FIC: Best Souvenir --chapter 1
Title: Best Souvenir
Author: thekorapersonality
Rating: PG-13 (so far)
Summary: Whistler never existed. Angel never stopped bumming around Manhattan to go to Sunnydale to meet Buffy. Buffy’s experiences are canon, minus Angel and things that relate to Angel (including Buffy’s relationships with Spike, Drusilla, and Darla. The nature of Buffy’s altered background with these characters will be explained within the fic). Half a year to a year after S7, Buffy is living in Rome (per canon), but has to visit Manhattan on Slayer business. Future-fic, alternate reality.
Chapter 1
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New York City, 2004
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It was after one in the morning in Manhattan when Buffy felt a familiar curdling in her stomach. She thought longingly of the Ray’s Pizza she’d passed recently. On patrol for the past few weeks, she’d seen Ray’s Pizza, Ray’s Famous, Famous Ray’s, Original Ray’s, Famous Original Ray’s, and any other combination of Ray’s she could come up with, and she still had yet to try a one. Buffy sighed. If she was going to have to forgo pleasure for business, there should at least be business to take care of. New York City may be the big bad on America’s Most Wanted, and it might not be too hot on any list for Greenpeace, but as far as a Slayer could be concerned it was right up there with Heaven, Eden, and Detroit: squeaky clean of demonic activity.
Buffy kicked a can in the road, more forcefully than she meant to, and it toppled along the street until it clanked down the sewer. Would it really be such a big deal if she got a slice of pizza to go-a big one with lots of pepporoni and greasy melted cheese and a sprinkling of olives and maybe a few green peppers and another one for the road? But no, she was stuck patrolling.
Her stomach tightened again. Uh-oh. This was not a hunger tightening. Buffy repressed the urge to breathe "finally" between her lips. She shouldn’t be pleased to find another vampire in Manhattan, but after three weeks with only four vamps she was in serious need of slayage.
For a moment, Buffy assessed the area. The spidey-sense was pulling toward an alley she could see a turn off for about a block away. There were still quite a few people around this time of night (was that why the vampires stayed away? Did New Yorkers make them afraid? Or was it the tourists?), but no one was by the alley. Buffy began to jog, non-chalantly depositing her bag of equipment in a dumpster. It didn’t do to be carrying that stuff while fighting, even if this was only one vamp. She turned down an alley and the street lights started clicking and buzzing. It was darker here, and smellier. And rattier. And bummier.
"Hey," she said to the bum rifling through the trash. He skittered away, and she stepped closer. He was a big bum, his filthy, tattered clothes hiding most of his skin, including a hood covering shaggy, matted hair. He smelled downright rancid. The feeling in Buffy’s stomach had shot up to her head and was pounding her with the "I feel vampire! Lemme kill!" thing. She was about to ask the smelly bum if he’d seen anything weird around, when she lunged forward and landed a foot in his stomach.
The bum staggered back, yelping. For a moment, Buffy hesitated, watching as he flailed for balance. Maybe she shouldn’t have done that. He was obviously . . . well, not well off, and probably wouldn’t last another kick like that. Then again, he was probably newly made and still confused about what he was, what he needed, and who he could kill.
He was a vampire, even if he was a vampire who looked like a poor defenseless bum.
He was clutching his stomach, moaning a little, staggering and looking from side to side as if trying to figure out how to get away. Buffy rushed him, pushing him onto the ground so she could use her legs to brace his thighs and her hands to lock his forearms. He didn’t resist. Buffy was a little surprised. Despite his haggard, weak appearance, even a human would probably resist full-body pinning, if he was any kind of sane . . .
Wide-eyed, and a little worried that she might be dealing with a male version of Drusilla, Buffy looked down, and met his eyes.
They were liquid brown and dark and filled with . . . well, she didn’t know what emotion they were filled with, but it wasn’t insanity. He was cold, hard, and, from what she could feel of him, weak, almost as if he was starving. His face was shadowed, hard to see, but what she could make out was big-big square jaw, big heavy brow, big straight nose-big and incredibly, indescribably, unbelievably filthy. The smell was over-powering. She tried not to breath in when she said, "Do you know who Angelus is?"
