Disclaimer: This all belongs to someone else. I just play with the characters like smutty bendable action figures *grin*.
Author’s notes: I wanted to thank Elisabeth for posting this for me on LJ, and Lisa Kelley for the beta.
Summary: So….at the end of Blind Date, Angel has just come to the realization that Spike sired Willow. Or so it appears.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Spike felt his sire’s gaze upon him, and sent his senses out, searching for the presence he knew he would find. Sure enough, on the balcony, wreathed in shadows, he found Angel, along with the Slayer, who didn’t quite get the point of the whole charade yet. But Angel did. Spike felt him watching them, putting the pieces together, working it out, and coming to exactly the wrong conclusion.
Just as they had hoped.
Willow played her part perfectly, lounging on the couch and looking like quite the pretty vampire, he had to admit. Her glamour seemed to be working perfectly, he thought with satisfaction, as he bent down and licked the skin that appeared to bear his mark. But his tongue wasn’t fooled, and he felt nothing but unbroken skin beneath it. Willow gasped from the contact, arching her body slightly against his, and he filed that fact away for further consideration.
“I know you’re there, Peaches.” He never raised his voice, knowing that his sire would be able to hear him regardless. “Figured it out, you know. The set-up, I mean. Red and I. And you know what? We decided you were right. You must’ve seen something that neither of us did. But tonight, after we had a chance to talk for a while, we saw it too.”
Willow stirred slightly next to him, glancing towards the shadows that she imagined held Buffy and Angel. “Oh, don’t worry, he was gentle. I barely even felt a thing. And now…now I feel *everything*.” Her voice was heavy with hidden meaning, as if tempting them to discover her secrets.
Spike smiled at her indulgently, pleased with the way she was playing her part. Of course, to Angel and Buffy, it looked like the indulgent smile of a proud parent, admiring his newly created progeny, but that was good too. He could work with that.
“What the hell did you do to her?” Buffy yelled, sagging slightly against the banister, jerking herself away from the hand that Angel put out to calm her. “You, you couldn’t have. And she would never have let you. It’s just, just—impossible. You’ve got a soul now. You wouldn’t.” There was a desperate certainty to her words. She desired, no, needed them to be true. Her tone demanded that someone tell her this was all an awful dream.
“The soul, the soul, the soul…THE SOUL WAS LONELY!” he yelled at her, his voice equal parts of anger and pain. Spike watched her flinch at the implied criticism. She had Angel, and he had nobody, or so the words seem to suggest to her guilty conscience.
“Enough with the introductions,” Spike muttered, pulling himself to his feet and dragging Willow along for the ride. “Leave us alone for a couple of days, okay? Got me a childe to train.”
Angel suppressed a shudder at all the emotions that phrase evoked. He remembered it, every bit of it, every moment, every crack of the whip, every sting of the lash, every moment of his dick sliding into tight, unprepared passages. Every moment of ecstasy.
“Don’t you dare,” he growled at Spike. “Don’t you hurt her or I’ll dust you myself.”
And yet, even as he uttered the threat, he began to sense that something about this was not real. Maybe it was the unexpectedness of the situation, or the suddenness of Spike’s decision. Or maybe it was something else…
“I’m gonna kill him,” Buffy muttered, her pain-filled eyes locked on Spike’s as he led Willow up the stairs. “Gonna kill him and dance in the dust, and then suck it up with a little hand-held Dustbuster and flush it down the toilet.”
Spike paused on the stairway, then swung Willow up into his arms and carried her the rest of the way up the stairs. She bent her head to the side, allowing him to nibble lightly at the skin of her neck.
Willow sighed softly and the scent of her arousal filled the air, surprising Spike. Seems like she was enjoying more than just the revenge aspect of their little drama. It might be fun to…
“No, Buffy,” Angel pulled the slayer back against his chest as Spike passed by them on the landing, using all of his strength to keep her from going after the couple. Oh, he would happily hold Spike while she plunged in the stake, but there was just something wrong here, something off. He had to figure it out before he let Buffy do something she might regret later.
