Fic: The Past is Prologue
Halloween Meme gakked from rahirah and slaymesoftly:
All of you fanficcers out there, I want you to post a link to your most Halloween-ish story. Note, the story doesn't need to be about Halloween, or even take place at Halloween. Just the story that you think best fits the Halloween spirit.
Some ground rules:
1. It must be complete. No WiPs allowed.
2. Do NOT post just a link.
Post all header information, such as title, fandom, pairing, trigger warnings, etc.
3. All fandoms welcome.
4. All pairings welcome.
5. All genres welcome.
For example: If you think the story you've written that best fits the Halloween spirit scares the pants off people, fantastic! If you think the story you've written that best fits the Halloween spirit is a straight-up laugh-fest, fantastic!
Here's my offering: I don't know how "Halloween" it is, but it does mention Frankenstein, contains an angry mob, and involves the unlife of a vampire. I guess that qualifies.
The truth is, when I saw the meme, I scrounged around my old, discarded tidbits file, looking for something that might work if I edited a little. It's something I wrote during the summer following the airing of BtVS Season 6 that never found its way into a bigger story (I just added the AtS Season 5 WWII reference. Everything else really does date back to the days following Season 6). It's also being posted unbeta'd. You have been warned.
Title: The Past is Prologue
Author: Shipperx
Genre: Horror/Angst
Pairings: Spike/Dru, Spike/Buffy
Rating: PG-13 to possibly a light 'R'
Summary: What goes through Spike's mind at the end of the episode "Grave"
Firelight cast shifting patterns onto stone walls, highlighting and obscuring ancient symbols as a voice said, “I am Temu. I came into existence in Nu before the Pillars of Shu had been created...“
Spike snorted. And people said William the Bloody Pratt’s poetry was awful.
He paced the width of the cave, his bare feet making no sound on the sand as he moved from one corner of the chamber to the other, doing anything to avoid looking at the creature he had traveled to this place to find.
In fleeting moments of honesty, Spike admitted that he had no idea what he was doing, what he really wanted, or why he was here. He didn’t understand his motives -- which was bloody ridiculous because they were his motives after all. He should understand them even if no one else did, but Spike didn’t think he understood much of anything any more. His world made no sense. His choices made no sense. What he had done to Buffy…
He blindly grasped at straws and notions, anything that might put an end to the confusion boiling inside him.
Was this a mistake? Would this be one more disaster in his unending list of disasters? He would be the first to admit this trip to the Dark Continent was not the culmination of a plan but an act of impulse and desperation.
It was the only choice he had left.
The creature’s eyes brightened, becoming pure white light, then dimmed to the previous phosphorescent green. “You want to be Ptah --“
“Who said I wanted Ta? What is Ta? I told you what I want and it bloody well isn’t something I’d say if I buggered off for tea.“
“I know what you want.”
“What I earned.” Spike lowered his brows and frowned in what he knew was an intimidating glower. “Let’s not forget the fiery trials and torture.”
“So be it, Shesmu. ‘What you earned.’”
“Better. And hurry it up. I didn’t bargain on this taking forever.” Somewhere, around the edges of his consciousness, pain had begun to creep in. Determination had kept it at bay at first, but pain could only be ignored for so long.
The being’s booming voice caused dust to rain down from the ceiling. “You have endured the required trials.”
"So you’ll give me what I want. Make me what I was so Buffy can have what she deserves.”
“Very well.” The creature touched Spike and unadulterated agony shot through him, through his eyes, his chest, even the soles of his feet. White-hot lightening cauterized the hollowness inside him. “We return your soul.”
It was too much. The pain… Spike threw back his head and screamed.
Take it away. Make it stop.
The room began to stretch . . . only it didn’t stretch at all. In reality, the room stayed the exactly the same. It only felt like it was moving, like the distance between where he stood and where he wanted to go expanded even as he moved forward.
What the bloody hell?
It felt like walking down a corridor filled with cobwebs, passing through gossamer barriers whose partial remains clung to him in successive layers. Only it wasn’t the handiwork of spiders clinging to him, but thoughts and memories.
He saw his father stretched across a massive mahogany bed. Wine velvet drapes blocked the daylight spilling through the windows as candles guttered in pools of white wax. He could see the gold guineas that had been placed over his father’s eyes as his mother sat sobbing into a linen handkerchief.
“Mum?”
There was a startled expression on her tear-stained face as she reached for him, clutching him tightly to her breast. “William…”
He was a child again, filled with the lilac scent that had clung to his mother’s hair and the feel of black bombazine beneath his cheek. He heard the rustling of her crinolines and the choking, sometimes hiccupping sound that she made as she cried. “He is gone.”
“Papa wouldn’t leave us.”
“He is gone.” She stood, leaving him, crossing the bedroom to throw open the draperies.
Light flooded the room blinding him, leaving his mother in dark silhouette. “I am nothing without him,” she said in a quiet, defeated voice.
William ran, throwing himself at her skirts, wrapping his arms tightly around her. “You’re not nothing. Not to me. I need you. I love you. Mum, please. . .”
He remembered squirming beneath Charterhouse’s headmaster’s cold, impatient stare. “Finish your recitation, William.”
