Crossing over into unchipped country by dutchbuffy2305;
Rating: R;
Timeline: Starts around AtS 5.09 or 5.10, goes AU and ends somewhere in April;
Author's note: Big hugs to my wonderful betas, mommanerd, meko00, LadyAnne and Ayinhara;
Author's website: http://home.planet.nl/~dutchbuffy2305
Feedback: Yes, please do, to dutchbuffy2305@yahoo.co.uk
Chapter 1
Buffy gets home from evening class and steps into the welcoming warmth of the house with a shiver of relief. There is something so hostile about Cleveland weather, and her memories of California become more and more golden the oftener she gets them out to drool over them. Balmy nights and sunny days, thermal underwear a distant rumor. She heats up some chocolate and gets up the stairs to the study, where she can hear everyone being busy and talking a lot. The sounds from below indicate that Xander is busy in his work room, probably in the company of Andrew. They might be sealing Andrew's entire X-men collection in plastic, or whittling stakes.
The bright copper head bent over something invisible on the big table looks up. "Hey Buff. How was class?"
"Okay, with a smidgen of disappointment."
"Did you sit next to Hot Guy?"
"Hot Guy was not there, hence the smidgen."
"How about my interdimensional vortex generator?" Willow says proudly, indicating the shimmering circle of light in front of her.
"I'm thinking it would look really nice in my ears?"
"Bad idea. You'd be tearing across the galaxy for the rest of your natural life. Which would then be really short, I guess."
Buffy does a mock shiver and holds up her hands to show she won’t touch.
Willow turns back to her research. A glowing hoop of blue fire lies on the table. Willow handles it with a pencil, careful not to touch it. Dawn and Kennedy sit chatting at the other end of the table. Buffy lets her tiredness wash over her and leans back, sipping slowly from the hot chocolate. She wishes she'd remembered to put in those little marshmallows her Mom used to have. She thinks she did a reasonably good job of touching base with her friends just now, light-hearted and asking after them, not just talking about her own concerns. They know that she's still not feeling all quippy and happy Buffy, and Europe only made it worse, because it was full of tall well-dressed people who didn’t speak English, a fact that Dawn and Willow handled way better than she did. She's glad to be back home, even if home is now Cleveland.
She yawns. Early to bed, she guesses. She puts down the half-empty mug of chocolate, but her tiredness makes her miss the table and she grabs hastily after it. Her outstretched pinky touches the fiery hoop and with a silent explosion of light a vortex opens and sucks her into it.
The vortex spews Buffy out after milliseconds, or centuries, she can't tell. Her milling legs catch solid footing and she stumbles, propelled forward by her own speed until she manages to stop. Gray concrete swirls around her and she throws up the entire contents of her stomach. The world steadies and comes into focus. She's in a big space, somewhere unbelievably hot, and already there’s sweat exploding from her skin in a haze of droplets. Urgently she peels off her down sleeveless vest, her fleece sweater, her long-sleeved T-shirt and then she's still too warm in her pink thermal undershirt. She's not in Cleveland anymore, baby.
That leaves her with wool trousers, thick socks and boots. She peels off the sodden socks and takes stock of her surroundings. She's sitting on the splotched, rough concrete of an old factory floor. The big doors to the outside are opened out into the night. The silence here is deafening compared to the subsonic roar of the snowstorm. Far away she can hear some traffic.
It smells like home, and nostalgia and heartache set in with breakneck speed. If she didn't know she'd been flung through an interdimensional vortex she'd think she was back in Sunnydale. She shakes off the sadness, which is inappropriate for an adventure. She's an experienced interdimensional traveler after all, she's met ancient Slayers and enigmatic shamans in cheap print dresses. She balls up her winter clothes and hides them behind some old crates. Shoes in one hand, she starts to explore cautiously. To the left there seems to be some kind of glass-walled old office space where a faint light is shining out. She paddles over there silently, her tender winter feet cringing away from the dirt and roughness of the flooring.
She peers around the wall through the windowpanes into the small space, cluttered with a library's worth of books in tottering stacks. A hunched shape is reading one of them by the light of a few candles., illuminating only the sparsely printed page, a poem she thinks.
The dark form looks up and throws his book face down. '"What are you sneaking around for, Buff? Trying to surprise me?"
He stands up and comes over to her. Buffy's heart shoots up into her throat, then sinks down into her bare feet and starts up a wild ricocheting dance.
"Had a nice feed, did you? You smell all human," the voice continues.
"Spike?" she croaks.
"Expecting someone else?" he says and walks up to her.
The way he walks makes her heart scream. How well she remembers that cocky strut and roll, taking his time about it, fishing out a cigarette and his lighter from his jeans pocket while he walks and lighting one. He smirks at her through blue-gray smoke.
"C'mere here," he says. "Give me a taste of what you ate, pet."
A sound tries to make its way out of her throat but fails. Spike stops stock still at ten feet away. "What the fuck! I can hear your bloody heart beat!"