The one emotion she could read in his face was curiosity. His gaze kept flitting over her face, taking in her little chin, up-turned nose, and green eyes. "Yeah," Buffy said. "You got it right. I’m the Slayer; I’m prettier than you; and I smell better. Hands down, you lose. So ‘fess up."
He didn’t move. He didn’t breathe. In fact, he really didn’t, as if he’d been living apart from humanity so long he’d forgotten how to fake it, or as if his breath had gotten caught somewhere. "Don’t even think about it," she snapped, as she saw him eyeing her neck. "Dinner doesn’t fix up her hair. Now, tell me."
Quickly, so quickly that she didn’t sense it until too late-which was shocking enough in and of itself-he reached a hand up. Then he was touching her hair. A vampire was touching her hair. A dirty, smells-worse-than-your-run-of-the-mill-stench-of-death-and-dying vampire was touching her hair. Buffy wondered who could say ew.
She ripped his hand away, slammed it back onto the pavement until she heard a crunch, and then she pulled a fist right up to that big square jaw and hit him. Hard.
For a moment, the vamp bum looked surprised. Then he thoughtfully licked up the blood dripping out the side of his mouth from what must have been a bite on his own tongue, and, with something like a sigh, turned his head away from her. For some reason, that infuriated Buffy, that he could turn away, as if he wasn’t afraid of her, as if she didn’t matter. She grabbed his chin and forced him to look at her, wrinkling her nose in disgust at touching the bare, dirty skin, and at the same time glancing away from meeting his eyes because they were beginning to disconcert here. "Do you know Angelus?" she repeated.
He made a strange sound, then, like a laugh. She scowled down at him. He looked just as surprised as she was.
She had come to Manhattan looking for the Scourge of Europe, and found very little Scourage going on. In fact, she’d found very little of anything going on, and no one who knew of anything that was supposed to be going on in lieu of something actually going on. The first vamp she’d found, after nearly a whole week of fruitless patrolling, hadn’t heard of Angelus. The next two had heard of him but only because she beat it out of them, and it turned out they had been lying. The last one had led her to someone who had heard of Angelus, but the same vamp had also heard Angelus had been destroyed at the turn of the century. Which, according to the Immortal’s henchmen in Rome, just wasn’t true.
Buffy was getting frustrated, to say the least. The Immortal was going to get this Angelus out of Manhattan and get him to open this alfalfa demon’s mouth, and then swallow Earth into Hell or something like that. So the end of the world was coming; she hadn’t gotten to go the top of the Empire State Building or eat Famous Ray's pizza; and this Angelus guy was hiding out in Manhattan, either laughing at her or terribly shy. Not to mention that this rotting bum she was having to sit on was laughing at her, too. She just didn’t see anything funny.
She hit the vampire bum again, this time on the ear. "You know Angelus," she hissed. "Where is he?" When he did not answer, Buffy punched his jaw again. Sometimes she liked to beat on vamps before staking them because it helped her blow off steam, but Giles had always said it was bad form. Buffy was sure that he would agree that in this case, a little improvisation was required. "Don’t wanna tell me where he is?" she said, after he’d choked back a bit of blood from her last blow. "Then we do this the hard way."
She kneed him-hard-in the groin. He roared, and threw her off of him with a strength she never would have guessed he had. For a moment, she was discombobulated. This wasn’t some newly-made vamp, liked she’d guessed at first. He wasn’t as weak as he looked, nor-considering how easily he’d disentangled himself from her limbs-was he inexperienced. What did it mean? What was up with this guy? And why did he have to smell so bad?
The bum was looking around, as if he wasn’t quite sure how he’d gotten to be vertical again, and his eyes landed on her. She lay where she had landed on the ground, breathing quickly and shallowly, as if seriously injured. Her eyes darted toward him, as if in fear. The ridges and amber eyes of his vamp face were already gone. He looked . . . She swallowed hard. She should not be feeling pity for this vampire, much less interest. But he just looked so . . . lost.
He began to shuffle over to her. When he was squatting beside her, close but not touching, working something out of his throat that sounded like "are you-?", she lashed out a leg, knocked him over, and pinned him down again. Her head hurt with a sharp, throbbing pain-he had thrown her hard!-but otherwise she was more than capable of holding him down, no matter how strong he was.