“A gentleman never insinuates evil that he dare not say out.“ He took a breath before continuing on. “He has too much good sense to be affronted by insults. He submits to pain because it is inevitable, to bereavement because it is irreparable, and to death because it is his destiny. . .”
There had been the party where he had overheard a woman say, “Have you heard? They call him ‘William the Bloody’ because of his bloody awful poetry.” And Cecily Addams had descended the stairs, a vision in lavender and white. When she had sat beside him on the settee he had been acutely aware of the way a single chestnut-colored curl had caressed her cheek.
She had asked, “Your poetry. It’s... they’re not written about me, are they?”
“They’re about how I feel.”
“Yes, but are they about me?”
Drusilla had approached him outside a hay and dung-scented stable.
“I see what you want," she'd said. "Something glowing. Something glistening. Something--“ She had paused, looking startled by the voices that whispered in her head. “--effulgent. Do you want it?”
“Yes. God, yes.”
And she had touched him and possessed him, taking something precious and vital away.
Passion. Bliss. Pain. Hurt. It had always hurt.
There had been a tugging. . .a tugging in his mind and in his chest. Pulling. Pulling so hard that something snapped, leaving him feeling...
It wasn’t peace. It had never been peace. It was freedom and surcease from pain. Exhilaration. Exultation. Strength. Power. Rage.
Rage had flushed Angelus’ features. “Remind me, William. Why don’t we kill you?”
And Drusilla’s childlike laughter had filled with demented glee. “The king of cups expects a picnic, but today is not his birthday.”
Angelus had a certain smug smile that had Spike want to rip off his face as his grandsire had said, "Just don't get it, now do you? Well, you're new, and a little dim, so let me explain to you how things are now. There's no belonging or deserving anymore. You can take what you want, have what you want, but nothing is yours."
Other memories surfaced--salt and soy and blood flavored with rice wine, the forlorn yet strangely peaceful face of a Slayer when the battle had been lost.
Triumph. Accomplishment. Success.
Houdini and Valentino. Flappers, the Ziegfeld Follies, and bathtub gin. Cigarettes and sex and dark movie houses. Drusilla petulantly demanding a new doll.
“Wicked you are,” she had whispered late one night. “Wicked and cunning and kind.”
“Kind, love?” He had been torn between affront and surprise.
“A kind like no other.”
Spike had smiled and nuzzled her ear, making her sigh. She'd hummed. “Neither here nor there, but all in between. It hurts you and drives you. Makes you do things you shouldn’t.”
He had grinned. “I do things I shouldn’t because I’m bad.”
But worry had entered her eyes as she had cupped his check and had shaken her head. “Poor thing. You have no place to be and no one to belong to.”
“I have you, pet. You’re all I need.”
But her attention had wandered. “Look, young lovers. Let’s have them for dinner.”
There had been white linen covered tables and Cotton Club jazz. Billie Holiday’s whiskey-soaked voice had filled the darkness with a haunting melody. “I thought for awhile that your poignant smile was tinged with the sadness of a great love for me. Ah yes, I was wrong. Again, I was wrong. Life is lonely…”
Screwball comedies. Boris Karloff as Frankenstein. Bombs over London. Humans fleeing down Charring Cross Road. Humans had just cause to fear.
Spike had grabbed Dru’s hand as her face had lit with odd ecstasy. “Can you feel the chaos?” she’d asked. “Isn’t it grand? It feels like the end of the world!”
Deafening sirens had blared and there’d been flashes of light caused by explosions and the fires they had left in their wake.
St. Pauls Cathedral had been surrounded by a wall of flames and smoke, making it look as though the church had been dragged into hell.
He’d laughed. “It could be the end of us, pet, if we’re not careful.”
A high-pitched whine that had been too close --entirely too close-- before a percussive blast had thrown them both into the air, along with bricks, glass, dust and scorching bits of shrapnel. Drusilla had screamed and Spike had staggered to his feet with a half-deafened ringing in his ears as he'd stared with startled disturbance at the sight of wood splinters embedded into the wall and all the way through his arm.
He’d wrapping his fingers tightly around Dru’s hand and had began dragging through a doorway, down flights of stairs, down to where all manner of Londoners had huddled in the Underground looking at one another with terrified and bewildered eyes.
There had been boat trip from Calais as they departed Vichy France. And a visit to the madness of Berlin in the waning days of the war. He'd swum in the ocean thanks to the turncoat Angelus. There had been seaweed and jellyfish and too many mouthfulls of brine.
Dark times then, both within and without. War and peace and the search for Dru.
Liverpool. Mop-topped four.
“It’s a mini-skirt.” He’d held it out, jiggling it like a new toy.
Dru’s dark eyes had widened with. “Oh no, I couldn’t wear that.”
“It’s the middle of the twentieth century.” He’d warpped his arms around her, playfully nipped her neck and angled his hips suggestively as he tangled his fingers in her hair. “You’d look smashing.”
“’Tisn’t decent.”
“We’re evil, Dru!”
“Miss Edith would not approve.”
They had drained a pair of hippies over Jim Morrison’s grave, adding the boys’ blood to their offerings of alcohol and mescaline, dropping their corpses over the rock star’s tombstone.
Spike had deviated from his path of destruction long enough to examine the boys new-fangled eight track player and had lost himself in a dead poet’s slurred words.
