Chain

By Irfikos

Part I: Blood

1.4: Bad Things

Notes: This section takes place during "As You Were."


He’s not here. What the heck? The crypt is cold and empty. Feels like no one has been here in awhile. She had convinced herself up until now that he had been here sulking all this time. Waiting for her to come to him and apologize or something. Waiting for her to come begging. As if.

He isn’t here. That’s… weird. He’s always here. Where else would he go? She looks around. There’s a mug of pig blood sitting out. Sprinkled with burba root. Full. Cold and… ugh… rancid. Okay. That’s not a good sign. She peers around in the darkness. A tingling feeling kindles at the base of her spine and begins to work its way up.

“Spike?” she tries. Knowing there will be no answer. “Spike, are you here?”

She sees that the candles had all been left to burn down to cold little wax puddles. The tingling crawls up her back and enters her skull, announcing itself as panic. She flies into action. Strewing books and clothes and dead candles in her wake, she searches frantically. She doesn’t quite admit to herself what it is she’s looking for. Pushes away the thought of ultimately finding nothing but a pile of dust in the corner. Worse yet, the thought of finding –

Nothing.

She climbs downstairs. Maybe…

Well, she hadn’t expected to find this. Big slimy green globs piled in the corner. Demon eggs? Were these the demon eggs? She closes her eyes.

When Riley bursts in, he finds her huddled on the floor of the crypt, crying.

---

Fourteen days. Far as he can figure from time spent since that initial waking and what clues he'd picked up. Fourteen days since the alley. Since Buffy. He wonders how she is. Even now. Pointless really. She surely isn't wondering about him. Why would she? What was it she'd said? Soulless? Dead? Evil? Whatever. Doesn't matter.

She’s likely in a prison herself right now. Doesn't have to be. He knows from his captors’ idiotic conversations that she hadn't even killed that girl, the geeks here did it. He'd wager she could bend the bars, anyway. Break through the wall. If she wanted to. Slip out. Take out a guard or two. Escape. Maybe even come looking for him. She'd ask around. "Anybody seen Spike?" she'd say. "Nobody? Not since–" She'd put two and two together. Remember something about a black van near the alley. Smell of nerd in the air. Something.

She'd track him down. Track them down. She'd take her time with it – killing them for what they'd done. Not just for what they'd done to him, of course. Torture them proper, she would. She'd force the littlest one to break his sodding spell before popping his bulgy little eyeballs from their sockets and feeding them to him. Eviscerate the little blond prat, let him bleed out on the floor. She'd let him drink from the big one, cut his throat open and hold him out choking and writhing before him. A gift. Catharsis. And he'd take her off somewhere safe. Maybe grab the Bit too. They could go to Berlin, London, anywhere really. Anywhere but this fucking hellhole where nothing good ever came of anything. Yeah. She would come for him. If she wanted to. If circumstances were different.

He chuckles, alarming himself at the dry rasping sound of it. Fourteen days, eh? Feels a lot longer. He'd starved before. Not for a while, but he'd done it. Angelus punishing him for… well… existing. Drusilla chaining him to the wall and forgetting him there for days. That miserable time right after the chip before he'd broken down and asked for help from his sworn enemy.

Come to think of it, ever since the chip it's been a kind of starvation. None of them had understood what it was like. None of them had cared, really. Even without a reflection he’d known that he had gone paler these last few years; leaner, color gone from his lips and cheeks. Well, he'd adapted, hadn't he? Pig blood. Nasty stuff. They couldn't begin to know. And he'd tried, dammit. Fought the good fight, eh? For puppies and Christmas and all that rot. For her. Forsaken all others. Forsaken. For nothing.

He swallows. His throat feels like vitriol. He's starved before, yeah. Not sure if he'd gone this empty for this long though. Bleeding it all out first hadn't helped. He hadn't had a proper meal the night all this mess started. That's the thing of it. He'd felt her at his crypt door. Run off after her. Left the mug sitting. Well, he'd made his choice then, hadn't he? Rhetoric, blood, love. Which is compulsory, again? Does it matter any more?

It’s just so infuriating. These little wankers go on plotting their stupid little schemes. Pratting about with their stupid little arguments. Playing their stupid bloody video games. Doing their best to pretend there isn’t a vampire slowly shrivelling to dust across the room. What are they playing at? It’s cruel. All that rich human blood. Just beneath the skin. Right there. He watches them, listens to it pump through their veins, all those little capillaries under translucent flesh. Giving them color. Making them glow. They glow brighter still when they catch his eyes locked on their jugulars, his tongue on cracked lips. They go flush with fear. Blood. God. The smell of it is so thick, it gags him at times.