“Don’t let him do this, Angel, don’t let him hurt her. Willow!” she cried out, pain and fear burning within her. “We can get you a soul,” she insisted. “We’ll do the restoration, and then get Giles to fix your soul like we did Angel’s. Just don’t—don’t do anything until then, okay?” she asked desperately.
Something flickered in Willow’s eyes. Angel thought it might have been regret. But then Spike spun his body until he hid her from their eyes. “Give her a soul and I’ll stake her myself,” he growled, fixing first Angel, and then Buffy, with his steely gaze. “Got it?”
They watched in shock as Spike carried Willow down the hall, slamming his bedroom door behind him. The sound of the deadlock being thrown echoed ominously in the resounding silence.
~~~*~~~
Buffy paced the floor of their bedroom suite, stopping every five or ten steps to glare at Angel, who was sitting, deep in thought, in one of the old leather chairs.
When he stopped hearing the sound of her footsteps, he looked up curiously, then shrank back at the fury he saw in her eyes.
“You let him do it,” she accused. “You just let him take her into that room, to do who-knows-what to her. How could you?” she wailed inconsolably. “He vamped her, but you’re his sire. Why didn’t you stop him? You could have told him not to, right? And he would have had to—“
It was right there, the idea, the something that felt weird. Off. But the sight of Buffy’s tears distracted him, and then it was gone again. He scrunched his forehead, trying to lead it back, but it was steadfast in its refusal to reveal itself.
“Angel? Are you even listening to me?” she demanded, crossing her arms over her chest and glowering at him.
“Buffy, just—just calm down.”
“Calm down? CALM DOWN?!?” Buffy stared at him as if he was a stranger. “How the hell do you expect me to calm down? Your childe,” she spit the word out as if it was dirty, “turned my oldest friend. She’s a vampire now. How the hell do you expect me to calm down?”
There it was again, that glimmering piece of an idea, and this time Angel was able to catch it and grab onto it. Spike had made a child. Or so he claimed. If that was true, Angel should be able to sense her. The new vampire should be a blip on the landscape of his psyche. She was family, after all.
“Just—just give me a second,” he insisted, fixing the blonde with that look he knew she couldn’t resist. She gave him a look of her own, but subsided, plopping down on the bed and glaring at him.
Angel closed his eyes, reaching out his senses. He sensed Spike, his childe’s excitement drawing him in like a moth to a flame. His senses ranged out farther, and felt lesser beings—childer of Drusilla, mostly. His soul felt dirty at the slight contact and shrank into itself.
But oddly enough, there was nothing of Willow.
He tried again, searching, seeking, sending out little pieces of himself. If she was a vampire, he should be able to sense her. But there was nothing.
Then he remembered the look that flashed across her face when Spike carried her up the stairs. It had spoken of regret.
Demons didn’t feel regret.
On the other hand, he thought slowly, thinking the idea through, naughty little witches looking for a bit of payback could feel regret. Especially if a certain blond vampire had talked them into a prank that had gone just a little bit too far.
Buffy watched as Angel opened his eyes and smiled at her. It wasn’t the happy smile she was used to seeing; it wasn’t even the nervous half-smile that he used to wear before the soul became permanent.
This was something almost feral. It made her uncomfortable and set her Slayer senses on danger overdrive. This was Angel at his most primitive.
“What?” she asked apprehensively.
“It’s a game, Buffy. A game called payback. Willow is not Spike’s childe. She probably just did a little glamour. She’s as human as you are.” He frowned for a moment, considering her Slayer status. “Probably more human.” Then reconsidered, taking Willow’s witchy status into account. “Maybe it’s a draw. At any rate,” he hurried on, “Willow’s definitely not a vampire.”
“But she was all with the putting his hands on her and the licking and—” Buffy’s mind boggled as she considered it. Would Willow let him do that sort of stuff, just for a little revenge? Sure, she was probably angry to find out that she’d been tricked, but angry enough for that? “They don’t even like each other, Angel.”