Strange days have found us. Strange days have tracked us down. They’re going to destroy our casual joys. We shall go on playing or find a new town.
CGBG and the Summer of Sam. Acid washed jeans, safety pins, and Ultra Light Blonde #4. A Slayer’s coat taken in token and in tribute.
“Killed another Slayer, you did” Dru had said in a sing-song voice. She had been so certain even before Spike had said the words.
She had circled him, saying in low, dire tones, “They’ll curse you for that. Hold you and claim you. Make you their whipping boy.”
“Not me, love.”
“Yes, you... and not you. Strange creature you are.” Dru had touched his coat. “So dark.” She’d touched his head. “And so light.” Suddenly she pulled away, looking terrified. “What are you?”
Prague and daylight had been on the horizon, the first blush of pink lightening the sky as they'd dashed and skidded through wet streets with with an angry mob on their heels, a mob that had known what Dru and he were. At the very least, they had suspected.
He’d lost Dru somehow. Even now he couldn’t say how it had happened, just that one moment she'd been by his side and the next she had been gone.
He’d searched for her and then had heard laughter which had sounded both delighted and pained.
"Dru?"
Within a courtyard, behind an archway of rusticated stone, Spike had found a young priest with his neck crooked in a way that nature had never intended. There’d been no question that the young man was dead as Drusilla had sat half draped over the corpse, laughing and crying at the same time.
A cold wave of dread had washed over Spike as he had approached the scene. There had been blood on the ground. Not just the priest’s blood, but Dru’s as well. A river of scarlet had run from wounds on her arms and thighs and there had been a wicked slash down her cheek.
Turned out that the priest had gotten in a his licks too.
Then Spike had noticed the sign of the cross burned into Drusilla’s forehead and that there was a stake protruding from her chest, missing her heart by no more than an inch.
Spike had heard the people coming, the footsteps running down the street. Voices had cried murder and monsters and death.
“Dru," he'd said. "We’ve got to go!”
She’d looked at him blankly and hadn’t seemed to hear.
“Pet?” Spike had knelt and rested his hand on her shoulder.
Dru had screamed... and screamed and screamed. It had been a horrifying sound.
“What has the bastard done to you?” Spike had asked, noting the welts, blisters as he’d examined her ruined face.
Something had burned his hand.
Holy water too?
Dru had said in a dreamy, pain-filled haze. “He tried to drive the demon from my soul. Said words and prayers.” Her eyes had looked like those of a wild, dying animal. “I hurt, Spike. I’m disappearing into thin air. Do you see me fading?”
He'd used his coat to bundle her before cradling her in his arms. “Not going anywhere, pet.”
“Yes, you are.” She’d pettily kicked the priest’s corpse, sending it toppling down the cathedral’s steps. “Stupid man,” she railed at the remains. “What else can I be? There’s nothing else inside me!”
She’d been a pitiful sight, weak as a kitten and verging on tears once again. And Spike had been achingly aware of the fact that the angry voices were drawing close.
That night had been full of shouts, threats, and screams as she’d clung to him. “An angel will come for me,” she’d whispered. “Black of heart and heavy browed.”
“No angel, pet.”
She’d looked Spike dead in the eye. “Things will change.”
A road sign had toppled beside a California road. He'd enjoyed it and had delighted in what he saw. Look at everything so bright, shiny, and new.
The first breezes of fall had lightened the air and had seemed to announce 'home, sweet, home.'
And pounding music had accompanied the very first time that he laid eyes on her.
One step away from falling to my knees.
The Slayer had moved with the music, young, lithe, and strong. He’d watched her dance, inside the club and later with the vamp outside the door. He’d introduced himself and had almost been polite.
“Nice work, love.”
She’d asked, “Who are you?”
“You’ll find out Saturday.”
She'd tilted her pretty blonde head. "What happens Saturday?"
"I kill you."
Hunter and prey had met face to face and neither had been certain who was who.
“Tell you what,” Spike had said. “As a personal favor from me to you, I’ll make it quick. It won’t hurt a bit.”
“Wrong,” Buffy had answered. “It’s gonna hurt a lot.”
She’d been clever. Had always been clever when she’d wanted to be.
Joyce had stood over him, a lioness protecting her young. “Get the hell away from my daughter!”
Later still, Angelus had mocked him. “Things change, Spikey. Got to roll with the punches.”
But some things had never seemed to change.
Spike had fumed but it had been an impotent rage. He’d been trapped in a chair, and he’d heard noises in other rooms, sounds made by Angelus and his own beloved Dru--traitorous sounds... and sighs... and the smell of sex.
Spike remembered with a smile the way that Buffy had looked at him with shock and disbelief when he’d punched a cop and announced, “I want to save the world.”
Then on another night in another year, he'd sat forlorn and defeated with Willow at his side. The witch had been nervous and frightened as he'd confessed, “Dru said I’d gone soft. Wasn’t demon enough for the likes of her.”
Joyce had nodded with understanding. “Well, she sounds quite unreasonable to me.”
Joyce had been a dear that way. She’d offered him marshmallows and hot chocolate. She’d listened. So rare to find someone who listened.
But the vision of Joyce’s face was quickly replaced by the memory of Buffy’s sneering one. “You’re beneath me.”
