Disclaimer: See Part 1 Chapter 1
SHADOWED SOULS Part 4
Chapter 11
The elevators rumbled, floorboards creaked, doors clicked open and shut, pipes creaked and water splashed, mattresses squeaked and clothing rustled before it all quieted down. Angel listened to it all absently; his hands shoved into his pants pockets, gazing through the double glass doors into the courtyard garden of the hotel, noting how the flowers and shrubbery were in danger of overwhelming the tiled fountain and wrought-iron gates.
What was the current psycho-babble phrase? Ah yes, processing. He needed to process what he'd seen on the Ghost Roads.
After a certain length of time, humans tended to romanticize the past, recalling with fond nostalgia bygone days but forgetting the downside; it appeared vampires had the same tendency. Since he'd left Sunnydale for LA, Angel realised that he'd gradually begun to view his past relationship with Buffy more and more idealistically, forgetting that despite her many good qualities, Buffy could be self-righteous, judgemental, intolerant and above all wilfully blind, seeing only what she wished to see. Angel winced as he acknowledged his own similar flaws – it had been so easy and much more comfortable to blame Spike as the one-size-fits-all 'problem' affecting any stressful situation than look deeper into what was really going on…
"She couldn't blame the witch." Spike commented conversationally as if reading Angel's mind, strolling into the lobby from the bar with the nonchalance of someone who is just idling away time.
Angel knew better and he tilted his head slightly as he watched his grandson mooch, aware that Spike wouldn't leave until he'd made his point.
"Little Red and her friends really did think that they were saving Buffy from a hell dimension." Spike said, coming to stand beside his grandsire to look out into the garden, neither of their reflections showing in the panes of glass in the doors. "Funny really, if they had, instead of tearing her out of heaven, Buffy would have been all over them with hugs and kisses and flowers. Buffy couldn't hate Willow for doing something she genuinely believed was helping her best friend, or the others for going along with it, and she didn't want to upset them by telling them the truth, so she just locked it all away, buried it inside and hoped if she ignored it long enough, it would just go away."
"I know. We saw Sweet's spell on Sunnydale." Angel answered, and softly sang: ""'You can't tell the ones you love, you know they couldn't deal, but whisper in a dead man's ear doesn't make it real…'""
"They couldn't deal...like you can't sing." Spike shrugged, yet without any seeming rancour. "Xander Harris, Willow Rosenberg and Rupert Giles have many foibles, but stupidity isn't one of them. They knew – maybe not Anya, or Tara or Dawn – but those three, trust me, they'd been around their Slayer long enough to have figured it out by the end of her first day back where she'd really been…where they'd really taken her away from…They knew deep down where Buffy had been long before Sweet's musical mojo forced the facts out of us all in rocking rhymes, but they couldn't, wouldn't admit even to themselves what they had done, so they said and did nothing and left Buffy in the care of a demon, because then they could take comfort in being able to lay all the blame on m- that demon when things went bad."
"That doesn't make it right!" Angel snapped, irrationally irked by Spike's laconic acceptance. "The way she treated you, the way they treated you. Giles conspired with Robin Wood to murder you behind Buffy's back. When you'd fought side by side with them for nearly two years and saved their lives, literally, on more than one occasion, and they repay that by trying to murder you. It doesn't bother you that they would do that to you when you had a soul? That they would do something that bad?"
"Bad in comparison to what?" Spike challenged. "Let's just remember who's the injured party here, big guy. So Spikey got hisself a soul and is racing along the Road to Redemption. Big bloody deal. Still doesn't alter the fact that I murdered Robin Wood's mother, which I think gives him the props in the "Who's got the most right to be pissed off?" stakes. Of course it wasn't right, but it was understandable."
"I don't understand it." Retorted Angel.
"Of course you do, love," contradicted Spike with open amusement, "because you've done it just as much as they have. That's what Guilt is. Whenever someone feels guilty about something his or her natural tendency is to rationalise away what they've done, to shift the blame onto someone or something else, because very few people have the balls and the personal integrity to accept responsibility for their own actions until they're forced to do so – we call those that can do that 'saints'. You had to force Faith to accept what she'd done when she murdered the Deputy Mayor, Buffy had to force Andrew Wells to accept that he'd murdered his best friend, Jonathan Levinson."
