Becoming - BtVS
Title: Becoming
Prompt: 110-Necrotizing fasciitis at tamingthemuse
Rating: Safe for anyone (except shapinglight. You wouldn't anyway, but don't read this, hon. It'll only get your blood pressure up *g*)
Summary: Spike's thoughts and actions, built around the words spoken by and to him at the end of season 6.
Dialogue borrowed courtesy of http://www.twiztv.com/scripts/
Note: This grew from a meta I did about Spike and his soul, here.
Word Count: 2,430
Comments: Are greatly appreciated, loved and cherished.
Disclaimer: here.
Becoming
Spike charged through the door into his crypt, allowing it to slam back against the jam behind him, as images of their fight replayed too vividly in his mind.
What had he done? He didn't even know why he'd gone there. To explain, certainly, but to explain what? The reason he'd ended up rutting with Anya? Or the reason he'd wanted to get Buffy and all the damned scoobies out of his head, out of his thoughts? How he'd gone seeking a spell to numb him from his loss, to change how he felt?
Something had happened to him and he didn't understand why. And all she'd said was that he had to move on? He hadn't wanted to be somewhere he needed to move on from, in the first place. It had just happened! One minute he was a happy, well-adjusted vampire, looking to score his third slayer. The next, he was crippled and the nature of his slayer obsession had shifted into something else. He loved her and he hated it!
She bloody well knew he didn't hurt her. She'd admitted as much! What her rejection of him was forcing him to ask himself, was why.
Growling with frustration, Spike grabbed the bottle of gin from the low shelf against the wall and slopped a large measure into a glass. Fumbling the bottle down onto Arthur French's tomb, he blindly gulped down most of it as Buffy's desperate face, beneath him on the bathroom floor, raised itself again in his imagination and he slumped in defeat. He had ended up hurting her though, hadn't he?
The glass shattered in his hand and he stared unseeing at the shards scattered across the floor. It was pathetic that he'd sunk so low - pining for a slayer, following her around like an orphaned puppy desperate for any scraps of affection, unable to hold his own in the demon world and unwelcome in hers. The soldiers had been clever - the fact that it was only humans he couldn't kill, was the ultimate punishment.
The chip was a constant reminder to him of all he'd lost. Learning to live with it was impossible, so he'd learnt to live around it and in so doing he'd become the ultimate outcast. With a sigh, he reached again for the bottle. What had he come to that even humans saw him as beneath contempt? No demon could respect him now.
As if conjured to refute his thoughts, a voice from the doorway hesitantly interrupted his intention to get totally plastered, again. "Uh ... knock knock?" Spike looked up as Clem walked in, with not so much as a by your leave.
It was all of a piece. Before... before the chip, before he got caught up with the damned scoobies and their spells and their grudging companionship, before Buffy died and left him and they were glad of his presence, before she came back and they shut him out again... before all that, unlife had been simple. He'd been top of the fucking food chain and he'd understood how the world worked. Then, demons had cleared his path and humans had trembled in his grasp. The last thing they ever did.
Clem was hovering. He always hovered, if you could hover when your body was the size of a Zeppelin. No, that wasn't right; a Zeppelin did hover because it was full of gas. Clem was an old gasbag, but his body looked like it was only half filled. His skin lay in loose folds, as if he'd been attacked by some disease that ate away the flesh and left the skin hanging there. Except, if he had a disease he'd be mercifully dead instead of plaguing Spike with his clichés and homilies. At any rate, such a fate for Clem would have been merciful for Spike.
"I was just in the neighbourhood so I thought, you know..." Clem gave a half wave and indicated the paper bucket from some fast-food place he was carrying.
He was always in the bloody neighbourhood, too. How the mighty had fallen, that a flabby, diseased, bloody harmless for god sake, demon felt it was all right to wander into his home at any time of the day or night.