She’d pushed him to the ground, stood over him, and tossed money in his face.
“You don’t even know what real feelings are,” she'd said with contempt.
Then Dru had returned, offering a path of escape. One that he’d refused... sort of.
“Poor Spike. So lost. Not even I can help you now.” There had been tears in Dru's eyes.
Then Joyce had died, making mortal death once again seem real.
She never treated me like a freak.
“Her mistake,” Xander had said, and the boy had meant it. Who knows, maybe the boy had been right.
Then Buffy had died, making death personal, filling him with grief that no drink and no tears could purge.
But in Sunnydale, miracles happened... or at the very least black magic did. She'd returned and, in a surprise even greater than that, she had turned to him.
“I can be alone with you,” she’d said, and he’d looked at her wondering whether he should be gratified or cut by her words.
She had said one thing and he’d heard another. She had kissed him and had told him, “I was depressed. That’s all it was, okay?”
Blind. Foolish. Wanker.
He’d thought that he’d known her, thought that he’d known the kind of girl that she was. He’d believed he’d meant. . .something.
He’d believed that somehow there still remained a thing called hope.
“A man can change,” he’d said.
Had he meant it? Did he know?
“You're not a man.” And Buffy had hit him, driving him to the ground. “You're a thing.”
But their dance hadn’t ended there. It had only become more complicated. She'd taken taken what he'd been willing to give, and he’d grabbed at whatever she offered.
Her eyes had widened and her lips had formed an astonished ‘O.”
Spike had thought This is it. This is everything. He’d thought she’d seen him. He’d thought that it had meant more.
Then morning followed and reality had come with it.
“Last night was the end of this freak show.” She had been so insistent. “What do you think is going to happen, Spike? We're gonna read the paper together? Play footsie under the rubble?”
Anger and impatience had fueled him. “So what? You go back to treating me like dirt until the next time you get an itch you can't scratch?”
“It was a mistake. You were convenient.”
Convenient? He’d laughed. He was the least bloody convenient thing in her world.
“Only a complete loser would ever hook up with you.” Xander had looked so self righteous as he’d yelled the words, as self righteous as Buffy when she had stood in a shadowed alley and screamed, “I am not your girl!”
She had been merciless, pouring out her self-loathing with every blow. “You don't have a soul! There's nothing good or clean in you. That's why you can't understand!”
He had lain bloodied and exhausted on the ground.
“You're dead inside!” she’d said. “You can't feel anything real. I could never be your girl.”
She had meant it. Why had he not allowed himself to understand that she had meant it?
“Tell me you love me,” she'd whispered in a moment of weakness.
“I love you. You know I do.”
She’d touched him. “Tell me you want me.”
“I always want you. In point of fact, I -“
She hadn’t wanted the words. She’d never wanted them. She’d said that being with him was killing her and had left him in the shadows when she'd walked into the light. A path he could not follow, no matter how hard he might try.
He’d tried to tell her, tried to find some way to make her understand.
“But you won't see it,” he’d said. “Something happened to me. The way I feel about you. It's different. No matter how hard you try to convince yourself it isn't. It's real.”
“I think it is,“ she’s said, a hint of compassion entering her voice. “For you.”
But for her, he and what they’d shared had been a ‘thing,’ something left unnamed because she was ashamed of it, ashamed of what she had done and of him. It had been written across her features as she, Xander, and Anya had talked as though he was not there.
“You let that evil, soulless thing touch you,” Harris had yelled. “I look at you and I feel sick because you had sex with that.”
The look on Buffy's face had been enough to make Spike ache.
He’d tried to move on, tried to not care. He'd tried to change, to do, to be... whatever the bloody hell it would take to make her--to make anyone-- see.
He was real.
He existed.
He was more than just a thing.
He had wanted to apologize for his mistakes. He had wanted...
“No, Spike, stop!”
He'd wanted to hold on, to not lose everything.
“Spike!”
Reality had crashed in under the unforgiving green-white fluorescent light of a narrow upstairs bathroom.
“Oh, God, Buffy. I didn’t...”
Didn’t he?
“Because I stopped you,” she’d said, pulling her robe tightly around her. “Something I should have done long ago.”
What had he done? What had he meant to do? What promises to her, to himself, had he violated?
And if he was only what she thought he was, why did he care?
Now, Buffy was there whenever he closed his eyes, screaming, yelling, crying, looking at him with contempt. He couldn’t escape, not the thoughts, the feelings, or this... this stabbing pain in his gut.
It wouldn’t go away. It wouldn’t stop. It was killing him and it had to end… somehow.
If his feelings weren’t real, then take them away. If they could not exist, then purge them because they burned in his chest and behind his eyes. Emotions rushed through him -- guilt, remorse, regret, and love. And all of it was impossible. The feelings could not be real. No one heard or saw them. They were trees falling in the forest that made no sound.
But if they were not real, then why did they stay? If they did not live, why the urge to kill them? Kill them dead so they would stop tormenting him, stop making him dream of things that never were and never could be, stop making him long for something out his reach. Make it stop. It had to stop, because it wasn’t what he was supposed to be and he couldn’t be anything else.
“We are done,” the creature said, looking at Spike curled in the fetal position on the floor.
