Author's Note: Yes it's me! I'm back in business after a loonnngg hiatus, I hit a dry spell for a little (okay, I'm lying, not so little) while, with homework adding to my unmotivated state, but hopefully now, I'll hit an inspired streak and post the next chapters up in quick succession. I'll try to have some chapters from "Baby You Don't Even Know" up too. Oh, and some dialogue in this chapter is taken from "Becoming Part One" just because the dialogue in that episode is so great, it would be a pity not to include it. It's hard to make a great thing greater. From here on out, the story does depend heavily on the last two episodes of Season 2.
Chapter 21: The Rise of a New Evil
Drusilla held her arms out blindly and spun around the room, waltzing with an invisible stranger. "It's so pretty," she chanted over and over in a childish litany. She paused and neared the huge stone structure that stood in front of the fireplace. With a little sigh, she wrapped her arms around it and put her face to the cold surface. "It fills my head."
Angel turned around to see his childe hugging the hunk of rock. He chuckled, turning his attention away from the book he was holding. This structure was many things; it was lethal, it was deadly, it was the deliverer of doom and misery and pain. It was a great many adjectives, but none ever coming close to "pretty". "That it is, sweet pea." Suddenly, his seductive purr hardened as he called, "Manny, Louis, come here!"
Drusilla released her hold on the rock as she watched the two vampire henchmen file into the room, each armed with crow bars. Grinning, she clapped her hands with delight. "Is Daddy gonna unlock my treasure chest?"
Angel cocked his head at the stone and the henchmen set to work on prying it open. "That's right, honey. It's a treasure." He turned and smirked at Dru, who gazed at him like a fawning teenager with a brat pack crush. "You know what this is, baby? You know what this will do for us?"
She glided serpent-like over to him, wrapping one arm around his neck. "It'll be a party, won't it?" she whispered into his ear. "It'll be a party that'll never end. Blood flowing like wine, bodies withering like flames, that's what you promised me."
Angel brought a thumb to caress her plump lower lip, still stained from breakfast. "And no one will ever say that I don't keep good on my promises."
A resounding thud and a slab of stone hit the floor. "It's open, Boss," one henchman announced.
Angel turned and gazed with satisfaction at the ugly horned statue that scowled at all the surveyors. Striding up to it, Angel slid one hand across the sword that protruded out of its chest reverently. "Acathla," he murmured with the utmost respect.
"Acathla will throw me a party," Dru chanted again, commencing a joyful jig. "Acathla shall throw me the grandest celebration."
Angel turned to Manny. "You've got the kid?" he asked harshly. Manny nodded and dragged out the gagged body of a teenage boy, writhing with fear in his constraints. He was just another anonymous Sunnydale adolescent whose sole purpose in life was to become a snack-able for those like Angel. He was stringy and lanky and probably had psychedelic, herbally-laced blood, but Angel didn't care. He wouldn't be needing him for food.
Angel took hold of the whimpering boy and brought him to his feet. Removing the gag from the boy's mouth, he suddenly gave the boy a sick smile that was seemingly warm and genuine. The boy continued sobbing uncontrollably.
"I s-swear man, take my money . . . m-my wallet . . . I only have twenty bucks in it, but take anything you want . . . T-the c-credit cards, the watch, anything! Oh G-God, just please don't hurt me!"
"Hey, shh, shhh, it's alright kid, it'll be alright," Angel comforted easily, shaking the boy to show some sort of camaraderie. "You know that don't you?"
Still crying silently, the boy shook his head.
"Well you are man, there's no doubt about that. You're gonna help make life what it should be. You're gonna help make history . . ." He gave a last little sneer. " . . . End." Suddenly, he changed as the boy gaped at him in horror. Before the boy could scream, Angel had already lunged his fangs into the boy's neck, drawing out a stream of blood. The boy convulsed against him and eventually went limp as Angel let the blood spill from the wound down his neck. He was careful not to drink the liquid. Retracting his fangs, Angel loosened his hold on the boy to smear one hand in the flowing blood. He then dropped the boy carelessly and approached Acathla.
He chanted solemnly the words as he had read them in the book and brought one hand around the handle of the sword. With an impatient smile, he tugged on it. It wasn't budging. His eyes widened when he began to grasp the sword tighter, struggling with it, but to no avail. The sword refused to move from its nestled position in Acathla's chest.
"Dammit!" he exploded with a wild growl. He kicked and smacked the statue with rage. Maybe he could pummel the apocalypse out of it. "Why the hell won't it work?! Why?!"
Manny and Louis cowered in fear. "I don't know, Boss," Louis mumbled. "Maybe . . . maybe we could try stealing some more books on Acathla . . . maybe ransack the library, see if we can find anything more about the ritual."