"Am I going to slay your demonic ass?" she asked, filling in his question. "Soon." She whipped out a stake and settled the point over his heart. The other Manhattan vampires-after the first, when she hadn’t known she’d have to work so hard to flush out vamps in New York City-had all confessed something or other at stake-point. It had been a mistake, however, to actually picket the vamps. After she’d checked out their leads and found out that they’d lied to her, she’d had to start all over again finding another vampire to give her new and better information. She wouldn’t make that mistake again. Still, he didn’t need to know that. "Tell me where to find Angelus, or you bite the dust. Literally."
Those unfathomable eyes regarded her again, and unconsciously, she squirmed on his chest. She wondered for a moment if he had a slight ability for thrall. His eyes pulled her in, made her want to both hide and open herself completely. What was a homeless, smelly vampire bum doing with eyes like that? Again, something clicked in her mind, telling her that her first impression of him was seriously far off the mark. She tried to shut it off. All this clicking in her head was making her feel nauseous. She must have cut her brow when he threw her.
Another sound was working through the bum’s throat. "Gone," he managed, finally. He sounded as if he hadn’t talked in ages.
Buffy’s first impulse was to stake him. Okay, which, as much as she wanted to, she couldn’t do, so moving on to second impulse, which was to grab his hair with her free hand, lift his head, and smash it back onto the pavement. Bad idea also, because that meant touching the hair, and seriously, smoochies with the Master?-way, way more appealing than touching this guy’s hair.
So instead, all Buffy did was say softly, in her most dangerous tone and over the pounding in her head, "I’m sorry, you’ve used up all your life-lines. Now give me your final answer, or it’s you who’ll be gone."
Again, he moved too quickly for her to react. He was doing something with his shirt-with the other hand, the hand whose wrist she had not broken yet. She could fix that. She grabbed his hand with her free one . . . and saw that he was baring his chest to her. A hard, marble-white chest, caked in layer after layer of grime, but . . . what kind of vampire . . . ?
Somehow, he changed her grip on his hand so that it was he who held hers, and then he placed that hand over her other one, so that both of hers gripped the stake. Then he wrapped his own hand-egads! It was huge! What had hands that big?-around both of hers, and gave a little shove on the stake so that the point was pricking his chest. Right over his heart. "Please," he said, simply.
It was a ploy, Buffy decided. He was trying to make her think he wanted dusting in order to throw her off her guard, and then he was going to . . . to what? Okay, so the ploy was working, because she totally didn’t know what to do, here. She didn’t want to stake him, because she still needed info, but here he was, begging, and his eyes . . .
Ploy, Buffy reminded herself. The cut on her head, though no doubt healing fast, was fuzzying her focus, making her forget. That and the fact that he seemed to have an uncanny ability to throw her off her game, make her forget what she was dealing with. He didn’t want her to dust him. This was a trick to confuse her, make her wonder what he was up to . . . .
What the hell was he up to . . . ?
His other hand, the broken one, lifted limply, sickeningly, but so slowly that she was mesmerized and didn’t stop to think he could still hurt her with it, if he really wanted to. It stopped near her hair. It didn’t touch, but it moved . . . There was an ache in his eyes, and she could feel it, physically feel it-his desire to run that hand through her hair. She made a little sound. She was terrified that she might actually want him to do it.
He was choking something out between his lips again. "You’re very . . ."
She caught her breath, wondering if she was about to get her first-ever sincere compliment from a vampire. It was tense. It should not have been, because he was a vampire, but he was a vampire wanting to die and wanting in his last moment to touch her hair and tell her . . . Tell her what? She was very what? She was still holding a freakin’ stake to his chest.
The vampire was looking at her wistfully. He wanted to tell her that she was beautiful. He wanted to tell her that she was the warmth and essence that was life itself. He wanted to tell her that she was worth living for. He could see pain, fear, experience, torture, age, and death in her eyes. She had been a Slayer for too long without enough to mitigate the pain. Death and duty had taken their toll on her. He had seen it in other Slayers who hadn’t even survived as long as she had. But there was something wonderful about her, too, something Heavenly that shimmered and shifted before his eyes. There was still the spark of life in her, burning brighter than it should in someone so burdened. It was pure and innocent and everything he was not. A half a decade ago, he might have told her that. A half a decade ago, hehad still hung on to hope, foolish as it had been. But his soul, with its immense capacity for punishing himself, had gotten tired of forcing him to go on with this existence.
