Note: Alternate season six. Takes place just after "gone" and then goes off canon completely. The events of Tabula Rasanever happened, so Giles is still around and Tara and Willow are still together, although shakily.Warning: this started out as a smutty one shot, which then unexpectedly grew a plot. If you are offended by smut, don't bother reading
Disclaimer: All things Buffy belong to Joss Whedon, I just borrow them for fun. This chapter includes dialogue from Lies My Parents Told Me by David Fury and Drew Goddard.
This is my first fic, and as of yet I have no Beta, anyone interested in betaing for me, I would be delighted to have your help! When it comes to update schedules, for the first several chapters of the fic, which I already have written, I'll be posting on a weekly basis. Once I catch up, I'll probably slow down to once a month; I will keep posting though, so stick with me! Thanks to everyone for the lovely reviews, they help keep me writing!
Chapter 4
Dawn, Tara and Willow sat in stunned silence for an endlessly long ten minutes, each lost in her own struggle to make sense of what a soulless Buffy could mean. Willow spoke first, her voice detached, "We need to tell Giles. Call a Scooby meeting." The other two nodded wordlessly and they all trooped downstairs to the kitchen while Willow phoned the Watcher.
"Giles? Yes, it's me. We need to have a Scooby meeting. Now. This," she took a deep breath, "it's big this time."
In twenty minutes the whole gang had congregated at the Magic Box, a hush hanging over the room as Willow briefly explained the situation. Xander ran his hand through his hair distractedly, "I don't get it. Buffy was always why we won. She always found a way. What're we supposed to do now that she's gone all Angelus on us?"
"What we always do," Giles said after a long silence. "I admit, this is a blow; Buffy has always been our leader and our best weapon. But we must remember that we've had just as important a part in pulling her through on many occasions. We are a team, and we can still function as one, even without our captain." He forced a tone of optimism into his voice that he didn't quite feel.
"I'll get the books." Tara stood and began pulling volumes off the shelves, picking off specific ones from different sections and setting them on the table. They all got to work, settling into research mode more quietly, with less banter than usual. Xander and Anya took the demon books, searching for anything that could eat or steal souls. Willow, Tara, and Dawn took the spell books, and Giles threw himself into the prophecies. After a bit over an hour he began to polish his glasses and mutter to himself. "It can't be related. It would be absurd." But he had to check. He fished a slim paperback from the pocket of the jacket he´d draped over his chair. The cover was a pale blue and read in simple, dark orange type "The Diary of Don Finch." He flipped to a page about two thirds through the book and stared at the rambling block of text:
Fifteen of ale, unhappy interruption- Mrs. Connor's runny stew smells better on its way out than in, that nectar of Lethe cheap whiskey in 3 fingered doses. And I'm here again blasted hole walls like dried piss. Forgive me father, I'm consorting with my demons again. Ha! Alright alright. Damned girl one in the world all that rot won't stay dead this one. All knocked to pieces. Bits fall out. Mrs. Connor's all one great piece hardly moves, the sow. Smells it on my breath, well I smell her like cabbage sweating from the damned pissy walls. Damned important bits leave her just like the bloody dead angel what ruined her. Got to paste her back together that one bitch without her sparky bits'll send us all back to pissy walls 3 fingered gulps suffocating in Mrs. Connor's infernal boarding house. I hate it here. I hate talking to you. Finish the last drops don't you worry I'll finish it then leave me be back next week. No use gluing her just like that only breaks again. Trite romance redemption all a load of horseshit. We're all god's children with eternal souls down here all we do is rut and connive. Have it your way love is all you need[next two lines unreadable]
Giles lifted his head from the small book and cleared his throat. It was daft. The man was a drunken sot, grudgingly included as the comic relief of the prophetic genre because parts of his diary predicted the titles of Beatles songs. But now, that passage…
"I think I've found something. It's horrifying and frankly, rather embarrassing, but I believe it fits our current, ah, situation. The majority of the text is a drunken ramble, but in parts it refers to one girl in all the world, who's come back from the dead, and had her 'sparky bits' knocked out, leaving her like Angel. It also implies a dystopia or apocalyptic outcome if we don't restore Buffy's soul to her."
