Chapter Seven, The Tangled Forest

Standing in the shadows at the edge of the forest, Spike holds the bit of red fabric to his nose and inhales. The scent of the whelp fills his nostrils. It's not exactly a welcome scent – a mix between stinky socks, cheap cologne, and something he can only define as human – but it is familiar.

"So you can just follow the trail like a bloodhound?" Buffy is more than amused by this little tidbit. She had no idea vampires could do this. Angel never told her about it.

"Something like that." Spike rips the cloth in half and tucks one piece back in place in case they need to find their way to the boats, which are now more carefully hidden using the natural foliage. He sniffs the air around them into the forest, and he experiences a rush of new smells which he has a hard time differentiating because he doesn't know their origins. At least in their home dimension, most scents are familiar and easier to pull apart.

Buffy shifts from foot to foot and watches Spike's expression, which she decides is a mix of annoyance and focus. "You look so thrilled about it."

"Not exactly high on my list of fun things to do in the middle of the day." Spike steps further into the forest, which is decidedly cool and damp and luckily provides enough shade from the suns. Closing his eyes and breathing deeply again, he tries to relax and allow the smells to spread apart for him, and when he puts less effort in, Xander's scent distinctly pushes forward in his mind.

Buffy is quiet until Spike adjusts his direction and moves forward with more certainty. There's no visible path in the wild vegetation, but the trees and brush are far enough apart that they can pick their way through them. Shifting the messenger bag on her shoulder, she trails Spike and asks, "What is on your list? I'm so curious what vampires do in the middle of the day."

"Sleep. Most vampires are nocturnal for obvious reasons." Spike takes a large step up and over a fallen tree, its trunk blocking the way. Without thinking, he turns back and offers the Slayer an unneeded hand up.

Buffy from a day or two ago would have made a face at his chivalry and shoved his hand away, but today, she runs her fingers over his cool, dry palm and hops up with his help. "Obviously. So no daytime television for you? I thought you liked the soaps?"

Spike lets his hand linger on hers as they continue moving. "Not soaps. One soap. Passions. And I taped it. On a VCR."

"You have a VCR?" She knows that he has a history of somehow finding a way to have modern conveniences in unusual living circumstances, but she wants to keep the lightness of their conversation going.

Spike follows her lead with the conversation but takes another sniff of the air to find the boy's scent. Locating it, he shifts directions slightly. "Had a VCR. I'm homeless now, remember?"

"But you're not homeless. You have a place to stay. And it's a home." Buffy ducks under a low hanging branch and adroitly avoids getting her foot tangled in a mass of tree roots.

This comment pushes a flash of irritation through Spike, and he says through gritted teeth. "Couch surfing tied to a chair or chained in a bathtub does not make a home."

"That's true," she quickly says to assuage his feelings. She thinks about her brief escape to L.A. by herself and how her little bare space was far from home.

Spike softens his tone in response. "Though I do enjoy the air conditioning and other modern conveniences that reliably function."

"And you have good personal hygiene." She wrinkles her nose as she pushes up a throng of leaves. "Not all vampires do."

Spike shrugs. "Probably depends on a lot of factors. Different vampires are. . . different."

He means in more ways than just hygienic practices. "I've noticed. You're a lot different than Angel."

This elicits a snort. "Stating the obvious."

Buffy stops and touches his shoulder. "Different in a good way." She's not sure what she's thinking but instinctively knows this is what she believes, what she's noticed but hasn't put into words.

Spike looks into her eyes and sees that she's telling the truth, and before he can talk himself out of it, he dips his head and kisses her gently on the lips. She leans into the affection and is slightly sad when he breaks to forge ahead. She sighs. They really should keep going.

"So how come more vampires like you come out of the proverbial closet so to speak? I mean, it seems like they could then enjoy the perks of modern civilization, and said civilization could provide some containment for them? I mean, what separates humans from savages is the culture piece, right? The ability to think and reflect and imagine. The desire to connect on said reflections." Buffy remembers a particular lesson in Dr. Walsh's class about the distinctions between humans and primates.

Spike is quiet as he considers what Buffy said. "Humans aren't ready for vampires. Not really. Anne Rice is about as close as most people can get without either being completely in denial or going the way of what was the boy's name?" Spike remembers how he turned the boy. He tasted funny as humans often did when they were terminally ill.

"Ford. His name was Ford." Buffy still feels sad that her friend thought becoming a vampire was the way to solve his problems. Staking him is not something that she relishes thinking about with any frequency.

Spike senses a shift in her demeanor. "I'm sorry about your friend. Killing someone you care about is never easy. It haunts a person if you're not careful. Did me."

