His head was collapsing in on itself and he could feel the skull crushing within. It was such a powerful migrane. A sense of dizziness followed and a sharp, short pain. The chip was becoming more burrowed inside his brain, allowing for a more dictatorial regime over his freedom of movement and control of thought. He felt himself becoming a computerised object during the night. Love was the cause of this disease. Spike was becoming the robot that he had purchased to heal his passionate wounds. This had backfired, and he now saw that he was a robot too.
Sleep did not take away these sensations.
So he dozed and did not awaken the entire night. He did not make his usual false breathing movements. The vampire lay back on the bed so still that he showed his true self, a creature of the night. Not a living thing. The beast lay dormant inside.
"Is he awake yet?" Willow asked Buffy over the phone.
"He hasn't stirred, he looks like Sir Deadalot to me."
"He should have woken up by now, the potions should have worn off." Willow was surprised. She was sure that even though Spike was completely exhausted, he should have shown some sign of rousing. The amount of blood that they had given him, was enough to heal the most stubborn of wounds. She told Buffy that O negative blood was like Mr Muscle when it came to healing. It does all the jobs that the other blood groups hate.
"Will, I'm worried, I've done everything to make him comfortable, but he looks so disturbed." Buffy had no idea about how to bring Spike back into the world of the conscious.
"Just let him rest and tuck him in with a teddy bear for company, and don't keep him too warm, that could be a little bit risky. After all, hot blood means anger, and anger is too cartoony with all the steam pouring out of ears and turning red and everything and."
Buffy was getting a little bit too used to Willow's crankiness. She decided to end the conversation quickly. "What good is a teddy bear to me now?"
Willow began to laugh, "I dunno, it just looks cute."
"Right, well guess it's time to see if Mr 'hey honey I'm sorry for all the pain I've caused but I'm just a bad, rude man' is feeling any more lively." Buffy muttered sarcastically.
Willow was feeling lonely and didn't want to hang up. "Anything else you want to chat about? You know the university basketball team beat Stanford today and the football team lost to some fraternity guys and they had a really big sale on at Wall Mart and it was full of balloons going whoo everywhere and it was really cool and."
"Sorry I don't have time for this." The phone went down. Buffy was glad that she had heard the last of her friend for the night. She was sat in her living room with the curtains drawn, watching an episode of a popular TV show when she heard a moan coming from upstairs. It was Spike.
Spike's pain was growing more extreme by the second. Visions of everyone he had ever killed flashed in his mind every moment. They were filed and sectioned in gray files within secured vaults, but they all flew open at once and their whole contents spilled out and flooded the small space inside his head. Buffy saw tears flowing from his eyes and rushed to comfort him. Spike's eyes fluttered open.
Buffy, was it her? It couldn't be. He tried to reach her in his dreams, but the robot clouded his nightmares. She could not be a vision, she would not be a creation. Robots disguise true love and care, so this could not be, could not be, could not be. It simply could not be. He was malfunctioning again. He'd bet a thousand kittens on it, that he was sure that this was not her, nor a figmant of his imagination. It was Glory in the mist, or at best, the Nibblet. No, it was Bob Barker. The minions said that they would bring 'this Bob Barker'. A thousand kittens would be the price is right, but there was no mistaking that smell of coconut and … Fructis. The nose never lied, the eyes could not see, but the nose could detect.