Chapter 3
"Breaking things?" she asked skeptically.
"No, not 'breaking things'," he said with a bit of forced patience, and a gentle mocking of her polite tone. "*Smashing* things. Annihilating things. *Busting* things wide open." A grin warmed his cold features. "Do your meek little heart good, it will."
Tara picked through the scrap metal and car parts at her feet, looked out over the rest of the junkyard with an unconvinced air. "Do you come here a lot?"
"M'a junkyard dog from way back, I am." Spike commented dryly.
"Speaking of which..." she said politely, "Nice job of, um...*disabling* the one we saw. Without hurting it."
Spike shrugged easily. "Oh yeah, well. That vampire thrall stuff works on more than just people."
Tara nodded dutifully, then returned to an uneasy perusal of her surroundings. Spike wondered vaguely if he'd unconsciously thrown a thrall on her. She had sunk back into a dour, listless mood by the time he'd come to get her that night, and had followed him out so absently, sleepwalking through the trip.
"You gonna start wearing tank tops and stuff, show off your new ink?"
"What? Oh." She smiled faintly. "Maybe, when it gets warmer."
Spike was unconvinced that any such thing would happen - her tone suggested that she would still inhabit the Land of the Baggy Shirts. At least...for now. He still had a fair amount of possible influence planned.
Would be a shame not to see that bird in a tank top *sometime*.
"All right, here's a good place to start..." Spike approached a dilapidated 70's-era car that sat near a cement block wall. A couple of good swift kicks soon had the front end loosened, but not off. Spike felt his blood pleasantly quickening with each blow from his boot, but Tara stood back a bit, wincing at the violence. Spike was surprised to find how much this reaction angered him, in a faraway part of his consciousness. He pushed the feeling aside and redoubled his determination to show her what he meant.
The front end finally fell with a noisy crash, and Spike ducked in for the headlights. "Here, one for each," he said, yanking a bulb free and tossing it to her. She caught it in surprise, looked at it and then him. Spike yanked his own bulb free, then rose and fumbled in one jacket pocket as he walked back over to her. He produced some safety goggles.
"Now put those on like a good girl..." He turned to face the cement block wall. "...and we'll have our lesson for today." Tara had no sooner secured the goggles when Spike flung the bulb viciously at the wall. It exploded with a delicate crash and a fallout of dented aluminum.
Tara stared. Spike gestured gallantly that it was the lady's turn. She blinked through her new eyewear, looking endearing. "Oh." With what seemed like a maximum of awkwardness, she reared back.
"Be sure'n chuck it hard, love, so it'll break."
She nodded distractedly, and seemed to gather some small bit of pent-up anger she kept saved for such occasions. She let fly. The explosion was much like Spike's, except this one had come at her hands, and it made her stand back, and breathe a little, and allow her mouth to drop open in a small, crooked smile.
Spike grinned. He knew he'd read her right.
After a quick hunt, he recovered a stash of glass soda bottles. His reward was Tara's broadened smile. He smoothly pitched one to its death against the wall, then she followed, her eyes increasingly amused behind the plastic. She wasn't terribly strong or coordinated, he noted, but what she lacked in finesse, she was quickly making up for in enthusiasm. Together they precipitated a small soda-bottle holocaust. When she turned to him after her last bottle was up, the flush in her cheeks told him everything.
"What else can we do?" she asked breathlessly.
Spike's face was all evil mirth. "What can't we?"
He was right. There seemed to be no end to the kinds of creative destruction afforded them. There were big slabs of sheet metal to be dented, and piles of things to be knocked over and a resulting gleeful din to be appreciated. They climbed onto a small, ruined go-cart that still had enough roll in the tires to take it down a small incline, and sailed it into a large stack of hubcaps. The noise and mayhem of the hubcaps' collapse was glorious, and Spike seriously thought he'd never seen Tara laugh so hard.
Tara found a pile of porcelain fixtures to be sacrificed, and against them there were metal poles to be wielded, chains to be swung, missiles to be thrown. Spike finally decided their annihilation of a large sink had not gone far enough. He sat it atop a pile of junk and determined to drop a cement block on it. A nearby cherry picker cage had been left low enough to climb into, high enough to still be impressive. He hauled both himself and his heavy projectile up, aimed carefully, dropped the block...and missed. Tara laughed as Spike cursed in frustration. Spurred on by her amusement, Spike impulsively launched himself over the railing with a howl and landed on the sink with both feet, cracking it nicely but taking a tumble down the pile of junk.
