So. Most of the last eight chapters was about two years old. I did say this has been rattling around in my head for some time, I wasn't exaggerating. This, however, is entirely new, written this glorious month of July. Two years is a long time, and I think I'm a bit out of practice. It took a long time to fall back into the RaPH voice, and I'm not entirely sure I've achieved it. I mostly just wanted to get the story on paper. So bearing that in mind, I present unto you, faithful readers, chapter 9.
Oh. And I like this Buffy.
Many thanks and infinite love to everyone who's stuck with me this long.
The ocean sped up.
The steady push-and-pull, boom and swoosh of a beating heart that wove through Spike's dreams suddenly became a thump-bump, thump-bump, and it was racing. The vampire wasn't sure if it was the sudden pounding heart that woke him, or the footsteps from upstairs. He was muzzily sitting upright when the woman called again, "Spike?" and Xander's heart beat so hard he was sure it would explode. "You down there?"
"Yeah love, give us a mo." Xander's eyes flickered frantically between the ladder and Spike. This was probably his best chance. Let the slayer know he'd found a surprise, hand Xander off to the witches to figure out, and get the hell out of dodge, but… Spike sighed. Xander was shaking, his breath ragged as he decided the ladder was the bigger threat and stared at it. He was so thin; thin and pale and so broken into pieces that panic and terror were practically radiating from him at the sound of his best friend's voice. Naked, frail, and about to expire from sheer anxiety was not the way to reintroduce Xander to his girls, and Spike pitied the creature he had become enough to want to protect him from that.
"I'm not here. I'm not here. I'm not here." Xander was whispering under his breath, curled into a ball so tight that his ribs had to be screaming at him.
"Shh, shh shh. It's just Buffy." Spike whispered back, "Just Buffy, and she won't hurt you."
"Not here, not real, not…" he seemed to run out of modifiers.
"Spike?"
"It's okay. I won't tell her, I promise. But I do have to go talk to her, okay? I'll leave the door open, you'll be able to hear everything." Xander shook and neither confirmed nor denied the merit of that plan. "I will be back, Xander. I promise." He was surprised to find he meant it.
Buffy was waiting for him in the crypt proper, perched casually on the sepulcher and swinging her feet. She met Spike with a smile when he popped his head out from under the trap; her health and youth were an astonishing contrast, and for once he smiled back. "I didn't wake you, did I?"
"No. Maybe?" It didn't matter. It occurred to Spike that he'd forgotten to put a shirt on. That Buffy didn't seem to care was a testament to how irritatingly comfortable she was with him now; that he was almost grateful for it, he chalked up to exhaustion. "What time is it?"
"Time for you to get a watch," She shot back with an incorrigible grin. Spike spent a split second contemplating her gruesome murder, and something must have shown in his face because the grin got a bit wider. "Sorry… I had a weird night, I think I'm still a little buzzed from patrolling. It's about ten."
Spike groaned and pushed himself into his living room. He'd been so out of it he hadn't even felt the sun come up; that was just pathetic. He covered his disorientation by asking, "Isn't it time for all good little slayers to be in bed by now?"
"Normally, yes." She absentmindedly cracked her knuckles and drummed her heels against the sepulcher. "And I tried. I went home, checked on mom, got Dawn's lazy butt out of bed… I even tried the sleeping thing, but it just wasn't happening. So I came here. You look like shit, by the way."
Spike scrubbed a hand through his hair and discovered it to be free of gel and sticking up like duckling fluff. "Christ."
"You're all… pale and skinny." Spike glared at her. She looked like sunshine in a brown pea-coat and ankle boots to ward off the beautiful sixty-degree weather. "Course, you're always pale and skinny. But seriously, Spike… you look like hell."
"Had a weird night myself." He muttered vaguely, watching her grin develop a licentious edge.
Spike was reminded of why he liked her. Granted, she was a sanctimonious pain in the ass, and too damn clever by half, but once she'd loosened up a little she could be a hell of a lot of fun. "Oooh, she still here?"
