"This isn't where I came from. Where I came from wasn't a basement. There were more humans." The other girl spoke in the same voice, but the words were wrong, the tone was off. It wasn't hers.
Willow wrung her hands together, contemplating the mirror image of herself on the other side of the bars. Well, not mirror image. She wouldn't show up in a mirror. Maybe the spitting image? Gross. There had been enough spit with all the neck-licking. Maybe the evil twin? But they weren't sisters. They were the same person.
"You're staring at me." The mirror-image frowned.
Willow jumped at the interruption. Right! Important things.
"I — I know we said we'd send you back to where you came from." She walked toward the bars cutting through the middle of the room, stopping face-to-face with the vampire version of herself. "But I can't do that! Buffy was right. That would have been bad. You would have been back in the world, and then you'd do the biting thing, and the killing thing, and the evil. And I can't let you do that!"
The vampire Willow stared back, unimpressed.
"I — I changed the spell," Willow said, her voice thin and high. "Instead of sending you back to where you came from, I sent you here. It's an abandoned — uh, I'm actually not sure what this place did. It has a big cage in the basement, but in Sunnydale, that means less than you'd think. That's just sort of normal Sunnydale decor. We've got lots of things to keep in cages here."
"We kept humans in cages." Vampire Willow sighed and stroked the bars of her cage.
Regular Willow stared.
"O-okay. That's… that makes sense." Willow cleared her throat. "But that's just what I mean. You're not the kind of person… vampire… thing that we should just let go. I feel like I need to at least try to help you. We can give Angel back his soul, so maybe I can help you get yours back."
"Sounds boring. Don't want to." The vampire pushed away from the bars and paced to the opposite side of her cell, into the darkness which Willow's eyes couldn't penetrate.
Willow resisted the urge to go up to the bars, or try to comfort the monster on the other side of the bars. Comforting vampires was a bad idea. Even if they looked like you, and seemed to be not the worst vampire ever.
"Well… I know it sounds boring. And I know that I probably can't expect you to help out of the goodness of your heart that you kinda don't have because it's not beating. So I… I have a plan."
The vampire watched from the darkness as Willow pulled out a knife. It thought, for a moment, that the girl would try to attack. It relished the thought. The human looked into the darkness, gritted her teeth… and then pushed the blade against her palm.
Willow forced the blade into her hand for just a moment, then yelped and dropped it. "Ow! Super ow. Why do people always do that cut on the hand thing when they're doing ritual blood stuff!? Ow ow ow! Okay look here!" She quickly pulled a flask from her bag, and let the blood drip into it, ruby red droplets splashing into the glassware. The vampire's eyes caught every single fleck of color against the wall of the vessel.
"You seem to have an… interest in me," Willow said, as if making a grand statement, laying out a case before a wary juror. "And I'm interested in you."
The silence from the dark was deafening. Willow flushed.
"In a different way than you're interested. Very different interests! No hands. But… but I'm interested in getting you to work with me. And I have something you're very… uh… well... "
"Interested in?" the vampire finished dryly.
"Yes. I — I can't words right now. Okay, enough bleedy." Willow corked the flask, smearing it with the blood on her hand in the process. The vampire sucked in air through her teeth.
"If you work with me, then you get as much blood as you want," Willow said. "And — and human blood. Not butcher animal stuff. My blood."
She couldn't know what those words meant to her audience.
"Do you want me to dance for it? Be your pet kitten?" The voice from the darkness sounded like a living thing, cornered and dangerous.
"No, I — I just want to make you happy," Willow answered quietly.
"Depends on the happy," the voice teased.
The human flushed, and the rush of blood to her face sent the vampire's fangs on edge.
"I want to — to s-see if I can — if we can work together," Willow continued, ignoring the taunt. "I just don't want to kill you. And I want to see if maybe someday we can make you better. And if that better-making can make other vampires get better."
"Not interested," the darkness hissed.
"I — I can't feed you if you don't agree. And I don't want you to die."
"Not interested."
Willow stood, stunned, for a moment. But no further words came, and so she whimpered, desperate, quietly enough that she thought the monster couldn't possibly hear.
The darkness saw the sound, ensnared it; caught every murmur of the sound, saw every movement of the lips from which it came.
It spoke before it could help itself.
"Fine," it sighed. It sounded like exasperation.
"Oh! Oh. Really? So — you agree to work with me, and not bite me, and not try and kill anyone?"
A silence stretched out of the darkness. Willow waited, her legs shaking, squeezing the flask in her hand. Blood dripped from her hand onto the floor — tick, tick.
"Yes," the voice spat. "Help. No killing. Boring. Blood now."
Willow didn't realize she had been holding her breath. She exhaled, then knelt, and rolled the glass container through the bars. It came to rest halfway between the girl and the monster.
The flask (the flask, the flask) — it reeked of her blood, it glowed, it sang, it sparkled, its hymn coursed through her (fallen grace of the falling grace) — even from six feet away, lying on a dirty floor, it looked like a piece of heaven had poured from the sky (ruby red light) and flowed into her cell — the taste she had been waiting for, ever since she had surprised the girl in the library — the taste of this girl, this tiny, frail creature (human, weak, prey), her blood, her life, what made her, what divided her (split by iron, spilt by iron), everything she was and could be and had been —
The vampire glanced at Willow, her eyes glittering in the dim light, then at the glass container.
She pounced on it.