell."
"You don't talk like me; your accent is all wrong and you use filthy language. Your hair is different. As are your clothes. And you aren't wearing glasses."
"Person changes in a century and a half. In our case, I'd say for the better."
"A century and a-You're not making any sense at all." He sounded petulant.
"Okay, then, let's put this simply, since I was apparently a tad less bright than I remember. I'm you, and I'm here from the future. The year 2004, to be precise."
"That's impossible," William scoffed.
"That I'm you, or that I'm from the future? I know you have a better imagination than that. You read The Time Machine." He frowned. "No, wait, that hasn't been written yet."
"I know what time travel is. It's merely a fiction. And even if it were real, and you truly are me"-this with a once-over reminiscent of Pennington but lacking its confidence-"I couldn't possibly be alive that long from now." William straightened and lifted his chin. "I know what's happening here. You are a madman who happens to look like me. Well, I won't share in your delusion." He crossed his arms.
"You're right about one thing: you're not exactly alive that long from now." With that, he morphed into his game face.
William cried out and scrabbled backwards. Since he'd been lying on a single row of crates, there was no room to accommodate the movement, and he tumbled to the floor.
Spike leapt up onto the crates, grinning, and made a fake lunge that elicited another girly cry and flinch from the man on the floor.
He let his human face slide back into place. "How's that for fiction?"
William stared up at him. "What…?"
"You're a vampire. Well, will be. Sooner than you think."
"Vampire," he echoed weakly.
"Undead creature of the night. Fangs, eternal youth, super powers, the works. Guilty conscience optional."
"And you're from 2004. And you're me."
"Give the man a medal!" Spike jumped down and offered his hand.
William slid back a few feet on his rump, raising a hand to his bruised face as if afraid Spike were going to lash out again. "I can get up on my own, thank you," he said, and proceeded to prove it.
"Hey, I was teasing about the axe and the biting. If I killed you, I'd probably wink out of existence." Spike frowned. "But if I didn't exist, then I couldn't have killed you.…God, I hate time travel paradoxes." He shook his head and returned to his earlier perch, this time sitting Indian-style atop the box.
William took a seat as well, crossing one leg primly over the other. "How did you-I-you-get here? From, er, from the future."
"Uh, not sure, actually," he admitted. "I was in the middle of an apocalypse, and poof. One minute I was fightin' these enormous uglies, all horns and red eyes and brimstone, and the next I got dumped in the alley next to the Whitmores'."
"If you don't know how it happened, then how will you return?"
"Dunno yet."
"Do you have a plan?"
Spike sighed. "Workin' on it. More a man of action than tactics these days."
"Physical activity has its benefits. However, I believe that the cultivation of the intellect is the highest of all pursuits."
Spike gave him an incredulous look. "I'm finding it suddenly ironic that your name is Pratt."
"It's your name as well, then, isn't it?"
"Shut up." Spike scowled. "If you're so brainy, why don't you come up with a brilliant plan to put me in the fray again before the world ends for good this time?"
"The world-ends?"
"Yup. Book of Revelation, 'Darkness,' The Last Man, reign of demons and the slaughter of mankind, all that fun stuff. Really gets irritating after the first few times."
William was definitely starting to look overwhelmed. "The world is going to end in the year 2004?"
"Okay, let's forget about that bit for now and concentrate on getting me back to the future." He smacked his forehead. "I can't believe I actually said that."
"Said what?"
"Nothing." He thought for a moment. "All right, here's what I figure. We've got till tomorrow night."
"Why? What happens then?" William sat up straighter, alarmed. "Are you going to bring that…that…medieval weapon to the party?"
"No, I told you, that was from the fight. Tonight happens to be one of the most important nights of your life."
"Why?"
Spike morphed again, briefly. "Remember this?"
William flinched. "Yes, quite well, thank you very much."
"May 15, 1880." Spike looked at him, one eyebrow raised, until comprehension spread over the other man's face.
"You became…I'm going to become a-a vampire, tonight?"
"Very good," he said in his best patronizing Watcher-voice. Then he continued, mostly to himself, "Looks like the Powers That Be sent me here, now, for a reason. And it's not to score touchdowns."
"What are touchdowns?"
"You know, it's not as much fun when nobody else gets your pop culture references." He ruffled his drying hair so it wouldn't stick to his scalp. "Point is, this can't have been a coincidence. I disappear from the middle of an epic battle and reappear a few feet away from myself on the day before I become a vampire. This has to have been orchestrated. There's something important about the transformation. They gave me 24 hours. One day, to do…what?"