"No." Nicotine. He needed nicotine. His lighter was sitting by the television, there had to be some cigarettes around here somewhere. Where were his cigarettes? The slayer made a "psst" noise and lobbed a half-empty pack at his chest. Christ, he was starting to love her. He lit up with a practiced motion and sucked in a lungful of sweet carcinogens and held it. This was the moment, if there was one, to tell her about Harris but… he let the smoke out with a sigh. But she'd just gotten her feet back under her, and the marine had been treating her like shit, and… he'd promised. Apparently the white hat was fucking infectious. He used Buffy's excuse, "No. She left before dawn. How's your mum?"
"Nice segue, mister I-don't-wanna-talk-about-it." The smile faded a bit and suddenly she looked exhausted; a young woman who hadn't slept all night and didn't want to go home. He used to dream of killing her, feeling his teeth in the smooth line of her neck; he had dreamt about fucking her, taking her, subduing her, even loving her, but those dreams faded. Now this was all there was to his relationship with the slayer: another little girl with wide eyes in his life, and he'd just asked her about her mother. He was ruined. "I dunno. Okay, I think. She has a doctor's appointment later. I don't really want to think about it."
"She'll be okay." The silence stretched out between them, laden with quiet fear. Spike, who had about as much respect for awkward silence as he did for pink taffeta, sank into his ugly green chair and spun it around to face the girl on the casket. "So why choose this morning to grace me with your presence?"
"Jerk." She told him, and then laughed. "Oh right! Patrol. Patrol is why I am here – and you're still a jerk – but it was too weird to not tell you about, I swear some of the vamps I see these days…"
"Not a patch on old Spike?"
"I ever tell you how creepy the uncle Spike routine is?" Spike smirked at her; she stuck her tongue out. "Anyway, you know how the last few weeks has just been… demons demons demons… that could have been cleverer. A demon deluge? with the whole Glory thing going on, my stake is starting to feel dirty."
Dryly, he said, "My heart goes out to Mr. Pointy."
"Aaw, Spike, are you jealous?"
"Just waiting for you to get to a point. That's not an invitation to stake."
"Oh like you wouldn't be totally lonely without me to keep you company." Her smile was impish, and yesterday the words would have been true. Right now it made him think of Xander, alone and quaking in the dark. He wanted to imagine Harris was his victim hidden under the nose of his do-gooder friends, but even that small fiction made him twitch with a strange sense of shame and guilt. He couldn't justify even imagining playing with a toy that broken. Buffy sighed, breaking him out of his reverie, "You're right though. I don't have a lot of time before mom's appointment and I promised her I would be there. I ran into this… I don't know, weird vamp last night who said he was Dracula."
"Dracula?" He tried for skeptical, but suddenly Spike was wide awake, glad he didn't have a heart-beat that speed up. "Really?"
"I know? Totally ridiculous right? I mean… I get that sort of thing a lot around Halloween, but this was weird. You're my go-to guy for vampire stuff, so, I mean, is there even a real Dracula?"
"S'probably some plonker in a cape." The contempt was not at all feigned, "Fledges."
Buffy snorted, "Hah. He was wearing a cape, but I dunno… he didn't seem very fledgy. He was… different. Sexy. Even Willow got a little… hot under the collar. I cannot believe I just said that."
"So you didn't stake him?"
"No." Buffy's face fell into a moue of consternation, "Like I said, weird. He didn't seem interested in doing the whole… 'I vant to suck your blud' dance either. I mean, I was gonna stake him, on principle, you understand," she actually waited on Spike's nod, "but then he just… said he was looking for something that crawled away from his garden and went all… poofy."
Spike felt his expression go wooden, "Poofy?"
"Yeah, it was ridiculous. He turned into a … bat or smoke or something, I don't really know. Like I said, weird night."
"Yeah. Weird." Spike dug another smoke out of the pack and took a deep drag on it before he even tried to respond. Dracula. If it really were him, Spike wanted to deal with the interloper himself; the slayer had no reason to go getting mixed up in that business, except of course that it was, quite literally, her business, and if this was really Dracula, Spike didn't see that wanker passing up the opportunity to take on a Slayer. Especially this slayer. A few of the free-standing tidbits of information in Spike's head were beginning to line up like dominos; if this mysterious, poofy, bat-fog, caped apparition, really were Dracula, and that certainly sounded like Dracula, Spike suspected that those dominos would start to topple. He tried for nonchalant, "I'll check it out for you. Don't have much else happening this week."
