Buffy dreamed.
She sat, cross legged, on a tightly cut green lawn, dew glistening and reflecting the bright sunlight. Around her on three sides was a copse of short, well cut trees, perfectly sculpted products less of nature than attention to detail. They swayed slightly in the light wind that relieved the heat, the climate pleasant and soothing. She closed her eyes and relaxed, enjoying the feel of the warm breeze on her face, a slight smile on her face. She felt the damp grass beneath her, the rustle of the bright green leaves on the trees surrounding her. Wearing a white, ankle length robe with a light blue sash hanging from her left shoulder to her right hip, with laced sandals on her feet, her arms bare, she knew that she should not be here, she knew that she was dreaming, but the garden was so peaceful that she could not quite grasp where it was she should be.
She felt a slight bump beside her, and opened her eyes, but slowly, feeling no threat.
Beside her sat a man, his skin bronzed with the sun, older than her by maybe five years. He was well built and handsome, his features strong, his dark eyes glowing with hidden amusement. Though he seemed young enough, his eyes betrayed more than his years, seeming ancient and weighed down with the experience of ages. On his broad, square shoulders hung a crimson cloak, over polished steel armour, engraved with a the head of a curled cobra, its vacant metal eyes seeming to follow her. Belted to his arms, criss-crossed with scars, were bronze greaves, and at his side hung a sword. She recognised him. She remembered the visions that had been plaguing her, and she knew that they came from him, the man called Legion. But unlike before, she felt no threat from him, no animus or hostility. If anything, she felt a kinship that she could not understand. Above all of that was a physical desire for him that seared through her. She had to hold herself still to prevent herself from sinking into his arms, despite him giving off no indication that he felt the same way. This before a word was even spoken. This with Spike still foremost in her mind.
He smiled slightly, his eyes never leaving hers, seeming somehow darker even in the bright early morning sun. 'You are the Slayer,' he told her, settling beside her, leaning back, his head turned towards her. 'Buffy Summers. She who destroyed the Master, sent Angelus to hell, destroyed Glorificus.' He bowed his head once. 'My compliments.'
'Who are you?' she asked him. Though she had only Jur'Khan Chung's assurance, she knew that Legion was not his real name. 'And where am I?'
He looked around. 'You are dreaming, girl,' he told her. 'In reality, you hang from rusted chains in a damp cellar with a mistress of torture waiting in the shadows for you to awake to attend to her most sadistic desires.'
She looked away, towards the horizon that lay at the end of what looked like an endless expanse of grass. 'And here?'
'Here? Here, you lie on the grass, an image of an estate that I once owned in what is now southern France. I thought it best to prepare you for what you face in pursuit of your desires.'
She smiled slightly, a bare shift of her lips. 'Why is it that more vampires in the last day have offered to help me than in all of my life before now?'
'I am no ordinary vampire,' he answered her in his deep voice, rising gracefully to his feet and offering her his hand. She took it, and rose also to stand beside him.
'We do not have a great deal of time before Drusilla tires of waiting for you to awake on your own and hastens the process,' he told her, his voice becoming cold as he referred to the infamous vampiress. 'By now she had learned that William … Spike … as you call him, has left far behind what remaining vestiges of affection remained for her.' Buffy's heart leapt. 'She will have learned that his unbeating heart and demon soul belong solely to you. She will leave him alive for the greater pleasure that she will enjoy in watching him watch you slowly suffer and die a forgotten death.'
Buffy shook her head. 'No,' she replied, becoming nervous for the first time since she had arrived here. 'Spike will stop her. She can't stand against us both.'
He looked at her, taking her hand. 'She can now,' he told her, his voice betraying his sincerity. 'She is far more powerful than you remember her, far more powerful than the two of you combined. She could swat either or both of you aside without the slightest effort. She, like myself and a few others, has transcended what it means to be a vampire. Unlike us, she has not acquired the experience to temper her desires. She is pure power and fury unleashed. There are few left alive to stop her.'
'Can you?'
'I am coming,' he told her. 'Believe me, I am coming as fast as I can. Not for you, I care little for Slayers, nor for your lover, for whom I care even less. But Drusilla is my match in power and strength – only my age and experience will give me the victory that my vengeance requires. Your blood, the pure unadulterated blood of one of the most powerful Slayers who has ever lived, would tip the balance against me. And I would be unable to help you.'