Just as well that it was a rhetorical question, because William didn't seem to have been listening. "How does it happen?" he asked at last, quietly.
"Tonight, you are going to literally run into the first real love of your life. Aside from your mum, of course."
"Cecily?"
"Better than Cecily."
"Nonsense."
"All right, maybe not, but you'll decide for yourself soon enough."
William visibly swallowed. "Does that mean we have a plan now?"
"We wait here so I can stay out of the sunlight and keep an eye on you until nightfall tomorrow. You'll go to the party like you're supposed to. I'll come with you. And then it'll be showtime. Whatever that means."
"And what happens then? Will there be two of us, or will you be sent back?"
"Dunno."
"So we wait?"
"We wait."
* * *
Notes:
"What's it like? Becoming…a vampire?"
* * *
"'She Walks in Beauty.'"
"Sentimental tripe, overused by lovestruck teenage girls."
"Byron was a genius."
"Byron was a twat."
"If you're really me, then you love Byron and you know it, and there's no point to this argument."
* * *
"Let me tell you a story."
* * *
"Three basic theories of time travel. First says I won't be able to alter events no matter how hard I try, because history finds ways to preserve itself. But I've got you here, and you're supposed to be at home taking care of Mum and going to bed, so that one can't be right."
"What's the second?"
"Whatever I do causes cascading ripples into the future. The tiniest of changes-even me being here at all-could cause huge alterations in future reality as I know it. Only I might not even realize it because my memory of the past could be constantly modified as I go."
"Do you remember doing this? That is, I mean, being here, with yourself?"
"No."
"What's the third?"
"That every time I take an action I create an alternate timeline into the future. Which means whatever we do here can change history. Well, my history."
arm across his shoulders
"What are you doing? Take your hands off me."
"Bloody hell. I'm sorry."
"Don't touch me!" He swiped at his wet cheeks.
Like doing it to himself, only further away. He'd had more than a hundred years of practice.
"Oh…Oh!"
William was sleeping again. Spike watched him and tried to absorb the knowledge that he'd just, in essence, had sex with himself.
He reached into his coat pocket and fished out a damp and dented pack of smokes and his lighter. The cigarettes had survived but the lighter wouldn't flick on, so he chucked it to the side and lit up in one of the lanterns.
"That one poem, you know? 'My soul is wrapped in harsh repose, / Midnight descends in raven-colored clothes…' Big hit among the California elite in the twenty-first century."
"Honestly?"
"We were a genius before our time, mate."
"I'm messed up. Irrevocable. Unfixable. But you-you're malleable. There's hope for you. You can fix things."
"You're William the Bloody!"
"Cecily," they breathed in unison.
"This is my cousin Spike from America."
Somewhere behind him, Spike heard a man mutter, "America-that explains last night."
Spike held out his hand. "Howdy, ma'am."
"Oh," said the woman, blushing. "Are you a cowboy? How interesting!"
The battle replayed itself in his head. Gunn had been the first to go down, hampered by his gut wound. He'd fought like a fiend first, though. Spike hadn't seen it, only knew what had happened by the kamikaze battle cry followed by the grunt and then the wet thud of half the kid's torso landing in front of him. Spike had ducked and managed to snatch up his axe to balance out the sword he'd nicked off one of the cowled, clawed creeps.
His Highness the dark hero and martyr and savior of all mankind, of course, had gone for the Hollywood stuff. With his eyes set on his bloody dragon he'd taken on four or five of the ork-things at once. Wanker only needed a shield and a poofier hairdo (as if that were possible) and he could've passed for Aragorn.
And Blue. She'd sliced through limb after limb, taking hits she couldn't block like they were nothing, though he knew they had to have hurt like a bitch. He'd only caught glimpses-having been enmeshed in his own heroics at the time-but he'd happened to be facing her when she'd been stabbed, three times almost simultaneously, hit her knees and collapsed without a sound, just an expression that was half sneer and half raw despair. The orchestration had been balletic.
Then it had been him and Angel on their own, fighting back-to-back for a spell.
"Just like the old days, eh, William?" Angel had said, slipping into his long-lost brogue.
"Except we'd've been on their side, Angelus," he'd retorted.
Now, he was…here, and Angel was left-will be left-will have been left-to save the day. Of bloody course. Angel could shanshu his way right down to hell again for all Spike cared, but damn if it didn't always have to be him alone in the end. Bleedin' spotlight hog.