(Other Spike)
The Boss stretched in his large, custom made leather chair and tried to stifle a yawn. He had come here to get some interesting and 'shocking' news (according to Marti, anyway) but so far he remained unimpressed. The three young men in front of him had been spouting rubbish about nothing in particular for ten minutes now, and that had way surpassed The Boss's attention span. He took another look at each man in turn. In fact, they weren't men at all. And they certainly weren't young. They just looked it. The three before him were ancient oracles, with the power to look into the future and the past and to predict what would happen in both time periods. That was why he had agreed to meet them. Who wouldn't when presented with a profile like that? When they had first entered his huge office, he had been surprised. He had been expecting a group of truly powerful looking demons, twice as big as him, who walked with a supreme confidence in themselves and who immediately took charge of every room and every sitution they were involved in. Instead, they were three decidedly skinny young humans (well, he used the label 'humans' loosly, they simply looked human) who seemed to be of a very nervous nature. They shuffled self-consciously into his office and offered him a polite hello and a meek handshake, before beginning to rattle on about something using terms only a genius would understand. The Boss was no idiot - if he was would he be able to run a whole city situated on a Hellmouth? - but he had been totally left behind. He was going to kill Marti if these guys didn't start amazing him real soon. Well, not literally of course, he'd known Marti since the thirteenth century, but he'd certainly be getting a really long lecture.
"Hold on," The Boss interrupted the smallest mid-sentence; the one with the mop of black curls "I'm a very busy demon, guys, and much as I appreciate you coming -"
"But you don't." The ginger one cut him off. "For the past five minutes you've been ignoring us. And in that time you've completely missed why we are here."
"Which is?" The Boss asked, trying to control his temper at being interrupted.
"Someone has tampered with the dimensions," The largest, a blond guy told him. "Someone I think you know quite well."
"You're kidding me, right?" The Boss queried with an uncertain smile on his face. This time when the three had spoken to him, they hadn't beaten about the bush, and he had given them his undivided attention. So he was pretty sure that they were insane.
"We don't kid around." the blond assured him, totally serious. The Boss glanced amusedly across at Marti, but his look was returned by a worried one from his friend.
"You don't believe this, do you?" he asked. Marti took a deep breath and exhaled slowly.
"I don't know, Matthew." He replied with a sigh. Marti was the only one who had ever been permitted to use The Boss's real name, mainly because 'Matthew' wasn't really a name that would strike fear into the hearts of your enemies, and he wanted it to remain a secret. "These guys are pretty prestigeous."
"So am I," The Boss argued with a laugh "But I don't go around telling people that a vampire your surgeon operated on last night was in fact from another dimension, and that he's causing the collapse of the barriers between worlds." He laughed again. "That's nuts."
"And so is the notion that demons exist, to some people." the black haired man bickered "You can't assume that what you know and believe is where things end. There's a whole other world - billions of others, in fact - but they don't cease to exist just because you think that the concept is 'nuts'." Matthew stayed silent, thinking over everything that had just been said to him. According to these three oracles, Spike wasn't really Spike. He was a different one from another dimension in which he had only just arrived in Sunnydale and was therefore un-chipped in the first place.
"I still don't believe it." He grumbled unhappily. He hated being shown up as knowing less than someone else, and this was, in his opinion, a massive insult to his intellect.
"You don't have to believe it," the ginger oracle told him calmly "Just help stop the barriers from falling down. If that happens, the world will - very literally - end."
"And how do I prevent that from happening?" The Boss asked with a resigned sigh.
It was the black haired man who answered. "Kill Spike."
Would she just get that goddam cloth off his head? Was she not aware it was freezing cold, and really irritating the cut on his head instead of helping it? Obviously not, Spike thought as Dawn pressed the wet cloth harder onto the gash on the back of his head. She had been hanging round in his crypt, torturing him with cloth after cloth, for over an hour now, and the gimick was turning sour.
"Why don't y' go see what your big sis is up to, eh?" he suggested with a grunt of pain as she increased the pressure for the millionth time. Was she trying to see how hard she'd have to press until the stupid thing went straight through his head, or what? That was what it felt like. In fact, Dawn was only gently placing it on, not wanting to hurt him in the slightest.
"Because I'm here looking after you." She answered with a sickly sweet smile. "And I'm gonna stay and look after you 'till you feel better." Spike curled his upper lip in disgust.