Oh, God! What had he done? In trying to be something that should not be, he had become... nothing.
All of you fanficcers out there, I want you to post a link to your most Halloween-ish story. Note, the story doesn't need to be about Halloween, or even take place at Halloween. Just the story that you think best fits the Halloween spirit.
Some ground rules:
1. It must be complete. No WiPs allowed.
2. Do NOT post just a link.
Post all header information, such as title, fandom, pairing, trigger warnings, etc.
3. All fandoms welcome.
4. All pairings welcome.
5. All genres welcome.
For example: If you think the story you've written that best fits the Halloween spirit scares the pants off people, fantastic! If you think the story you've written that best fits the Halloween spirit is a straight-up laugh-fest, fantastic!
Here's my offering: I don't know how "Halloween" it is, but it does mention Frankenstein, contains an angry mob, and involves the unlife of a vampire. I guess that qualifies.
The truth is, when I saw the meme, I scrounged around my old, discarded tidbits file, looking for something that might work if I edited a little. It's something I wrote during the summer following the airing of BtVS Season 6 that never found its way into a bigger story (I just added the AtS Season 5 WWII reference. Everything else really does date back to the days following Season 6). It's also being posted unbeta'd. You have been warned.
Title: The Past is Prologue
Author: Shipperx
Genre: Horror/Angst
Pairings: Spike/Dru, Spike/Buffy
Rating: PG-13 to possibly a light 'R'
Summary: What goes through Spike's mind at the end of the episode "Grave"
Firelight cast shifting patterns onto stone walls, highlighting and obscuring ancient symbols as a voice said, “I am Temu. I came into existence in Nu before the Pillars of Shu had been created...“
Spike snorted. And people said William the Bloody Pratt’s poetry was awful.
He paced the width of the cave, his bare feet making no sound on the sand as he moved from one corner of the chamber to the other, doing anything to avoid looking at the creature he had traveled to this place to find.
In fleeting moments of honesty, Spike admitted that he had no idea what he was doing, what he really wanted, or why he was here. He didn’t understand his motives -- which was bloody ridiculous because they were his motives after all. He should understand them even if no one else did, but Spike didn’t think he understood much of anything any more. His world made no sense. His choices made no sense. What he had done to Buffy…
He blindly grasped at straws and notions, anything that might put an end to the confusion boiling inside him.
Was this a mistake? Would this be one more disaster in his unending list of disasters? He would be the first to admit this trip to the Dark Continent was not the culmination of a plan but an act of impulse and desperation.
It was the only choice he had left.
The creature’s eyes brightened, becoming pure white light, then dimmed to the previous phosphorescent green. “You want to be Ptah --“
“Who said I wanted Ta? What is Ta? I told you what I want and it bloody well isn’t something I’d say if I buggered off for tea.“
“I know what you want.”
“What I earned.” Spike lowered his brows and frowned in what he knew was an intimidating glower. “Let’s not forget the fiery trials and torture.”
“So be it, Shesmu. ‘What you earned.’”
“Better. And hurry it up. I didn’t bargain on this taking forever.” Somewhere, around the edges of his consciousness, pain had begun to creep in. Determination had kept it at bay at first, but pain could only be ignored for so long.
The being’s booming voice caused dust to rain down from the ceiling. “You have endured the required trials.”
"So you’ll give me what I want. Make me what I was so Buffy can have what she deserves.”
“Very well.” The creature touched Spike and unadulterated agony shot through him, through his eyes, his chest, even the soles of his feet. White-hot lightening cauterized the hollowness inside him. “We return your soul.”
It was too much. The pain… Spike threw back his head and screamed.
Take it away. Make it stop.
The room began to stretch . . . only it didn’t stretch at all. In reality, the room stayed the exactly the same. It only felt like it was moving, like the distance between where he stood and where he wanted to go expanded even as he moved forward.
What the bloody hell?
It felt like walking down a corridor filled with cobwebs, passing through gossamer barriers whose partial remains clung to him in successive layers. Only it wasn’t the handiwork of spiders clinging to him, but thoughts and memories.
He saw his father stretched across a massive mahogany bed. Wine velvet drapes blocked the daylight spilling through the windows as candles guttered in pools of white wax. He could see the gold guineas that had been placed over his father’s eyes as his mother sat sobbing into a linen handkerchief.
“Mum?”
There was a startled expression on her tear-stained face as she reached for him, clutching him tightly to her breast. “William…”
He was a child again, filled with the lilac scent that had clung to his mother’s hair and the feel of black bombazine beneath his cheek. He heard the rustling of her crinolines and the choking, sometimes hiccupping sound that she made as she cried. “He is gone.”
“Papa wouldn’t leave us.”
“He is gone.” She stood, leaving him, crossing the bedroom to throw open the draperies.
Light flooded the room blinding him, leaving his mother in dark silhouette. “I am nothing without him,” she said in a quiet, defeated voice.
William ran, throwing himself at her skirts, wrapping his arms tightly around her. “You’re not nothing. Not to me. I need you. I love you. Mum, please. . .”
He remembered squirming beneath Charterhouse’s headmaster’s cold, impatient stare. “Finish your recitation, William.”
