"Unmoved"
By iyaorisha

Timing: AU S7

Pairings: Buffy/Spike (also Xander/Anya)

Summary: Spike has healed, but doesn't want to leave the Summers' house. Buffy struggles with flashbacks from the attempted rape. Meanwhile, Rack's twin sister seeks revenge for his death. Can Willow defend herself without resorting to magick?

("Unmoved" is the second in a series of four linked AU S7 fanfics I wrote in the summer of 2002.)

Rating/Warnings: R. Violence (including suggested domestic violence), language, F/M, M/M flashback, rape flashback, and torture.

Spoilers: None if you've seen up through S6. References to my fanfics "Relating to a Psychopath" and "Look What Love Gave Us"

Feedback: Brutal honesty is best (I enjoy floggings, I really do), but warm fuzzies are accepted as well. You can post a review here or email me at fanfic_by_iyaorisha@yahoo.com

***
Chapter 1

The little girl was lost, but she didn't know it yet. The streets all tended to look the same in this area, and the approaching dusk made it harder to make out far away landmarks. So, she kept walking even though each step took her further and further away from both her own home and her grandmother's house. Only when she came to the little square did Deira realize that she had gone astray. By then, it was too late.

Charlotte Madeira Layton, age 6 and 1/2, had run away from home. At first, it seemed like a good idea, an adventure even. But now, she was lost.

She sat on a bench and began to cry.

"There, there my darling, dry your tears."

Deira looked up in surprise. A man stood at her side, offering a neatly folded handkerchief in one hand.

Her mother had warned her not to talk with strangers. But the man seemed kind. His blue eyes were full of concern and his voice was soft, unlike her stepfather's.

She reached out to take the handkerchief from him, but he hunkered down instead and gently wiped her face. "Now, why is such a pretty girl crying?"

She opened her mouth, but she didn't know where to begin. The man waited patiently, his gentian eyes full of concern. Finally, Deira shook her head shyly.

"Let me guess, you're lost?"

She nodded.

"Do you live nearby?"

She started to nod again and then, shook her head instead. Then she remembered and nodded vigorously

"Yes. No. Yes. Hmm." He raised an eyebrow. "You used to live around here?"

Another nod.

"But now you don't anymore?"

A sad little shake.

"However, if you could, you would again."

Deira's green eyes widened in surprise.

He understood. In her whole life, she had only met one other adult who understood her wishes and dreams -her grandmother. She decided to confide in the man. "I ran away from home," she whispered. "I'm going to live with Grandma Lottie."

"Ah, that was a bold thing to do. You must be a terribly brave little girl." He smiled.

Deira smiled back and her fear left her. She told the man everything. How she had waited until her mother laid down for an afternoon nap. Then she quickly changed into her favorite dress and gone out the side door. Left before her stepfather came home and the shouting began. Yelling at her mother because there was stew instead of chops. Bellowing at her brothers and new step-brothers because they had left their toys on the stairs or muddied the entryway floor or torn their clothes playing. Snarling at her because she was a girl, and therefore, useless.

In the three months since her mother, Nellie Madeira Layton had married Samuel Packard, the little girl had heard more arguing and curses than in all her life prior. Packard was a coarse man who'd married well above himself when he took the widow Layton as his third wife. Nellie had seemed grateful enough for his attentions before the marriage, but he suspected that sooner or later, she'd throw her middle-class background in his face. So he lashed out at her and their combined brood of nine children.

Nellie, accustomed to servants and unused to budgeting, gave her new husband plenty of fuel for his rage. The food she bought was poor in quality and scant in quantity. Her cooking did little to improve it. When she brought a platter of scorched eggs and undercooked rashers to the breakfast table, Packard lunged out of his chair and threw the food at the wall with a foul oath. Nellie cringed when her husband. Finally, she thought, the blow would come and everything that her former mother-in-law predicted would come to pass.

