Shade: Where the Sun Can't Find You
Wish I was
Too dead to care
If indeed I cared at all
Never had a voice to protest
So you feed me to judges
Buffy was still running when she hit the streets on the outskirts of the cemetery, quiet, haunted by the memories of a thousand fights, of wars that were beyond the imaginations of the people who lived in the silent, shadowed houses across from the cemetery gates. People in other towns always say that the dead make good neighbors; nobody in the Sunnydale is that stupid. In this neighborhood, the doors get locked at sunset and people, so used to lying to themselves about their own motives, settle down for another exciting night of T.V. and tell themselves it's not they're too scared to go out, it's just that they're not interested. Even in the daytime, the streets are deserted; this is not a place anyone wants to linger. Deep inside themselves, everyone knew the truth about Sunnydale, Sunny Hell. They just worked in the theory that if you never speak something's name, it will never notice that you're there. Sunnydale's curse was silence. If anyone saw Buffy's dash through the shade-shrouded streets and avenues, they kept it to themselves. Sunnydale is used to its secrets, and if anyone recognized the Slayer as she pounded past their home, tears on her face, they didn't say anything. They would rather not know.
Spike was back. Which she didn't care about. Because who cared that where that vampiric parasite was as long as she wasn't tripping over him ever other step. But he looked so haunted now, so lost, so tortured by his newfound vestiges of humanity. She had seen the look on his face a countless times before, had started each morning by trying not to see it in her own mirror. No, she wasn't going to feel sorry for him, wasn't going to feel anything. He fucked Anya on a table with a video camera rolling the whole time. He tried to rape her. He left her. He left. Shit, and which of those was she thinking was the worse crime, which of those was the unforgiveable sin that made her leave him when he was hurting, when he was looking as lost as she had ever seen him? She wished she knew why she had left, wished she could curse him out with composure, with confidence about why exactly she was doing anything. She couldn't get that look on his face out of her mind. He had looked better after Dru left. He looked better lying drunk on the floor. He looked better after she beat him, till her fingers were bloody and swollen, till his face was lost in pain. At least then he had seemed sure of her feelings, confident of where they stood in relation to each other.
But this... what was she supposed to be doing about this? Hadn't Spike ever heard that old story about sleeping in the bed you made? So he had gone to the demon to get his artificial humanity ripped out by its wires and instead wound up with something more permanent than he could have hoped for. Big deal. Hello, Spike's problem. And he had the nerve to think she could love him, that she would care at all about what happened to him. If she was glad at all to see him back, it was just because she always figured she would be the one to take him down.
What, like you killed him after he slept with Anya? No, wait he's still standing.
Or maybe the way you killed him after he attacked you in the bathroom? She wouldn't even let Xander kill him after that. How was that for a strange possession? Spike was hers to destroy and no one else's.
The same kind of a death you gave him after his one millionth and a half scheme to take over Sunnydale and destroy you? The plans he always walked away from, no matter how magnificently they failed.
Stop lying to yourself, Buffy. This is the vampire who showed up at your house carrying a shotgun once and the only thing you did was make room for him on the back step. And now is when you're going to kill him? You and what spine? Everybody needs a nemesis.
The voices in her head were making some kind of appalling sense, and what was worse, they wouldn't shut up. She wanted him dead, didn't she? She wanted him dust under her nails, an unpleasant memory, a lesson for future slayers that Giles could write down in those diaries he had kept about her for so long. Of course, that would assume that she could afford the transatlantic phone call it would take to tell him. She had a family to feed, a heartbroken Willow to nurse back to some semblance of humanity. Like she wanted to teach anybody else to be human.
Teach to be human? Where the hell had that come from? Spike sure wasn't going to be getting any lessons on humanity from her. She figured that soul or no soul he was still Spike. Only now he was a pissed off Spike, tortured by his very existence. It wasn't like having a soul instantly made him a good person. What was a soul? Serial killers had them.
But she had lost her biggest argument with Spike's newly human eyes, with the pain that coated him like tattoos, skin deep suddenly becoming surprisingly permanent. How many times had she told him she could never love him because he had no soul, could never truly feel anything for him because he had no humanity in common with her?
Panting, exhausted, she leaned against a storefront wall, felt the brick of the building solid behind her, the only real thing in her world right now. Everything else was still spinning, still lost in the hurricane that was Spike.
If she didn't care, why was still thinking about it? If she didn't feel something, anything for him, how could she still be so angry? And worst of all, most impossible to ignore no matter how much she wanted to, was some horrible, niggling feeling like she owed him. In all those dark days after she came back, it had only been Spike that understood what she was going through. It was only Spike that she could tell the truth to. Who was he going to tell the truth to, now that he had, in some strange way, been brought back to the man that he was? Clem? That was a laugh.
She hated him. Hated him with a passion. Couldn't stand the bloodsucker. He needed to be pushed off of her the last time he tried to touch her. He slept with other women. He beat her, stalked her, insulted her. Told her he loved her when Riley showed up with his perfect wife, his perfect life. Asked how she was after the social worker told her that she would lose Dawn. Bandaged her hands after she scraped them bloody crawling out of her own coffin. Told her he would keep her little sister safe until the end of the world. Risked his own life to keep the people she loved safe.
She didn't know how she got back to the crypt, didn't remember any of the walk through the heart of the town that was her own little gateway to hell, the cork on a bottle of apocalypse. One minute she was leaning against a wall on Main Street, cursing the poor suffering woman who had ever given birth to Spike, and in a blink, she was standing outside his door, wondering how she wound up in the last place on Earth she wanted to be. It was in every muscle of her body to turn and go, to leave this stupid place, with the cocky bastard trapped by daytime inside, and never come back, when the door swung open.
Spike stayed in the shadows, lost in the blackness and the sudden contrast between noon and midnight, but his voice was still clear enough. "Still a vampire, sweets. And that means I always know when you're near."
To Be Continued...