“A gentleman never insinuates evil that he dare not say out.“ He took a breath before continuing on. “He has too much good sense to be affronted by insults. He submits to pain because it is inevitable, to bereavement because it is irreparable, and to death because it is his destiny. . .”
There had been the party where he had overheard a woman say, “Have you heard? They call him ‘William the Bloody’ because of his bloody awful poetry.” And Cecily Addams had descended the stairs, a vision in lavender and white. When she had sat beside him on the settee he had been acutely aware of the way a single chestnut-colored curl had caressed her cheek.
She had asked, “Your poetry. It’s... they’re not written about me, are they?”
“They’re about how I feel.”
“Yes, but are they about me?”
Drusilla had approached him outside a hay and dung-scented stable.
“I see what you want," she'd said. "Something glowing. Something glistening. Something--“ She had paused, looking startled by the voices that whispered in her head. “--effulgent. Do you want it?”
“Yes. God, yes.”
And she had touched him and possessed him, taking something precious and vital away.
Passion. Bliss. Pain. Hurt. It had always hurt.
There had been a tugging. . .a tugging in his mind and in his chest. Pulling. Pulling so hard that something snapped, leaving him feeling...
It wasn’t peace. It had never been peace. It was freedom and surcease from pain. Exhilaration. Exultation. Strength. Power. Rage.
Rage had flushed Angelus’ features. “Remind me, William. Why don’t we kill you?”
And Drusilla’s childlike laughter had filled with demented glee. “The king of cups expects a picnic, but today is not his birthday.”
Angelus had a certain smug smile that had Spike want to rip off his face as his grandsire had said, "Just don't get it, now do you? Well, you're new, and a little dim, so let me explain to you how things are now. There's no belonging or deserving anymore. You can take what you want, have what you want, but nothing is yours."
Other memories surfaced--salt and soy and blood flavored with rice wine, the forlorn yet strangely peaceful face of a Slayer when the battle had been lost.
Triumph. Accomplishment. Success.
Houdini and Valentino. Flappers, the Ziegfeld Follies, and bathtub gin. Cigarettes and sex and dark movie houses. Drusilla petulantly demanding a new doll.
“Wicked you are,” she had whispered late one night. “Wicked and cunning and kind.”
“Kind, love?” He had been torn between affront and surprise.
“A kind like no other.”
Spike had smiled and nuzzled her ear, making her sigh. She'd hummed. “Neither here nor there, but all in between. It hurts you and drives you. Makes you do things you shouldn’t.”
He had grinned. “I do things I shouldn’t because I’m bad.”
But worry had entered her eyes as she had cupped his check and had shaken her head. “Poor thing. You have no place to be and no one to belong to.”
“I have you, pet. You’re all I need.”
But her attention had wandered. “Look, young lovers. Let’s have them for dinner.”
There had been white linen covered tables and Cotton Club jazz. Billie Holiday’s whiskey-soaked voice had filled the darkness with a haunting melody. “I thought for awhile that your poignant smile was tinged with the sadness of a great love for me. Ah yes, I was wrong. Again, I was wrong. Life is lonely…”
Screwball comedies. Boris Karloff as Frankenstein. Bombs over London. Humans fleeing down Charring Cross Road. Humans had just cause to fear.
Spike had grabbed Dru’s hand as her face had lit with odd ecstasy. “Can you feel the chaos?” she’d asked. “Isn’t it grand? It feels like the end of the world!”
Deafening sirens had blared and there’d been flashes of light caused by explosions and the fires they had left in their wake.
St. Pauls Cathedral had been surrounded by a wall of flames and smoke, making it look as though the church had been dragged into hell.
He’d laughed. “It could be the end of us, pet, if we’re not careful.”
A high-pitched whine that had been too close --entirely too close-- before a percussive blast had thrown them both into the air, along with bricks, glass, dust and scorching bits of shrapnel. Drusilla had screamed and Spike had staggered to his feet with a half-deafened ringing in his ears as he'd stared with startled disturbance at the sight of wood splinters embedded into the wall and all the way through his arm.
He’d wrapping his fingers tightly around Dru’s hand and had began dragging through a doorway, down flights of stairs, down to where all manner of Londoners had huddled in the Underground looking at one another with terrified and bewildered eyes.
There had been boat trip from Calais as they departed Vichy France. And a visit to the madness of Berlin in the waning days of the war. He'd swum in the ocean thanks to the turncoat Angelus. There had been seaweed and jellyfish and too many mouthfulls of brine.
Dark times then, both within and without. War and peace and the search for Dru.
Liverpool. Mop-topped four.
“It’s a mini-skirt.” He’d held it out, jiggling it like a new toy.
Dru’s dark eyes had widened with. “Oh no, I couldn’t wear that.”
“It’s the middle of the twentieth century.” He’d warpped his arms around her, playfully nipped her neck and angled his hips suggestively as he tangled his fingers in her hair. “You’d look smashing.”
“’Tisn’t decent.”
“We’re evil, Dru!”
“Miss Edith would not approve.”
They had drained a pair of hippies over Jim Morrison’s grave, adding the boys’ blood to their offerings of alcohol and mescaline, dropping their corpses over the rock star’s tombstone.
Spike had deviated from his path of destruction long enough to examine the boys new-fangled eight track player and had lost himself in a dead poet’s slurred words.
