Here we are again. No one's reading this at the moment, but that's okay, it can go up here anyway. One minor warning, I was screwing around with continuity a lot in this chapter, so it's a bit... odd. Should be good though - the beginnings of a plot.
By late November, Spike had made the decision to lay low for a while. He told himself it was because the Slayer would be on the rampage until she exhausted herself but knew somehow that he was lying. Not about the slayer being on a rampage, because she was – her friend was dead, her mum's health was failing, and demons were quaking in their footie pyjamas at the sound of her name – but about the threat that she posed to him. He was in now. He was part of the team since he'd rescued Harris' corpse from inevitable desecration and it was... bloody awful. The friction just wasn't there anymore; Giles had taken to sharing his stash of loose-leaf from the mother country, Buffy hardly threatened to stake him anymore, the witches invited him to birthday parties – the spark had officially gone out of their relationship.
He was in on all the Scooby hijinks now too, apparently, super marines, mystical trances, sick mums, and crap fathers at the aforementioned birthday parties he felt his hat bleaching; he was being domesticated; he was being nice; he was getting nauseous. Then the Slayer got staked by her own trusted Mr. Pointy and Spike wanted to run at light-speed in the opposite direction even as he told her about the two that he offed, back in the day when he was less of the cuddly teddy-vamp that Dawn clung to whenever they were in the same room.
This was not something he'd ever wanted – destroy the precious Scoobies from the inside out, yes, become their pet vampire, no. The smart thing to do would be to skip town before he got too much softer – just pack up his meager belongings (a few of Dru's ribbons, a spare pair of trousers) and get the hell out of dodge before he was contracted into playing dress-up or something. But there was nowhere for a chipped vampire to disappear to. Spike supposed he could find his princess, head down to Rio and hunt her down, but Dru was a fickle creature at best and the chances were she wasn't there any more. With the chip in his head he didn't have the wherewithal to make it on his own. So he was stuck – it was either take his chances in Rio with no money and no murder, or keep playing the Slayer's lap dog until he was treacle-sweet and a total disgrace. Not that there weren't third, fourth and even fifth options, but he would rather go three rounds with a Rhitcy in the slimy stage than go to Angel, or get Harmony to take him back. The worst part was that he liked them, god help him, he liked the Scoobies – they were tough as old boot leather but so vulnerable.
Spike wanted to squeeze the world like a ripe papaya just to watch it bleed – he had wanted to split the Scoobies open fresh and crisp and glistening and drink down their strength but they'd domesticated him – bought him a lamp for fuck's sake. It would be too easy now to hurt them and he knew when he got the chip out that he wouldn't enjoy it – they'd sucked the fun out of it by opening up and being so damned nice. Betrayal wasn't his game, Spike preferred things straight forward, go find the Slayer in a warehouse and dance your girlfriend around the corpse. He wasn't a fan of getting in close, getting under their skin, and feeling the flavor of broken trust in his veins - that was always Angelus' gig. So he had to get out before he got too much closer, had to because when the chip came out he wasn't going to feel guilty for ripping their spines out - what the hell kind of demon would feel bad for offing a Slayer anyway? He was pathetic, and he had to go.
So he scooped up a box of clothing and some old records, left the lamp they'd bought him in the crypt, and tried to get the hell off the hellmouth before it turned him softer than he was. Spike figured he'd drop by some of the old haunts first, grab a quick farewell drink from Willy's, collect his poker debt from Clem and skip town before the Shark caught word and decided to collect his dues. He figured he'd head to Clem's little out-of-the-way dive that he kept with his cousin first, invite him out for a drink and be out of town by the time he got around to spreading the news of Spike's egress. But the fastest way to get there from the Restfield crypt was to cut across Main then through Hillside cemetery – the cemetery where the boy was buried.
Spike sighed hugely, dreading seeing the Slayer because she spent a lot of time at that grave, just talking to the freshly laid sod. Sometimes Spike heard her monologues asking for Xander's advice about her mom, her little sister, the Marine; most of the time he avoided the place like the plague. Tonight the vampire didn't really have a choice and it would be rude not to say goodbye to the boy anyway. He'd never realized exactly how vital Harris was to the Scooby life, but now he was gone and there was a great bloody hole in the center of the saving-the-world hijinks. It was only polite, he supposed, to say his final goodbyes to the boy – not that they'd talked much in the first place, but there was history between them. Sure the best times they spent together one or the other was cursed into silence but there had been times when he hadn't wanted to rip the boy's tongue out, and who would have guessed it was the boy that made Sunnydale bearable?