Once, she might have been his salvation, and he, in his own way, might have shown her that the light inside of her that led him to that salvation was her salvation, too. But the time had passed. She was his salvation, now, but only in ashes.
"Ha!" she shouted suddenly, and eased off of him. "You have a chip!" she announced. Being able to explain the guy suddenly loosened a tension she hadn’t even known was there. Now he couldn’t throw her off, confuse her, trick her into feeling something, because she now knew what he was. She began twirling her stake in her hand. "I should’ve known."
The bum looked at her blankly, and sat up. Absently, he scrubbed at his jaw, only succeeding in rearranging the grime on his face. He would look . . . look good, clean, she thought-and then wanted to throw up for thinking it. Just because he had a chip in his head and couldn’t hurt her, had she really sunk so low as to find a vampire attractive? Especially considering that there were other vampires who took a lot better care of themselves than this one?
"You don’t know what’s happened, do you?" she asked finally. "You were in California recently, weren’t you? Like maybe three or four years ago. White rooms, like a prison? Cell-mates, maybe. Did you know Darla? How ‘bout Maggie Walsh, the bitch with the beady eyes?"
The bum blinked several times. He was holding his broken wrist with his good hand. He wanted the bones to set straight. "Darla?" he whispered.
"Look," Buffy said, breaking her fighting stance and putting her hands on her hips. "I know you’re not a danger to society any more, so I’m not going to bother to slay you. You have two choices. You can put-put around, starving and reeking your ass off. Or you can help me out for a while, like Darla did." At his look of surprise, Buffy’s brows rose. "Oh yes. If you really did know her then you’d know what that took her to help me. But a vamp’ll do anything for fresh blood and something to kill, and I can give you both. So, we have a deal?"
He was looking at her with something unfathomable in his eyes. Then he stepped toward her, and Buffy had to restrain the urge to fall back. He couldn’t hurt her. Darla had escaped after Buffy defeated the Master, but had returned to Sunnydale much later, seeking the Gem of Amara. The Initiative had captured Darla and planted a chip in her brain, effectively making her impotent to suck the blood of humans. She had escaped the Initiative, but been so desperate for blood and so desperate to kill that she had temporarily joined the Scoobies, just to have pigs’ blood and something to do. She’d been dusted when the chip had begun to degrade, but the alliance had actually been rather interesting while it lasted.
There was no other explanation for this vampire’s unwillingness to hurt her other than that he couldn’t, which meant the Initiative’s project had had longer lasting effects than she ever could have imagined. Apparently, all the chips weren’t as low quality as Darla’s had been, because this one had already lasted six months longer than hers.
"You want me to . . . help you?" he asked finally.
Buffy rolled her eyes. It was the nature of a vampire to gloat if ever a Slayer resorted to asking for their help. Darla had done it often. "Yes, I want you to help me," she said.
Some time later, some time in the far future, Angel would tell Buffy that it was at that moment he saw light again, the light of hope-the light of the sun. He had not seen it since before his turning.
"But don’t forget, I’ll more than make it worth your while," Buffy went on. "Blood, remember?"
"I remember," he replied, and looked away. His voice was much stronger, and he had now said two full complete sentences. Amazing what the promise of killing things could do for someone.
"But first, you’re going to help me find Angelus." She wrinkled her nose. "Scratch that. As much as I’m not looking forward to your company, this may take more than one night, and I am not spending my first visit to New York with someone who smells like you, even if I won't get to go up the Empire State Building or eat Ray’s Pizza. Or Ray’s Famous Pizza. Or Ray’s Famous Original Pizza."
His jaw hung open a little. "What?"
"A shower. New clothes. A truck load of deodorant. And maybe you can shave your head?" she added hopefully. "Come on. And don’t even think of trying to run. I have manacles in my duffel bag. And I’m going to use them. Once we get to my duffel bag, that is. Now do what I say or no blood for you. Get a move on."