Strange days have found us. Strange days have tracked us down. They’re going to destroy our casual joys. We shall go on playing or find a new town.
CGBG and the Summer of Sam. Acid washed jeans, safety pins, and Ultra Light Blonde #4. A Slayer’s coat taken in token and in tribute.
“Killed another Slayer, you did” Dru had said in a sing-song voice. She had been so certain even before Spike had said the words.
She had circled him, saying in low, dire tones, “They’ll curse you for that. Hold you and claim you. Make you their whipping boy.”
“Not me, love.”
“Yes, you... and not you. Strange creature you are.” Dru had touched his coat. “So dark.” She’d touched his head. “And so light.” Suddenly she pulled away, looking terrified. “What are you?”
Prague and daylight had been on the horizon, the first blush of pink lightening the sky as they'd dashed and skidded through wet streets with with an angry mob on their heels, a mob that had known what Dru and he were. At the very least, they had suspected.
He’d lost Dru somehow. Even now he couldn’t say how it had happened, just that one moment she'd been by his side and the next she had been gone.
He’d searched for her and then had heard laughter which had sounded both delighted and pained.
"Dru?"
Within a courtyard, behind an archway of rusticated stone, Spike had found a young priest with his neck crooked in a way that nature had never intended. There’d been no question that the young man was dead as Drusilla had sat half draped over the corpse, laughing and crying at the same time.
A cold wave of dread had washed over Spike as he had approached the scene. There had been blood on the ground. Not just the priest’s blood, but Dru’s as well. A river of scarlet had run from wounds on her arms and thighs and there had been a wicked slash down her cheek.
Turned out that the priest had gotten in a his licks too.
Then Spike had noticed the sign of the cross burned into Drusilla’s forehead and that there was a stake protruding from her chest, missing her heart by no more than an inch.
Spike had heard the people coming, the footsteps running down the street. Voices had cried murder and monsters and death.
“Dru," he'd said. "We’ve got to go!”
She’d looked at him blankly and hadn’t seemed to hear.
“Pet?” Spike had knelt and rested his hand on her shoulder.
Dru had screamed... and screamed and screamed. It had been a horrifying sound.
“What has the bastard done to you?” Spike had asked, noting the welts, blisters as he’d examined her ruined face.
Something had burned his hand.
Holy water too?
Dru had said in a dreamy, pain-filled haze. “He tried to drive the demon from my soul. Said words and prayers.” Her eyes had looked like those of a wild, dying animal. “I hurt, Spike. I’m disappearing into thin air. Do you see me fading?”
He'd used his coat to bundle her before cradling her in his arms. “Not going anywhere, pet.”
“Yes, you are.” She’d pettily kicked the priest’s corpse, sending it toppling down the cathedral’s steps. “Stupid man,” she railed at the remains. “What else can I be? There’s nothing else inside me!”
She’d been a pitiful sight, weak as a kitten and verging on tears once again. And Spike had been achingly aware of the fact that the angry voices were drawing close.
That night had been full of shouts, threats, and screams as she’d clung to him. “An angel will come for me,” she’d whispered. “Black of heart and heavy browed.”
“No angel, pet.”
She’d looked Spike dead in the eye. “Things will change.”
A road sign had toppled beside a California road. He'd enjoyed it and had delighted in what he saw. Look at everything so bright, shiny, and new.
The first breezes of fall had lightened the air and had seemed to announce 'home, sweet, home.'
And pounding music had accompanied the very first time that he laid eyes on her.
One step away from falling to my knees.
The Slayer had moved with the music, young, lithe, and strong. He’d watched her dance, inside the club and later with the vamp outside the door. He’d introduced himself and had almost been polite.
“Nice work, love.”
She’d asked, “Who are you?”
“You’ll find out Saturday.”
She'd tilted her pretty blonde head. "What happens Saturday?"
"I kill you."
Hunter and prey had met face to face and neither had been certain who was who.
“Tell you what,” Spike had said. “As a personal favor from me to you, I’ll make it quick. It won’t hurt a bit.”
“Wrong,” Buffy had answered. “It’s gonna hurt a lot.”
She’d been clever. Had always been clever when she’d wanted to be.
Joyce had stood over him, a lioness protecting her young. “Get the hell away from my daughter!”
Later still, Angelus had mocked him. “Things change, Spikey. Got to roll with the punches.”
But some things had never seemed to change.
Spike had fumed but it had been an impotent rage. He’d been trapped in a chair, and he’d heard noises in other rooms, sounds made by Angelus and his own beloved Dru--traitorous sounds... and sighs... and the smell of sex.
Spike remembered with a smile the way that Buffy had looked at him with shock and disbelief when he’d punched a cop and announced, “I want to save the world.”
Then on another night in another year, he'd sat forlorn and defeated with Willow at his side. The witch had been nervous and frightened as he'd confessed, “Dru said I’d gone soft. Wasn’t demon enough for the likes of her.”
Joyce had nodded with understanding. “Well, she sounds quite unreasonable to me.”
Joyce had been a dear that way. She’d offered him marshmallows and hot chocolate. She’d listened. So rare to find someone who listened.
But the vision of Joyce’s face was quickly replaced by the memory of Buffy’s sneering one. “You’re beneath me.”
