TITLE: Dry Kind of Love 14/?
AUTHOR: tanith
RATING: PG-13, just to be safe.
ARCHIVE: It's all yours, just let me know.
FEEDBACK: Bring it on. akirgo@yahoo.com
SPOILERS: Probably some minor ones here and there.
DISCLAIMER: See previous chapters.
SUMMARY: You can run, but you can't hide. Future fic.
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Anne had never been very good at waiting. Sitting around when there was something useful to be done seemed like such a waste of time. No, she was always action girl. If someone was in trouble, she'd find a way to deal with it, quickly and efficiently. She'd rescue whoever needed rescuing.
She doesn't like how the tables have turned. She doesn't like being the one who needs to be rescued.
They've removed the blindfold, but not the gag. The dirty strip of cloth has grown damp from resting between her jaws. Perhaps it will soon be wet enough to bite through. She tries to moisten it with her tongue, but her mouth is so dry now that it is a useless endeavor. How long has it been since she has had something to drink? If this keeps up, she'll die of thirst before they have a chance to kill her.
Good. She doesn't want to give them the satisfaction.
Part of her hopes that no one is coming for her; that William did the smart thing, took Zoe, and got as far away from here as possible. But part of her, the selfish part, is praying that William will come for her. And she knows William enough to be pretty confident that it's the selfish part that is going to win.
She hears him before she sees him, a slight creak on the stairs. And then he sweeps into the room with cat-like grace, like smoke swirling in the breeze. And her breath catches in her scratched throat at what she sees.
It's like a vision from the past. The years have melted away from his face, vanished along with all the color in his complexion. It pulls at her, pushes her brain in directions it does not want to go. It confirms her fear that everything was no more than a facade, a fancy scientific glamour. A monster in a man's clothing.
It's not his fault, she tries to remind herself. He had to deactivate the chip. But it still hurts her, to see him like this again, after so much time...being normal.
"Face it, Spike," she had said, "we can never be normal."
For once, Anne wishes she could have been wrong.
All semblance of normalcy is long gone, however. He strides into the room, the forgotten but familiar swagger back in his step. His duster floats around him and his beautiful blue eyes flash gold. And he is grinning, a wild, manic grin. A predatory grin.
He walks right by her as if she were not even there.
"Dru," he murmurs, seductively, and Anne is desperate to see what is going on. She can hear Drusilla squealing with delight, but she can't turn around. She is forced to listen to her husband fool around with his ex behind her back. Literally. It is far worse torture, she decides, than anything that Darla could have come up with.
But Darla doesn't seem to be particularly happy, either. She is standing in the corner, just barely in Anne's line of sight, her arms crossed over her chest. She is watching the reunion of Spike and Dru, her suspicion openly displayed across her face. She bites her lip, and then disappears out the door.
It is not any sort of residual Slayer sense, but just plain old maternal instincts that let Anne know that her daughter is in trouble. She realizes, with sudden horror, that Spike would be just stupid enough to bring reinforcements in the form of their daughter, and quite possibly, some of her friends. If Darla could smell them...
Her body is too weak to fight her bonds at all effectively, but Anne strains violently against her gag. She tries to shake it off, she gnaws at it, but to no avail. Finally, she resorts to screaming into the cloth. But the sound is horribly muffled. Worse still, it falls on deaf ears; from what she can hear, Spike and Dru are so engulfed in one another that the house could fall down upon them and they wouldn't notice.
Exhausted and beaten, Anne sinks back into her chair. And for only the third time since her mother died, she begins to cry.
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Zoe waits with her friends at the bottom of the stairs. Around them loom a miscellany of furniture from the past. Covered in sheets, the antique chairs and love seats and end tables appear like ghosts, frozen in space as well as in time. All and all, this house would be pretty cool - if it weren't for the circumstances that brought them here.
Zoe spins her axe around, getting used to the weight of it in her hands. Always one to prepare for the worst, she tries to imagine what it would be like to thrust the axe into another human being - or humanoid being, she amends. What would it feel like the moment the blade sinks in, and steel meets flesh? Zoe decides she is being too morbid, and tries to think of something else.
Unfortunately, "something else" is the thing that has been bothering her all evening, the line of thought she cannot push away. It teases her, like an itch at the back of her throat, impossible to scratch. There is still something wrong with her father's story; something that doesn't quite seem to fit. And try as she might, Zoe can't seem to put her finger on it.
