a/n: i'm back! hopefully the wait was worth it. this chapter is for Lorelai whose innocuous question served as a kick in the butt. enjoy!
Chapter 25
Spike glanced down at his cards and then back up at the other players. The perfect poker face making it impossible for the others to form any idea as to what his hand contained. He studied the demons seated around the table and the single human. He frowned and looked around again; he was feeling a huge sense of déjà vu. Had he been here before? Had he played this very game before? He frowned again as his hands played the game while his mind wandered. He was there but he wasn't. And then the game was over and Spike was claiming his winnings and the human was throwing down his lost possessions and a baby carrier with a slumbering baby girl snuggled in to the blankets.
'Hello baby girl,' Spike said with a smile. 'Gentlemen.'
With a curt nod Spike pocketed the cash and other trinkets the demons had offered up and grabbed the baby carrier. The human was long gone; Spike would leave the baby at a hospital and be back by Dru's side before dawn. He turned to leave and found his way blocked by five year old Serrah. It would be a year before he saw Dru again.
'Did you love me even then?'
'Didn't know you, bit.'
'But you kept me.'
'You were innocent, never done wrong but already been wronged.'
'Always the poet, William,' Serrah smiled and it was a wise smile that gave her the appearance of someone much older. 'You can't stay here.'
'I know.'
'Mummy needs you. I need you.'
'I don't know how to fight the magic.'
'You already are.'
Spike had nothing to say to that. Though he could see how she may be right, after all he was no longer wandering in that wasteland of despair and death. Was he fighting the warlock's power or was Serrah merely enabling his escape?
'Go back, daddy, kill them all.'
And in the basement of Nikolai's hide out Spike's eyes snapped into focus. He growled at the warlocks before him and felt small satisfaction when they flinched. He ripped the chains holding him right from the wall and launched himself at the men before him. Their power no longer affected him and the Gem kept his wounds healing. In minutes the basement was bathed in the blood of dead warlocks and Spike was once more taking to the stairs.
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'Its time to go,' Buffy announced, she was tired of waiting around and doing nothing while Giles and Wesley gathered spells that might prove useful.
'We need more time,' Angel told her simply, which was pointless because she had been watching the preparations and knew that he had done nothing for the last hour but sharpen weapons. He hadn't spoken a word to anyone in half an hour.
'Stop stalling, Angel, we leave in five minutes.'
It took them just under two hours to locate Spike. It would have taken considerably less had Angel not insisted on stopping to save three teenagers from a fate Buffy thought they deserved. She was in a bad mood and they were wandering around back alleys drunk and giggling. She didn't even bat an eye when one of them ended up receiving a hard knock to the head and she did nothing more than snort when Angel got himself in the way of her elbow.
As they approached the house, Buffy and Anya were in the lead as Angel had been banished to the rear after a particularly irritating remark. The closer they got the easier it was to hear the sounds of battle coming from inside. Buffy smiled smugly at a particularly high scream and then took a hurried step back from the door when the screamer, a bloodied warlock, was thrown toward her and the now open door. He bounced of a shield of some sort and landed with a thud at her feet just inside the door.
'Take care of the shield,' she ordered her magic experts, and stepped over the body of the unconscious warlock. She turned back once she was inside to snap his neck.
And then she threw herself into the fray.
She grabbed a vampire by the back of his shirt and tossed him behind her for Angel or one of the others to deal with. She had herself a master to find. She followed the trail of dead and bloodied bodies and found what she was looking for. Nikolai was huddled against the wall his arm a bloodied mess and Spike was in the middle of the room battling two vampires and a warlock who was still attempting to use magic against Spike. She hesitated for a moment but then moved toward Nikolai, Spike could handle himself.
'Well, well, well, what do we have here?' Buffy smiled smugly and served a kick to his injured arm. His newly reattached limb twisted to an awkward angle and Nikolai cried out.
Buffy snorted. 'And you still can't figure out why I'm with Spike?'
Nikolai glared at her and she backhanded him across the face.
'You could never be half the vampire, half the man that Spike is.'
'I love you.'
Buffy laughed. 'You don't love me, you want me because I'm unattainable, because you want to have something no other vampire has. But you screwed up, you can never have me, I have always been and I will always be Spike's. You made sure of that, we were happy with the claim, happy knowing we belonged to each other even if I would eventually grow old and die.
'I should thank you, you know, you gave me eternal life and love, you forced a demon witch, the grandmother of our child, to curse us with something so powerful that few attempt it. You gave me love not only in this life but the next and the next. I will live like this, young forever, until the day someone is strong enough to kill us and then we will be born again. We will once more live to love. You gave me that. And I would thank you if I didn't hate you so damn much.'
Buffy gripped his injured arm and gave a sharp twist and a tug, once more severing the limb. Nikolai screamed and screamed, she knocked him out just to protect her ears. When she turned around Xander was staring at her in horror, behind him Anya was helping Spike kill those who had merely been rendered unconscious by her friends and Angel. Spike stood up from the last of the unconscious, now dead, warlock and shot her a grin.
'Hello cutie.'