Tara's laughing turned to gasps. She ran around the pile to check on his safety, sighing in relief when she found him simply dusting himself off. She chastised him for scaring her, and he took it with the proper - if smirking - little boy air, but heard very little of what she said. As he followed her out into the junkyard proper, he found he was immensely pleased at his ability to scare her like that. Not in the usual fiendish way - he'd discovered a delicious, soft thrill at the show of genuine concern. He watched her walk in front of him and wondered what he could do to make it happen again.
His goldfish-like attention span was soon drawn back to the potential of the cement blocks. He picked up another and heaved it with a shout and a great crash through the window of an old bus. Tara took the cue and threw objects through the other windows, till Spike found her eye wandering to a junked car whose windows were all still intact.
He spotted a baseball bat, plucked it up and tossed it to her. "Here's what you need, love." When she caught it, her eyes lit and met his and she grinned at his understanding of her.
Spike felt that soft thrill again.
She marched to the car and whacked the bat into the windshield, grimacing against the potential spray of glass. She opened her eyes to find none had occurred - she'd spider-webbed the glass without breaking it. She relaxed and swung again.
"Atta girl," Spike enthused. He watched her gain momentum. She swung again and again, laying waste to the windshield, as though she'd gone into a trance. Spike sensed something happening. He dropped what he was doing and moved toward her.
"You can do whatever you want," he said, his voice low and hypnotic.
Tara smashed the bat into the metal frame of the window, having exhausted the glass. She seemed to recognize this, but only dimly. She moved back a step and cracked into the passenger's side window.
"You have a choice," he purred. Smash. "You can do something about the things you hate." SMASH. "You don't have to be beholden to anyone, ever again."
SMASH SMASH SMASH SMASH
She'd worked her way entirely around the car now, but was still swinging fiercely at anything she could find, landing most of her swings but not all. He knew she was crying. Between that and her flying hair, she couldn't have been able to see much. Her obviously tiring arms waved the bat in ever more erratic arcs. Spike moved in carefully from behind, nimbly ducking the flailing bat, reached around her body and caught her hands in his. He fought to still her until she was simply standing and weeping and he was simply holding her.
Just for her own safety, he told himself soberly, as he held her sobbing form secure against the world. She turned to bury her face in his chest, and he helped by removing the goggles. He could feel her heart pounding like a rabbit's. She was getting careless with that thing...can't have her gettin' hurt.
Somehow, resting his cheek against her tangled hair and closing his eyes made up an integral part of his safety regime.
The moment sat still for a while, quiet except for Tara's small sobs and the occasional, faraway night sound, until suddenly a big arc light flared to life overhead, flooding the place with glare. A slurred voice called out from somewhere behind it: "Hey! Whass going on out here?!"
Spike squinted until he saw a short man in a dirty ball cap, walking the unsteady terrain toward them on even unsteadier legs. He was bathed in backlighting, an effect that would make anyone else look dramatic. For this bloke, it only emphasized his smallness.
"What're you doing?" the man bleated. "Y'all are trespassing, you know that?" Then his small, reddened eyes landed on the car, soon moving between it and Tara's bat. It didn't take him too long to add it all up, but it did take longer than most, Spike noted. If everyone else's brain was the equivalent of a calculator, this guy was still using an abacus.
"Were you doing what I think you were? You were, weren'tcha?" He pointed imperiously at the newly-windowless car. "THAT is a vintage piece of scrap! I coulda gotten top dollar for that thing, but now you've ruined it! I hope you've got money saved because you are going to pay..."
Blah blah blah. Spike barely listened to the prat droning on. He could smell the booze on his breath from there, and knew a little man trying to be important when he saw one. Short work to scare him off. His concern was for Tara, still snuffling and warm against him. He was feeling protective of the moment she'd been having before this wanker showed. He looked down at her face, to see her simply staring past his t-shirt at nothing. Her heartbeat was still fairly fast, but other than that, he couldn't read her.