“Well they’ve obviously managed to get past that little obstacle,” he insisted, joining her on the bed. He grasped her hands, running his thumbs across the backs of her hands over and over, until he sensed that she was relaxing. “Listen, Buffy. If she were a vampire, I would know it. Feel it. It’s just something we do. We can sense each other. Even when Spike was mad at me, hiding from me, even then, I knew he was there. I share that connection with all of my childer.” Whether he wanted to or not.
Buffy stared at him as he explained. The light in her eyes, the one that had almost been extinguished by her grief, began to glow again. She once again looked sure of herself, strong, and able to handle whatever life threw her way.
“They are *so* gonna pay.”
~~~*~~~
“Did you see that?” Spike asked, grinning gleefully. “It looked like the bloody poof was going to lose his lunch. And the Slayer, she wanted my throat so badly that I wasn’t sure Angel was going to be able to keep her in check. It was bloody marvelous,” he crowed.
He dropped Willow down to her feet, smiling down at her, oblivious to the fact that she had yet to say a word.
“I think we may have gone a bit too far with this.” Her mind was filled with visions of Buffy’s anguished face, and although their plan for revenge had seemed like a good idea at the time, in retrospect it was beginning to seem more than a little cruel.
“Oh bollocks,” Spike insisted. “It was no worse than what they did to us.”
“Spike, she thinks I’m dead! I think that trumps a date with Harmony or Trevor.”
“Don’t know that I’d agree with you on that,” Spike argued playfully. He was refusing to take her sudden change of heart seriously. “Wasn’t you sitting there with Harmony.”
“Hey, Trevor was no sweetheart either,” she reminded him, feeling herself being pulled into a game of disaster-dating one-upmanship. “And that’s *so* not the point.”
Spike cocked his head, looking at her with such an utter lack of understanding that she really wanted to smack him. This situation they were in was messy, and he was treating it like it was nothing.
“Don’t you get it?” she demanded, squaring off against him. She faced him, hands on her hips, glaring at him in an effort to make him understand, trying to use the force of her emotion to convey her point.
Spike glared right back at her, as if he was finally starting to understand. “I get it,” he said, starting to pace back and forth in front of her, throwing her angry little glares every couple of steps. “Things got a little too intense for you, and now you’re going to run off like a scared little witchie-poo,” he said, as if pronouncing a great truth.
“Scaredy cat,” he added for good measure.
“Bastard,” she hissed, wondering how she had ever let him talk her into this. “I must’ve been insane,” she muttered to herself, shaking her head dismissively. “I’m going to talk to Angel and Buffy and tell them what happened. If you still have this burning need for childish revenge, you’ll just have to work it out yourself.”
She headed for the door, but Spike was faster, stepping in front of the doorknob to keep her from turning it and opening the door.
“Ah, ah, ah…I don’t think so,” he told her, his voice smooth as satin. She stared at him in open-mouthed shock, as his hands grabbed her upper arms and swapped their positions, turning her around until her back was against the door. Using his body, he pressed her against the solid wood. One hand released her arm, only to grab her chin, lifting it up so that he could look into her eyes.
She struggled against him, pushing and prodding ineffectually at his chest, until he tightened his hold on her jaw in an attempt to get her attention.
“Damn it, let go of me,” she insisted, wishing her voice sounded more determined and less nervous. He did that to her, when they were this close together. Made her feel jumpy. Nervous. Less in control, both of her self, and the situation.
“Or what?” he whispered, leaning in. He made a show of sniffing the air and then smiled at her. “You don’t really want to spill the beans, Willow. You’re just scared.”
“Oh yeah? And where did you come up with that great pronouncement, Doctor Freud?”
He smiled at her, and her nervousness increased. “I get it from the way that you smell. From the fact that your body trembles so sweetly against mine,” he rested his forehead softly against hers. “And from the way that you lick your lips when you’re nervous.”
While she fought for a way to deny his claims, he took advantage of her distraction and brushed her lips lightly with his own. When she remained still against him, his lips touched hers again, sliding against them, teasing hers just the slightest bit open before plunging his tongue inside.
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