"I suppose…"
"Suppose nothing, it's not pretty but it's a fact. It was easier for Giles to blame me than face his own culpability. As long as he could pretend that I was the problem and I was the threat, he could ignore what he'd done to contribute to the whole sorry mess in the first place."
Spike lit a cigarette and it's reflection bobbed in the glass panes of the doors, seemingly floating in mid-air in a way that was probably comical, had Angel been in any mood to find humour, as Spike expounded, "Giles abandoned her, Angel. Back when Willow was heading for the Dark Side and did that wacky Tabula Rasa spell, Giles had already got a plane ticket to England - and for what 'not-good' reason? Indoctrination."
"I don't understand?" Angel blinked. "Are you saying something brainwashed Giles into leaving Sunnydale?"
"Yes. He did. His entire culture did." Spike snorted. "Look, do you think it's a coincidence that Giles and Wesley and every British Watcher you've ever met has that stuffy, more-emotionally-repressed-than-Vulcans vibe? Giles was emotionally abandoned by his family before he was out of leading reins, shipped off to boarding schools to grow up in dormitories and maybe glimpse mother and father as beautifully dressed strangers every few months or so; that saying about the war being won on the playing fields of Eton? It was true because English children have to be enormously self-reliant from toddlerhood; it helped our race conquer the world and create an Empire upon which the sun never set, but it didn't do much for our mental health. Did you dad ever send you away?" Spike asked suddenly.
"No." Angel shook his head. As acrimonious as their relationship had been for a long time, the idea of banishing his son to some distant city out of the way would never have occurred to Liam's father.
"In a strange way, I was lucky my father died before I was born." Spike admitted. "I'm sure my dad would have loved me in his own way, but as a noble son of an ancient English House, I would have been packed off to Eton or Harrow or Winchester by the time I was old enough for first grade. Instead, I grew up with my mum, and I knew I was loved. But Giles…there's a difference between dependency and reliance. Everyone has an instinctive need to be needed, but Giles upbringing, and Wesley's, made that fact anathema. Rupert Giles was brought up to see that view of human relationships as heresy...why do you think he's a single, middle-aged librarian with all the romantic debonair style of the Marx Brothers?"
"Neither of them are very comfortable with feelings." Angel admitted, smiling faintly despite his inner turmoil. "When Faith left LA – after Willow restored my soul – you should have seen Wesley squirm when he thought she was going to hug him – there are mountain ranges with less rigidity."
"'Never complain, never explain.'" quoted Spike. "Giles was so locked in to seeing any form of emotional reliance as an unhealthy dependency that his solution to Buffy's loss of her mother was to put an ocean between them! He was going to go back to England and leave a twenty-year-old child to bring up a fifteen-year-old child because: she needed to stand on her own two feet. She was the Slayer, she had to get on with it…" Spike lowered his voice to a credible bass-profundo as he trotted out these phrases in a sarcastic recitation before reverting to his normal lighter tenor voice, "…and after Buffy died saving Dawn from Glory he abandoned all of them. Yeah, he was grieving and devastated, but so were Xander and Willow and Dawn and the entire Scooby Gang. That group of children practically adopted him and turned him from a bumbling, inept twit into a useful Scooby, but he just walked away…he left a group of children on the Hellmouth with a psychologically traumatised Slayer as the piece de resistance of their so-called arsenal and me as their protector! He screwed up big-time and everything went to hell – Willow addicted to magic, Xander sabotages his own future, Anya reverts to vengeance demon, Dawn's a kleptomaniac and the only one that Buffy can rely on absolutely through the whole mess is yours truly, a soulless demon. Given a choice between admitting all that to himself and trying to murder me, is it any surprise which one Giles picked?"
"Not really." Angel ran a hand through his hair. "Robin Wood though…I don't think I would have had your magnanimity…for all his justification."
Spike blew out a series of smoke rings that, again, seemed to appear suddenly out of thin air in the reflection of the glass and dissolve upwards. "I understood where he was coming from…if it had been my mum…but he was the same as Giles - blaming me meant he didn't have to face the truth…"
"That Nikki Wood was a Slayer before she was a mother." Angel acknowledged.
