Chain

By Irfikos

Part III: Blood and Love

3.5: Chained

Notes: Later that night...


Hey!
Been trying to meet you.

Hey!
Must be a devil between us…

But hey!
Where have you been?

If you go I will surely die.

We’re chained…

–Hey
Pixies, 1989

---

“Ahh…” Warren settles into the chair, leaning back and propping his feet up on one of the still unpacked boxes of equipment. He shoots a grin at the vampire who is standing just inside the door of the burnt out room, waiting for Warren to indicate whether or not he may enter further. Nice and housebroken. Warren doesn’t indicate. “Home sweet home, huh?”

The vampire looks uncomfortable. Well, more uncomfortable than usual. He’s been acting funny ever since they had arrived at the new lair. Even quieter. And slouchier.

“Why so glum, chum? Don’t you like the new digs?” Warren looks around at the room he had claimed as his ready room. “Sure, it’s not as homey as the last place, but you gotta admit, it’s pretty wicked cool. Just screams “evil lair” dontcha think?”

Spike nods and continues to stand there, looking thoughtfully at the burnt debris scattered on the floor.

“Yeah. It’s a mess. I know. I sent the guys ahead to get the place all set up. But cleaning wasn’t as much of a priority as tapping into the the power grid and stuff.” He points up at the lights in the ceiling. “Fully operational.”

Spike glances up at the lights briefly and nods again. Definitely preoccupied. Warren isn’t sure if he’s more concerned that the vamp might be up to something or irritated that he’s being tuned out.

“So…” he continues, “You should be pretty happy, huh? No more cage. Full belly…”

Warren takes his feet off the box and leans forward. His vampire is nudging at something on the floor with the tip of his boot. Totally not paying attention to him. For an immortal being, he has the attention span of a toddler with ADD. He’s already looking better though. That’s a relief. Warren doesn’t like to admit it to himself, but it was a major screw-up to have let the vamp get so weak. Easier to control, yeah. But able to take on the Slayer? No way.

Warren peers down at the garbage at Spike’s feet. “What’cha got there, Sparky?”

Spike’s head flies up and his shoulders hunch guiltily. Already, he’s tensing up in anticipation of receiving a shock. Warren suppresses a chuckle. It’s good to be the king.

“Oh…” the vampire mumbles hastily, looking down again at the object that had drawn his attention away from his master. “S’nothing. Junk.” He brings his boot down over it. Crushes it into smaller pieces. Chances a look at Warren to gauge the odds of escaping punishment. Warren leans back a little. Decides to let it slide. He is a god, but a merciful god.

“Come here,” he commands, noting that the vampire has stopped breathing again. Weird. Vamps aren’t supposed to need to breathe at all. Well, maybe for talking and smelling and stuff like that. But Spike does it a lot. More often than not. Warren has noticed lately though, that Spike will stop breathing altogether if he thinks he’s about to get another shock. Pain conditioning. He’ll probably have to reprogram the chip to compensate if the vamp is already finding ways to prepare himself before a shock. Soon. When the vamp’s strong enough to handle another upload.

He hasn’t even registered the movement before he realizes that Spike is already standing in front of him. Vampire speed. Wow. He’ll have to clock that sometime. Once he has the Slayer he probably won’t even need Spike. It still might be a good idea to keep him around though. Do some experiments. Maybe use what he learns to control a vampire army or something. Oh, well, plenty of options. He can figure it out later.

Spike is obviously desperate to avoid punishment. And he’s obviously getting stronger if he’s able to move like that. Warren stands up and appraises him. He’s still skin and bones, but there’s some color to him now. Shortly after he had fed, the wounds around his face had begun to bleed freely. The vampire had, of course, made sure that the blood didn’t go to waste. By the time they had stashed the van in the warehouse area of the new lair, the bleeding had mostly stopped. Now it looks like the sores have already started to scab over. The blisters from the cross and the holy water are healing a bit too. Vampire healing. Cool. It may not take that long after all. If that stupid crowd of people hadn’t decided to come out the back way and interrupted them, they could have grabbed Harris and brought him back for Spike to eat later. That would have been perfect.

“How do you feel? Stronger?” he asks

“Uh, yeah…” Spike responds, cautiously beginning to breathe again. “A bit.”

“You’re healing.”

Spike reaches up and runs tentative fingertips over his wounds. “Starting to. I’ll… I’ll need more blood–”

“Shut up.” Warren cuts him off. “I’m not stupid. You’ll get blood. If you deserve it. Just chill.”

The vampire’s hand moves up from his face to brush nervously through the dirty coils of white-tipped hair above it. He shuts up.