"I don't need lookin' after." he informed her in an angry tone. Dawn rolled her eyes. Typical male. 'No, I'll fix it. Of course I know best. The plague? Ha! That can't kill me.'
"You can't fool me," she assured him, relieving the pressure from his head and skipping over to the effort of a sink he had in the corner of his crypt to dampen the cloth. "You'll feel better when I'm gone, believe me."
"Oh I do, don't worry." Spike muttered, gingerly touching the wound on the back of his head. It felt as thought the surgeon had done a pretty decent job closing the thing up. And he hadn't messed his hairline up, so he was safe on that front. Now if he could just get the Slayer's sister to bugger off he'd be fine. Well, as soon as the thumping pain stopped. Dawn returned with another cloth and brought it towards his head, only to have him grab her wrist roughly. "You touch me with another bloody wet cloth and I swear..." he growled fiercely. Dawn yelped, remembering what Xander had told her the other night, and hurredly backed away from him. Just grumpy, she told herself, grumpy and injured. Certainly not un-chipped. No way. She continued to tell herself this as she replaced the cloth and rubbed her wrist which didn't hurt. It didn't. Because if it did and Spike wasn't shouting in pain, that would mean he was un-chipped. And he wasn't. No way. So it didn't hurt.
'Sunset Beach'. The cream of the crop when it came to crappy, soppy and just plain pathetic daytime television. Buffy wasn't a religious watcher of it or anything, but it came in handy when she was bored, upset and had nothing better to do. All of which applied as she sat staring at the screen eating a bar of chocolate she'd discovered in her bare cupboards. She was irritated with herself for not standing up to Spike and asking what was going on with him, and irritated with Ben for not realising that his twin brother Derek was obviously behind the scandal on tv.
"Could it be..." Ben mused aloud with his trademark 'Im thinking really hard' look. "Derek?"
"Of course it's Derek, you stupid -" Buffy didn't get to finish her insult as the doorbell rang. She quickly switched the tv off, not wanting to be caught watching something so blantantly sad, and hurried to the door. She flung it open and found Xander standing there with Anya on his arm.
"Morning." Xander greeted her with an amiable smile.
"Afternoon." She corrected him as she let the couple in and motioned to the clock which told them it was 12:45pm. Anya looked around the house with the same innocent smile on her face as always.
"It's strangely quiet here today," she commented to Buffy "Dawn at a friends?"
"In a creepy way, yes." The Slayer replied with a sigh "She's at Spike's."
"Spike's?" Xander repeated, sounding more than a bit urgent. "Why?" he demanded.
"Well," Buffy said slowly, frowning at his demeanor "He's got this huge cut down the back of his head and he passed out when she went to see him this morning. So she's 'looking after him'."
"A cut down the back of his head?" Anya repeated and gave her fiancee a shove in the ribs when the Slayer nodded. Buffy was beginning to get worried. What were they keeping from her?
"What is it?" she asked, folding her arms across her chest so they knew she wasn't going to let this one slide without being answered properly.
"Think, Buffy," Anya said patronisingly "Spike has a cut on the back of his head and he's been acting more violently then usual. That all points to...?"
The Slayer suddenly felt very sick. "The chip."
As she ran, Buffy's mind screamed through everything that had ever transpired between her and Spike, working backwards from last week when they were sleeping together to when he'd first arrived in Sunnydale and been hellbent on killing her and her friends. The chip couldn't be out. It couldn't. And the worst thing was, not that she was losing someone she had actually grown to love, but that she had been so blind to not see it, and Dawn was in danger because of her blindness. Her little sister was in a crypt with a notorious killer, pampering him like a mother would a child, and it was all because Buffy had been too wrapped up in her own personal problems to notice the blatantly obvious. A cut on the head, mood swings, and the rest of it. Did she need a neon sign? But then again, hadn't Dawn been hanging around in a crypt with a notorious killer all along? Just because Spike couldn't kill then, it didn't mean he hadn't killed thousands of innocent people in his life. It didn't make him any less a vampire. Buffy felt tears threatening to spill out as this realisation hit her. She had fallen in love with a vampire again, and again he'd hurt her. She'd told herself again and again that Spike was different from Angel, but if anything, he was worse. Spike didn't even have a soul. The only reason he wasn't out killing people at that very second was because of the chip. The Slayer corrected herself. How did she know he wasn't killing people right then? No. Not killing 'people'. Killing Dawn. She picked up speed, not caring that she was knocking into the townspeople of Sunnydale, and forced herself to her limit. She needed to get to Spike's crypt and she needed to get there now. And when she got there, she had to put all her feelings aside and kill him.