"You killed someone you cared about?" Buffy considers that maybe he killed someone he loved after he was newly turned, and although before she would have said there's no way he could be haunted by anything, now she's starting to believe him.

"Yeah. Wasn't what I wanted though," he says. He can't tell her he killed his mum after making her a vampire. He doesn't know how she'd take that.

She holds aside a curtain of vines and steps through behind Spike, intentionally brushing his arm. He smiles at her as he passes by.

Buffy continues the earlier thread, "Or the other option is that they come out of denial, can't see beyond their beliefs about what they learned, and go all witch hunt-y."

Spike hops down a sharp incline, careful to keep his fingers out of the mud, and Buffy grunts a little as she lands next to him, one palm landing in the muck.

"What do you mean, pet?" he asks after she gets her bearings.

Buffy wipes and shakes the damp clay off her hand but manages to transfer it to the fingers of her other hand. "My mom. She got sucked into this thing by this demon. She and Willow's mom started a group called Mothers Opposed to the Occult or MOO. God, they made buttons. . . you know those little things you pin on your shirt when you want to show your support for something?"

Spike vaguely knows something about this type of thing, so he nods.

Making a face and spreading her hands and fingers wide like that will help her mud predicament, she continues, "They came after me and Willow and Amy, Willow's friend who is a witch. Almost burned us at the stake. Amy turned herself into a rat to get away."

"A rat?" Spike is half listening, more amused by the expression of disgust on her face in reaction to the mud.

"Uh huh." She slips her thermos of water out of her bag, swirls open the lid, pours a few drops of the precious liquid over her hands to loosen the thick grey earth.

"That must have been entertaining."

She smears the softened muck onto the closest tree trunk and absently gives her now clean-ish hands a happy smile. Then, she unexpectedly makes eye contact with Spike and says firmly, "Being almost burned at the stake was not entertaining."

He's tempted to pick up her hand and nibble on her finger. . . maybe entice her into a little repeat of what happened between them on the boat. Instead, he teases, "You lived, didn't you?"

"True. But Amy's still a rat. Willow's been taking care of her."

Spike shrugs and moves past Buffy, hunting for Harris's scent again. "Her own fault really."

Buffy can't help it; she laughs even though she knows she shouldn't. She takes a sip of water and spins the lid so that it's loosely closed.

They dodge around a patch of sunlight that's skirting through an open space in the trees above. Buffy glances at Spike to make sure he's not going up in flames. He smiles at her concern.

She doesn't look at him when she says the next part. "You know, I kind of have to sometimes think in black-and-white terms to do my job."

Spike gets this more than she knows. "The us versus them dynamic is really powerful."

"It is."

Spike considers where to take this line of discussion and chooses academic. "And evolutionarily important. It helped humanity survive. It helps vampires survive if they band together properly."

"A long time ago vampires and other demons were in the out group for humans."

Without obvious signs, Buffy and Spike happen upon a curved solid wall of stone covered in green that prevents them from going straight. Exchanging a look, they silently agree to head left to go around the barrier. Buffy wishes they had another scrap of cloth or something to go on, but Spike seems confident. What if Slayers had that sense of smell? She almost immediately decides she wouldn't want it. It wouldn't be as bad as reading everyone's thoughts, but some smells she wouldn't want heightened. . . like dumpsters in alleys.

She refocuses on what Spike is saying to continue their conversation, "They're in the 'them' group for good reason. We eat them or kill them. . . depending. Killing vampires and demons allows humanity to survive but perpetuates the us versus them fallacy."

"Which sometimes you have to abide by to survive." She stumbles a bit, but Spike catches her elbow to steady her. She gets the good shivers at the unexpected contact and discovers that she doesn't want to punish herself or him because of it.

Spike stays just behind her left side and marvels that he's attracted to the fact that her blonde hair is curling in the humid air. "Right. Survival is key."

"But it's a fallacy because it isn't true in every case. Like those little Dynas demons. They don't hurt humans at all."

She's starting to get it. Spike resists the urge to shout hallelujah. "But even within species, there is diversity. So in the Dynas group, odds are there are some Dynas that don't do such great things."

"Like humans who kill other humans." She offers Spike his thermos of blood, but he shakes his head, so she slips it back in the depths of the bag. "So you're saying that vampires aren't created equal. Duh. I already knew that."

Lukewarm pig's blood sounds bloody awful right now. Might sully the memory of how her essence tasted on his tongue. "Oh really?"

"Well, there's Angel." As soon as she says the other vampire's name, she knows she screwed up.