But Packard merely gave her a look of utter contempt and stalked off, calling to his two oldest sons. They had work to do. Asa and Seth hesitated, their eyes full of shame and sympathy. But, at Packard's second roar of their names, the youths silently rose and followed their father out into the morning mist.

For several minutes, Nellie and the younger children were frozen with shock. She stared at the mess on the wall and floor. The platter had been from her first marriage (a lifetime ago, she thought); the food the best she could manage.

Deira watched her mother struggle to hold back sobs as she knelt, trying to salvage edible portions from among the shards of china. When the meager remnants were doled out to the hungry and frightened children, the little girl noticed the food on her plate was flecked with dust and what appeared to be blood. She barely made it to the privy before her stomach emptied itself of the milky tea she'd swallowed before her stepfather's rage.

As she retched into the stinking hole, a single word formed in her mind. Enough. She decided to return to her grandmother's house where she, her mother, and brothers lived after her father died.

It was quiet there, she told the man. Quiet and clean, with her own little room tucked under the eaves, and plenty to eat. A proper tea with both warm and cold things to eat; not just whatever was left over once Packard and his oldest sons had eaten. And pudding every day! (The last was a bit of exaggeration. It was true that with money tight, Nellie splurged on meat and eggs not sugar. Thus, Deira hadn't tasted a single sweet since the wedding cake. And so, her child's mind turned the Sunday night cake or jellie into a daily treat.)

Deira had lived in her paternal grandmother's house since she was three and she thought that she knew the way there. But in truth, her stepfather had not allowed a visit back to Grandmother Lottie since the wedding. Three months is a long time for a child and Deira's memory had faded. She was lost.

The man sat patiently, listening to it all. When Deira finished, he ran a hand through his blond hair and looked at her intently.

"They'll be worried, then?"

"I don't think so."

"Why? Won't they notice that you're gone?"

"Oh no," Deira shook her head so emphatically that her long chestnut curls flew. "They hardly notice me at all. Once I spent the whole afternoon in the garden and when I came inside to ask for tea, Mama had served it already."

A little half smile flickered at the corners of the man's mouth. "Hmm. They might not notice you, little Deira, but others do."

She tilted her head and looked at him, puzzled.

"Others notice you. Your beauty." The man reached out and stroked the little girl's cheek with his fingertips. His touch was chilly and it made her tummy feel odd, but she didn't flinch. He seemed to smile approvingly, added "And your spirit."

"My spirit?" she said wonderingly. "Do you mean my soul?" She frowned with the effort to understand.

"No. Your vitality. The life force within you."

The little girl's brows scrunched up even more. "My life force?"

The man reached out and ever so gently, took her chin and turned her face so that she looked away from him, out into the night. With his other hand, he pushed her glossy thick hair behind her ear so that the side of her neck was exposed. Then he traced the vein there with a finger. "Yes, your life force."

This time, she shivered from the contact with his icy finger. The man seemed disappointed as he dropped his hand. "It's late, darling. Are you sure you won't be missed?"

"No. Little girls like me disappear everyday. No one seems to care. That's what they count on."

He seemed taken aback, as though he thought it was a strange thing to say. "Who, Deira? Who is counting on it?"

"The ones who notice me." She took a little quick peek at him, her eyes glimmering Pernod green beneath the thick lashes. He could see that her forehead was still wrinkled in confusion. "Why do they notice me? Tell me again" she asked.

"It's your life force." He repeated. "They sense it. And it calls them to you."

"Why?" Deira said in a voice so soft that he leaned closer.

"It is something they lack." He whispered into the perfect pale pink shell of her ear. "They hunger for it."

"Oh!" She exclaimed, then even softer. "I am hungry."

When she turned to face him, he thought, it's all wrong. His eyes should be the ones gleaming yellow. His features the ones changing to show the demon. He raised a hand to his face in confusion and felt spectacles. "No!" He snatched them off, a movement that sent a sheaf of soft, wavy dark blond hair tumbling down into his eyes. The spectacles fell to the cobblestones, tinkling as they broke.