Angel suddenly brightened, gazing at Acathla with renewed inspiration. Shrugging an arm around Dru, he pursed his lips into thoughtful languor. "Yeah . . . or anyone."
Dawn showered Buffy with morning's warmth and sliced her closed eyelids with sunlight. Stirring, she shuddered and tried to rise from a bed of grass, feeling her limbs cloaked in numbness. The heavy weight of someone's head rolled off her arm, and she straightened, suppressing a cry of surprise. She blinked, gazing around herself in confusion. Expecting to see the secure, safe walls of her bedroom, she searched her mind, trying to find an explanation as to why she was greeted by cold tombstones instead. And then the events of last night came flooding back to her.
Sitting up, she grimaced and gripped her throbbing head. She wondered if it was possible to die from emotional hangover. If so, then this was probably what it felt like. Looking down, she saw Spike snoring softly into the grass right beside her.
She frowned and flexed her arm, which had apparently served as Spike's pillow for the night. She stared down at him with a critical eye. He lay with one arm splayed across his face, shielding his delicate white skin from the sun. Absently, she mused over the ivory, almost feminine paleness of his complexion. Guess the fog-ridden climate of London does nothing for a nice toasty tan, she thought, cocking her head at his still-sleeping form. Her eyes traveled across his face, noting how his hard, chiseled features seemed nearly boyishly soft when he was sleeping. His mouth that usually delivered biting epithets in a moment's blow was softened and slightly agape, puffing out little breaths. Restless curls of bleached hair fell downwards into his face, framing it in a way that made him look reminiscent of the etchings of Apollo Buffy had seen in English class. Buffy could tell why Drusilla used to swoon over him. He was handsome and unintentionally soft when he wasn't speaking or moving or fully conscious. Or when he was in pain, crying into her lap, like last night.
Suddenly Buffy became aware of what she was doing. She was actually looking at Spike in a favorable light. The way she was looking at Spike as he slept seemed to be filled with the kind of intimacy that characterized the afterglow, post-coitus. The kind of experience she was supposed to have with Angel. Blushing for reasons she couldn't understand, she roughly nudged Spike awake with her foot to break out of her self-consciousness.
He snorted awake crudely. Blinking away the morning sun, he propped himself on his elbows, yawning. He cleared his eyes of blurriness and frowned when he finally saw Buffy crouching in the grass in front of him, surrounded by a halo of light. He almost mistook her for an apparition with the way the light reflected off her golden hair into a myriad of sparkling highlights. He squinted and finally realized that the lovely angel staring at him was in fact that annoying, shrewish, blonde Slayer who thrived on making his life hell. So he sat up fully, clutching his head.
"Hey," she mumbled darkly in greeting.
He gazed around their sepulchral surroundings. "Where are we?"
"The cemetery. It looks like we fell asleep here last night." She suddenly turned a beat-red when uttering the innocent little sentence, as if it carried more innuendo than it was supposed to.
He sighed, rubbing the back of his neck to get rid of the little stalks of grass that coated him after a night spent camping by accident. "Oh yeah. Right after you attacked me and nearly tried to impale me with a stake."
Buffy made an annoyed little scoff, narrowing her eyes. "No, it was right after you started blubbering like a baby in my arms."
Spike shot her a disgusted, offended glower. "Did nothing of the sort," he sniffed.
"You're kidding me, right? I was right here, you made for some major-blubbering action. You were one sob away from a total girly blub-fest."
Spike clenched his teeth and glared hatefully at her. "Not that I did, but I would say that the situation called for it, wouldn't you?" he spat vehemently.
Buffy immediately shrunk with guilt. Stung, she knew he was right. Of course he was right. He had poured his heart out and rightfully so. She herself planned to hole herself in a dark room for some length of time and cry her eyes out sometime soon. When he had sobbed into her arms last night, her heart wrenched with sympathy. So why was she making fun of him, deriding him in his pain? Maybe because Spike just . . . brought it out of her.
"You're right," she murmured, staring blankly into her lap.
"What's this? The prickly prat of a Slayer actually admitting that she's wrong? This will go down into the annals of history as a first."
"Shut up, Spike," Buffy sighed, cutting into his intense tone of hostile sarcasm tiredly. "Is it possible to communicate with you like a human being without getting my mistakes thrown back in my face?"
"Depends on whether I like you or not. So I guess the answer is a world of damning and fiery "no"."
Despite the caustic banter between the two, Buffy was surprised with the generally benign tone Spike was addressing her in. The fact that he still felt inclined to verbally spar with her was surprising considering she was the one who had let her boyfriend ruin Spike's life. At the thought, her cheeks burned with a rising storm of guilt.
"I'm sorry," she whispered suddenly and abruptly, surprising Spike.
