Made for fun, not for profit. The Buffyverse belongs to Mutant Enemy and Joss Whedon, I just like to play there.

A/N: This update is short for a reason. It started out as the opening section of a longer chapter, but I felt that this puppy came to a nice cliff-hangy ending, and this way all you lovely people won't have to wait quite as long between updates. Just to be clear, in the previous chapter Giles didn't hit Spike. When Spike tried to turn around, his injured leg buckled and he hit his head on the radiator as he fell. Yes, Giles took advantage of that happening, but he didn't beat our Blondie Bear unconscious. However, Spike doesn't know that, and since Sam didn't see what happened, she may draw some biased conclusions. Hope you enjoy it, and please read and review!


"The true rule, in determining to embrace, or reject any thing,

Is not whether it have any evil in it; but whether it have more of evil,

Than of good. There are few things wholly evil, or wholly good."

~ Abraham Lincoln, June 20, 1848


9 – I Love A Mystery


Sam wasn't sure when she woke up, or what had caused it. She turned over in the bed and buried her face in her pillow again, wanting to slip right back into her dream. She couldn't even remember what it had been about, but that didn't matter. It was a dream, and dreams meant sleep, which meant waking up and not being jet lagged anymore. She turned over onto her back again, trying to find a way back to dreamland, and suddenly realized why she was awake. She needed to pee.

Grumbling to herself, she sat up and rubbed a clumsy hand over her face. Pants. Where were her pants? She never wore them to bed, not even in the New England winters when warm PJs made every kind of sense, instead preferring to cuddle up under a fluffy comforter. Since she wasn't at home, and Giles' place wasn't pants-optional, she needed to find the little devils before trudging out to the bathroom. She probably wouldn't run into Giles at this time of the night… or morning… or whatever time it was, but she didn't want to leave that up to chance. In her experience, things went wrong. They went wrong a lot. Murphy's Law basically worked double shifts in Sunnydale, so even with one-in-a-thousand odds of Giles actually being awake and out of his room, if she didn't take the time to put her pants on, it would pretty much guarantee that Giles would be in the hall and see her in her undies. The universe just seemed to work that way. She could handle being seen sans pants, but Giles would probably have an embarrassment-induced stroke.

A quick glance around the room and she spotted her sweatpants draped over the armchair which sat between her bed and the window. A few moments later she had tugged them most of the way on and was halfway to the door, nearly tripping over the stretchy fabric which was tangling itself around her feet instead of just sliding over them the way it was supposed to. By the time the waistband was actually at her waist, she had reached the door. Sure enough, the hallway was empty. Sam shook her head at herself as she stepped into the bathroom, muttering. "Well, I'm either superstitious, paranoid, or crazy. It's gotta be one of the three."

After she had used the toilet, she heard a noise coming from the ground floor. It was almost too faint to make out over the gurgling whoosh of the plumbing, so she washed her hands and quickly shut off the water, waiting for the toilet to finish running so she could listen for the noise again. She was drying her hands when she heard it again, a sort of muffled clanking. She frowned, trying to puzzle out what it was, and let her hands drop away from the towel. She ducked back into her room to slip into her bathrobe and then padded down the hall, listening intently, and made her way down the stairs as quietly as possible.

The only noise she heard was the creak of her own footfalls on the stairs, but when she got to the landing she paused, closing her eyes and focusing on the nighttime sounds of Giles' apartment.

Her own breathing? Check. Wind from outside blowing through tree branches for the requisite scary sound? Check. Refrigerator humming? Check. Chains clanking somewhere past the kitchen…

Wait.

Chains?

Why were there chains? There shouldn't be chains. This wasn't a horror movie, or a ghost story. Okay, yeah, Hellmouth and general wackiness, but the evil around here was hardly ever ambiguous, and it was very rarely sneaky. Ninety percent of the time it was some kind of monster bearing down on you and growling, not lurking somewhere trying to scare you with clanky-metal sounds, which, when you stopped to think about it, was really kind of pathetic… That is, the clanking-as-a-fear-tactic part was pathetic. Seeing a growling monster coming at you was always scary, even when there were other people and weapons and a Slayer on your side of things.

She moved the rest of the way down the stairs and over to the kitchen, keeping an ear out. Yep. There it was again: clank... clank clank… "Bloody rot." Clank!

Spike? And it sounded like he was in the study. Well, that solved part of the mystery, at least. The 'who' and 'where' parts, anyway. As for 'how', 'what' and 'why', she was still in the dark.

Sam got to the door of the study and, not knowing what else to do, she knocked. "Spike?" The clanking stopped abruptly. "Can I come in?" The door had been slightly ajar when she knocked, and the slight force of her knocks was enough to make it swing open as she finished speaking. She had turned the hallway light on, and enough of that light spilled into the study to let her fill in one more part of the story, the 'what' part, and now she almost wished that she had stayed upstairs to wonder about the mysterious clanking noises, because what she saw in the room took her breath away. Not in a good way or a fun way, or any other remotely pleasant way. No, this was something she had not expected, and it definitely was not of the good.

Spike was chained to a pipe which connected the radiator to the wall. His feet were braced against one of the radiator's supports and his arms were straight out in front of him, straining against the manacled chains that were locked around his wrists. He was in gameface, which was easy enough to see even with dried blood caked in a big smudge from his temple all the way down to his jaw, and for a second – the first second, actually – she saw just how scary he could be. Then the ridges faded away and his eyes melted back to blue, and he looked at her with a tired, pained, wary expression.

She heard herself make a strange, whimper-sigh kind of noise. He just… well, she was pretty sure how he would react if he knew that she was having the 'oh-you-poor-thing-let-me-cuddle-you-till-you're-better' kind of feelings that she always got when she saw a lost child or a skittish dog at the pound, so she wouldn't say anything to him about that train of thought.

"Oh, sweetie. I'm sorry."

Except that. That just kind of came out on it's own, but it pretty much covered the topic without going into too much detail, so that was okay. Besides which, now she knew exactly what she had to do.

TBC