Go to: Chapter Two
Author: thekorapersonality
Rating: PG-13 (so far)
Summary: Whistler never existed. Angel never stopped bumming around Manhattan to go to Sunnydale to meet Buffy. Buffy’s experiences are canon, minus Angel and things that relate to Angel (including Buffy’s relationships with Spike, Drusilla, and Darla. The nature of Buffy’s altered background with these characters will be explained within the fic). Half a year to a year after S7, Buffy is living in Rome (per canon), but has to visit Manhattan on Slayer business. Future-fic, alternate reality.
Chapter 1
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New York City, 2004
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It was after one in the morning in Manhattan when Buffy felt a familiar curdling in her stomach. She thought longingly of the Ray’s Pizza she’d passed recently. On patrol for the past few weeks, she’d seen Ray’s Pizza, Ray’s Famous, Famous Ray’s, Original Ray’s, Famous Original Ray’s, and any other combination of Ray’s she could come up with, and she still had yet to try a one. Buffy sighed. If she was going to have to forgo pleasure for business, there should at least be business to take care of. New York City may be the big bad on America’s Most Wanted, and it might not be too hot on any list for Greenpeace, but as far as a Slayer could be concerned it was right up there with Heaven, Eden, and Detroit: squeaky clean of demonic activity.
Buffy kicked a can in the road, more forcefully than she meant to, and it toppled along the street until it clanked down the sewer. Would it really be such a big deal if she got a slice of pizza to go-a big one with lots of pepporoni and greasy melted cheese and a sprinkling of olives and maybe a few green peppers and another one for the road? But no, she was stuck patrolling.
Her stomach tightened again. Uh-oh. This was not a hunger tightening. Buffy repressed the urge to breathe "finally" between her lips. She shouldn’t be pleased to find another vampire in Manhattan, but after three weeks with only four vamps she was in serious need of slayage.
For a moment, Buffy assessed the area. The spidey-sense was pulling toward an alley she could see a turn off for about a block away. There were still quite a few people around this time of night (was that why the vampires stayed away? Did New Yorkers make them afraid? Or was it the tourists?), but no one was by the alley. Buffy began to jog, non-chalantly depositing her bag of equipment in a dumpster. It didn’t do to be carrying that stuff while fighting, even if this was only one vamp. She turned down an alley and the street lights started clicking and buzzing. It was darker here, and smellier. And rattier. And bummier.
"Hey," she said to the bum rifling through the trash. He skittered away, and she stepped closer. He was a big bum, his filthy, tattered clothes hiding most of his skin, including a hood covering shaggy, matted hair. He smelled downright rancid. The feeling in Buffy’s stomach had shot up to her head and was pounding her with the "I feel vampire! Lemme kill!" thing. She was about to ask the smelly bum if he’d seen anything weird around, when she lunged forward and landed a foot in his stomach.
The bum staggered back, yelping. For a moment, Buffy hesitated, watching as he flailed for balance. Maybe she shouldn’t have done that. He was obviously . . . well, not well off, and probably wouldn’t last another kick like that. Then again, he was probably newly made and still confused about what he was, what he needed, and who he could kill.
He was a vampire, even if he was a vampire who looked like a poor defenseless bum.
He was clutching his stomach, moaning a little, staggering and looking from side to side as if trying to figure out how to get away. Buffy rushed him, pushing him onto the ground so she could use her legs to brace his thighs and her hands to lock his forearms. He didn’t resist. Buffy was a little surprised. Despite his haggard, weak appearance, even a human would probably resist full-body pinning, if he was any kind of sane . . .
Wide-eyed, and a little worried that she might be dealing with a male version of Drusilla, Buffy looked down, and met his eyes.
They were liquid brown and dark and filled with . . . well, she didn’t know what emotion they were filled with, but it wasn’t insanity. He was cold, hard, and, from what she could feel of him, weak, almost as if he was starving. His face was shadowed, hard to see, but what she could make out was big-big square jaw, big heavy brow, big straight nose-big and incredibly, indescribably, unbelievably filthy. The smell was over-powering. She tried not to breath in when she said, "Do you know who Angelus is?"