"Oh my god! You mean there really is a real Dracula?" Buffy sounded so much like Dawn in that moment that Spike couldn't contain the guffaw. She hopped off the sarcophagus and struck a little pose of self-satisfaction, "I might've met the real Dracula! Go me."
Spike rolled his eyes, "Go home, Slayer; I'll keep you updated. And give Joyce my best."
The slayer left muttering about her mother's first name and Dracula in her back yard, and Spike turned his thoughts towards the basement.
He could almost feel the flinch through twenty feet of air when he put his feet outside the ladder rungs and slid down, "S'just me, Harris." Xander was sitting on the bed, stiff as a stone, right where he'd left him.
"I tied you to a chair." Xander said matter-of-factly when Spike crouched down in front of him.
The vampire managed to completely suppress the twitch of surprise that this statement inspired in him, "Lifetime ago, mate."
"Hah. Yes." Harris' face was inscrutable, too thin and too pale, and a bruise had bloomed and spread from his scalp to his eyebrow; Spike didn't know if he was noticing it now because it was new or Xander had sufficiently recovered from his anemia to produce one. There was two-day stubble on his jaw, and for the first time it occurred to Spike to be surprised that the boy had been clean-shaven. With those hands, holding a razor must have been impossible; he didn't know what to make of it. When he finally met Xander's eyes again, the boy was watching him calmly with eyes full of understanding and something like acceptance. Spike suddenly felt riddled with wormholes of self-loathing, made worse when Xander said, "I'm sorry."
"Are you cold?" Spike's subject change lacked subtlety, but it was, he decided, a legitimate question. Xander had been stark naked since Spike cut the clothes off him, and while Sunnydale's weather was never less than beautiful, it was still November and too cold to be drenched in ice water and left to air dry. Spike felt like an ass for not having considered it earlier; Xander was radiating fever-heat, his skin pebbled with goosebumps. Spike didn't give him the opportunity to answer before tugging his own comforter up and around Xander's shoulders, wrapping him in it as tightly as he dared.
It was strangely rewarding to watch Xander push one thin arm out of the folds of fabric and rub it gently with the inside of his wrist, feeling the softness and luxury that Spike so craved in his own life. "Thank you."
"No worries." Retreat. Spike dithered around for a moment, pulling a shirt over his head to cover his shaking hands. The look that Xander had given him pried into the darker places of his mind, stirring a wellspring of temptation for things he thought buried long before Xander had been. That open vulnerability that told him he could do anything he liked and he would never hear a word of complaint, that the boy would even thank him for it; it was the same silent plea that Dru's eyes held on bad nights, tempered by a toughness that was pure Xander. Spike fought himself not to take him up on it, and hated that he even considered fighting it. He made a pot of tea.
The slither of fabric behind him made Spike turn around and face his houseguest again. Xander stood slowly and painfully, balancing carefully on his right leg. From a distance, and framed in the light of the trap door, Spike could see his muscles strain to keep him upright in the face of exhaustion and agony. The bruised skin and lines of carefully placed sutures seemed to glow against the pallor; it was beautiful, in a way. Spike felt like a monster.
He tried not to ask what the hell Xander thought he was doing because this was the first sign of real initiative he'd shown since Spike found him, but it was a near thing. Instead, he asked, "How can I help?"
"I think… I have to pee." Xander looked so confused by this turn of events, so betrayed by his own body that Spike almost laughed in spite of himself.
"You can use the drain under the shower," Spike said instead, moving around the bed slowly and carefully and taking Xander by the elbow. His skin was warm and dry like paper under Spike's fingers, and every lurching step towards the hole in the floor was a moment of fear as Xander teetered and Spike tried not to hold too tightly. The boy adamantly refused to be picked up and carried; when Spike tried it, he wrenched himself away so sharply that Spike dropped him. Xander looked so pained for this mild insubordination and the punishingly hard floor that Spike didn't have the heart to try again. Every painstaking step became a fight against gravity; Harris had always been a scrapper. At least he conceded to letting Spike hold him upright.