She can’t speak. Destiny is dealing her a low blow and she's petrified by it. He's on her faster than her eyes can track and has her neck in a crushing grip. His scent and the familiar contours under her fingers make her soft and will-less. His face and body are rock hard, deflecting her limp defeated fists with ease. But it's Spike, after all. She won’t have to defend herself.
"Who are you and what have you done to my Buffy?"
The air is thick and slow around her. She stares at the furious milk-white countenance above her through spider webs and dew. This can't be her Spike. He snarls at her as if he hates her and he has an air about him as if he's never been insane in his life. He exudes lack of soul and barely contained bloodlust with every vibration of his body. She actually feels a sliver of fear for this one.
"Who are you and what have you done to my Spike?" she counters two beats late.
She may be a little rusty, but she does remember quipping. The Spike pushes her away from him, still holding her neck, with her artery close under a big black-lacquered thumb, and looks her over carefully. He raises the other finger and points at her.
"No games, you cunt. My Buffy does not have a heart beat or body heat. You're older than her. Spill."
"I accidentally touched a magic object, an interdimensional vortex generator. It flung me here. Is this Sunnydale?"
"What else?"
"In my world, Sunnydale is a big hole in the ground, courtesy of you."
He grins at that. "I've always been bad."
She can't let that one go. "No, you haven’t. William."
His hand jerks and rattles her head like a doll's. "What the fuck! I told you, no games. Where is my Buffy!"
"How would I know," she says, irritated. "Probably in Cleveland where I came from. " She sees him frown. "Surrounded by a powerful witch and two slayers," she adds. "She's probably dust by now."
He brings his face very close to hers. "You better hope not, Slayer. You better hope she's right as rain, because then I will exchange her for you. Otherwise you die."
When Buffy hears him call her 'Slayer' she tears up like a wimp. The Spike notices it and sniffs her suspiciously.
"You're not that scared. Why cry?"
She looks into his cold blue eyes and something inside her swells and bursts open like a boil, leaving her weak and shaken.
"He used to call me Slayer all the time."
Tears are running down her face now. His smirk is evil. "I usually love it when girls cry before I rape and eat them because it makes their blood taste better. But now I don’t want you to cry, I want you to pay attention. Tell me more. How is your world different? We need to get one of these interdimensional whatsits for the exchange."
Instead of answering she says, "Do you love her?"
He brays with laughter. "Don’t be daft. She killed my Dru. I probably hate her. But she's mine, my get, my lieutenant. First minion of the Master of Sunnydale."
"The Master? I killed him."
He cuffs her, "Don't be stupid. I killed him, the Most Annoying One, and now I'm Master of Sunnydale. Have been for six years now. A sweet gig, and I don’t want your little interdimensional fooling around to bollix it up."
Buffy almost covers her ears and screams. She makes her voice come out even, knowing that Spike will read her every emotion from her smell and heart rate anyway. "I killed Dru, and then you killed me?"
"Right."
"And this is 2003?"
"'Course," he says, frowning, but fishing for a cigarette again.
"Things went differently in my world" she says. "I never killed Dru. As far as I know, she's still roaming the world."
His face goes slack and wondering at that. "Dru? Dru alive? My Dru?"
It's a relief to see him like that, get that face she associates with herself, Spike blindly and blissfully in love. He can't be that different then.
"So. You never got chipped?" she asks.
"What? Of course not. Burnt the fuckers out who were trying that thing. I fell for that in your time?"
"You were distracted, I guess," Buffy offers, obscurely needing to exonerate her Spike. "Dru dumped you, and you were pretty cut up about it."
Her ears are ringing and her cheek hurts. She's lying on the floor, and realizes she's been hit by a furious Spike with a burst of vampire speed, which hers never seemed to use much.
"You're lying," he grates, towering over her.
She shakes her head numbly. She receives a kick in the side for it. It's very reminiscent of her kicking Spike when he was possessed by the First. She crosses off one tally. Still plenty left.
"Don't damage me too much," she says flippantly. "I might not be able to get you to the vortex generator else."
He roars and smashes a chair through the window. That is so Spike, taking out frustration on inanimate objects. The love boil that burst open in her heart races flames to her cheeks and fingertips. Too late, too late, it sings. The real Spike will never know now.
A minion in game face sticks a worried head around the door. "Boss?"
"Bugger off!" Spike says, a little calmer. "Get my car ready."
Buffy sits up. "You're going to what, just drive to Cleveland? Don’t you need a plan?"
"I have a plan, Slayer. Got contacts in Cleveland. You'll see."
Buffy mulls on that. At least she'd be back in Cleveland. "The car. Is it the DeSoto?"
Spike rakes a hand through his hair. "How the bloody hell do you know all this stuff about me? What was I still doing in Sunnydale if I wasn't its Master? You are the Slayer, right?"
He delves behind a stack of books, she hears clicking and he surfaces with a thick wad of cash, which he stuffs in his jeans pocket.
"We were enemies for a long time, but finally we became allies. First to defeat Angelus."
Spike nods at that. "Right. Same here. We killed the old man."