Spike regarded their new adversary. "On your bike, you. We ain't done nothin' wrong."
The little man puffed up. "Oh, yeah? Well I'd like to hear what a judge'd say about that! This here's MY PROPERTY." He poked himself in the chest so hard Spike was pretty sure it caused the next moment's loss of balance.
The vampire let go of Tara reluctantly, stepped up to the little bugger. "I don't bloody care whose property it is."
"Well then you got trouble, mister! Now you get outta here 'fore I kick yer asses!"
Spike cocked his head in faux-earnestness. "I thought we were supposed to pay for the car."
Blink, blink. "Wull, yeah! You pay first and then you get yer asses outta here!"
Spike allowed himself a smirk. This joker wasn't even a moving target. Almost unfair to whip out the bad-ass on him...almost. Spike's smile grew - if he vamped, this one'd probably piss his pants, right here in front of him *and* a pretty lady. Too delicious, having this ponce to play with. He calculated how much taunting he could indulge in before playing his trump card.
But instead of a trump card, what got played was a wild card.
Spike startled faintly to see Tara's head move into view just off to his right. "Leave us alone," she told the little man, the last of her teary mood obviously turning into anger.
Spike suddenly wished that he came with a warning label: 'DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME, WE *ARE* PROFESSIONALS.' The last thing Little Men Who Were Trying To Be Important needed was to be told off by women. And the last thing Women Who Were Getting In Touch With Their Anger needed was to mix it up with drunken idiot rednecks.
And somehow, the thought of her truly involved in the situation was an instant buzz-kill.
He reached a hand toward her elbow. "Tara, love..."
Tara gently removed Spike's hand, keeping her eyes fixed on the man. "We didn't ruin your stupid car. It was a piece of junk to start with."
The man's face, already mottled with drink, turned the color of borscht gone bad. "Oh, you think you know, do ya?" he sputtered. "That's a very rare model, a collector's item! You owe me a *shitload* and you're gonna pay me tonight!"
As his arm jerked out to point at Tara, the shift in fabric showed Spike the outline of a biggish gun under his jacket. Spike felt the moment when his face would have blanched, were it still capable. Bloody hell. Nothing he'd have to worry about, of course, but with Tara there - Christ. Is this what his little "lesson" had produced?
"You know it's people like you who make it impossible for the independent businessman to make a living! It's people like you! PEOPLE LIKE YOU!" The guy was losing it at an alarming rate. Spike's muscles were just getting the signal to act, to jump in front of her or possibly push her forcibly out of the way, lest any potential projectiles travel straight through him and continue on toward her. The man's fingers were twitching - Spike imagined they were itching for the gun she didn't know existed.
But in the next instant, Tara's demeanor changed into a type of steel formerly unknown to either of them. She didn't seem to move a muscle or change anything Spike could put his finger on - she just silently and mysteriously became the most intimidating creature conceivable. From the look on the man's face, Spike reckoned his astonishment equaled his own.
"We will do," she intoned quietly. "whatever we want to. Now go."
The man's rage came to a screeching crash. His face crumpled first into uncertainty, then into panic. Spike watched him fumble in his jacket pocket and produce a tiny cross on a chain. Evidently, someone was remembering the kind of things that were rumored to creep around Sunnydale.
When he spoke again, the redneck's voice was a stammering wreck. "Y-y-y'all are lucky. I-I-I'm-a let you g-g-go this once."
Then he damn near killed himself running away.
Spike gaped at Tara in as much glee as astonishment. "What was that? You pull a mojo?"
Tara looked pleased and excited. "No, just me. I just wanted to see if I could do it." Spike's eyes still asked questions. Tara turned sheepish. "I-I just...pretended I was a vampire."
Spike was dumbstruck with admiration. Not only had she made someone *else* stammer while not doing so herself, essentially she'd vamped out before he could. He put a hand to his chest and stumbled backward a step, a rakish grin splitting his face. "Be *still* my heart," he drawled.
Tara looked down with a pleased flush, one that sent a little stirring into Spike's groin. Was he imagining things, or was she actually responding to flirting? She looked back up and met his eyes, and the tingle it shot threw him made Spike reach for a joke. He looked at his chest and back at her: "Hey," he deadpanned, "it worked."
They both broke out laughing.