He had long since licked up the dried pig blood from his wounds, from his clothes, from the floor. He had cleaned himself like a cat, rubbing it from his face, catching the dried flecks in his hands, licking his hands clean. Again and again. Not enough. Never enough. Hungry.

---

"But, he's dying or something. It just seems kinda wrong."

"Wrong?” Warren turns to face Jonathan, raising the tranq gun to his shoulder as he does so. It makes Jonathan nervous, the way he’s always waving the thing around. “C'mon, he's a vampire. A bad guy, remember? And he can't die because he's already, you know, undead…"

Andrew looks up from the robot hand he had been pretending to arm wrestle. "Hey, wait a minute! I thought we were the bad guys!"

Warren glares at Andrew. "Yeeeeesss. We're the better bad guys though. Smarter and y'know, more civilized. Vampires are evil, but we're, like, crime lords. It's totally different."

"Oh, okay. That’s cool." Andrew nods and uses the robot hand to scratch his head. Jonathan rolls his eyes and tries again.

"Okay, so… he's not dying, but… look at him. I mean... I think he really needs some blood. Or something."

Three heads swivel to stare at the prisoner. He sneers and does something with his fingers that looks kinda like a backwards peace sign. Jonathan isn't sure what it means, but he doubts that the intent is very peaceful.

Despite the defiant gesture, it’s obvious that the vampire’s fading. He just sits there, huddled against his wall. He’s gaunt, swimming in the leather coat he keeps wrapped around himself. It’s pretty amazing how much weight he's lost, actually. How different he looks. Fast approaching skeletal. He’s white as paper now, with all kinds of vicious, purple-grey bruises mottling his face, mostly around his right eye and cheekbone. His lips are bluish white and cracking. He looks a lot like a zombie - something between the original Night of the Living Dead and the 1990 NTLD remake. Jonathan almost says this out loud but stops himself before another Romero/Savini argument can erupt. The last one got pretty ugly.

The prisoner glares back at them silently. He had stopped the frantic pacing and lunging within his confines after the first couple of days. Had stopped speaking, aside from occasional frustrated outbursts of profanity and grand threats, after the first week or so. It’s been two days since he last moved from the spot where he now crouches, watching them.

They look away.

"Just… chill, okay? He's fine. If we'd been giving him blood all this time, he'd be up to full vamp strength. Timothy Dalton here would be peeing his pants every day.” Warren gestures at Andrew with the tranq gun. Andrew jumps back. This time it's Warren who rolls his eyes as he lowers the gun. “Besides, I need him hungry for the plan to work."

"Hey, he was like, coming right at me that time. I could have been killed!" Andrew points the robot hand at Spike.

"Okay, okay, calm down… don't wet yourself.” A self-satisfied smirk at that. “Now, I should be ready for phase two by tomorrow night, anyway. After that, things should get really cool."

Jonathan shakes his head. "I don't know about this, guys. It's really weird. I mean, this is Spike, you know? We kinda know him–"

“It. It’s a vampire, stupid. It would suck your blood in a second if it could.”

There’s an acknowledging snort from the vampire’s cage.

Jonathan sighs. He’s getting nowhere. Don’t the others see that this whole plan is just completely nuts? Is he the only one who’s totally creeped out here? “Okay, okay. …But the Slayer… she’s… she’s Buffy. From high school Buffy. And… the crime lord thing, I thought we were gonna get chicks and take over the town and stuff, yeah, but… this other stuff… your girlfriend–”

"EX-girlfriend, Short-Round. And, hello – bad guys, remember? Well… the better bad guys. You know what I mean. We do bad things. We’ve already DONE bad things. All of us. And the Slayer’s after us. She knows what happened with Tr– what happened that night. Which was totally an accident, by the way – if she hadn’t tried to run like that… Anyway, the Slayer's still looking for us. What do you think she’ll do if she finds us? I mean, it’s totally us or her, man. Just… quit whining and get back to work and pretty soon you’ll see.”

Warren gives them both a reassuring smile before pointing the gun at the prisoner and firing. Jonathan grimaces as the dart hits Spike in the shoulder. With a growl, the vampire scrabbles to pull the dart from his body and shoots a furious look at Warren before slumping forward, unconscious.

Warren lowers the gun and grins. “It’s gonna be fun, okay?”

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