"That's my bright boy." Spike uttered Darla's oft-used phrase to her son and lover, smirking as the dark vampire flinched slightly. "I had no idea my "a Slayer with family and friends weren't in the brochure" was going to become some sort of tagline, but after me and Wood had our little heated debate in his garage I got to thinking…have you ever thought that the reason the Slayer didn't have family and friends was as much for their sake as not to distract the Slayer?"
Angel stared out into the garden, confessing softly, "What you said to Wood, about how no matter how many people they've got around them, the Slayer fights alone and the rest of us be damned? I sometimes felt that with Buffy. Cordelia…we barely got to kiss…but still she let me in…in a way that Buffy never would. I know Buffy loved me…but she still shoved a sword through my gut and sent me to a hell dimension for a century -"
"- Because she was the Slayer." Spike commented after a pause. "I know it. So does Buffy… one night before we went after the First she finally admitted to me how she kept her distance from everybody– she'd had a big row with Faith and the Potentials and they'd voted in Faith as their new leader –"
"I know. Me and Wesley saw, on the Ghost Roads." Angel admitted. "You went and found her so she wasn't alone…"
Spike took a deep drag of his cigarette, staring out into the night. "That's the truth that Robin Wood spent his whole life denying. Thing is, friendship is a two-way street. If you have a hero complex then you'll soon not have friends. If your best friend never needs your comfort, advice, help or support, first you get bored, then you feel worthless, then you feel superfluous then you look around for someone who needs you because you're sick of always being Jimmy Olsen to Superman."
Angel found himself nodding automatically, recognising his own greatest flaw – he'd been so determined to protect 'his team' he'd stubbornly pushed them away, ignoring his own inner disquiet and Lorne's sage, succinct advice that he was an idiot. And look where it had got him and all of them – Wesley, gut-shot and Darla spearing a sword through his guts in a strange synchronicity to his friend's injury. All because he'd persistently heard 'you're a champion of light' as 'hello, Superman, what kept you?'
"Buffy and Willow are best friends, but that's why when Tara was murdered and Willow went all Emperor Palpatine on us, Buffy couldn't reach her, because Buffy was first and foremost The Slayer. You know how I…feel…about Buffy, but no matter how close you get, how deep the bond…"
"There's always a distance you can never span, a barrier you can never breach," Angel acknowledged with, even now, a soupcon of bitterness in his tone, aware that there had always been a tiny part of Buffy that he could never touch.
"Yep, a little bit that will always be unreachable and impenetrable – the bit that is simply Slayer. It was why Xander could save Willow from destroying herself with grief and rage – and save the world from being destroyed by her – and Buffy couldn't. Xander has no super-powers, except his pure, uncontaminated humanity."
"And sometimes that's the most powerful thing of all." Angel acknowledged – after all wasn't the whole point of this so he could, once more, Shanshu in LA – be a human man again.
"And Nikki Wood had exactly that same little part of her. Robin Wood hated me because it was easier to blame me than face the fact that she was his world, but he wasn't hers." Finishing the cigarette, Spike expertly flicked it into the huge ceramic tub of a large potted tree, ignoring Angel's grimace. "He was right – he hadn't signed up the Slayer gig, but Nikki had."
"She was the Slayer, you were a vampire. What you did…" Angel began.
"Was what has always been done; Slayer and vampire are opposite sides of the same coin." Spike spoke with flat indifference, though the shadows in his eyes belied his tone of voice. "Giles hated me because he could transfer his guilt over abandoning what are, let's be honest, his children, rather than face up to it. Robin Wood hated me because he couldn't blame his mum for putting being the Slayer above being his mother. He could avoid having to admit that his mother loved him…but not enough to renounce being the Slayer. He was barely four years old for God's sake and she was all he had. Nikki Wood knew how unlikely it was she would live to see him reach fourth grade, but it didn't matter enough to her to put Robin's needs first. She loved him, but not enough to quit; she loved him, but not enough to walk away."
"So you let him live?"