++++++++++++++++
"Breaking things?" she asked skeptically.
"No, not 'breaking things'," he said with a bit of forced patience, and a gentle mocking of her polite tone. "*Smashing* things. Annihilating things. *Busting* things wide open." A grin warmed his cold features. "Do your meek little heart good, it will."
Tara picked through the scrap metal and car parts at her feet, looked out over the rest of the junkyard with an unconvinced air. "Do you come here a lot?"
"M'a junkyard dog from way back, I am." Spike commented dryly.
"Speaking of which..." she said politely, "Nice job of, um...*disabling* the one we saw. Without hurting it."
Spike shrugged easily. "Oh yeah, well. That vampire thrall stuff works on more than just people."
Tara nodded dutifully, then returned to an uneasy perusal of her surroundings. Spike wondered vaguely if he'd unconsciously thrown a thrall on her. She had sunk back into a dour, listless mood by the time he'd come to get her that night, and had followed him out so absently, sleepwalking through the trip.
"You gonna start wearing tank tops and stuff, show off your new ink?"
"What? Oh." She smiled faintly. "Maybe, when it gets warmer."
Spike was unconvinced that any such thing would happen - her tone suggested that she would still inhabit the Land of the Baggy Shirts. At least...for now. He still had a fair amount of possible influence planned.
Would be a shame not to see that bird in a tank top *sometime*.
"All right, here's a good place to start..." Spike approached a dilapidated 70's-era car that sat near a cement block wall. A couple of good swift kicks soon had the front end loosened, but not off. Spike felt his blood pleasantly quickening with each blow from his boot, but Tara stood back a bit, wincing at the violence. Spike was surprised to find how much this reaction angered him, in a faraway part of his consciousness. He pushed the feeling aside and redoubled his determination to show her what he meant.
The front end finally fell with a noisy crash, and Spike ducked in for the headlights. "Here, one for each," he said, yanking a bulb free and tossing it to her. She caught it in surprise, looked at it and then him. Spike yanked his own bulb free, then rose and fumbled in one jacket pocket as he walked back over to her. He produced some safety goggles.
"Now put those on like a good girl..." He turned to face the cement block wall. "...and we'll have our lesson for today." Tara had no sooner secured the goggles when Spike flung the bulb viciously at the wall. It exploded with a delicate crash and a fallout of dented aluminum.
Tara stared. Spike gestured gallantly that it was the lady's turn. She blinked through her new eyewear, looking endearing. "Oh." With what seemed like a maximum of awkwardness, she reared back.
"Be sure'n chuck it hard, love, so it'll break."
She nodded distractedly, and seemed to gather some small bit of pent-up anger she kept saved for such occasions. She let fly. The explosion was much like Spike's, except this one had come at her hands, and it made her stand back, and breathe a little, and allow her mouth to drop open in a small, crooked smile.
Spike grinned. He knew he'd read her right.
After a quick hunt, he recovered a stash of glass soda bottles. His reward was Tara's broadened smile. He smoothly pitched one to its death against the wall, then she followed, her eyes increasingly amused behind the plastic. She wasn't terribly strong or coordinated, he noted, but what she lacked in finesse, she was quickly making up for in enthusiasm. Together they precipitated a small soda-bottle holocaust. When she turned to him after her last bottle was up, the flush in her cheeks told him everything.
"What else can we do?" she asked breathlessly.
Spike's face was all evil mirth. "What can't we?"
He was right. There seemed to be no end to the kinds of creative destruction afforded them. There were big slabs of sheet metal to be dented, and piles of things to be knocked over and a resulting gleeful din to be appreciated. They climbed onto a small, ruined go-cart that still had enough roll in the tires to take it down a small incline, and sailed it into a large stack of hubcaps. The noise and mayhem of the hubcaps' collapse was glorious, and Spike seriously thought he'd never seen Tara laugh so hard.
Tara found a pile of porcelain fixtures to be sacrificed, and against them there were metal poles to be wielded, chains to be swung, missiles to be thrown. Spike finally decided their annihilation of a large sink had not gone far enough. He sat it atop a pile of junk and determined to drop a cement block on it. A nearby cherry picker cage had been left low enough to climb into, high enough to still be impressive. He hauled both himself and his heavy projectile up, aimed carefully, dropped the block...and missed. Tara laughed as Spike cursed in frustration. Spurred on by her amusement, Spike impulsively launched himself over the railing with a howl and landed on the sink with both feet, cracking it nicely but taking a tumble down the pile of junk.
