Willow was on blood duty.
They'd worked out a schedule surrounding Buffy's and Dawn's school times, and Xander's work schedule. Buffy didn't want any of the Potentials doing it (besides, they were off trolling ancient museums with Giles), and Willow didn't have class until the afternoon, so it was her job to play blood-bringer and guard dog.
She had complained at first – not because bringing the blood was such a bad job, but more about the guarding bit. She still didn't trust herself to do any kind of offensive magic without going dark, and she didn't know what she could really do if Spike decided to break loose.
"You can handle it, Will," Buffy had said, patting her arm as she and Dawn breezed out the door. "I trust you."
Willow just wished she could trust herself.
She heated the blood up as usual, poured it into the mug reserved for Spike, and brought it down into the basement. She made her footsteps as loud as possible, so he would know she was coming, and announced her presence a few stairs from the bottom with a "hey."
"Hey." His voice in response was so soft she could barely hear it.
He was in his usual position: huddled in the corner of his cot, pressed as closely to the wall as he could get. His hands rested on the sheet, chains pooled around them like shadows. "Breakfast," she offered, holding out the mug and feeling extremely lame.
"Thanks, Will."
Hearing him use her nickname reminded her suddenly, explosively, of last summer. That horrible summer after Buffy's death, when Spike had stuck with them and fought beside them and taken care of Dawn every night that the others couldn't. When he'd been their friend, kind of.
"Will," she said. Pondered. It was a new thought – one that had actually never struck her before. "Did anyone ever call you that? You know, because your name was William, before, and sometimes people named William get called Will?"
He looked up in surprise, his face morphing from vampire back to human. "What? Oh – no." He let out a little laugh. "Angel would call me 'Willy' sometimes, back when we were together, but that was only to bother me. I hated nicknames."
"Even when you were human?"
"When I was human." His voice trailed off. "That was a long time ago."
"Do you miss it?"
The words were out before she could think them through. Spike's face darkened, but not in a dangerous way – he set the mug down beside him on the bed and pressed his fingers to his temples. "I don't know," he murmured.
"What's it like – having your soul back?" She could tell she was going too far, but she had to know. This, she realized, was something that she'd been wanting to ask Spike for a long time. She had to know what a soul was, why it made a difference. Why she'd been able to do what she had done despite having one. "Do you feel human again?"
"No," he said, "but yes. It's – I dunno. There's still a demon in me, but now there's a soul in there, too. And that with all the other bloody things in my head. It's – there's too much." His face twisted; he grabbed for his mug and drained it in a quick swallow, then clamped his hands to his head again. "Too much."
"I'm sorry." Had she pushed him too far? "I'll go if you want."
"No!" His voice was quiet, but insistent. She looked over, and he relaxed his grip on his head, moving his hands back down to the bed, his face suddenly vulnerable. "Would you – will you sit with me?"
She didn't really want to, but he looked so pitiful that she couldn't say no. "Okay," she said. She perched on the very edge of his cot, clenching her hands together and staring down at her lap. "Sure. Just for a little while, though."
"You know what it's like."
Her head snapped up to look at him; his eyes were boring into her. They were blue, she realized. She'd actually never noticed their color before. That thought made her feel weird – a mixture of regret and indignation and uncertainty for all the time that he'd been on their side and she hadn't ever tried to get to know him.
"To kill people," Spike elaborated. "To want to kill – and then realize later that you wished you hadn't."
Her hands twisted tightly into one another. Her friends had been shying away from the k-word around her, as though she were too fragile to hear it. But she deserved it, she knew – being forced to acknowledge what she had done. Deserved it and a lot worse.
"What's it like, not having a soul?" she asked, her voice small. "What does killing feel like?"
"Depends on the kind of vampire you are," he said. "Killing is our art, but we do it in different ways. Dru – she had a thing for children." He winced. "Some bloody kick about the beauty in destroying the innocent – maybe had something to do with her own past. Angel liked torture. Called it 'poetry.' He liked to play with his victims before he killed them. Well, you know – you remember what he did to you and your friends." Willow remembered pulling a string of dead, colorful fish out of an envelope, remembered that sick dread upon realizing that Angel could get into her house. Remembered teaching a class for the end of her junior year because Angel had killed her favorite teacher and left her in Giles's bed.