He cocked his head at her confusedly. "Didn't think my distaste for you would cut you that deep---"
"No, Spike . . . I'm sorry . . . I-I'm sorry for everything I haven't done . . . f-for not s-saving Dru and Munitz----" She could feel the ocean of tears start to fall in a deluge across her cheeks as she started to babble. Spike just paled, as if he had momentarily forgotten and had found peace in that split-second of forgetting. With her crying, he was filled with razor-edged pain again and his tumultuous blue eyes flashed. He quickly had gotten up on his feet and aggressively brushed the grass from his clothes. Then he stood, looking as if he didn't know what to do with himself.
"Buffy---" he mumbled quietly.
"No Spike, please . . . I know it doesn't mean anything, I know I've said all of this already and it won't ever, ever make a difference, but----"
"You're sorry, I know!" He yelled, kicking the ground futilely. Suddenly he looked down at her, his voice growing hushed and steely and poisonous. "You're right, it doesn't help. So you can stop your sniveling and whining and your martyr-ly do-gooding routine, 'cause I know what's behind it, Buffy. It's not even about me. I'm not fool enough to think that all these tears spilled and all this angst and hurt and pain is over me, one who's only served to annoy the hell out of you and vice-versa. You don't really care that I've lost the love of my life and my brother, the only family I've had----you think you do, but you don't. You just want to. You want to make yourself believe you care. Maybe if you do that, then you won't have to think about that murderer you screwed. The monster, that--that thing you let crawl between your legs. You think that by saying sorry, I'll just absolve you for fucking around with a killer . . . don't you?"
She just kept crying softly, shaking her head slowly as she crouched in the grass. Flinging himself back down on his knees, he grabbed her shoulders and shook her roughly and savagely, screaming, "Don't you?!" She could have broken in his arms for she wasn't a slayer now, just a frail, defeated girl. He almost expected her to strike back at him with alarming force, sending him sailing into the air and across the cemetery, but she never raised a hand against him. Suddenly Spike paused and realized how her slight arms were shaking uncontrollably under his white-knuckled fists. Her day-old, caked makeup was running in black streaks across her face and in her eyes was a spark of pain that seemed even deeper than his. Her whole body was convulsing with sobs under his hands and it was then when he understood how his words, spoken merely out of anger, had struck a wounding, profound chord. So he loosened his grip and stared at her. He hadn't imagined that she could possibly even touch the enormity of what he was feeling, but she felt all the same things---possibly more. His hateful frown softened as he let her cry the way she had let him do the night before. He felt any anger towards her dissipate as she bowed her head and continued to sob. Conflicted, he bit his lip and didn't know what to do. But suddenly, he perked, as if remembering something and he grabbed Buffy's wrist abruptly. Surprised she gave a slight cry and tried to wrench away, but found him staring at her watch.
"9:45," he murmured, dipping his head back up to stare absently into space.
"Wha---" Buffy started in confusion as he sprang back up and grabbed his jacket. "What are you doing?"
"I've got 15 minutes to get down to the bus depot."
Buffy furrowed her brows in alarm. "Bus depot? What? Where you going?"
Spike shrugged his duster on carelessly. "The ticket's for somewhere off near the border. Think I can make it to Mexico by evening practically."
"Mexico? What's in Mexico?" She felt a panic surge within her and she didn't know why.
"Besides an abundance of man-size cockroaches, I don't rightly know. But I don't give a toss either way. All I know is that it's not here."
"B-But . . . what about Giles? What about Sunnydale?"
He gave her a cold look. "Does it look like Sunnydale's been all that good to me?"
She shrunk. "No," she admitted. "But Giles. Your father. Are you going to leave without telling him?"
Blankly, he drew a cigarette from his pocket and lit it expertly before drawing deep drags off of it. "Hadn't thought about it, but it looks that way doesn't it?"
"But . . . don't you even care? Don't you care that you might be hurting him or---"
"Look Buffy, it's been pretty obvious that me and the old man aren't the "let's go out for a rousing game of catch" father-son duo. He's never shown a sign of caring about me before, why would he now?"
"Maybe he doesn't because you won't let him! You keep shutting him out whenever something happens, you don't even give him the opportunity to show him how much he loves you---"
"Loves!" A contemptuous scoff. "Right, the old chuffer loves me. That's why he's ignored me for seventeen years. That's why he never bothered to call when I was cold and hungry and living in a one-room flat with my mum to see if he could make it better. That's why he's never sent a birthday card once, not once to show me he even remembers the day. That's love."
"But it goes both ways," Buffy insisted. "If only you could give him a sign that you even want those things, it would make a difference. Help him, show him that you actually do care."
"I think that's a great idea," a grim voice called from behind them. Turning around, Buffy and Spike faced a bruised and slightly bloody Xander with fear painted across his face. "Because right now, he needs all the help he can get. He's been captured by Angelus and Drusilla."