Tara's laughing turned to gasps. She ran around the pile to check on his safety, sighing in relief when she found him simply dusting himself off. She chastised him for scaring her, and he took it with the proper - if smirking - little boy air, but heard very little of what she said. As he followed her out into the junkyard proper, he found he was immensely pleased at his ability to scare her like that. Not in the usual fiendish way - he'd discovered a delicious, soft thrill at the show of genuine concern. He watched her walk in front of him and wondered what he could do to make it happen again.
His goldfish-like attention span was soon drawn back to the potential of the cement blocks. He picked up another and heaved it with a shout and a great crash through the window of an old bus. Tara took the cue and threw objects through the other windows, till Spike found her eye wandering to a junked car whose windows were all still intact.
He spotted a baseball bat, plucked it up and tossed it to her. "Here's what you need, love." When she caught it, her eyes lit and met his and she grinned at his understanding of her.
Spike felt that soft thrill again.
She marched to the car and whacked the bat into the windshield, grimacing against the potential spray of glass. She opened her eyes to find none had occurred - she'd spider-webbed the glass without breaking it. She relaxed and swung again.
"Atta girl," Spike enthused. He watched her gain momentum. She swung again and again, laying waste to the windshield, as though she'd gone into a trance. Spike sensed something happening. He dropped what he was doing and moved toward her.
"You can do whatever you want," he said, his voice low and hypnotic.
Tara smashed the bat into the metal frame of the window, having exhausted the glass. She seemed to recognize this, but only dimly. She moved back a step and cracked into the passenger's side window.
"You have a choice," he purred. Smash. "You can do something about the things you hate." SMASH. "You don't have to be beholden to anyone, ever again."
SMASH SMASH SMASH SMASH
She'd worked her way entirely around the car now, but was still swinging fiercely at anything she could find, landing most of her swings but not all. He knew she was crying. Between that and her flying hair, she couldn't have been able to see much. Her obviously tiring arms waved the bat in ever more erratic arcs. Spike moved in carefully from behind, nimbly ducking the flailing bat, reached around her body and caught her hands in his. He fought to still her until she was simply standing and weeping and he was simply holding her.
Just for her own safety, he told himself soberly, as he held her sobbing form secure against the world. She turned to bury her face in his chest, and he helped by removing the goggles. He could feel her heart pounding like a rabbit's. She was getting careless with that thing...can't have her gettin' hurt.
Somehow, resting his cheek against her tangled hair and closing his eyes made up an integral part of his safety regime.
The moment sat still for a while, quiet except for Tara's small sobs and the occasional, faraway night sound, until suddenly a big arc light flared to life overhead, flooding the place with glare. A slurred voice called out from somewhere behind it: "Hey! Whass going on out here?!"
Spike squinted until he saw a short man in a dirty ball cap, walking the unsteady terrain toward them on even unsteadier legs. He was bathed in backlighting, an effect that would make anyone else look dramatic. For this bloke, it only emphasized his smallness.
"What're you doing?" the man bleated. "Y'all are trespassing, you know that?" Then his small, reddened eyes landed on the car, soon moving between it and Tara's bat. It didn't take him too long to add it all up, but it did take longer than most, Spike noted. If everyone else's brain was the equivalent of a calculator, this guy was still using an abacus.
"Were you doing what I think you were? You were, weren'tcha?" He pointed imperiously at the newly-windowless car. "THAT is a vintage piece of scrap! I coulda gotten top dollar for that thing, but now you've ruined it! I hope you've got money saved because you are going to pay..."
Blah blah blah. Spike barely listened to the prat droning on. He could smell the booze on his breath from there, and knew a little man trying to be important when he saw one. Short work to scare him off. His concern was for Tara, still snuffling and warm against him. He was feeling protective of the moment she'd been having before this wanker showed. He looked down at her face, to see her simply staring past his t-shirt at nothing. Her heartbeat was still fairly fast, but other than that, he couldn't read her.
Spike regarded their new adversary. "On your bike, you. We ain't done nothin' wrong."