The pang she still feels at the thought of killing Angel is very small now, more of a reflex than a real feeling. "Is he in LA now?"
"What? You just heard me say, we killed him, dusted him. Of course he's not in LA."
"So he didn't come back?"
"No, why would he? Did he in your world?"
She nods, wondering still. "He was raising Acathla, and I ran him through with a sword and sent him to hell."
She registers his incomprehension.
"We, my Buffy and me, dusted him because he had a filthy soul, and was trying to kill us together with your old friends," he says.
Oh. Of course, there would be no rising of Angelus if she wasn't around to sleep with him. Oh. She crawls up from the floor. Spike does not extend a hand to her.
"You killed my friends?"
"We killed them, pet. Had us a real ball doing it, too."
"Filthy soul, you say?" she taunts, angry now. "You went and got one for me!"
He gapes. "Never."
"Oh yeah. Dru dumps you; you get chipped, fall in love with me, and get a soul for me."
Why she leaves out that they were lovers before he got the soul, she's not sure. He roars in anger and starts for her throat again, but this time she's ready for him. The all-out fight that ensues destroys most of the ancient office furniture, although it seems to be made of steel. The books scatter and fly around in the tiny space until they can't set a foot down without crushing some ancient tome. The fight is oddly out of whack. She caroms into a wall of books, expecting resistance but going through it like a fist through butter, and then the second time she's counting on give and painfully rams a solid steel disk with her butt. Buffy is a little weirded out to notice that she's really enjoying this. She hasn't even reached for her stake. Is she incapable of staking this Spike because she loved the other one? Geez.
She manages to get him up against the wall and positions the stake over his heart. She's pressing up close to him and can't help noticing the outline of his body under his tight black T-shirt.
Arousal flares through her, love riding hard on the heels of anger, and she sees Spike take a deep whiff to determine what he's smelling exactly.
"Bloody hell, slayer," he growls. "You loved him back, didn’t you?"
"No way," she bites back, "I used him as a sex toy. What Slayer would love a vampire?"
His face turns soft and he smiles sweetly at her, using his free hand to stroke her upper arm.
"I would love you, Slayer," he says huskily. "Such a pretty girl you are, with your big green eyes and your tawny hair. Come here."
The stake drops from her hand and she's kissing him before he's finished his sentence. He tastes like her Spike, exactly like him, brassy and smoky at the same time, brimstone and pennies. She feels him harden against her and moans helplessly. His whole body tenses in preparation for she knows no what and she's flung across the room. He straddles her, applying merciless pressure to her throat.
"Are you insane, you daft bitch? Falling for a ploy like that? Of course I wouldn’t love a Slayer. Any Slayer is my enemy, and if you weren't one you'd be my lunch, not my date."
He despises her, she can see it in his face. His lisp are curled in disgust and he shakes her head and pushes on her throat until she sees black stars dance in front of her yes. Note to self: he's not the real Spike. He's just another vampire.
He sits back on her thighs and lights his third cigarette. "So. Dru's still alive. Why'd she dump me?"
But he does love his Dru. She's always thought that was what made him different, his ability to love. There's hope.
"She was mad because you'd allied with me to kill Angelus."
She sees the flash of pain on his face and wishes she could kiss it better. "And then you got chipped, and when she came back you threatened to kill her to save me."
He shakes his heads and smokes pensively. He's gorgeous, his face and hair a vision in creams and blues, the smoke curling around his head enhancing his eerie beauty. He looks younger and smoother than her Spike, she thinks. She made him suffer so much that she made a vampire age. An achievement she can be real proud of.
She can hear a car roll up. The minion comes in, dangling the keys proudly.
"Here you are, boss."
Spike doesn’t take them. He remains sitting on her hips, finishes his smoke and asks the minion.
"Which way is the car pointing?"
The minion gibbers a bit but points away from the big doors.
"Get back in and turn it for me, you stupid sod. And remember next time, or you'll never get tenure."
"Tenure?"
"Manner of speaking," Spike says curtly, but winks at her.
He jumps up like a big cat and stalks off in the direction of the car, one hand unerringly swiping the duster off its hook in mid-stride. Buffy sits up, staring after him. What does he expect her to do?
"Slayer!" he calls out mock-sweetly. "Are you coming or do you want me to make you?"
She gets up stiffly. Lying on the floor like that has made her remember she was really tired, although the balminess of the climate here cushions tiredness like the relentless cold in Cleveland doesn’t. She wobbles for a moment and feels disoriented. She must be getting old, because events are developing faster than she can follow. She only just got here and already she's leaving.
She walks over to the DeSoto. In her universe she's never seen it after her so-called date with Spike. The car frames him like a painting, Dorian Grey. She opens the car door and crawls in reluctantly. "Why don't we fly? Would be lots faster."
"Too much security these days, Slayer. This won’t attract any attention."
"Maybe not the car, but the trail of people you ate certainly will, " she retorts.
How can she find this ruthless killer even remotely charming? The thing is, she does. She should try to keep the two Spikes separate in her mind.
