Rating: PG for some language
Feedback: Thank you. Melpomenethalia@aol.com
Spoilers: Through season seven's "Help," episode four.
Distribution: The Warren and Fanfiction.net. If you're interested, please let me know.
Summary: Spike asked Buffy to sit with him to keep the monsters at bay. Here's my take on what might happen if someone stayed with him.
Disclaimer: All characters are owned by Mutant Enemy (Joss Whedon), a wonderfully creative company whose characters I have borrowed for a completely profit-free flight of fancy. Kindly do not sue me, please, as I am terrified of you. Thank you.
Author's Note: This is the second in a series of vignettes, all occuring on the same day.
11:45 a.m.
What am I doing here?
I've asked myself that question at least twenty times in the last ten minutes. This is so not a somewhere I want to be right now. It smells kind of damp down here, like when the plumbing exploded last year, but the school is so new that the odor is mixing with the fresh paint smell and the scent of newly poured cement. It's too new to be dirty, but too empty and dark and bleh to be clean, either. This place is just nothing.
I'm really trying to ignore the scrabbling sounds coming from the corners, but I'm pretty sure there are rats around. Well, of course there are. That's stupid. What else would he be eating? I wonder what he does with the rat bodies after he's done with them. Suddenly, I'm thinking I might be smelling another scent besides mildew and paint and cement and hasn't-bathed-for-four-months-vampire.
So, I just keep sitting here, quietly, on top of a pile of orange and blue gym mats that haven't been moved upstairs yet. It's dark. There are lights and stuff, but it really isn't any brighter than his crypt used to be. The whole gray, gray, and more gray color scheme sorta fits his old place, too, at least how it was until he fixed up the bottom part. But even back then, he tried to make it a home. There was a TV and a chair and a lamp-- okay, granted, a lamp he stole from Xander, but still a lamp. It was bare, but it felt lived in, or unlived in, or something. But there's nothing here. Absolutely nothing shows he lives down here. I guess he curls up on the concrete to sleep at night, with no blanket, no pillow, no nothing. I mean, that can't be comfy. It can't even be healthy. Can vampires get piles?
He hasn't moved the whole time I've been down here. He just sits, staring into space, his eyes all bugged out and his mouth kind of slack. I tried to talk to him when I first found him, which took a while because this basement is huge and he could have been anywhere. He didn't blink when I said hello. When I pulled over the mats and sat down facing him, he didn't do anything at all. I don't think he even knows I'm here.
He's not unconscious, though. He just looks… well… terrified. That's kind of freaking me out. The Big Bad is not supposed to get scared. Things are supposed to be frightened of him, not the other way around. I mean, there's nothing down here to be afraid of, except maybe rats and a few really big spiders or roaches, but that shouldn't make him wig. On the other hand, I just made myself wig, but that's a whole other story.
So, we sit. It's the fun that's not. He stares at empty air; I stare at him and try to figure out what's going on here. Why did he come back? Why does he stay down here? Do I even know who this is anymore?
Lunch break is almost over, and I have to get back upstairs. I'm not exactly sure why I came here, but the whole thing about at least trying to do something even if we know it might not do any good kinda seemed to fit the sitch. I don't know how I feel about him. There's definite pity action happening, and there's also a big, heaping helping of angry, too. But the guy who's sitting in front of me right now? Hard to hate him. He's too scared of everything around him. He's too not who he was. I'm not even sure what name to call him anymore, so, when I get up to go, I just skip that part.
"I have to leave. Biology starts in five minutes, and if I'm late the teacher will probably send me down to talk to the counselor for slacking off… and I so don't want to end up talking to Buffy about tardies."
I realize his face hasn't changed at all since I got here. He's still looking at the nothing behind me, staring through me like I'm invisible. This hasn't done jack for anybody.
"Um, bye."
I turn to leave and get about three steps away when I feel the hand on my shoulder. It scares me silly and I shriek way too loud, but when I turn around, he's standing there, actually making eye contact with me.
"It went all quiet. Can here the drip-drip-drip on the walls and the scuttlebugs in the ceiling."
"Um, yeah, right," I say, not sure how to respond.
"Quiet," he mumbles. "No voices. Made the voices go away, you did."
"Is that, uh, good?"
He laughs a little, and for one second, like, a heartbeat, his posture changes back to what it was before, back when he wanted the world to remember him rather than forget him.
"Yeah, Bit. S'good. Go. Don't think you should come back, though. There's bad things down here. The girl wouldn't like you bein' here."
"You think you can manage not to mention to Buffy that I came to see you?" I ask carefully, but he's wandering away, back into the darkness. "Spike?"
He doesn't turn around or say goodbye. He just leaves. As I open the door into the hallway to go to biology, I think over what happened. It was a really, really tiny difference.
But maybe it was better than no difference at all.