Maybe it was just the direction his thoughts were taking, or maybe it was the direction his feet were moving, but Spike would swear he could smell him. That curious blend of clove and clover, sharp, clean, grassy sweetness and just a pinch of something darker, spicier. But it wasn't possible and Spike told himself that he was just smelling the grass of the graveyard. He was going around the bend – felt painfully sharp stabs of fondness well in his gut, tempered by irrational frustration. The boy was dead, that wasn't going to change and if Spike's olfactory senses couldn't process that information then it was his nose's fault.
But... was there any harm in taking a look?
Cursing himself seven times a fool, Spike let his boots detour from his route to Clem's place and headed towards the kid's grave. He found it easily, and despite knowing that there wouldn't be a headstone for several months; he knew the plot of land like he knew his local grocery store – better, in fact, since he never bought shit from greengrocers but spent all of his time in boneyards.
And his nose hadn't led him wrong. As he crested the hillock he'd been climbing he spotted the dark shape there on the ground where Xander Harris had been buried, sitting on the plot he'd filled in with his very own hands. Not only could he smell it, but he could hear a heart beat, faint and frantic in strange counterpoint to the gently chirruping late crickets. And he smelled blood, the iron tang of it dry and bitter in the night air – Spike crept in closer keeping as low as he could coming down from the side of a hill. The person – thing – whatever, crouched over Harris' grave didn't seem to notice him, but he ducked between conveniently large headstones anyway, trying not to alert the thing to his presence. If it was some sort of demon with appallingly bad timing he didn't want to frighten it off and have to chase it across town.
The vampire crept closer and his eyes began to feed him information that couldn't quite be believed. Broad shoulders curled over themselves, long limbs that wrapped around a vulnerable core and all of it so fucking familiar that Spike choked on air he didn't need. It had to be a doppelganger, simulacrum of some variety and whoever had summoned the bastard thing had done a fair job of it, right down to the sweet spicy smell and the exhausted sobbing. If Spike had been anywhere else, if he wasn't sitting on a hellmouth surrounded by impossible occurrences every day, he would have believed that he saw Xander Harris clutching his bony knees to his chest on his own grave. But he was on the hellmouth, and the idea of a doppelganger demon wasn't all that outlandish – he was surprised this hadn't happened before, but it wouldn't be happening tonight, not with this particular Scooby. The idea of it outraged him.
Spike didn't have a problem with the dead. Being dead himself he thought it would be a little silly to be squeamish about things like zombies or ghosts, but impersonating the dead, mimicking every detail down to the smell and wounding their loved ones – hurting the Slayer through Xander who wouldn't be able to defend himself against unlicensed use of his image – that was unacceptable. Hypocritical, maybe, for a vampire to feel that unpalatable blend of disgust and grudging admiration for the technique, but Spike was more about the crunch than any psychological agony, and he'd never let his demon use his face to hurt the people he loved. They would be having a chat, possibly one in which Spike showed its own intestines to the demon wearing his friend's face (because Xander wasn't here and could hardly contest the label), and explained the situation to it. This was his town, and those people were, for whatever reason, off limits. He'd gone fucking soft.
But as he crept closer still Spike's brain churned over his personal brand of sense-making; a nugget of Darla's logic lodged in his brain "Occam's Razor: all things being equal, the simplest explanation tends to be the right one"; Angelus' too-frequent clichés and aphorisms as he growled out "The truth is stranger than fiction, lad"; and Dru's dreamy and frightening insight twisting it around in his head to say "Pretty pictures stirred up by the wings of moths, but what's real will always have its way." So Spike caught himself thinking maybe, just maybe doppelganger demons were too stupid for reality, and the simplest explanation was simply that it was Xander sitting there, sounding like him, smelling like him, looking thin and careworn but still very much like him, oblivious to the world. Spike was less than three feet away now, crouched beside the vulnerable fetal pose of his sometimes-friend and he reached out, a careful hand resting gently against the thin and shaking shoulder. "Xander?"
The boy's head snapped up and he caught Spike's eyes with a vacant gaze, wide and lost, helpless like a baby bird drawing the strength to chirp its first nonsense. "N-no."
And damned if that wasn't a typical Xander Harris reply. Except it hadn't been sarcastic, it had been frightened, and the shoulder beneath his hand was quaking now in fear and something else – the blood scent, old and dull, sharpened and the boy scrambled to his feet and took off limping at a dead run. "Xander!"