"You volunteering to donate some blood?" he smirks at her, showing his tongue.
She shivers. The tongue. She looks away from him and tries to look bored, but is very much afraid he'll see right through her like he always did.
"Off we go then, Slayer."
"Wait!" she says. "My clothes. I'll need them in Cleveland."
He hesitates but nods. She gets her clothes from behind the crates and dumps them in the back.
They roar off.
Chapter 2
Baker, Barstow, Primm. The names zoom by in a blur, flashing in his narrow field of vision for seconds before he's past them. He's put his window down so he can get some fresh air and see a little more of the road, as it's night anyway. The snoring of the Slayer beside him can hardly be heard over the loud growling noise of the old-fashioned eight-cylinder engine.
Spike wouldn't have believed it if he hadn't seen it. Bleeding Slayer just lay down and was off in minutes, sagging against him like he was her boyfriend. As if she trusts him completely. He pushes her over to rest against the door, but it's somehow wrong on a deep visceral level, and it upsets the balance of his world. He's the Slayer of Slayers, he killed four of them and keeps one of them around as his minion; petty revenge born of the anger he felt when his companion of more than a century was ripped away from him by her little baby-soft hands.
He shakes away the game face that still threatens when he thinks of Drusilla's death. He doesn’t ever want to forget it, which is why he still keeps the annoying ex-Slayer around, who even in death has the most galling sense of duty and honor and gives him his due as her sire punctiliously. He often sends her on long and dangerous missions because he can't stand having her underfoot all the time. It's more out of a sense of outraged possession than affection that he wants her back. Maybe it’s time to stake her when he's got her back again, huh?
He sticks his head out of the car, howls at the moon and swerves playfully at a few cars coming in the other direction. The tooting of their horns and the flashing of their lights follows him for half a minute and he laughs. He lights up and smokes contentedly. Actually, this is fun. There's a quest, there's a Slayer he can needle to his heart's content and possible kill if the mood strikes him. How would he tell the tale? Met this Slayer, killed her twice? He shakes his head and blows a little shred of tobacco from his lips. He can play this anyway he likes, that's what makes it this such a blast.
His eyes are needed to keep him on the road and stay away from the scarce traffic at this time of night, but for the rest his nose tells him all he needs to know about his surroundings. The mild foggy air of the coastal town changes into sharp cold desert night, varied by snatches of small town miasma he travels through, a fug of human breath and sweat, gas and stale cooking. Each town has a unique combination of smells, the powder and decay scent of old people, milk and shit from the babies. He detects the rich blood scent of fertile women, mitigated or strengthened by diet, tacos or hamburger, polyester sweat or wind-dried cotton. The further he drives inland, the drier the air gets. At a long stretch between two towns the air gets so pure and empty he can detect the spoor of a single desert fox crossing the road in the millisecond he needs to pass through it.
The fat-bellied moon flops up over the low ridge on his left. Something shifts in his internal awareness of the world around him. Almost sunrise. In a quarter hour or so he will wake the Slayer. She turns around under her blanket and he gets a good look at her face. So changed in looks compared to his Buffy, who still has the round face and big eyes of a seventeen year old, but so similar in the power of their will. Apparently life has stripped away all softness and sweetness from this one, just as death has with the other. The blanket slides off her throat and he has to fight off a surge of hunger for a moment. He should have taken someone to feed off, but he never thinks when he's in a hurry. He's old and strong-willed enough to fight it off until tonight, when he will hunt and drink with impunity.
He grins to himself when he thinks of the bitching that will ensue from the woman next to him. He's been the victim of her tongue for six years now, and he just knows this one will be exactly the same.
Spike contemplates exacting some retribution on this Slayer on behalf of his other self. The tale is beyond belief. Dumped, chipped, souled. It's bitterly shameful, and he doesn't know if he can manage to keep his resolve or if he will kill her in a proper fight. Killing Slayers is his business, the foundation of his fame. Turning her was payback for killing his beloved. Humiliating rather than killing this one seems in order, for turning his other incarnation into the very epitome of everything he's not. Weak and goody-goody beyond belief. He wants to know every detail of the other's sorry tale, needs to torture himself with what he's escaped from.
Sun's getting really close. He's the Master of Sunnydale, and she'd best not forget it. Now she’ll drive him for a change. He pulls off the road near Littlefield and shakes her awake.
"Wakey, wakey Slayer. Time to earn your keep."
She smiles fuzzily at him before jolting awake, and nearly leaves a Buffy-shaped hole in the car door when she remembers everything. Her hand flies to her neck, as if she can feel the touch of his gaze there. Her body races and panics, and he has to admire her composure, because none of this is visible on her tight face. Too bad for her, he can sense every variation in her heartbeat, smell minute changes in her hormone level and the sharpening of her faint sleepy odor into a sweat of fear. He shows her his teeth.
"It's me, sugar," he says in a honeyed tone. "Did you sleep well?"