"No! Change!" he pled as his heart thudded painfully. "Change now!"

Without the glasses, his vision was blurry. Still, at the corner of his eye, he could see her. What she had become.

Deira crouched on the bench. He couldn't mistake her growing hunger; he knew it too well. Blood thirst is stronger than any human desire. Even if enough had been consumed to sate a thousand vampires, the yearning to drink would still remain. The craving quickened preternatural senses so that the most trace amounts of blood were instantly detectable. And, yet it also made one feel intoxicated -at times, during the hunt, he almost reeled from the desire.

Blood thirst was the very essence of want. Unfulfilled, it quickly became a palpable thing. He could feel it now, in the hunger of the small girl beside him.

"Are you sure you won't be missed?" She asked softly. "After all, you're noticed, too."

He shook his head, cried vehemently. "No, I'm not!"

She laughed. "Of course you are. You just didn't know." A little half-smile revealed the tiny points of her fangs. "They count on that, too, you know." She added sagely.

He looked away. Shut his eyes so that he wouldn't see the little vampire staring at him. Wasn't that his childhood comfort, shutting his eyes in the belief that if he couldn't see awful things like the bogeyman under the stair, they couldn't see him?

But even with his eyes screwed shut, he couldn't escape his awareness of her voracity. Like all things evil and obscene, it had a physical presence --a weight to it-even though it lacked actual form. The magnitude of young Deira's blood thirst was so great that he felt it had a pull over him, like the Moon's effect on open water.

The gravity of her hunger and the enormous unfairness of it all, froze him in place the moment before she struck.

William screamed.

***

Spike thrashed his way free of the bed-coverings and leapt to his feet. He threw his head back, gulped down unneeded air. As the panic subsided, he remembered where he was: Buffy's basement. The realization brought a new dread --had he cried out in horror? If so, did the girls hear him? The vampire waited a minute to see if anyone knocked at the basement door, called down the stairs to see if he was okay. Dawn and Willow each had done that once during the fortnight since he came to stay at the house. Either Buffy never heard him or she didn't care enough to find out why he was screaming.

The Deira dream was the fourth nightmare this week. Not the worst of them all (that had been the Russian orphanage he and Dru laid to waste). But it was the second one in which he was the victim. An unpleasant turn-of-events if there ever was one.

Such nightmares didn't make him feel as awful as the ones in which the people he had eaten returned to berate him for their murders. Nonetheless, the dreamfeel of the little girl's teeth driving into his jugular had been bad enough to kill any desire to go back to sleep.

Spike sat on the edge of the cot and ran a hand through sleep-rumpled hair. Dreams of the earliest victims were the most horrid. How was it that he remembered their names and faces after a dozen decades?

Vampires typically have near perfect recall when it comes to useful information-- things necessary for their survival like territorial borders or locations of stashes of cash and jewelry. Otherwise, their memories tended to be poor. How often had he heard Darla brag that she couldn't remember her parents' names? He, too, had once struggled to recall his mother's face, once so beloved.

So why did he remember the exact shade of pink Deira was wearing the night he killed her? Or the pattern of the waistcoat worn by Harold Mayhew, a young missionary he had lured into an opium den with a tale of a missing sister. Had his fledgling self filed all these details away out of unconscious guilt? Spike shuddered at the thought of such memories stockpiled, dormant but malignant in his mind. It was as if they had lain in wait all these years to be awakened by his restored soul.

"Bah!" he shouted and stood up. He had to shake off this negative mindset -it could only lead to brooding and paranoia. One only had to look at Angel to see that. And Spike would dust himself before he ended up that way.

***
"I'm going to dust him!"

"Xander, calm down." Buffy planted a hand on the middle of his chest. The construction worker was strong, but he couldn't get past the Slayer if she didn't want him to.

"Why is he still here?" He fumed. "You said a week. One week. It's been two."

"Not yet." Dawn piped up. "It'll be two weeks tomorrow."

"And he'll be gone tomorrow." Buffy said appeasingly.