Spike shrugged. "After we'd beaten the crap out of each other and he was sitting there I really was going to drain him dry, but he freed me – when I Sired my mum – the demon said terrible things, tore me apart inside and when it tried to have sex with me…but Robin made me realise that it really was it and not her. My mum was gone the instant I sank my fangs into her neck. It was the demon, not my mum, because my mum did love me with all her heart. I was her world. I didn't kill him because I looked at the poor bugger and realised that my mum loved me so much she would have quit, she would have walked away from being the Slayer - for me."
"And because of that you gave Giles a break too by not going after him?" Angel theorised.
Spike shrugged again. "I didn't go after Giles because I didn't need to. His and Wood's little master plan meant he'd already done himself more damage with Buffy than I could ever inflict. He'd betrayed her trust even more with his and Wood's harebrained notion than with that Cruciamentum crap Slayers used to have to go through – and considering we were facing up to the First Evil at the time, what they'd done could very well have gotten Buffy killed…and Giles had to live with that worry every time Buffy went out the front door, every single day until we had our little Apocalypse shindig."
Angel looked at Spike, somehow not surprised by what his grandson had just said; Spike looked truth in the face, unflinching, even in relation to his own actions. "I was so locked into seeing Buffy as the beleaguered heroine…" Angel confessed, "What I saw on the Ghost Roads…Buffy being the perpetrator rather than victim of domestic violence was one brickbat I was totally unprepared for."
"That's what makes the Ghost Roads so dangerous." Spike told him. "Your body can't bleed or even be bruised, but your mind can be totally destroyed. The Ghost Roads show you what your heart most desires – and what you dread above all other things. They show distilled truth, raw and unpolished, and there aren't a lot of creatures of any kind who can handle that without going crazy."
Momentarily Angel wondered what Spike had experienced on the Ghost Roads, but knew with complete certainty the blond vampire would never talk about it.
"Buffy is…as much as I…care for her, I don't know if I could forgive what she did, if it had been me." Angel confessed flatly, hating the fact that he sounded as though he were confessing that his love for Buffy wasn't deep enough, making his final words more harsh than he intended, "What she did to you – what they all did - was completely out of line."
Spike rolled his eyes heavenward. "Haven't you been listening, here? All right so what she did to me wasn't exactly Buffy's finest hour, nor was what Giles and Robin tried to do very nice either, or the way the others treated me. Big deal. So I fought side-by-side with them before I got a soul. So what? Like Xander once said, "'But I never forgot what he was.'" "
Angel opened his mouth, to make what objection or point he wasn't even sure, but Spike simply steamrollered on.
"Just because I only spent two weeks moaning in the basement instead of wallowing in self-loathing for a century doesn't mean I don't know exactly what I've got to atone for, Angel. They could all have been better people, sure, but despite all their flashy powers, they're still only human, not all-knowing, all-wise sages, and anyway, a lot of what they did is a lot less than I deserve. I went into this soul redemption thing willingly, and I can't complain now the chickens are coming home to roost and I'm reaping what I've sowed, so don't start going all righteous indignation on Buffy and Co., 'cause as Gunn would put it, they've got plenty of just cause, mate. Besides…" Spike gave a deep shrug, "I was hardly Mr Altruistic in the whole mess. I used the situation to get what I wanted just as much as they each did. Buffy blamed Little Red, but couldn't bring herself to confront her. She hated Willow, and she hated me, but most of all Buffy hated herself for hating us, for hating being back, for not loving Dawn and her friends enough to not resent being resurrected, for wanting to be left where she was…and I used that, make no mistake...I'm sure you know I tried to – hurt – Buffy one time. I've told you before, Angel, Ugly is where I live."
The dark vampire watched as, with this, Spike gave a sniff and walked back into the corridor towards the bar, presumably to either spend the night hours drinking or find somewhere to sleep now the rooms had been overtaken with Vampire Slayers. After the blond vampire disappeared from view, Angel sensed flickers of movement on the balconies and corridors above, the perfect acoustics of the lobby carrying even their quiet conversation further than Spike realised. He sensed guilty shapes drawing back with, hopefully, plenty to think about. Good, Angel though harshly, let them stew as they contemplated the less than pleasant reflections of themselves in the mirror of Spike's words…
Continued in Chapter 12© 2006 & 2010 The Cat's Whiskers