Spike eyed Dawn's neck hungrily as she wandered around his crypt, talking about everything and anything. What he wouldn't give to just be able to bite down on that little vein and bleed her dry. The vampire didn't even try to surpress a smile. Nothing was stopping him, was it?
"What you smiling at?" Dawn asked him innocently. Spike shrugged.
"Just you." he replied honestly, missing off the part in the middle that went 'killing'. The Slayer's little sister beamed at him, wondering why she had doubted him before. Xander was imagining things.
"Y'couldn't do me a favour could y', pet?" Spike's smile didn't fade. "Could y' put that cloth on the back of my head again?" This was his chance. Dawn hurried over to the sink and grabbed a cloth happily.
Meanwhile, The Boss had just come out from the sewers which connected to Spike's crypt, and was fumbling around in the dark looking for a staircase. In his hand was a long, pointed stake which was intended for Spike. The oracles had finally convinced him of the severity of their case and he had come here to end the vampire's life. His hand touched a step and he smiled. Bingo.
There it was. Buffy, panting with the strain of running, hopped over a grave and reached an anxious hand out as the door to Spike's crypt drew near. If she got there and anything had happened to Dawn, she didn't know what she was going to do. With a final boost of energy, the Slayer slammed into the stone door and flew through it as it flung open.
The stake came plunging towards Spike's heart just as his fangs had settled on Dawn's petite neck. He pulled away and kicked the arm of his attacker, who he found to be The Boss. He released Dawn, who was dragged to one side by Buffy, who then jumped at him. Spike's eyes widened. Surely this wouldn't be his last few moments. Killed by a Slayer in an alternate dimension with a huge demon gunning to end your life on your left aswell. But at the vital moment, Buffy hesitated. Her hand touched Spike's arm and they looked straight in each others eyes. Then, there was black...
The Boss stretched in his large, custom made leather chair and tried to stifle a yawn. He had come here to get some interesting and 'shocking' news (according to Marti, anyway) but so far he remained unimpressed. The three young men in front of him had been spouting rubbish about nothing in particular for ten minutes now, and that had way surpassed The Boss's attention span. He took another look at each man in turn. In fact, they weren't men at all. And they certainly weren't young. They just looked it. The three before him were ancient oracles, with the power to look into the future and the past and to predict what would happen in both time periods. That was why he had agreed to meet them. Who wouldn't when presented with a profile like that? When they had first entered his huge office, he had been surprised. He had been expecting a group of truly powerful looking demons, twice as big as him, who walked with a supreme confidence in themselves and who immediately took charge of every room and every sitution they were involved in. Instead, they were three decidedly skinny young humans (well, he used the label 'humans' loosly, they simply looked human) who seemed to be of a very nervous nature. They shuffled self-consciously into his office and offered him a polite hello and a meek handshake, before beginning to rattle on about something using terms only a genius would understand. The Boss was no idiot - if he was would he be able to run a whole city situated on a Hellmouth? - but he had been totally left behind. He was going to kill Marti if these guys didn't start amazing him real soon. Well, not literally of course, he'd known Marti since the thirteenth century, but he'd certainly be getting a really long lecture.
"Hold on," The Boss interrupted the smallest mid-sentence; the one with the mop of black curls "I'm a very busy demon, guys, and much as I appreciate you coming -"
"But you don't." The ginger one cut him off. "For the past five minutes you've been ignoring us. And in that time you've completely missed why we are here."
"Which is?" The Boss asked, trying to control his temper at being interrupted.
"Someone has tampered with the dimensions," The largest, a blond guy told him. "Someone I think you know quite well."
"You're kidding me, right?" The Boss queried with an uncertain smile on his face. This time when the three had spoken to him, they hadn't beaten about the bush, and he had given them his undivided attention. So he was pretty sure that they were insane.
"We don't kid around." the blond assured him, totally serious. The Boss glanced amusedly across at Marti, but his look was returned by a worried one from his friend.