He just knows he can piss her off twice as easy by pretending to be his unlucky shadow, who presumably sweet talked his way into her confidence or some such, instead of using snark and wit, which she seems to enjoy.
She yawns and stretches. When her skinny form is animated with her spirit he can see a vague echo of his luscious Buffy in her movements, the fierce warrior spirit that imbues the Slayer, and they are uncannily similar. Then her face sinks back into lines of worry and discontent and the resemblance fades again. Has her nose grown or what? These humans grow taller, fatter, thinner and shorter before your eyes. Wrinkles appear on their foreheads like slugs' tracks, their brows sink over their eyes and their cheeks fall in. Second chins appear and the spines shorten and bend and before you know it they're dead. Rotting away in their coffins, not like him, cheating Old Nick for more than a century now. You have to eat them quick, when they're young and fresh, before they lose their flavor, like tender summer fruit, strawberries or raspberries, sweet juice exploding against his palate.
Once when he was young, he made the mistake of befriending a human being. He forgot about the passing of time, and when he looked the friend up again he was old and bent, almost dead. He hasn't forgotten the jealousy in the old man's eyes upon seeing Spike young and beautiful as ever. What could have possessed the other Spike to engage with a human being? Heartache lay around the corner, look away for a second and they’re dust in the wind. Not him.
The Slayer grumbles and bitches about showers and breakfast but he pays her babbling no mind. If he listened to every word prey and their ilk mouthed at him he'd never get his dinner on time. He curls up on the backseat and falls asleep instantly. He wakes in time to steer her east on the I-70.
He wakes up because the car is standing still. The Slayer's heartbeat is going into overdrive and he can hear her harsh panting. He checks out the sound of the motor, no problem there, then the mileage, but there is still be plenty of gas. No screams, so sirens, nothing out of the ordinary.
"Wake me up for money if you need more gas," he mumbles and goes back to sleep.
Again the car stops. He gives her money, watches her carefully as she buys water, food and gas. She doesn't try anything funny, and indeed, what would it be in this universe? No one she knows is alive. His Buffy saw to that. This Buffy needs him to get to Cleveland and find the amulet. His contacts. He rolls back into the same pose so that she will think he slept on. Her fleece sweater is soft under his head.
The third time he wakes it's slow, because the Slayer's heartbeat has slowed. He cricks himself up on his elbow to investigate. She's sleeping, again, on the front seat. It's too light outside for him to drive, so he settles back to sleep, irritated at the weakness of humanity. He orders himself to wake a few minutes before sundown, so he can drive off the minute it's dark enough.
The Slayer doesn't even wake up when he shoves her upright and drives off. She's managed to turn off on the I-76 at the right moment, for which he's thankful. They're deep in Nebraska – Gothenburg, Overton, Elm Creek - before she regains consciousness. She doesn't smell so fresh anymore, and the deep grooves between her eyebrows are an indication that she's not feeling so hot. This is none of his concern. He hopes she keeps her gob shut so he can pursue his own thoughts.
So. Dru's alive and well somewhere in another dimension. He's not sure how that makes him feel. The first few years after her dusting he'd have gone after her like a shot, done anything to join up with his Dark Beauty again, but now? A fellow gets settled, gets used to things as they are. The moment he thinks this he's appalled at himself. He's never in his whole long life stayed anywhere longer than a few months, maybe a year. How come he's been letting himself get cooped up in Sunnydale for so long? Has his Buffy been influencing him?
He starts tapping the steering wheel to lighten the building tension in his body. Dru. Alive. Wait, didn’t the Slayer tell him something about getting dumped by her? That can't be right. He opens his mouth to bark a question at her, but sees from the corner of his eye that she's rubbing her temples and licking her lips as if in thirst. To proud too ask, huh? He must have been a bit distracted and all, there are better ways to get a woman to talk than snarling at her.
"Slayer? How about we pull over for dinner and a shower? Not necessarily in that order?"
She perks up immediately and smiles at him with her dry lips, her big tired eyes regain some sparkle. Way to go, Spike old man. She'll sing like a canary.
Chapter 3
An elastic cord stretches between Buffy and Sunnydale, and driving away from the town is making it longer and thinner. Any moment now it'll snap. She didn’t realize how much she was longing for home until she smelled the scent of a Sunnydale night and heard the peaceful sounds of surf and highway rumbling in the background. In the rest of the world everything's so intrusive. The shape of the houses and the cars, how people dress, jumps on her retinas and hijacks them, fascinating and irritating her with the differences. Every city has a different shape to it and the McDonaldses are just plain wrong, with icky local specialties and just not hitting the sameness she longs for.
And there is so much weather all the time. Not only in Europe, which she on the whole only pretended to like, but also in Cleveland, rain, wind, snow, it never stops. You have to dress for it, it's on TV, people keep mentioning it in their small talk. Somewhere in her guts this just registers as wrong, as if the balmy unchanging warmness of Sunnydale is imprinted on her soul as the only right kind of climate.