Clem mumbled something about some show on the telly, but Spike wasn't listening. It was not as if Clem ever had anything interesting to say. Good for the odd hand of poker, but hardly the sort of demon Spike would have been seen dead with before. Was this his future, he wondered, inane conversation and carpet slippers in front of the TV?
Avoiding Clem's sometimes too knowledgeable eyes, Spike sighed, talking aloud but interrogating only himself. "What have I done?" Suddenly the question turned on him, into a more confusing form. "Why didn't I do it?" He gazed sightlessly up at the ceiling as he tried to figure it all out. It came down to one thing: "What has she done to me?"
"She done who?" Clem asked, obviously confused. Spike didn't have time for this. He'd never have time for this. Clem grunted. "Ohh. The Slayer, huh? Gosh. She break up with you again?"
The bastard sounded sympathetic and Spike spared him a glare as he began to pace, in an attempt to channel his restless energy away from tearing the fucker's head off. "We were never together," he said, to shut Clem up as much as anything. "Not really. She'd never lower herself that far." And that was the whole fucking point, wasn't it? Bastard! That was why she'd thrown him out. That was how she saw him.
Clem was still wittering on, but once again, Spike tuned him out. "Why do I feel this way?" he cried.
A random movement on Clem's part caught Spike's attention, just as Clem spoke again. "Love's a funny thing," he offered.
Well, that was bloody useful. What a fucking insight. "Is that what this is?" It wasn't that simple.
Or maybe it was, just not that sort of simple. "I can feel it," he said. "Squirming in my head."
"Love?" Clem asked, obviously still confused but persisting.
Spike wanted to roar his denial, but managed, for reasons he didn't have room to examine, to keep his voice calm. "The chip. Gnawing bits and chunks." He raised his hands to his head in a fruitless miming of his desire to rid himself of the foreign object lodged inside his brain.
Wearily he lowered his arms and turned to face the only demon who was still willing to associate with him. "You know," he said, "everything used to be so clear." Looking over at Clem, he saw that he had his attention. "Slayer," he said, indicating a space to one side of him. "Vampire," he pointed at a spot to his other side. "Vampire kills Slayer, sucks her dry, picks his teeth with her bones. It's always been that way." That was the way it was supposed to be.
He looked up again. "I've tasted the life of two Slayers," he added, as if Clem would somehow question his credentials. "But with Buffy..." He trailed off as his frustration at his condition once again came to a head. "It isn't supposed to be this way!"
Furiously Spike swept out his hand and sent a piece of wrought iron tomb furniture crashing to the ground "It's the chip! Steel and wires and silicon!" Abruptly all his energy dissipated. What was the point when all he could spend it on was inanimate objects and harmless old fools whose blood didn't even taste good, even if his fangs could reach through all the layers? "It won't let me be a monster," he explained. "And I can't be a man." And if he had a choice, would he even want to be? He'd thought so. 'You treat me like a man', he'd said to her once. At the time, he'd been grateful. At the time, he'd believed it. "I'm nothing," he concluded, because nothing was all he had left.
Clem looked disconcerted but, once again, he did his best. "Hey. Come on now, Mr. Negative." He always did his bloody best and there were nights when he'd been lucky to get out of the crypt alive as a result. Spike didn't know why he kept coming around, but he did. "You never know what's just around the corner. Things change." And that would be another example of why he was so lucky to be alive.
Spike paused, remembering the night he'd denied that demons change, in the face of the changes in Angel, before everything had changed for him. He laughed, bitterly. "Yeah, they do."
A thought began to tickle at the back of his brain, an elusive memory... something Angelus had once said? Something Dru had mentioned, before... when she was sick, when they were searching for a cure for her, before they came to Sunnydale? It was almost there. He let his mind go blank, deliberately not hunting the thought down, waiting for it to come to him, and there it was! Oh yeah, things change. "If you make them."