The one emotion she could read in his face was curiosity. His gaze kept flitting over her face, taking in her little chin, up-turned nose, and green eyes. "Yeah," Buffy said. "You got it right. I’m the Slayer; I’m prettier than you; and I smell better. Hands down, you lose. So ‘fess up."
He didn’t move. He didn’t breathe. In fact, he really didn’t, as if he’d been living apart from humanity so long he’d forgotten how to fake it, or as if his breath had gotten caught somewhere. "Don’t even think about it," she snapped, as she saw him eyeing her neck. "Dinner doesn’t fix up her hair. Now, tell me."
Quickly, so quickly that she didn’t sense it until too late-which was shocking enough in and of itself-he reached a hand up. Then he was touching her hair. A vampire was touching her hair. A dirty, smells-worse-than-your-run-of-the-mill-stench-of-death-and-dying vampire was touching her hair. Buffy wondered who could say ew.
She ripped his hand away, slammed it back onto the pavement until she heard a crunch, and then she pulled a fist right up to that big square jaw and hit him. Hard.
For a moment, the vamp bum looked surprised. Then he thoughtfully licked up the blood dripping out the side of his mouth from what must have been a bite on his own tongue, and, with something like a sigh, turned his head away from her. For some reason, that infuriated Buffy, that he could turn away, as if he wasn’t afraid of her, as if she didn’t matter. She grabbed his chin and forced him to look at her, wrinkling her nose in disgust at touching the bare, dirty skin, and at the same time glancing away from meeting his eyes because they were beginning to disconcert here. "Do you know Angelus?" she repeated.
He made a strange sound, then, like a laugh. She scowled down at him. He looked just as surprised as she was.
She had come to Manhattan looking for the Scourge of Europe, and found very little Scourage going on. In fact, she’d found very little of anything going on, and no one who knew of anything that was supposed to be going on in lieu of something actually going on. The first vamp she’d found, after nearly a whole week of fruitless patrolling, hadn’t heard of Angelus. The next two had heard of him but only because she beat it out of them, and it turned out they had been lying. The last one had led her to someone who had heard of Angelus, but the same vamp had also heard Angelus had been destroyed at the turn of the century. Which, according to the Immortal’s henchmen in Rome, just wasn’t true.
Buffy was getting frustrated, to say the least. The Immortal was going to get this Angelus out of Manhattan and get him to open this alfalfa demon’s mouth, and then swallow Earth into Hell or something like that. So the end of the world was coming; she hadn’t gotten to go the top of the Empire State Building or eat Famous Ray's pizza; and this Angelus guy was hiding out in Manhattan, either laughing at her or terribly shy. Not to mention that this rotting bum she was having to sit on was laughing at her, too. She just didn’t see anything funny.
She hit the vampire bum again, this time on the ear. "You know Angelus," she hissed. "Where is he?" When he did not answer, Buffy punched his jaw again. Sometimes she liked to beat on vamps before staking them because it helped her blow off steam, but Giles had always said it was bad form. Buffy was sure that he would agree that in this case, a little improvisation was required. "Don’t wanna tell me where he is?" she said, after he’d choked back a bit of blood from her last blow. "Then we do this the hard way."
She kneed him-hard-in the groin. He roared, and threw her off of him with a strength she never would have guessed he had. For a moment, she was discombobulated. This wasn’t some newly-made vamp, liked she’d guessed at first. He wasn’t as weak as he looked, nor-considering how easily he’d disentangled himself from her limbs-was he inexperienced. What did it mean? What was up with this guy? And why did he have to smell so bad?
The bum was looking around, as if he wasn’t quite sure how he’d gotten to be vertical again, and his eyes landed on her. She lay where she had landed on the ground, breathing quickly and shallowly, as if seriously injured. Her eyes darted toward him, as if in fear. The ridges and amber eyes of his vamp face were already gone. He looked . . . She swallowed hard. She should not be feeling pity for this vampire, much less interest. But he just looked so . . . lost.
He began to shuffle over to her. When he was squatting beside her, close but not touching, working something out of his throat that sounded like "are you-?", she lashed out a leg, knocked him over, and pinned him down again. Her head hurt with a sharp, throbbing pain-he had thrown her hard!-but otherwise she was more than capable of holding him down, no matter how strong he was.