"You don't believe this, do you?" he asked. Marti took a deep breath and exhaled slowly.
"I don't know, Matthew." He replied with a sigh. Marti was the only one who had ever been permitted to use The Boss's real name, mainly because 'Matthew' wasn't really a name that would strike fear into the hearts of your enemies, and he wanted it to remain a secret. "These guys are pretty prestigeous."
"So am I," The Boss argued with a laugh "But I don't go around telling people that a vampire your surgeon operated on last night was in fact from another dimension, and that he's causing the collapse of the barriers between worlds." He laughed again. "That's nuts."
"And so is the notion that demons exist, to some people." the black haired man bickered "You can't assume that what you know and believe is where things end. There's a whole other world - billions of others, in fact - but they don't cease to exist just because you think that the concept is 'nuts'." Matthew stayed silent, thinking over everything that had just been said to him. According to these three oracles, Spike wasn't really Spike. He was a different one from another dimension in which he had only just arrived in Sunnydale and was therefore un-chipped in the first place.
"I still don't believe it." He grumbled unhappily. He hated being shown up as knowing less than someone else, and this was, in his opinion, a massive insult to his intellect.
"You don't have to believe it," the ginger oracle told him calmly "Just help stop the barriers from falling down. If that happens, the world will - very literally - end."
"And how do I prevent that from happening?" The Boss asked with a resigned sigh.
It was the black haired man who answered. "Kill Spike."
Would she just get that goddam cloth off his head? Was she not aware it was freezing cold, and really irritating the cut on his head instead of helping it? Obviously not, Spike thought as Dawn pressed the wet cloth harder onto the gash on the back of his head. She had been hanging round in his crypt, torturing him with cloth after cloth, for over an hour now, and the gimick was turning sour.
"Why don't y' go see what your big sis is up to, eh?" he suggested with a grunt of pain as she increased the pressure for the millionth time. Was she trying to see how hard she'd have to press until the stupid thing went straight through his head, or what? That was what it felt like. In fact, Dawn was only gently placing it on, not wanting to hurt him in the slightest.
"Because I'm here looking after you." She answered with a sickly sweet smile. "And I'm gonna stay and look after you 'till you feel better." Spike curled his upper lip in disgust.
"I don't need lookin' after." he informed her in an angry tone. Dawn rolled her eyes. Typical male. 'No, I'll fix it. Of course I know best. The plague? Ha! That can't kill me.'
"You can't fool me," she assured him, relieving the pressure from his head and skipping over to the effort of a sink he had in the corner of his crypt to dampen the cloth. "You'll feel better when I'm gone, believe me."
"Oh I do, don't worry." Spike muttered, gingerly touching the wound on the back of his head. It felt as thought the surgeon had done a pretty decent job closing the thing up. And he hadn't messed his hairline up, so he was safe on that front. Now if he could just get the Slayer's sister to bugger off he'd be fine. Well, as soon as the thumping pain stopped. Dawn returned with another cloth and brought it towards his head, only to have him grab her wrist roughly. "You touch me with another bloody wet cloth and I swear..." he growled fiercely. Dawn yelped, remembering what Xander had told her the other night, and hurredly backed away from him. Just grumpy, she told herself, grumpy and injured. Certainly not un-chipped. No way. She continued to tell herself this as she replaced the cloth and rubbed her wrist which didn't hurt. It didn't. Because if it did and Spike wasn't shouting in pain, that would mean he was un-chipped. And he wasn't. No way. So it didn't hurt.
'Sunset Beach'. The cream of the crop when it came to crappy, soppy and just plain pathetic daytime television. Buffy wasn't a religious watcher of it or anything, but it came in handy when she was bored, upset and had nothing better to do. All of which applied as she sat staring at the screen eating a bar of chocolate she'd discovered in her bare cupboards. She was irritated with herself for not standing up to Spike and asking what was going on with him, and irritated with Ben for not realising that his twin brother Derek was obviously behind the scandal on tv.
"Could it be..." Ben mused aloud with his trademark 'Im thinking really hard' look. "Derek?"
"Of course it's Derek, you stupid -" Buffy didn't get to finish her insult as the doorbell rang. She quickly switched the tv off, not wanting to be caught watching something so blantantly sad, and hurried to the door. She flung it open and found Xander standing there with Anya on his arm.