She rolls her shoulders and tries to concentrate on the road. She's never driven this long at a stretch and it's hard. She has to force herself to go on, driven by a need to get back to Cleveland and be done with this too familiar alternate reality that taunts her with might-have-beens. She forces herself but actually she'd like to turn back and let Sunnydale's presence soothe her again and she can’t let that happen.
The past summer, when the triumphant feeling of defeating the First started to fade she let herself go, just for a few days, she thought. She let out all the inappropriate mushiness and hurt and undigested lumps of maybe-love and wallowed in them. It was just a few days, and then she tried to reconnect to the others again, but it's as if they'd gotten so much of a head start in those few days that she's never managed to catch up again. They all have these plans and dreams, schools they want to go to, businesses they want to start, and she doesn’t seem to have any. Not that she wants to have fantasies like Andrew, who thinks he's going to be the next great thing in script writing or comic book drawing, or a Watcher like Dawn or a contractor like Xander. But it’s scary not to have any dreams, so she's been making them up when the others ask about hers. She dutifully enrolled in night classes when they got back from the confusion of Europe, but she doesn’t know what she's doing it for.
Buffy suspects that if you take away the Slayer, the girl that remains is just kinda small. She has no wants and no dreams, she gave up on them a long time ago and she doesn’t know what to replace them with.
She rubs her eyes with one hand and the car makes a sickening lurch to the left. It takes her endless rubbery moments to get back into the right lane and her heart keeps thumping in her throat. Her body feels full and hot, about to burst into flames or splatter apart into little shapeless pieces. She pulls the car over as soon as she can and rests her head on her hands. The vampire behind her stirs and mumbles something. She can't muster enough energy to reply to him and he stops moving. She's thirsty and tired, her head aches, but she can't make herself decide to go and buy some food and drink. She doesn't have any money on her; she didn’t have her purse when she was snatched away from her friends.
The only thing to do is get back on the road and drive, back on the black ribbon that stretches all the way to Cleveland. She doesn't know where she is now, she's never had a head for distances or geography, it's just this dry and arid place, white from the glare of the sun, cars the only thing that give brief color to the landscape. She sits up and drives on.
Buffy waits as long as she can to replenish the gas. It's getting colder already. She buys water and food with Spike's money. No soda or hamburgers, just plain water and apples. She wants to be light as air, as insubstantial as she can, not weighted down with meat and starch. The feeling is familiar from when she Slayed, the later years, when not eating was a kind of power game she played with her body. She wanted to see if the Slayer energy diminished when she did, like she wants to be ready for take-off when the moment comes. She did fly once, jumping straight into that vortex swirling below Glory's tower, and secretly she'd like to try again. Snow starts at first powdering and then thickly covering the side of the road, and she goes on until she can drive no longer; she stops the car and feels herself falling, flying towards sleep spread out like a black landscape beneath her.
When she wakes up it's dark and Spike is driving again. She feels awful, dried out and headachy, thirty-two rather than twenty-three. She sneaks a peek at Spike at the wheel and marvels that she mistook him for her Spike for even a second. There's a wildness about him, a lack of containment that she thinks she remembers from meeting him long ago. But she can't be sure. It's not as if she paid a lot of attention to the original Spike at first. She does remember taunting him in the bathtub, all chained up and chalky pale with poor feeding, but even then he was stripped of real power. Or what he perceived to be his power, his ability to kill. There is no point in engaging this one in conversation. It's just hard to feel herself react to his face or a casual touch of his hand or the flare of his duster. She hopes her guts will catch up with her brain sometime soon.
When he mentions food and a shower she practically slavers and wags her tail, so goodbye to staunch Buffy. She'd do almost anything to feel clean and taste a hamburger. They get off the road and check in at a motel. She has to put on all her Cleveland clothes again and her nose almost freezes off in the thirty feet to the motel office, her boots crunching snow with loud crackling sounds. Middle America weather is back. It's pretty clear what the clerk thinks when Spike asks for a room for a couple of hours and lots of towels, but she doesn’t care.
She hesitates when she steps into the stuffy room with its bland ugly furniture and synthetic carpet. A motel room is so cheap, she thinks. And yet all Spike and she ever did was fuck in his crypt or outside. She fingers the slippery maroon polyester sheets. Spike's sheets were cream and of a good quality cotton. They almost never used them.
"No time to sleep," the other Spike says brusquely. "Grabbing a shower and eating is all we're gonna do. You shower first."
He leaves and Buffy is grateful for his tact. It's vaguely embarrassing to be in one room with him if there's a bed. The bathroom is barely clean, with strips of mold so thick she's almost afraid they'll tear themselves off the wall and attack her, but the shower is heavenly.
She's wrung out her hair and is trying to dry it with the inadequate dryer they've screwed to the wall here when Spike comes back in. He's wiping his face with his sleeve and the first thing Buffy thinks is that his manners are awful. Then the realization that he's been hunting hits her, that he's killed a person while she was blithely showering! The dryer whuffs jerkily next to her ear as she sinks down on the bed and stares at him.