The smell of the boy's urine was heavy and bitter as the pitiful stream disappeared hundreds of feet under the earth, the smell of a deeply dehydrated human. Idly, Spike wondered when the boy had last been healthy, apparently Xander was idly wondering something else, because he asked, "We're… underground. Under pipes."
"Yes."
"Where's it go?"
Spike snorted; it would be Xander who asked that question. He was always niggling at the fine details of things, and occasionally those details were enormously helpful. It was evidence, at least, that Harris was in there somewhere; under the flinching madness, the Xander Harris that Spike had known and quite often hated was waiting to emerge. Spike was interested to note he was excited about the prospect. "Caverns. Under the cemeteries on the south-end of town, remember?"
He expected a nod or a flash of understanding, not: "Buffy died down there."
"Did she?" He let Spike carefully guide him away again, apparently lost in his own head. The vampire hadn't been privy to the details of the slayer's death; he remembered being surprised as hell when a second slayer popped into existence, but he had never asked about it. At the time, it wasn't important, and it wasn't really important now. He got Xander settled on the bed again, wrapped in his comforter, and pressed an open bottle of water against the insides of his wrists. "Apparently none of you stay dead for very long."
"No drugs."
"Huh?" Spike had been hoping for a better reaction, something that offered insight into Xander's current condition. Harris was quite obviously not dead, and he had been hoping that his anvil sized hint would inspire Xander to make some comment on the subject; the boy was quieter, but he seemed so much more rational today, but perhaps that was nothing to do with Harris and more because Spike had slept. He wished, without daring to say the word because Anyanka was undoubtedly still furious with him, that he knew what had happened and what was going on in Harris' head.
Xander stared longingly at the bottle, "No drugs. Please don't make me sleep."
"Oh. No. It's not drugged. It's safe to drink." Xander gave the bottle a clumsy swirl, staring at it. Spike could practically see how much he wanted to drink, how thirsty he still was, but after the first laced bottle, he didn't trust it. Spike couldn't exactly blame him, so he did the expedient thing and plucked it out of Xander's grasp, took a quick sip, and put it back. "It's fine, Harris. But do you want some drugs? Something for the pain," he reassured quickly, "not something for sleep."
"My pain…"
"And your fever. Just a few Advil. Please?" Xander looked horrified at this, and Spike felt pretty shaken himself. He didn't remember the last time he had said "please" unironically.
Spike retreated back to his hot plate-cum-kitchenette and knocked together a cup of tea. It didn't occur to him that Xander might want one because Xander wouldn't be able to hold the mug. Finally, after a few moments there were quiet slurping noises, and Spike let out a sigh of relief. He had been afraid that by drugging him yesterday, Xander would refuse anything that would help him to heal, and suddenly healing was a priority. "I notice," he said stiffly, wondering if this would be a bad idea as it emerged, "that you haven't mentioned Buffy."
"No."
"She was just here," Spike tried kindly, "don't you want to know what she had to say?"
Xander gave him a searching look, and sipped at his water. Spike had the feeling he'd just opened a can of worms. "She wasn't real."
"She seemed real enough to me."
The heavy gaze hadn't left his face; Spike fought the urge to squirm under the scrutiny. He didn't know what Xander was looking for, and didn't know if he wanted him to find it. "Buffy is impossible." Xander said finally, and took another calm sip of his water. "She can't be here."
A light went on in Spike's head, accompanied by a sudden flash of understanding. It was eerily consistent madness; Dru, his only frame of reference for these kinds of thing, had not provided him much experience with consistency. "Are we back to hell?"
"We never left."
"I'm real, Xander. I'm here."
"You're dead." Spike couldn't argue the point.
He sighed. Eventually, when he'd managed to fatten the boy up and taken the time to fix his hands, when Xander was approaching healthy, maybe he'd also approach sane. For now, all he could do was keep Harris fed and watered and try the kind of mindless reassurance that had worked so well on his sire. "Xander, I don't want to hurt you," He said slowly, relieved to find it was true. Spike didn't know if he could call himself a proper vampire anymore, but he had always been good at adapting. "I want to help you get better."
Xander smiled softly at him and finished his water. "Hope is hell too."
tell me, how bad was it?