"Am I going to slay your demonic ass?" she asked, filling in his question. "Soon." She whipped out a stake and settled the point over his heart. The other Manhattan vampires-after the first, when she hadn’t known she’d have to work so hard to flush out vamps in New York City-had all confessed something or other at stake-point. It had been a mistake, however, to actually picket the vamps. After she’d checked out their leads and found out that they’d lied to her, she’d had to start all over again finding another vampire to give her new and better information. She wouldn’t make that mistake again. Still, he didn’t need to know that. "Tell me where to find Angelus, or you bite the dust. Literally."
Those unfathomable eyes regarded her again, and unconsciously, she squirmed on his chest. She wondered for a moment if he had a slight ability for thrall. His eyes pulled her in, made her want to both hide and open herself completely. What was a homeless, smelly vampire bum doing with eyes like that? Again, something clicked in her mind, telling her that her first impression of him was seriously far off the mark. She tried to shut it off. All this clicking in her head was making her feel nauseous. She must have cut her brow when he threw her.
Another sound was working through the bum’s throat. "Gone," he managed, finally. He sounded as if he hadn’t talked in ages.
Buffy’s first impulse was to stake him. Okay, which, as much as she wanted to, she couldn’t do, so moving on to second impulse, which was to grab his hair with her free hand, lift his head, and smash it back onto the pavement. Bad idea also, because that meant touching the hair, and seriously, smoochies with the Master?-way, way more appealing than touching this guy’s hair.
So instead, all Buffy did was say softly, in her most dangerous tone and over the pounding in her head, "I’m sorry, you’ve used up all your life-lines. Now give me your final answer, or it’s you who’ll be gone."
Again, he moved too quickly for her to react. He was doing something with his shirt-with the other hand, the hand whose wrist she had not broken yet. She could fix that. She grabbed his hand with her free one . . . and saw that he was baring his chest to her. A hard, marble-white chest, caked in layer after layer of grime, but . . . what kind of vampire . . . ?
Somehow, he changed her grip on his hand so that it was he who held hers, and then he placed that hand over her other one, so that both of hers gripped the stake. Then he wrapped his own hand-egads! It was huge! What had hands that big?-around both of hers, and gave a little shove on the stake so that the point was pricking his chest. Right over his heart. "Please," he said, simply.
It was a ploy, Buffy decided. He was trying to make her think he wanted dusting in order to throw her off her guard, and then he was going to . . . to what? Okay, so the ploy was working, because she totally didn’t know what to do, here. She didn’t want to stake him, because she still needed info, but here he was, begging, and his eyes . . .
Ploy, Buffy reminded herself. The cut on her head, though no doubt healing fast, was fuzzying her focus, making her forget. That and the fact that he seemed to have an uncanny ability to throw her off her game, make her forget what she was dealing with. He didn’t want her to dust him. This was a trick to confuse her, make her wonder what he was up to . . . .
What the hell was he up to . . . ?
His other hand, the broken one, lifted limply, sickeningly, but so slowly that she was mesmerized and didn’t stop to think he could still hurt her with it, if he really wanted to. It stopped near her hair. It didn’t touch, but it moved . . . There was an ache in his eyes, and she could feel it, physically feel it-his desire to run that hand through her hair. She made a little sound. She was terrified that she might actually want him to do it.
He was choking something out between his lips again. "You’re very . . ."
She caught her breath, wondering if she was about to get her first-ever sincere compliment from a vampire. It was tense. It should not have been, because he was a vampire, but he was a vampire wanting to die and wanting in his last moment to touch her hair and tell her . . . Tell her what? She was very what? She was still holding a freakin’ stake to his chest.
The vampire was looking at her wistfully. He wanted to tell her that she was beautiful. He wanted to tell her that she was the warmth and essence that was life itself. He wanted to tell her that she was worth living for. He could see pain, fear, experience, torture, age, and death in her eyes. She had been a Slayer for too long without enough to mitigate the pain. Death and duty had taken their toll on her. He had seen it in other Slayers who hadn’t even survived as long as she had. But there was something wonderful about her, too, something Heavenly that shimmered and shifted before his eyes. There was still the spark of life in her, burning brighter than it should in someone so burdened. It was pure and innocent and everything he was not. A half a decade ago, he might have told her that. A half a decade ago, hehad still hung on to hope, foolish as it had been. But his soul, with its immense capacity for punishing himself, had gotten tired of forcing him to go on with this existence.