"What?" he says, mildly irritated. He has a sated, lustful look on his face, lips full and eyes at half-mast, a look that she knows from right 333333333333333333333333333333333333333333after sex, in that minute before she kicked it off his face with her words or her fists. He flings a jacket and some other items of clothing on a chair.
"Brought you some warm things to wear, Slayer."
She can hardly speak, anger and betrayal clog her throat. "Did you rape before you killed her, or after? Was she Dawn's age?"
He lifts an eyebrow while he's shrugging out of his duster. "Didn't have time for fucking the food, love. Who's Dawn?"
She watches, paralyzed with choices, while he undresses nonchalantly and walks buck naked to the shower, swaggering and sleek. She stares but doesn’t see him. She ought to stake him right now. He's a killer. She knew this in theory, but she's never seen the reality of it this close. When he was manipulated by the First, the bodies rising in the cellar were horrific, but she didn’t feel him kill them as she feels the loss of the unknown life right now. She should have known he wasn’t letting her shower out of chivalry, it was just practicality. He kills, she showers; he showers, she has a hamburger. Jesus, who knows how many people he killed just now?
The dryer dies in her hand. It needs another coin. She stares stupidly at it and stomps off to the bath room, stake in hand. She's gotta do something or she'll explode. She opens the door he hasn’t bothered locking and freezes on the threshold. Spike hasn't bothered with trivialities like shower curtains. He's hanging lazily against the shower wall, cream against the blotched white, eyes closed against the water, his hands lazily stroking his erect cock. Buffy sees a tiny splatter of blood on his neck bleed down quietly, pinking a trickle of water and then getting lost in the fall of water running over his chest.
She's staring, heart clenching at this sight, and knows she won’t be able to put a stake through those languidly bunching chest muscles. She's lost it, it's official. Her friends were right after all, she is blind to Spike, and she probably couldn’t kill him if she saw him drink a victim right in front of her nose. She turns away, putting the stake in her pocket again, she needs to think. All her instincts are overset, they are too stupid to keep her Spike and this one apart, and her brain has never been a reliable guide.
"Leaving already, Slayer? Thought you were going to lend me a hand…" Spike drawls after her.
Yeah, yeah, enough with the innuendo already. She finds no funny quip ready on her tongue and makes do with slamming the door. The situation is impossible. She's on a road trip with a serial killer and she's just been letting it happen. From the moment he said they were leaving for Cleveland until now she's just tagged along behind him. It has to stop.
She tries to think over her options. She could dust him right now and drive on to Cleveland on her own. She'd have to take his money before it dusted with him, though, or she’ll never get there. Does she need him? The trip will go slower without him, that's for sure. And didn’t she just decide she couldn’t dust a Spike, however evil? Might as well bow to the inevitable and let him whisk her to Cleveland with all possible speed. One they get there, when or if they manage to locate the vortex spiral, will be soon enough to have another try at killing him.
And really, this is another world. The weight of her own world was a heavy enough burden to bear, has had her on her knees and occasionally with her nose in the dust, and she's just learning how to stand up straight again and not doing a very good job of it yet. The Slayer of this world is the one to take care of this Spike, and her responsibility is to get back to Dawn in one piece. Crystal clear, if you just take a moment to check it out. If she can't prevent him from killing for ever after, at least she can see to it that he doesn't kill anymore in her presence.
Spike ambles out of the bathroom, drying his hair with a towel and not bothering to have one around his hips. Of course she looks, why shouldn’t she? She'll just have to add one resolve extra to her new little stack, and that is not falling for the lure of this Spike's hot little body. That said, his dick is still half hard from his jacking off in the shower, and it makes her feel tingly, which is kind of shameful. How pathetic is it that she had no trouble at all keeping her hands off a Spike who was living in her basement, for God's sake, and yet this one is just oozing edibility? Best not think that thorough, or she'll like herself even less.
Spike dresses while she watches. He rakes his hands through his wet curls with a sigh and she guesses he wants gel to flatten it down. He never could be persuaded that the curls are cuter. She refrains from saying this.
"Let's get your dinner, Slayer."
"I'm not made up," she grumbles but complies. She's made her resolve now, she's gotta be strong to see it through. And she'll have to get some clothes at the next stop, because it's just awful to be wearing these totally smelly old ones. Vamps don’t sweat, but she does.
At the B-rated hamburger place across the road she demolishes her burger with gusto. Spike smiles.
"You tear into that burger like it's a pumping artery, Slayer. Some things don’t change."
What does he know? She hasn’t eaten this much in years.
Spike plays with a cigarette but doesn't light it, which would get him kicked out in no time. Very cool and controlled for Spike, she thinks. Must be the Master thing that's taught him patience like this, or maybe he always had it. She wouldn’t know, after all.
"So," he begins, "why don’t you tell me a bit about your world. I think the branching off point is your not killing Dru, right?"
Buffy nods, too busy eating to reply just yet.
"Why didn't you?"
That's a good one. She tries to cast her mind back to that moment in the underground club, holding Dru at ransom to get the clueless vampire groupies out.