She’d pushed him to the ground, stood over him, and tossed money in his face.
“You don’t even know what real feelings are,” she'd said with contempt.
Then Dru had returned, offering a path of escape. One that he’d refused... sort of.
“Poor Spike. So lost. Not even I can help you now.” There had been tears in Dru's eyes.
Then Joyce had died, making mortal death once again seem real.
She never treated me like a freak.
“Her mistake,” Xander had said, and the boy had meant it. Who knows, maybe the boy had been right.
Then Buffy had died, making death personal, filling him with grief that no drink and no tears could purge.
But in Sunnydale, miracles happened... or at the very least black magic did. She'd returned and, in a surprise even greater than that, she had turned to him.
“I can be alone with you,” she’d said, and he’d looked at her wondering whether he should be gratified or cut by her words.
She had said one thing and he’d heard another. She had kissed him and had told him, “I was depressed. That’s all it was, okay?”
Blind. Foolish. Wanker.
He’d thought that he’d known her, thought that he’d known the kind of girl that she was. He’d believed he’d meant. . .something.
He’d believed that somehow there still remained a thing called hope.
“A man can change,” he’d said.
Had he meant it? Did he know?
“You're not a man.” And Buffy had hit him, driving him to the ground. “You're a thing.”
But their dance hadn’t ended there. It had only become more complicated. She'd taken taken what he'd been willing to give, and he’d grabbed at whatever she offered.
Her eyes had widened and her lips had formed an astonished ‘O.”
Spike had thought This is it. This is everything. He’d thought she’d seen him. He’d thought that it had meant more.
Then morning followed and reality had come with it.
“Last night was the end of this freak show.” She had been so insistent. “What do you think is going to happen, Spike? We're gonna read the paper together? Play footsie under the rubble?”
Anger and impatience had fueled him. “So what? You go back to treating me like dirt until the next time you get an itch you can't scratch?”
“It was a mistake. You were convenient.”
Convenient? He’d laughed. He was the least bloody convenient thing in her world.
“Only a complete loser would ever hook up with you.” Xander had looked so self righteous as he’d yelled the words, as self righteous as Buffy when she had stood in a shadowed alley and screamed, “I am not your girl!”
She had been merciless, pouring out her self-loathing with every blow. “You don't have a soul! There's nothing good or clean in you. That's why you can't understand!”
He had lain bloodied and exhausted on the ground.
“You're dead inside!” she’d said. “You can't feel anything real. I could never be your girl.”
She had meant it. Why had he not allowed himself to understand that she had meant it?
“Tell me you love me,” she'd whispered in a moment of weakness.
“I love you. You know I do.”
She’d touched him. “Tell me you want me.”
“I always want you. In point of fact, I -“
She hadn’t wanted the words. She’d never wanted them. She’d said that being with him was killing her and had left him in the shadows when she'd walked into the light. A path he could not follow, no matter how hard he might try.
He’d tried to tell her, tried to find some way to make her understand.
“But you won't see it,” he’d said. “Something happened to me. The way I feel about you. It's different. No matter how hard you try to convince yourself it isn't. It's real.”
“I think it is,“ she’s said, a hint of compassion entering her voice. “For you.”
But for her, he and what they’d shared had been a ‘thing,’ something left unnamed because she was ashamed of it, ashamed of what she had done and of him. It had been written across her features as she, Xander, and Anya had talked as though he was not there.
“You let that evil, soulless thing touch you,” Harris had yelled. “I look at you and I feel sick because you had sex with that.”
The look on Buffy's face had been enough to make Spike ache.
He’d tried to move on, tried to not care. He'd tried to change, to do, to be... whatever the bloody hell it would take to make her--to make anyone-- see.
He was real.
He existed.
He was more than just a thing.
He had wanted to apologize for his mistakes. He had wanted...
“No, Spike, stop!”
He'd wanted to hold on, to not lose everything.
“Spike!”
Reality had crashed in under the unforgiving green-white fluorescent light of a narrow upstairs bathroom.
“Oh, God, Buffy. I didn’t...”
Didn’t he?
“Because I stopped you,” she’d said, pulling her robe tightly around her. “Something I should have done long ago.”
What had he done? What had he meant to do? What promises to her, to himself, had he violated?
And if he was only what she thought he was, why did he care?
Now, Buffy was there whenever he closed his eyes, screaming, yelling, crying, looking at him with contempt. He couldn’t escape, not the thoughts, the feelings, or this... this stabbing pain in his gut.
It wouldn’t go away. It wouldn’t stop. It was killing him and it had to end… somehow.
If his feelings weren’t real, then take them away. If they could not exist, then purge them because they burned in his chest and behind his eyes. Emotions rushed through him -- guilt, remorse, regret, and love. And all of it was impossible. The feelings could not be real. No one heard or saw them. They were trees falling in the forest that made no sound.
But if they were not real, then why did they stay? If they did not live, why the urge to kill them? Kill them dead so they would stop tormenting him, stop making him dream of things that never were and never could be, stop making him long for something out his reach. Make it stop. It had to stop, because it wasn’t what he was supposed to be and he couldn’t be anything else.
“We are done,” the creature said, looking at Spike curled in the fetal position on the floor.
Oh, God! What had he done? In trying to be something that should not be, he had become... nothing.