The little man puffed up. "Oh, yeah? Well I'd like to hear what a judge'd say about that! This here's MY PROPERTY." He poked himself in the chest so hard Spike was pretty sure it caused the next moment's loss of balance.
The vampire let go of Tara reluctantly, stepped up to the little bugger. "I don't bloody care whose property it is."
"Well then you got trouble, mister! Now you get outta here 'fore I kick yer asses!"
Spike cocked his head in faux-earnestness. "I thought we were supposed to pay for the car."
Blink, blink. "Wull, yeah! You pay first and then you get yer asses outta here!"
Spike allowed himself a smirk. This joker wasn't even a moving target. Almost unfair to whip out the bad-ass on him...almost. Spike's smile grew - if he vamped, this one'd probably piss his pants, right here in front of him *and* a pretty lady. Too delicious, having this ponce to play with. He calculated how much taunting he could indulge in before playing his trump card.
But instead of a trump card, what got played was a wild card.
Spike startled faintly to see Tara's head move into view just off to his right. "Leave us alone," she told the little man, the last of her teary mood obviously turning into anger.
Spike suddenly wished that he came with a warning label: 'DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME, WE *ARE* PROFESSIONALS.' The last thing Little Men Who Were Trying To Be Important needed was to be told off by women. And the last thing Women Who Were Getting In Touch With Their Anger needed was to mix it up with drunken idiot rednecks.
And somehow, the thought of her truly involved in the situation was an instant buzz-kill.
He reached a hand toward her elbow. "Tara, love..."
Tara gently removed Spike's hand, keeping her eyes fixed on the man. "We didn't ruin your stupid car. It was a piece of junk to start with."
The man's face, already mottled with drink, turned the color of borscht gone bad. "Oh, you think you know, do ya?" he sputtered. "That's a very rare model, a collector's item! You owe me a *shitload* and you're gonna pay me tonight!"
As his arm jerked out to point at Tara, the shift in fabric showed Spike the outline of a biggish gun under his jacket. Spike felt the moment when his face would have blanched, were it still capable. Bloody hell. Nothing he'd have to worry about, of course, but with Tara there - Christ. Is this what his little "lesson" had produced?
"You know it's people like you who make it impossible for the independent businessman to make a living! It's people like you! PEOPLE LIKE YOU!" The guy was losing it at an alarming rate. Spike's muscles were just getting the signal to act, to jump in front of her or possibly push her forcibly out of the way, lest any potential projectiles travel straight through him and continue on toward her. The man's fingers were twitching - Spike imagined they were itching for the gun she didn't know existed.
But in the next instant, Tara's demeanor changed into a type of steel formerly unknown to either of them. She didn't seem to move a muscle or change anything Spike could put his finger on - she just silently and mysteriously became the most intimidating creature conceivable. From the look on the man's face, Spike reckoned his astonishment equaled his own.
"We will do," she intoned quietly. "whatever we want to. Now go."
The man's rage came to a screeching crash. His face crumpled first into uncertainty, then into panic. Spike watched him fumble in his jacket pocket and produce a tiny cross on a chain. Evidently, someone was remembering the kind of things that were rumored to creep around Sunnydale.
When he spoke again, the redneck's voice was a stammering wreck. "Y-y-y'all are lucky. I-I-I'm-a let you g-g-go this once."
Then he damn near killed himself running away.
Spike gaped at Tara in as much glee as astonishment. "What was that? You pull a mojo?"
Tara looked pleased and excited. "No, just me. I just wanted to see if I could do it." Spike's eyes still asked questions. Tara turned sheepish. "I-I just...pretended I was a vampire."
Spike was dumbstruck with admiration. Not only had she made someone *else* stammer while not doing so herself, essentially she'd vamped out before he could. He put a hand to his chest and stumbled backward a step, a rakish grin splitting his face. "Be *still* my heart," he drawled.
Tara looked down with a pleased flush, one that sent a little stirring into Spike's groin. Was he imagining things, or was she actually responding to flirting? She looked back up and met his eyes, and the tingle it shot threw him made Spike reach for a joke. He looked at his chest and back at her: "Hey," he deadpanned, "it worked."
They both broke out laughing.
++++++++++++++++