“How long will it take? To heal? Till you’re strong enough. And don’t lie to me.”

“Uh… well, y’know… depending what you want me to do –”

“How long before you could take on the slayer.”

Spike’s eyes widen and a surprised laugh escapes him before he can stop it. Warren narrows his eyes.

“The Slay–” Spike is trying to keep his voice even. He’s being careful not to raise his eyes to meet Warren’s. “–You want me to fight the Slayer? That’s… that’s what this is all about?”

“How long?”

Spike blinks as he contemplates his answer.

“I’ve never… y’know, technically… beaten the Slayer… and, uh, weak as I am just now…”

“I don’t need you to kill her, stupid. I know she’s kicked your ass. I’ve seen it.” Warren smiles as Spike clenches his jaw. “I just need to know how long it would take before you could… you know, engage her in a fight. Help to subdue her. And it better not be long.”

Perplexed, Spike appraises his condition. Warren hovers over him, waiting.

“Uh… the bones should knit… couple days. That’s – y’know – if I feed again…” He flinches as he says it, realizing that mentioning the blood again could incur Warren’s wrath. Warren’s smile disappears but he lets him get away with it this time.

“…The wrist… it’s bad off. It’ll be weak a day or so longer. Got a concussion… that’s… three days maybe, long as I…” he skips over the part about needing to feed. Warren gets the point. He crosses his arms and begins to tap his foot.

“Uh… gone empty for… dunno how long. Could take awhile before I get much strength back…”

“Okay, Nosferatu, lets wrap it up here. I don’t care how you’re feeling. I just want a timeframe.”

Spike clenches his jaw again. Lets a bit of an edge seep into his voice. He doesn’t raise his head though. “I could fight you tomorrow.”

Warren stops tapping his foot. The vampire is feeling himself getting stronger from the nice big meal he had tonight. It’s making him cocky.

“Attack me and your brain explodes,” Warren reminds him.

“Well, yeah. Aside from that though…”

Warren pulls his fist back and strikes a blow across the vampire’s bruised cheekbone. It knocks his head to the side and he staggers back a step or two, but he doesn’t fall. Spike closes his eyes for a couple seconds.

“I hurt you,” Warren states.

Spike opens his eyes but doesn’t raise them. He’s testing the situation but he still knows his place.

“I said, ‘tomorrow,’” he responds quietly. He adjusts his stance a bit, preparing for another blow.

Warren keeps his fists clenched. It feels good to hit Spike. He had never been on the winning side of a fight in his life. Never known the satisfaction of throwing a punch and actually hurting his opponent. He had always been the one on the other side of the fist. This is definitely better. But Warren isn’t stupid. He knows where his power lies. He knows that fists alone could never make the kind of impact on the creature necessary to control him. He feels a certain pride in knowing that in however many hundreds of years the vampire has walked the earth, he is probably the only person to have ever been able to really hurt him. Now that’s power.

“Threaten me again and I’ll make the chip fire. See how strong you feel then. You want that?”

The change in the vampire’s demeanor isn’t obvious but it’s there. Fists may be useless on him, but the threat of the chip is palpable. Warren wonders, not for the first time, just how painful the shocks must be to terrify a preternaturally strong demon with the kind of pain threshhold Spike has. Once, during one of their dinnertime chats, he had asked Spike what it felt like. The vamp had been too busy screaming to reply, and Warren hadn’t been interested enough to force him to answer. It’s hard to describe that sort of thing after all. At one point, Warren had actually started to feel kinda bad for him. But every time empathy tries to creep in, he remembers the vampire threatening him. Intimidating him. Disrespecting him. He remembers how terrified he had been. All his life, it’s been like a constant state of fear. Fear of people like Spike. People who think they’re better than him somehow, just because they’re stronger or more popular. People who still come crawling to him when they need their homework done for them or their stupid robots built for them. Or the microchip in their head looked at. People not as smart as him. He doesn’t feel terror any more. Just anger. Warren Mears has moved up the food chain. No way is he going to let anyone get away with threatening him again.

Warren repeats himself, “Is that what you want?”

There is no longer any edge in Spike’s voice. “No – I… All I meant was… a human. I could fight a regular human tomorrow.”

“And the Slayer?”

“I don’t… Not sure I can. Even at full strength. It’d be a long time…”

“Just to corner her. Give me a chance with the tranq gun or something.”

Spike scowls down at his boots. “What do you… plan to… do with her?” he asks tentatively.

Warren lets out an exasperated sigh. “Just answer the question, okay?”

Spike shrugs his shoulders. “Well… just to… y’know, distract her… Soon as the bones knit, I suppose. Three days. If you’ve got good aim. And she’s likely to dust me before you can snag her.”