He smiled with satisfaction as the full details of the story Dalton had dug up, too late to be of use in helping Dru, came back to him. Things would change, all right. He was going to make them change! Let the slayer and her gang of sidekicks get nice and comfy, thinking him gone from their lives. He was going, but he'd be back!
*****
The demon was right; it was about the slayer. She was the catalyst that had sent him on his quest. "Bitch thinks she's better than me," he said, the anger that had got him half way around the world still bright, for lack of having had any outlet. "Ever since I got this bleeding chip in my head, things ain't been right. Everything's gone to hell."
"And you want to return to your former self."
It was a statement, not a question, but Spike answered anyway, "Yeah."
The demon's laugh seemed calculated to enrage him further. "Look what she's reduced you to," it taunted.
It wasn't just her. It had started before that and Spike voiced his protest: "It's this bloody chip."
The demon ignored him, continuing its summation of Spike's condition, "You were a legendary dark warrior, and you let yourself be castrated. And you have the audacity to crawl in here and demand restoration?"
An initial sense of pride at being recognised as a force in their world was replaced by short-lived indignation. It was the truth. He had been castrated, but he didn't have to stay that way. "I'm still a warrior," he promised.
The demon's taunts goading him. There'd never been a chance he'd back down. He'd rather end his existence than continue as he was, but the taunting helped. "Do your worst," he challenged. "But when I win ... I want what I came here for. Bitch is gonna see a change."
The first challenge was a hard fight, but Spike's need gave him a determination such as he'd rarely felt before. This wasn't only to the death; it was much more serious than that.
Once the surprise of realising there was more than one challenge had past, he knew there had to be three. There were always three.
The second challenge was more of the same, only doubled. It left Spike weak, but still unbowed. "Well, that was a bloody doddle and piece o'piss," he boasted, just in case the demon thought he was done for.
As he should have expected, the third challenge took a different form.
Cursing, Spike tried to shrink away as the beetles skittered up his body. Closing his eyes and mouth against them, he resolved that he would survive, even when one of the little bastards climbed up inside his nose. If they were the same flesh-eating scarabs as the ones in The Mummy movie, they'd not find much to interest them in his dead flesh. He just had to wait until they realised that fact and left him alone. It didn't make the pain any less, when they took experimental bites out of him though. Spike screamed and kept on screaming, until his voice had worn away to nothing.
When he came to, lying flat on his back on the floor of the cave, the beetles were gone. He gave a small groan and opened his eyes a crack, just as a dark shape crossed between him and the light from the torch on the wall. "You have endured the required trials," the demon intoned. It was unclear from its voice if that was a source of satisfaction, or disappointment to it.
Spike blinked up into the darkness. "Bloody right I have."
Painfully he pushed himself over and up onto his knees. "So you'll give me what I want. Make me what I was." His voice sounded strained and weak to his own ears, but he was still there and still able to move, so there was also hope. This was what he'd come for. This was why he'd fought, why he'd endured the trials. To get the chip out, "So Buffy can get what she deserves," wasn't it?
He wavered, feeling the world spin and braced his hands on his knees to steady himself. Buffy... if it hadn't been for Buffy he'd probably never have come on this quest. She was his curse and... and she was so much more. For a moment, his entire existence kaleidoscoped and he saw it all, from his making, through Angel's desertion, his life at Dru's side, to Sunnydale and the chip and Dru's own desertion of him. All points on his journey, all leading to a cave in Africa. He saw how each small step had led him to this and he saw the inevitability of each one of them, given his nature. All at once, he realised that this was the moment of his destiny.
Above him, the demon's eyes flared green. "Very well," it said. Spike lifted his face, suddenly nervous about what he'd asked for. "We will return..." The demon paused dramatically and Spike would have laughed if the sound could have got past the lump in his throat. The demon's hand reached out towards him as it finished its judgment, "your soul."
When the demon's hand touched his chest, it seemed to explode in a burst of fiery orange and his body arched, a new pain ripping through him. Spike threw back his head and screamed.