His hands were broken, mangled and bloody, full of pine splinters and fresh soil. He clutched them to his body as he staggered away, reeling against familiar headstones. The nice thing about crawling out of your own grave, Xander thought hysterically, was that even as the dirt did it's damnedest to suck you back under, if you moved your feet fast enough it gave you something to stand on. And the really great thing about the hellmouth was that no one stopped him as he staggered out onto Main street, bleeding, dirty, seeing things that couldn't possibly be real – people and not people at all – but he couldn't draw the breath to scream, still felt like he was suffocating under six feet of dirt.
Xander reeled, left then right, spinning in traffic driven circles down the street, and he knew where he was, and who these people were, but couldn't make himself pick a direction, couldn't force himself to look any of them in the eye. It had to be a spell, there had to be something wrong with his eyes and he thought if his hands would just uncurl themselves that he could claw them out. He stumbled forward, ricochet'ed off the shoulder of a man in his mid-forties and gaped at him in horror as the man grabbed his shoulder, "Hey!"
"T-t-two years." Xander stammered.
"You okay, son?"
"Two years." Xander said more firmly, "heart attack." He said, and broke away, his hands screaming at him as he ran, full steam away from the man who was going to have a fatal heart attack in two years, and away from all of the people he could see slowly dying around him.
Eventually his panicked run around Sunnydale brought him back to where he'd started – a hole in the ground in one of a dozen cemeteries. Xander pressed frantically around the grave he'd sprung out of, looking for clues that might explain this newest insanity, but all he managed was to shift the dirt back into the hole and twist the pinky of his left hand completely out of line. The new, sharp pain caused him to cry out and ended his frenzy. Xander collapsed in the dirt, exhausted and panting – he thought maybe if he went to Buffy... but everything was so strange – images swimming slickly over one another and he wasn't sure he'd recognize her.
Xander didn't know what the hell he was going to do. Wait here until one of the scarier denizens of the Sunnydale nightlife made an appearance and ate his liver? Go wandering again in a world that looked like it was dipped in LSD and cellophane? Or just wait until later when there would be fewer people around and he might make it home. There wasn't much of a choice in that, he was too exhausted to move just yet, his hands were one screaming ache and his head another; so he would wait here until he had the strength to try again or until something ate him.
It was the second part of the plan that worked out, but not nearly as quickly as he'd hoped.
"Hello."
Xander whipped around at the sound of the voice, startled and caught like a deer in headlights. The man on the street had been different; like thousands of sheets of transparent glass, each showing a different picture, layered together as a three dimensional puzzle. A four dimensional puzzle, because as the man stood the infant, the boy, the man with high cholesterol, and the dust his bones would become. But this man… Xander fought with his eyes for control, tried to see one image in the place of fog, a bat, a wolf, a handsome gentleman, a monster – he saw the demon in the shadows and tried to be afraid as well as confused, panicky, and sore. Insane. He was going insane. "Hi."
"Interesting."
He didn't feel very interesting, he felt like meat. "Who are you?"
"I am the Prince of Darkness," Answered the man who was not a man, his pretentiousness was strangely soothing and not at all lost on Xander, despite his state. "I am the son of the dragon. I am Vlad Tepes, I am the night."
The old instincts were coming back, the default programming that kept Xander wisecracking under the gun and he pushed himself to his feet, cradling his injured hands, "Good for you." He breathed hoarsely, in, out, he had to get out of here. "I'll let you get back to that then."
The smile was cold and made of marble. "Be silent."
Xander's mouth slid shut against his will and he rebelled, tried to speak but the words were lodged like sea glass in his throat.
"What is your name, boy?"
"Alexander LaVelle Harris." Came the automatic response as some of the glass came free. His full name, which he hardly admitted to anyone, and he could have kicked himself if he'd been capable of moving his feet.
"Yes, you'll do very nicely." Dracula was closer, had been moving all the while, while Xander stood rooted to the spot by feet that refused to obey him. "Who am I?"
"Master."
"Perfect." He felt the cold lingering touch of Dracula's hand on his cheek, shuddered in terror and exhaustion. The voice was heavy, pushing him pack down to the earth and wrapping his mind in a fog. Xander felt himself growing sleepy and wouldn't it be nice to just... curl up and take a nap? "Sleep, child."
Xander slumped forwards into the monster's embrace and was swept into a dream.