Xander would not be appeased. "Why not tonight?"

"I need to remove the charges that I set in the crypt before he moves back in. I don't have time to do it today."

He shrugged. "So Spike blows himself to bits." He relented when he saw the look on Dawn's face. "Look, I can do it. I helped down at the construction site last week. Didn't look all that hard."

"No way, mister." Buffy laughed. "You'd be the one in bits! It can wait until tomorrow."

"Plus, Buffy has to work late." Dawn said quickly. "She can't walk me home. I need Spike to pick me up from my SAT class tonight."

Xander started to yell something and then stopped. "SAT? You're taking the SATs?"

Both girls nodded.

"How is that possible? You're a kid. Um, 14 right?"

Dawn gritted her teeth. "I'm almost 16."

Xander pressed his palms to his forehead. "You had a birthday. How did I miss that?" he muttered.

"You've just been busy." The teen said softly. "The wedding and then the...not wedding."

"Not to mention stopping your best friend from destroying the world." said a voice from the stairs.

They looked up. Willow stood there, a spiral notebook clutched in one hand. "I heard the shouting. Shouldn't pique my curiosity at this point, but I came running anyway."

"Sorry, Wil." Xander smiled sheepishly. "Looks like you're studying."

The redhead blushed. "No, it's my journal. Just some stuff I'm trying to work out before my therapy session tonight."

There was an awkward silence. No one was ever quite sure what to say when the subject of Willow's addiction to magick came up. And it seemed to come up a lot these days. Part of Willow's recovery plan was to be as candid and honest about her addiction as possible.

She couldn't understand why her friends were so uncomfortable when she talked about her daily struggle. After all, they were incredibly supportive of her decision to spend a month at the Druidic treatment center in Wales. And when she returned home with a list of places and activities that she should avoid in order to ward off a relapse, her friends gladly altered their routines. But, everyone seemed to tense up whenever she mentioned therapy.

"That's great, Wil." They would murmur when she announced a breakthough. Then, someone would quickly change the topic. Sometimes, even as she spoke, Willow could see the gears in their heads turning frantically in search of something else to talk about.

"Well, I guess I'd better get back to it." she said with feigned cheerfulness and tried not to notice the relief in their eyes as she climbed back upstairs.

Xander sighed. "Buffy..."

"I know. Spike. Gone tomorrow."

"Good. But I was actually going to say that since Dawnie's fifteen." He shook his head "Are you sure you're fifteen?"

Dawn rolled her eyes.

"Well, I thought, maybe next week, I'd take her for her learner's. If it's okay with you?"

The squeal of delight from the brunette was nearly deafening. She gave Xander a rib-cracking hug and then turned to her sister. "Say yes! You've got to say yes! Janice has had hers for four months now."

"I don't know, Xan?" Buffy teased.

"She can't be any worse than you were." Xander cringed with the memory of the last time Buffy was behind the wheel.

"Hey!" The blonde punched him lightly.

"Remember the time you almost ran down Willow's dad on his own lawn..." Xander bent over double from laughing.

Buffy tried to look mad, but then she started laughing, too. Mr. Rosenberg still wasn't speaking to her.

Dawn couldn't believe they were joking around when her whole life hung in the balance. "You guys!"

***

Normally, the pain was so bad that all her other senses were dulled by it. Colors, smells, sounds: all faded. But their laughter reached her as clear as a bell. Penetrating the pain, rousing her anger.

Anger always came with the pain now. Watching them go about their lives as if it had never happened, as if the death was forgotten already. But it wasn't. She could never forget.

Eight years ago, she left this town and vowed to never return. The dark energies of the Hellmouth were beginning to consume her. She had to go nearly a thousand miles away before she no longer felt the tug of it on a daily basis. And still, it had called to her every time her twin let borrowed power course through him.

She had come back to Sunnydale for one reason only -- to make Willow Rosenberg pay for Rack's death. Her brother would not go unavenged.

***

(Continued in Chapter 2)