TITLE:
Darkest Before Dawn #4 "Reflections in a Guiness"
AUTHOR: Nmissi
PART: 4/?
DISCLAIMER: I own Nothing and No one. Especially not Spike. If I did,
what makes you think I'd share him with you?
DISTRIBUTION: Anybody, just credit me and let me know where it's
going.
Feedback: Please. Nmissi@aol.com
SUMMARY: The way the world would work if I wrote the Buffyverse.
The silky tang of blood scent, the undercurrent of Fear …It was homey and welcoming to the vampires in the room. The mortals smelled only beer, and sweat. They lacked the discernment to perceive their predators, stalking the edges of the herd, weaving into and out of the dancing crowds. In the bathroom, a girl lay bleeding, near to death in one of the stalls, while her friends applied lipstick on the other side of the door. A corpse lay cooling in the parking lot, and at the bar someone knocked back a suspiciously red-tinged tequila sunrise. It was nightfall on the Hellmouth.
"A lingering concern I have, mate, is just how much of your money I can take before it occurs to you -you haven't the faintest idea how to play pool."
The crack of cue against ivory was crisp in the air, somehow loud against the barroom din, as Spike worked the mortals for money. It was their third game, and he'd already relieved the frat-types of two twenties and a fiver. Not bad for a few hours honest work, he figured.
"Just rack 'em, English."
The college boy had lost his last five dollars to the foreigner, and he was none too happy about it.
Spike studied him momentarily, then shrugged his shoulders.
"Whatever. S'your funeral."
It was over in mere minutes, and he took more of their money with a snarky smile.
"Pleasure doin' business with you blokes…Come back 'round when you learn the game, eh?"
They left him then, dark expressions on their cookie cutter faces.
"Hmm. Right then. Just four more names to add to the ever- growing list of people that'd like to see me dead."
He brushed it off. If they wanted trouble with him, he'd be available later this evening, in the parking lot, or the cemetery. After he'd had a couple of beers. That WAS the point of the whole dreadful boring pool game, he figured. So he threaded his way through the gyrating teenyboppers, across the room to the bar.
"Guiness," he said, laying money down.
The bartender crooked a brow at this, and the vampire smiled winningly.
"Oh, all right then. What's my tab at now? I'll make good."
They conferred over figures a few minutes, before settling up. Finally Spike was alone with his beer. He took a seat along the wall, and watched the people in silence.
He could hear their heartbeats, could smell the elixir in their veins. He watched as they moved together, in pairs, and separately, alone at tables.
Alone just as he was.
It was funny, he supposed. He was a Vampire, a hunter amongst his prey. And yet he felt more at one with the vibrant crowd, than with the other predators.
Oh, he could see them. Other vamps like himself, stirring in the shadows. Only the newest, rawest of the undead were Obvious- the others hunted unobtrusively, sticking to the dark, clustering along the walls. Occasionally they would engage a human in conversation, or in a dance, but it was all an act, all to further the hunt. They didn't feel the music, or find the people interesting. It was all about feeding.
More and more he felt this way, these days. He'd always held on to too much of his mortality. Vampire Society had its own hierarchy and its own chronology. It moved slower than the mortal world. But Spike had never lived outside the humans; he'd lived among them. Drinking their blood even as he read their books and watched their movies, killing them even as he marveled at everything they, as a race, were capable of.
"That's it. I'm a bloody Roman- pilfering civilizations I crush under my heel."
He brought a steel-toed boot topside of the table, and rested it there on the edge, and took another swig off a second beer. He fumbled in his pocket for his cigarettes, before he remembered he'd lost them.
At the slayer's house. While shagging her.
He smiled, and tapped his foot on the table in time to the music. Then he finished off his beer and ordered another one.
Only in the last year or so, only since the Chip, had he come to feel this peculiar affinity with the mortals, however. He'd always admired them. But something had changed. Even now that the Chip was out, he still hadn't been able to summon the nerve to kill.
Oh, he'd put the urge to the test, as soon as he'd been back upon his feet. Barroom brawls had become his new hobby. And he had developed a fondness for a certain species of adversary; he liked to fight men of a superior build than his own, men with more muscle than mind.
He was not so blind as to miss the significance of his "type"; he'd always been very perceptive. Night after night, he was going out into the dark, to smash in faces with strong noses and dimpled chins, to test himself against thick fleshy forearms and necks as broad as his thighs.
His Riley-and-Angel surrogates. His hatred was at a peak when he fought them, his demon keyed up, at the ready. The thirst for their blood, insatiable.
Yet he would not drink them, would not kill them.
It disconcerted him no end. Somewhere in his head he could still hear the voice of Angelus, the voice of authority, laughing at him.
"Sod it. Poofter's out of your life. Get a grip."
He was aware he was talking to himself. Fortunately the succession of beers kept him from caring all that much. Damn it all. He'd successfully NOT THOUGHT about the early years of his unlife in a couple of decades. This was no time to get maudlin.
And the Damn Scoobies. That whole bit had hurt. He'd thought of himself as a part of the team, and their lot had turned on him like a pack of vicious dogs. He was still smarting over that. Logically, he could see their point- He WAS a vampire. And yeah, he'd tried to kill them a few times. But did nothing he'd done in the last year count? He'd listened to their sob stories, he'd fought the good fight right alongside them. He talked books with Giles and played pool with Xander. You'd think that sort of thing would get him a little consideration, but no. Not Spike, he was Eeev-ill.
Damn the ungrateful lot of them. It'd serve them all right if he ate each and every one.
Oh. Yeah, there was that bit. Buffy. Buffy might not like that. If he ate her Watcher, and her friends, Buffy would be angry, Buffy might…
(cry)
…stake his Undead Arse.
He fell back into contemplating his beer, and wishing he had a cigarette.