Spike stiffens, and he moves ahead a little to get away from her. "Angel is not a bloody saint. Just 'cause he has a soul. He was killing even after he got cursed with the bloody thing."

"I-I didn't know that." How is she going to fix this?

Spike doesn't care that she seems rattled because his pride is hurt. He huffs, "Well, he was. Didn't know what to do with himself, so he kept right on killing despite the guilt and the soul."

"Oh."

"Yeah. He had a sodding choice."

Buffy is silent for a long moment, not sure what to say to the fuming vampire. She wants to say that she knows Angel's not a saint, but that might provoke him further, so she instead says, "You have a choice. The chip that keeps you from hurting humans is broken, so now you have a choice." The ramifications of what it might mean for her world view if he does make a different choice than she's been told to expect. . . somehow, those implications aren't unfathomable not after. . .

"Buffy! Look out!"

Without warning, Spike's form is hurtled backward past her, and as he crashes into a tree, her eyes take in the large, very hairy creature that is the likely cause of said crash. Buffy hears a loud, possible battle cry behind her, and she whirls to see two similar hairy creatures swinging through the trees just above them.

As one lands on her head, she drops her water bottle, and the liquid splashes across the forest floor as the bottle spins out of sight. Buffy brings her arms up to protect herself and shove the creature away. Maybe it's the element of surprise, maybe it's the friendly-appearing primate-like face that her brain barely registers, but she hesitates. The demon emits a high-pitched howl, opens its smiling mouth and latches onto her the bare skin on her bicep. Buffy tries and fails to fling the creature away, and another jumps down and latches onto her other arm. Within seconds, she feels her heart skip a beat and a heaviness settle inside of her gut, leaving her feeling like her body is shutting down. Her hands brush helplessly at the creatures, and she falls to her knees.

Using the tree trunk to brace himself, Spike sinks to the damp earth with the weight of the demon heavy on his torso. As Spike fumbles behind him for anything he can use as a weapon, the demon growls at him and swings its face toward Spike's arm. It opens its mouth wide and latches onto his flesh. Almost straight away, the demon recoils, spitting and gagging and rolling on the forest floor.

As the demon recovers and grabs the vampire's ankle, Spike uses a good old fashioned fist to knock the demon unconscious. "Uh huh. I'm dead. Didn't expect that, did you?"

Then, Spike turns his attention to Buffy. "Bloody hell." No grey here.

Spike charges forward to aid the failing Slayer and tries to haul the smaller demon off her, but both are firmly latched. Eyes rolled back, they're focused on doing whatever they're doing to hurt Buffy, so Spike uses their distraction to hook a finger in the mouth of the closest one. He tears the creature away, the mouth popping on Buffy's skin as it unfastens. Picking up the heaviest branch he can find, he hits the demon in the head before it can recover enough to come after him.

Although Buffy's head is lolling to the side, Spike sees that she's valiantly trying to summon the energy to fight back. Her efforts are sorely lacking as her limp hand vaguely pushes against the creature's head.

Spike brushes her wavering hand aside. "Let me, love." He pops the demon's mouth free with a forceful jerk, and Buffy crumples to the ground.

The bigger demon snarls at Spike, dodging the vampire's attempt to brain him in the head. "Why is a vampire protecting a Slayer?" The demon's voice is deep and almost unintelligible in the non-native tongue.

"That's a very good question." Brandishing the bit of wood, Spike ducks as the primate-like creature swings an extra-long, well-muscled arm at him. "I'm not sure of the answer yet."

As Spike springs back up, the creature leaps, grabbing hold of a vine and kicking Spike in the head. He staggers and drops the branch as he smashes again into a nearby tree. His head spinning, he thinks, if I don't get staked in this fight with all the wood around, it'll be a bloody miracle.

Using the tree as leverage, he pushes off and hopes to high heaven that his instincts are sharp. As luck would have it, he rams his whole body into the demon's stomach, and the creature lets out a yelp of pain and falls to the earth next to the Slayer. The momentum carries Spike, and he drops on top of the demon.

Before the creature can regroup, Spike pushes off its chest, grabs its head, and violently twists to the left. The neck breaks with a satisfying crunch, snuffing the demon's life out. Spike quickly clamors to his feet, wiping his hands with satisfaction. The kill feels more gratifying than his battle with Phut, probably because he isn't cowering and hoping the damned chip won't go off.

Turning his attention to Buffy, he gently scoops her up in his arms, making sure to secure what's left of their supplies. She stirs and manages to pull up enough to wrap her damaged arms around his neck.

Spike murmurs in her ear, "C'mon, love. Let's get out of here before the other two wake up."