Once, she might have been his salvation, and he, in his own way, might have shown her that the light inside of her that led him to that salvation was her salvation, too. But the time had passed. She was his salvation, now, but only in ashes.
"Ha!" she shouted suddenly, and eased off of him. "You have a chip!" she announced. Being able to explain the guy suddenly loosened a tension she hadn’t even known was there. Now he couldn’t throw her off, confuse her, trick her into feeling something, because she now knew what he was. She began twirling her stake in her hand. "I should’ve known."
The bum looked at her blankly, and sat up. Absently, he scrubbed at his jaw, only succeeding in rearranging the grime on his face. He would look . . . look good, clean, she thought-and then wanted to throw up for thinking it. Just because he had a chip in his head and couldn’t hurt her, had she really sunk so low as to find a vampire attractive? Especially considering that there were other vampires who took a lot better care of themselves than this one?
"You don’t know what’s happened, do you?" she asked finally. "You were in California recently, weren’t you? Like maybe three or four years ago. White rooms, like a prison? Cell-mates, maybe. Did you know Darla? How ‘bout Maggie Walsh, the bitch with the beady eyes?"
The bum blinked several times. He was holding his broken wrist with his good hand. He wanted the bones to set straight. "Darla?" he whispered.
"Look," Buffy said, breaking her fighting stance and putting her hands on her hips. "I know you’re not a danger to society any more, so I’m not going to bother to slay you. You have two choices. You can put-put around, starving and reeking your ass off. Or you can help me out for a while, like Darla did." At his look of surprise, Buffy’s brows rose. "Oh yes. If you really did know her then you’d know what that took her to help me. But a vamp’ll do anything for fresh blood and something to kill, and I can give you both. So, we have a deal?"
He was looking at her with something unfathomable in his eyes. Then he stepped toward her, and Buffy had to restrain the urge to fall back. He couldn’t hurt her. Darla had escaped after Buffy defeated the Master, but had returned to Sunnydale much later, seeking the Gem of Amara. The Initiative had captured Darla and planted a chip in her brain, effectively making her impotent to suck the blood of humans. She had escaped the Initiative, but been so desperate for blood and so desperate to kill that she had temporarily joined the Scoobies, just to have pigs’ blood and something to do. She’d been dusted when the chip had begun to degrade, but the alliance had actually been rather interesting while it lasted.
There was no other explanation for this vampire’s unwillingness to hurt her other than that he couldn’t, which meant the Initiative’s project had had longer lasting effects than she ever could have imagined. Apparently, all the chips weren’t as low quality as Darla’s had been, because this one had already lasted six months longer than hers.
"You want me to . . . help you?" he asked finally.
Buffy rolled her eyes. It was the nature of a vampire to gloat if ever a Slayer resorted to asking for their help. Darla had done it often. "Yes, I want you to help me," she said.
Some time later, some time in the far future, Angel would tell Buffy that it was at that moment he saw light again, the light of hope-the light of the sun. He had not seen it since before his turning.
"But don’t forget, I’ll more than make it worth your while," Buffy went on. "Blood, remember?"
"I remember," he replied, and looked away. His voice was much stronger, and he had now said two full complete sentences. Amazing what the promise of killing things could do for someone.
"But first, you’re going to help me find Angelus." She wrinkled her nose. "Scratch that. As much as I’m not looking forward to your company, this may take more than one night, and I am not spending my first visit to New York with someone who smells like you, even if I won't get to go up the Empire State Building or eat Ray’s Pizza. Or Ray’s Famous Pizza. Or Ray’s Famous Original Pizza."
His jaw hung open a little. "What?"
"A shower. New clothes. A truck load of deodorant. And maybe you can shave your head?" she added hopefully. "Come on. And don’t even think of trying to run. I have manacles in my duffel bag. And I’m going to use them. Once we get to my duffel bag, that is. Now do what I say or no blood for you. Get a move on."
Go to: Chapter Two