“Three days? Cool. That’s good. I can do that.” Warren turns away from Spike, already working on the plan. “Go get the guys. We need to get ready.”

Spike turns and trudges from the room. Warren looks around gleefully at his new sanctuary. Three days and the Slayer is his. Pretty damn cool. He steps over to the doorway and bends to look at whatever had so fascinated Spike earlier. Huh. Must’ve been kids playing in here at some point. He picks up a blackened porcelain fragment of a doll’s face. Scrapes away soot with his fingernails to uncover round green eyes. A doll. Stupid vampire. He drops the shard and stands up, wiping his hand on his pants. With his heel, he grinds the porcelain into the concrete.

---

On his way to fetch the lessers, Spike takes a slight detour, ducking down a corridor off to the left and slipping into a tucked away little room no larger than a supply closet. Once upon a time, it likely was a supply closet. Now it’s a burnt out husk with dented metal shelves lining the walls and great mounds of rat droppings in the corners. Somewhere in between then and now, this room had been Spike’s. His sanctuary. He had, at one time, done a good deal of quality drinking in this room. When Drusilla would work herself into a snit and put him out of the bed. And later, when Angelus had come back to claim what was his. This is where he had spent his days. Yeah. Lovely memories, those.

He bends down and rummages through the debris on the floor. Finds what he’s looking for under a toppled set of shelves. He pulls the bottle out and squints at it appraisingly. Not even enough whiskey in it to get one of the little boys out there buzzed. Still… the blood he’d had tonight’s not sitting right. Needs a chaser. Sure, it’d been rich and warm and… god… so alive. It’d been enough to make his eyes roll back in his head with the sheer pleasure of it. But then, halfway through the girl, she’d looked up at him and given a bit of a whimper. And no, he couldn’t stop drinking even if he’d wanted to – well bloody hell, why would he want to? – but it had given him pause. And then… what’s his name… the Slayer’s boy…Harris – Harris had shown up and that feeling had hit him again… that fucking annoying something in the periphery…

Something missing. Something… it had been important, right?

Nothing. It was nothing of course. It was just that he’d eaten too fast after starving so long. Nothing more. Still the taste in his mouth is bitter. He opens the bottle and downs the contents of it in one pull. Beautiful! Tastes like piss. Burns everything away. Much better.

He’d hit Xander, hadn’t he? He’d hurt the Slayer’s pet boy. Lucky thing they’d been interrupted by the crowd of humans spilling from the bar, or Warren likely would have had Spike off him as well. Wait… was that lucky? He’d wanted to hurt Harris, hadn’t he? Ages ago, perhaps? Seems to recall quite a few elaborate fantasy scenarios in which he inflicts all sorts of pain on the egregiously dressed wanker. There were possibly even some sketches involved.

Tonight, he had finally been able to inflict a bit of hurt on Xander Harris. And he felt nothing. Feels nothing. Because you are nothing he thinks and then quickly shakes the thought from his head.

Conflicted, that’s what he is. He takes another pull from the bottle. Nothing. Bloody hell. The boy will be fine. He’ll limp off to the Slayer and she’ll come and ram a stake through his chest and that will be the end of this nonsense once and for all. It’ll be a relief, really. His only regret – no, not the only one, but the one that seems to be clearest in his mind at the moment – is that he won’t be able to rip Warren Mears into bloody little bits before she dusts him. Not conflicted about that bit. He may be going mad, and he may be a bloody slave here, but at least he still has a dream or two intact, yeah?

He reaches up to touch the bruise on his cheekbone. The Slayer will come. And she will do her job. And until that time, he will do his job. And there is no choice in the matter at all.

He throws the bottle against the wall. Watches the glass shatter and sprinkle to the floor. He exits the room and returns to the hallway.

They meet him at the end of the hall and he stops.

“Um… there was a noise – we didn’t know –”

“It was nothing,” he interrupts Andrew, looking directly at him long enough to discourage any further questions about his detour but not long enough for it to be construed as insubordinate. Jonathan just stares at him apathetically. That one’s going to rabbit off any day now. And when that day comes, Warren is going to have Spike kill him. He almost feels sorry for the little bastard. Almost.

“Okay, yeah, but… what are you doing… um, loose?”

He pictures his hand punching into the boy’s throat, grabbing onto the windpipe and wrenching it free from his body – pulling it out of him like the little plastic thread from a packet of cigarettes. It would take the rest of him a few seconds to die. But at least he’d be quiet about it.

“Boss sent me fetch you. Plans.”

Andrew nods and the two of them edge past the vampire. When they’re clear, he turns and falls into step behind them.

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