"Oh that's great! I was worried we'd just have a quiet weekend dealing with our super-powered best friend having come down with a slight case of Evil! But no, nothing boring on the Hellmouth! Always gotta throw a little apocalypse into the mix to spice things up a bit." Xander had stood up for his verbal explosion, and he plopped back into his chair looking defeated when he finished.
"I don't mean to hop on the pessimism bandwagon, but how are we gonna do this? We can't outfight Buffy, and we are kinda handicapped on the magic front…" Willow sighed and sunk down into herself, taking on the communal air of dejection that hung over the room.
"She's right. With Buffy being one of the bad guys now, and Willow not able to do magic 'cause of the whole being a crazy junkie thing, we're basically a bunch of civilians. We need someone strong to help us, and I think it's pretty obvious who to ask. We need Spike," Anya said matter-of-factly from her perch on the counter, unaware of Xander's reproachful look.
"I'm not sure that would be wise, Anya. While Spike's strange—" Giles hesitated, "fixation with Buffy has caused him to help us in the past, he's still a soulless and ultimately selfish creature. It's quite probable he'll see Buffy losing her soul as an opportunity to win her over."
"No! Spike's not like that anymore!" Dawn turned her whole body to face the Watcher, furious. "Did you just forget about last summer? He loves Buffy, for real. He'll know it isn't really her!"
"I'm not the biggest fan of the fang 'cause, you know, scary, and I've been on the wrong side of bumpy and bottle-in-the-face Spike too many times to get the warm fuzzies over him, but Dawny's got a point. He's not like he was, at least when it comes to Buffy, and we are kind of desperate. We could at least find him and see how he reacts. We'd be all cautious-like."
After a few more rounds of bickering back and forth the gang finally decided to risk approaching Spike for help.
"They've all gone! Little chickens all flown the coop and our pretty little Slayer nowhere to be found." Drusilla pouted, then clutched at Aaron's arm, her mood darkening instantly. "Ooh! Filth! Depravity! Sick, sentimental Willy! Crammin' the light down his throat, wedding his lovely dark demon to it! I see him! Monster all tame and perverted, licking at the Slayer's boots an' draggin' her back into the sun. Naughty boy! Mustn't meddle!"
The pair stood on Buffy's front lawn before the empty house. They'd taken their time getting from the warehouse to Ravello Drive, hoping that Buffy's first soulless actions would be fatal for her friends and would send her in search of more appropriate allies. Aaron watched Drusilla calculatingly. "You having a vision there, sweetheart?"
Her eyes went wide and her mouth pursed, she nodded solemnly.
"And if I'm translating crazy into English right, we gotta get to the Slayer before your soft, lovesick ex-beau does something to make her switch sides again. We'll let him steep in the warehouse for a bit; the bonds'll hold for a while yet. Then we'll see if the new Miss Summers wants to take care of him for us. That should squash any plans he might have to get her soul back"
"Spike's not family anymore…" Drusilla looked forlorn, "not even I can save him if he's a mind to go chasing after souls…"
He didn't sleep, couldn't with the constant scream from the muscles in his arms reminding him he was still trussed up and exposed. But he thought. He turned her over and over in his mind, worrying at her like a loose tooth. It had been the Slayer, somehow, but not human, not really Buffy. It had been like seeing her. Her eyes bright, smile warped, crooning "Pleasure? To take my leave of you, of course…Had I known, I would have dashed your brains out the moment I saw you. Spared myself a lifetime of tedium." Her words had never stopped whispering at him from the back of his head, not really. Just got better at drowning them out.
Despite all his mocking, his seeming nonchalance, seeing the Slayer with that same twisted familiarity, that same wrongness staring back at him from behind her eyes had made his stomach turn. The last time he'd looked into eyes like that he'd… No! He wasn't going to bloody cock it up this time! Not with Buffy. He'd dust before failing her like he'd failed…then.