Spike took his quarry in a flying tackle, bracing himself for the inevitable migraine on impact. The boy was quick, frantic, moving like animal as he skittered from one headstone to another without an actual plan, a rabbit drawn from its warren without anywhere to go. Spike caught him on the open stretch of grass and gravel where the hearses and the gravediggers drove and leapt, hoping like hell he wasn't about to smash Xander's face into a headstone and kill him again – that wouldn't be easy to explain to the Slayer. He prayed he'd be able to hold on long enough to ride out the waves of the chip, he hoped he'd knock some sense into the boy, he hoped the gravel wouldn't tear the duster…
Impact.
Spike's shoulder hit Xander's back with a thump and they both went sprawling, scraping hands and knees and tearing a good chunk of skin off Xander's arm which suddenly bloomed with the sweet, distracting smell of fresh blood. Distracting enough, but only for a fraction of a second, just long enough to realize that the chip wasn't trying to blast him into unconsciousness, and just long enough for Spike to not feel a sudden and sharp pang of realization that this wasn't Xander. He'd half convinced himself of the opposite but reality had its way and Dru was right, it was a bully.
"What the hell are you?" He growled at the thing, which was squirming and struggling, tearing more of its skin on the rough path and smelling so much like Xander Harris that Spike was ready to rip it in half for sheer audacity. None-too-gently he flipped the thing over and pinned it, ignoring flailing hands and the muffled cry of pain. "What are you?"
"Dead…" the thing gasped back, and this close Spike saw the differences he hadn't from afar, saw the pale, drawn skin, saw how thin and rickety this creature made Harris out to be. Saw bruises and scrapes and raw looking skin even as the thing fought to get away, weak and panting hoarsely, its struggle wild and feverish. "Dead dead dead…"
"What… are you?" Why, if it could mimic Harris so well, down to the smell and the face of desperation, had it chosen to look like this? Like a cheap, abused facsimile, wearing the same suit they'd buried him in? Why did he smell, ever so faintly beneath the usual combination of grass and spice, like jasmine and myrrh? It looked tired now, and resigned – panting in the dust and crying tears that left clean streaks in the smears of dirt and blood on his face. Gently, now the thing had stopped fighting and Spike had a hand free, gently the vampire gripped the thing's chin, stared into the gaunt and exhausted face, watched as huge brown eyes skittered away from his, and licked a smear of blood away from the jaw. Spike tasted graveyard dirt, tasted salt and clover, he tasted truth. The shock left him breathing, groping at the boy's wrists and shoulders, holding him upright, trying to shake him back to reality.
"Dead dead dead" Xander was chanting, voice rough and cracking, but whether it was a prayer or a statement Spike didn't know. "They tell you dead and gone… they lie."
"Xander… you're…?" There weren't words. "Jesus."
"Real?" the boy that wasn't dead managed to ask him in a reedy quaver, he looked exhausted, eyes hardly tracking as he drew in breath after ragged breath before finishing his thought, "God… please be real."
Spike didn't have the opportunity to answer him before all the tension left his body and Xander lost consciousness.
Spike, almost dizzy with the revelation, disentangled himself and scrambled to his feet. Xander Fucking Harris. The name deserved the emphasis, because until now Xander Harris had been dead – a lost friend, fallen hero, martyr to the noble cause blah blah blah – until now.
Spike wondered if he was crazy. Hallucinating in some way – a throwback to Dru's special madness or… hell, the Initiative had cut open his head and jammed a piece of hardware in there, maybe they'd jogged something loose with a careless scalpel and he was imagining it. All of it, the mad dash through the headstones, the brief and furious scuffle, the infuriatingly accurate smell… all of it something his idle brain cooked up and really he was standing here on the gravel path with the knees of his trousers torn out because he'd gone mad.
Except that he hadn't, Spike knew about stars and delusions, and this wasn't either. This was something new and strange, something Spike would definitely be staying in town to figure out. For the second time in his unlife, the vampire gently lifted Xander, this time mindful of his injuries. He could feel the feverish warmth of the boy even through the thick leather of the duster, could smell his blood, and plainly see the wrecked state of him – Spike knew Xander would need medical attention, but didn't dare take him to a hospital; there was a heartbeat, Xander was warm and breathing, but not long ago he had been dead, the kind of dead that would undoubtedly show up on a monitor. The vampire sighed, shifted the unconscious human so Xander's weight leaned into him, and headed back across the cemetery. At least this time he wouldn't have to boot Harm out.
That's all folks... for the day. See you again tomorrow.