"Morning." Xander greeted her with an amiable smile.
"Afternoon." She corrected him as she let the couple in and motioned to the clock which told them it was 12:45pm. Anya looked around the house with the same innocent smile on her face as always.
"It's strangely quiet here today," she commented to Buffy "Dawn at a friends?"
"In a creepy way, yes." The Slayer replied with a sigh "She's at Spike's."
"Spike's?" Xander repeated, sounding more than a bit urgent. "Why?" he demanded.
"Well," Buffy said slowly, frowning at his demeanor "He's got this huge cut down the back of his head and he passed out when she went to see him this morning. So she's 'looking after him'."
"A cut down the back of his head?" Anya repeated and gave her fiancee a shove in the ribs when the Slayer nodded. Buffy was beginning to get worried. What were they keeping from her?
"What is it?" she asked, folding her arms across her chest so they knew she wasn't going to let this one slide without being answered properly.
"Think, Buffy," Anya said patronisingly "Spike has a cut on the back of his head and he's been acting more violently then usual. That all points to...?"
The Slayer suddenly felt very sick. "The chip."
As she ran, Buffy's mind screamed through everything that had ever transpired between her and Spike, working backwards from last week when they were sleeping together to when he'd first arrived in Sunnydale and been hellbent on killing her and her friends. The chip couldn't be out. It couldn't. And the worst thing was, not that she was losing someone she had actually grown to love, but that she had been so blind to not see it, and Dawn was in danger because of her blindness. Her little sister was in a crypt with a notorious killer, pampering him like a mother would a child, and it was all because Buffy had been too wrapped up in her own personal problems to notice the blatantly obvious. A cut on the head, mood swings, and the rest of it. Did she need a neon sign? But then again, hadn't Dawn been hanging around in a crypt with a notorious killer all along? Just because Spike couldn't kill then, it didn't mean he hadn't killed thousands of innocent people in his life. It didn't make him any less a vampire. Buffy felt tears threatening to spill out as this realisation hit her. She had fallen in love with a vampire again, and again he'd hurt her. She'd told herself again and again that Spike was different from Angel, but if anything, he was worse. Spike didn't even have a soul. The only reason he wasn't out killing people at that very second was because of the chip. The Slayer corrected herself. How did she know he wasn't killing people right then? No. Not killing 'people'. Killing Dawn. She picked up speed, not caring that she was knocking into the townspeople of Sunnydale, and forced herself to her limit. She needed to get to Spike's crypt and she needed to get there now. And when she got there, she had to put all her feelings aside and kill him.
Spike eyed Dawn's neck hungrily as she wandered around his crypt, talking about everything and anything. What he wouldn't give to just be able to bite down on that little vein and bleed her dry. The vampire didn't even try to surpress a smile. Nothing was stopping him, was it?
"What you smiling at?" Dawn asked him innocently. Spike shrugged.
"Just you." he replied honestly, missing off the part in the middle that went 'killing'. The Slayer's little sister beamed at him, wondering why she had doubted him before. Xander was imagining things.
"Y'couldn't do me a favour could y', pet?" Spike's smile didn't fade. "Could y' put that cloth on the back of my head again?" This was his chance. Dawn hurried over to the sink and grabbed a cloth happily.
Meanwhile, The Boss had just come out from the sewers which connected to Spike's crypt, and was fumbling around in the dark looking for a staircase. In his hand was a long, pointed stake which was intended for Spike. The oracles had finally convinced him of the severity of their case and he had come here to end the vampire's life. His hand touched a step and he smiled. Bingo.
There it was. Buffy, panting with the strain of running, hopped over a grave and reached an anxious hand out as the door to Spike's crypt drew near. If she got there and anything had happened to Dawn, she didn't know what she was going to do. With a final boost of energy, the Slayer slammed into the stone door and flew through it as it flung open.
The stake came plunging towards Spike's heart just as his fangs had settled on Dawn's petite neck. He pulled away and kicked the arm of his attacker, who he found to be The Boss. He released Dawn, who was dragged to one side by Buffy, who then jumped at him. Spike's eyes widened. Surely this wouldn't be his last few moments. Killed by a Slayer in an alternate dimension with a huge demon gunning to end your life on your left aswell. But at the vital moment, Buffy hesitated. Her hand touched Spike's arm and they looked straight in each others eyes. Then, there was black...