The Scoobies tramped along behind Willow and the bobbing firefly of magical energy that would lead them to Spike. "Ugh, are we sure we haven't slipped into bizarro world? 'Cause there is something seriously wrong with us seeking out Captain Peroxide to help fight Buffy." Xander grumped.
"It's not like we're fighting her, fighting her. We just need some extra muscle to help—" Willow abruptly shut up as she slipped into the warehouse, the others on her heels. For a moment no one said anything. Spike remained suspended as Buffy had left him, in a stray patch of florescent light from outside. "Spike!" Willow squeaked, "You're hung, er, hanging by magic in the middle of an empty warehouse!"
He smirked. "Noticed that, did you, Red?"
"It's funny because he's well-endowed and Willow noticed, and she's a lesbian." Anya explained perkily, laughing.
"Anya!" Xander looked horrified.
Giles removed his glasses and began to polish them, "oh dear lord."
"If you lot've all finished gawking, would you mind getting me the bloody hell down from here?"
Tara cleared her throat, "O-of course." She moved from Willow's side with a quiet, private signal to her lover and approached Spike. She reached up so her hand was a few inches from the crackling cuff, her manner all business, and hmmed.
"'Hmm,' what, Glinda? Can you get me down or not?" A note of anxiety crept into his voice.
"Yes, I think so. But you're lucky the sorcerer who did this didn't mean it to be a more permanent binding. His magic has strength to it." Tara rummaged in her large handbag and pulled out a lighter, a small crystal and a bundle of herbs bound tightly in crisscrosses of colored string. She lit the herbs and held the crystal over the smoke, muttering something about opening circles and distracting someone's will. Then she briefly touched the crystal to each one of the magic restraints. They flickered, then disappeared and Spike tumbled to the ground in an ungraceful heap.
"Bloody hell!" He rubbed at the deep welts on his wrists and ankles, "Sodding John Wayne and his prissy pink magic, probably uses it to tickle his own arse hole, the great poof. That hurt!" He grumbled to himself and tucked his prick back into his jeans, buttoning them as best he could despite the giant rip Buffy had left in the seam.
Giles cleared his throat. "Now that we've resolved your distressing situation, which you can be sure I'll question in depth later, there are matters we must discuss. We came to ask for help, Buffy's—"
Spike cut him off, "a bit lacking on the soul front. I know." He sighed. "It was Dru and her stupid new fling, piece of fucking work, that one. Did the job, left, then Buffy came here, scrubbed clean of her soul. Seeing her like that, it was…." There was none of the usual snarkiness in his voice as he trailed off, his face pained.
"Save the crocodile tears, oh infamous bottle blond of evil and horndoggery. Like you didn't take advantage of the situation to finally get what you wanted! We all saw you with your dickhanging out! Gee, I wonder how that happened?" Xander burst out, gesticulating, his voice full of sarcasm and disgust.
Spike scowled. "Yeah, so we fooled around a bit, what'd you expect? Big Bad, here, not like I was gonna turn her down. But as soon as I saw how she was… how the Buffy had gone right out of her…" He shook his head.
Giles swallowed, biting back his anger at Spike's cavalier mention of 'fooling around' with Buffy. As much as he hated it, Anya had been right. Spike was necessary, and for the duration of the mission the Watcher would just have to tolerate him, as odious as that might be. "Like I said, we came to see if you would be amenable to helping us restore Buffy's soul to her. It is a matter of extreme urgency, one that I believe calls for setting aside our differences and forming an alliance." He spoke tightly.
"Don't have to ask for my help, Rupes. I'm gettin' her soul back whether you lot want me or not. And if you don't like how I go about it, you can just piss off; I won't fail Buffy on account of some sanctimonious moral objection to my methods. What's 'right' is what gets Buffy back to her old soul-havin' self. End of story."