"What about you?" she asked.
"I liked the fight." Spike's face went a little dreamy. "Battle, and violence – Never had much taste for what Angel did; it was too slow, too delicate. Bloodlust – the rush of a good kill" – He broke off, looking confused. "See, I still like it," he confessed. "But it's wrong, I know that now. All of me still remembers the feeling of a neck snapping like a twig under my hands – the taste of fresh blood, all full of adrenaline from a fight; made it a little sweeter – All of me remembers it, but part of me still wants it. And now I hate that part of me more than I've ever hated anything." He paused, and then said almost with wonder, "I was a fighter, and now all that energy is going towards fighting myself."
He looked up at her again. "What's it like for you?" he asked. "Killing on purpose, with a soul."
"I – I don't know," she admitted. "At first it was just this horrible anger. Tara was gone, and Warren killed her, and I just – I just lost myself. It wasn't about me anymore; it was this wave of grief that I couldn't control, so I tried to control it by making it into vengeance. Instead of – of – of letting myself feel, I just . . . went dark." She hesitated. "But it was more than just that." Blaming it on grief was a cop-out, and Willow was done withholding. "It was me, too – it was anger, and resentment, and every bitter feeling I'd ever had. It was" – She shivered. "It was this dark core in me that I never knew was possible."
"Your demon," he said knowingly.
"My – but I'm human!" Willow protested.
"And that makes everything all okay?" His voice and face sprang to life suddenly: defensive and indignant. "You lot have such a bloody fixation on souls, but humans have done just as much evil as the demons. You had a soul when you tried to end the world. Warren had a soul, and look at what he did." Willow flinched, but Spike kept going, his voice softer now. "Everyone's got a demon in 'em, Will. You do, and Buffy does, and I do. It's just you humans are supposed to have a soul that balances it out. But sometimes it fails." His eyes pierced into her. "Sometimes the right thing happens to make it fail."
The look he was giving her was significant. Tara had been enough for her, a catalyst. And, for Spike – "If you hadn't had a chip, when Buffy died" –
"I don't know what I would've done," he admitted. "She told me to look after the Niblet for her, and it wasn't like I could have broken that promise" –
"But it was tempting?" asked Willow.
Spike looked at her with an oddly twisted smile. "Ending the world?" he asked. "Making it all stop? Yeah. It was tempting."
"Would you do it now? Now that you do have a soul?" Willow didn't know exactly what she was looking for – some kind of proof that she wasn't that bad? Absolution of her sins, from a vampire even more bloodstained than she was? Did his murders count less than hers did, because he hadn't had a soul and she had?
"Dunno," he admitted quietly. "Part of me says no – I've already killed so many people, how could I ever kill more now that I know how wrong it was? But another part of me – Buffy is the only reason I made it this far. She's the only reason for the person I am now, the things I know, the life I have. And if I lost her again . . . there's part of me that would do anything to stop the hurting."
"Which part of you is it?" Willow asked, realizing as she said it that she was whispering. "The demon or the human?"
"At this point?" His eyes were even bluer when they were sad. "I'm not even sure of the difference."
Willow reached out, almost about to squeeze his hand – but then she realized that that probably was some kind of violation of personal (vampire-al?) space or something. But it was too late to stop the motion of her arm, so she just stroked the back of his hand instead.
The chains caught her eye, and the chafe marks on his wrists. "These are hurting you," she said. "I can let you out, you know. I'm here to keep an eye on you."
He jerked back, clutching his manacles to him. "Don't," he said, breathing hard. "Don't take them off."
"Buffy trusts you, you know," said Willow.
"Yeah," Spike said. "I know. And she trusts you, too. But do you trust yourself?"
Willow looked down. She knew she didn't even need to answer that.
"Leave them on, Willow," he said softly. "This way neither of us needs to test that."
"Okay," she replied. This time she did take his hand, giving it one gentle squeeze before pulling away and collecting his mug. "And thank you . . . William."