She swallows a big bite. "I guess I saw your reaction to Drusilla. And I knew some of what Angel did to her, and maybe I felt a little bit sorry for her."
Spike snorts. "Just because she was driven insane by Angel and Darla before they raped and killed her doesn't mean she wasn't a killer, love. All vampires were human once, remember? Doesn't make us any less evil."
Buffy chews on that while she demolishes her second burger. "I know. You started out a sensitive Mama's boy, William, and still you got to rank pretty high on the Evil Top One Hundred."
Spike preens a little. "That I did. Do." He puts the cigarette on his lips and absentmindedly pats his pocket before he remembers and lays it on the plastic daisy patterned table cloth. He's making a little daisy himself, from cutlery and salt shakers, and the cigarette makes a petal. Buffy looks at it in wonder. Geez.
"And how can you be sure Dru is still around? Or did we stay in Sunnydale all those years, same as I did?"
Buffy thinks deeply and takes a few big swallows from her nice cold Coke. "You helped me defeat Angelus because you wanted her back, and then you left…"
Spike's hands grip the pepper shaker hard. Oh, bad boy, I could cut you to the quick…"What? Wanted her back? From who?"
"Angel…Angelus I mean. You were in a wheel chair. I dropped an organ on you after you captured Angel to restore Dru to health."
"Ah! So that panned out then!" Spike nods in satisfaction.
"Uh-huh. Well, I understood from you she was kind of too fond of her Daddy…"
Spike growls and his fingers tear eight little holes in the long-suffering table cloth.
"And?"
"I saw you again a year later, when Dru had dumped you for a Chaos Demon. Then you returned to Sunnydale for…" She just manages to swallow "the gem of Amara." She's not responsible for this world, true, but to let loose a Spike in it who's invincible would still be a very bad idea. "….and got captured by the Initiative soldiers…"
"Must have been out of my mind," Spike grumbles.
"Dru returned to Sunnydale a year later, with burns on her face, and tried to get you back. But you'd fallen in love with me by then and offered to stake her for my loving you in return."
Spike looks as if he's swallowed something bad. "I find that bloody hard to believe. Why the hell would I fall in love with a Slayer?"
"You tried killing me first," Buffy says pointedly, kind of enjoying this. "Many times. But you failed."
"Huh."
Buffy looks up and away, trying to think how to phrase this. "Time passed. You tried to rape me in my own bathroom and felt so bad about it you went and got a soul."
Spike curls his lip. "In your own bathroom? How'd I get in then? You must have invited me! And I don’t rape Slayers, I kill them in honorable battle."
"Yeah, well. You lost it for a few, I guess. It was a bad thing to do, and you repented. You got your soul, went crazy, became sane, and sacrificed yourself to defeat the First Evil and the Turok Han from the Hellmouth. Sunnydale slid into a great big crater, end of story."
Spike looks gobsmacked. "That's just…rubbish. I would never do any of those things. Don't even know what they are."
Buffy shrugs. "Get your head around this: you loved me. A lot. Everything follows from that. Weren't you the same with Drusilla? Love's bitch?"
"Hey!" Spike says, pointing his finger at her. "You don’t get to say that"
Buffy shrugs again and thinks about a third hamburger, but decides on a milk shake. Chocolate. She's not vanilla girl anymore. Spike gets one too, and they slurp up the frothy stuff in tandem. Buffy smiles, imagining how they must look, Slayer and vampire drinking from straws together, like skewed mirror images. It's a sad smile, because this is the wrong vampire.
TBC
squawks
05/18/17 04:16 am
pj! I remember wishing one of your stories would be finished seriously about a decade ago. Amazing. I just tried an old password I used to use and amazingly got in too. Memories!
pj
03/20/17 01:20 am
10 yrs later, i finally rem my username and password. Pari, you rock. Hope you are well.
Rabbit_moon1
12/23/16 01:12 pm
I donate every month. Please donate to keep this site up!
AudryDaluz1
10/06/16 08:34 am
Great post.
Chrissel
08/31/16 03:45 pm
And anyone else who loves this site, it's worth mentioning there's a nifty little "Donate" option just below the shout box here! ;)
Chrissel
08/31/16 03:43 pm
Just wanted to take a moment to thank Pari and all the mods for maintaining such a great site!
05/18/17 04:16 am
pj! I remember wishing one of your stories would be finished seriously about a decade ago. Amazing. I just tried an old password I used to use and amazingly got in too. Memories!
pj
03/20/17 01:20 am
10 yrs later, i finally rem my username and password. Pari, you rock. Hope you are well.
Rabbit_moon1
12/23/16 01:12 pm
I donate every month. Please donate to keep this site up!
AudryDaluz1
10/06/16 08:34 am
Great post.
Chrissel
08/31/16 03:45 pm
And anyone else who loves this site, it's worth mentioning there's a nifty little "Donate" option just below the shout box here! ;)
Chrissel
08/31/16 03:43 pm
Just wanted to take a moment to thank Pari and all the mods for maintaining such a great site!