"Maybe I can't see the forest for all the trees," she murmurs.
"What?" Roger looks up from the floorboards he is studying.
"Nothing," Zoe whispers. "Sorry."
She is trying to figure out which parts of the situation correspond to the forest and which parts are the trees, when she feels a tingle race up her spine like an icy finger. She jerks around, but sees nothing in the oppressive darkness, just the ghostly shapes of the furniture that wait silently around the room, like a sleeping army. Zoe shivers in spite of herself, and she remembers why she spent so many years afraid of the dark.
Then she hears Roger's voice, distant and childlike. "Zoe?" he asks. "Where's Sarah?"
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There was a time when holding her like this would have been the closest thing to heaven for Spike. Her long dark hair in his hands, her cool white skin against his, her soft red lips dancing over him. No chaos demon, no Angelus; just him and his Dru.
But as he holds her now, as she runs her sharp nails down his chest and looks up at him with her sad, insane eyes, he knows that time is long gone. And now, it is nothing but a game.
"I've missed you," she coos. But her expression is sad. "Are you finally free? I feel the chains pulling at you, Spike. You swing upside down by your ankles, but you smile. You are the hanged man, never again to stand on your own two feet, but laughing all the while." She pushes as stray strand of hair back into place, much as she did one fateful night over 140 years before. "You scare me, William," she says, and she steps away, her pale white hands falling to her sides.
Under other circumstances, it could be considered closure between them. But it is in that moment that William knows he has failed.
So for Darla to come in with Sarah held tightly under her iron nails is just redundant, really. But Darla has never been one for subtlety.
"Lookey here, Spike." She spits his name out like bitter wine. "I brought you a welcome home gift."
She pushes the girl to him, and Sarah lands sobbing against his arm. He tries to hold her steady, but she claws away from him, hysterical with fright, her thin blond hair coming loose from it's carefully constructed knot and falling across her face, where it becomes stuck down with tears. Instinctively, he grabs hold of her wrist when she tries to push away, and pulls her close into a deadly embrace. She shudders against him, blubbering.
William looks up at Darla's expectant face. He thinks about sacrifices, and what is best for the cause. And he knows what he must do.
Quickly, so that he doesn't have to think about it, he manhandles the screaming girl until they are standing in Anne's line of sight, directly in front of the door. He grins wickedly up at Darla. "I want her to watch," he says, indicating Anne.
Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Anne resume struggling against her bonds, even harder than before, but he does not allow himself to look at her. Instead, his gaze is fixed on Sarah's smooth expanse of white neck. He twists his hand into her hair, jerking her head back. His game face comes on without him even having to summon it. He runs his tongue across her skin, feeling her blood throbbing in her jugular and tasting her sweat. She whimpers, but no longer has the strength to struggle against him. And so he lowers his teeth to her neck, and he whispers, "Run."
His movements are fluid, he'll still give himself that much credit. In one graceful motion, he pushes Sarah toward the door and whips around, pulling out a stake. But Darla is just as quick. Within seconds she is upon him, a fury of teeth and claws. She is older, and meaner, and not out of practice, as he is. And unlike him, she doesn't have four other people to worry about.
It is his desire to make sure that Sarah has made it out safely that enables Darla to take him down. He turns his head to the door to check on the girl, and even though he is relieved to see her disappear down the stairs unharmed, it is enough of an opening for Darla to slip in and disarm him. The stake flies from his hand and skitters across the floor. William delivers a swift kick to Darla's midsection, and she staggers backward, but before he can free his second stake from his pocket, or reach the axe he left propped by the door, she is on top of him again. She pins his arms down with her elbows and holds him tight.
"You didn't fool me for a second," she tells him.
He brings his knee up, forcing her off. He gets to his feet, licking the blood from his lips. "Probably better for me in the long run," he says.
"You don't have a long run."
She backhands him, and he blocks it, but sloppily, and the force of the blow still sends him stumbling backward.
"Ooh, you're rusty," Darla clucks.
"That's what you think." Deftly, he spins around, his elbow connecting firmly with the side of her face, and she reels away. He leaps for the axe, but as his hand closes on the handle, he glances upward and catches sight of the figure standing in the doorway.
"Zoe?" he says, and at that moment, Darla charges him from behind. His head slams into the wall, his mind exploding into stars, and the last thing he sees before he slips away is his only child, alone in a room with Darla and Drusilla.
*************
TBC