'What about Jur'Khan Chung?' she asked him, unsure of what side to take, or whether to simply stand aside.
His eyes grew cold. 'He has involved himself in a game that is beyond him for the sake of avenging a woman who cared nothing for him. I will deal with him if I can get past Drusilla.'
'Why is she so powerful?'
He looked towards the horizon, towards which the reddening sun was sinking fast. 'We have little time left. Suffice it to say that she stole something from me, something that cannot be replaced no matter how many more millennia I live, something that gave her such power as normally takes thousands of years to accumulate. I had intended it for another. For that Drusilla will die. But you must survive for a while longer, you must ensure that she does not feed from you.'
Buffy felt the first stirrings of despair. 'How? If she is that powerful.'
He smiled, one last time, as night fell and her vision began to waver, as she felt herself being dragged away by the first stirrings of pain. 'Tell her that she not escaped me. Tell her that she will never escape the vengeance of Patricius Quintus Eranus.'
Buffy stirred, being ripped from the pleasant haven of her dreams to the harsh reality of the damp cellar of which she had been told. It was dark, lit by spluttering torches that gave off the claustrophobic smell of burning tar. Water dripped with slow monotony to the floor, echoing around the dank chamber. The ceiling was low, almost to Buffy's head.
Unable to see much beyond five feet, the first thing of which the Slayer became aware was the sharp pain of metal digging into the soft flesh of her wrists as she hung on rusted chains from the roof. Sighing softly with discomfort, she levered herself from the floor with tired, rubbery legs, shifting herself upright, feeling the brush of the ceiling on her hair. She pulled once at the manacles that bound her, but they gave not one inch. She pulled again, harder, grunting with the effort, and felt one begin to loosen, but it would come not further. Straining to see, all she could sense was that she was surrounded by gloom without visible end.
No, that was not all that she could sense. Her right side tingled, meaning only one thing, that a vampire was near. She stiffened once her foggy mind began to clear and scream at her that she was uncomfortably close to a creature that lived only to feed from her. She was about to pull away when she felt something in front of her, also. There were two.
There was a click to her right, and a brief burst of flame that illuminated the chamber with soft, sickly yellow light. She gasped once.
Spike lit the cigarette dangling from his lips, his expression impassive as he looked at her. She lost herself for a moment in the depth of his ice blue eyes, then pulled away, knowing that she could afford to take nothing for granted, despite what she had been told in her dream by the vampire who had, at last, identified himself.
Her lover, the man for whom she had searched these last five months, stood about ten feet from her, staring at her coldly. She shivered once. She had not seen him regard her in that fashion since they had first met, outside the Bronze what seemed like a lifetime of experience and agony before.
'Slayer,' he greeted her, his voice level, and colder than the grave. She did not recognise his tone. Even when angry, he had always been so full of life, but now he seemed more dead than the corpses of his past victims. 'Long time.'
'Spike,' the answered, her voice equally cold. She ignored the rush of bile in her throat, the physical manifestation of the deep hurt that dragged down her rapidly beating heart. She straightened.
If her time searching was wasted, so be it. She would not let him see her disappointment, the shattering of the illusions about the depth of the love that he felt for her that he had assured her had suffused his entire being in a manner that could never die. A tear fell from her eye, though she knew that even he could not see it in the dark, the silver lighter in front of his face, making it glow as yellow as his eyes when feeding.
She felt once again the bitter ache of betrayal, that just as she had once more allowed herself to open to a man he ripped himself from her in such a way as to ensure the maximum pain. Her heart heavy in her chest, she stood as defiantly as possible, ignoring the chains, looking straight into his eyes.
'Dru took your sorry ass back, then?' she taunted, trying her best to keep her voice from cracking. Of all the ways that she imagined they would meet again, this was one that she had never thought, so certain she had been that his love for her had been as pure as that she felt only when he left. 'I'm surprised that she took the time.'
A dreamy voice came from the shadows in front of her, unseen but powerful. 'My boy couldn't stay away,' Drusilla's voice drifted from the darkness. 'The past was chasing me, and only the present could protect me.'
'That's right, pet,' he told her, the fondness in his voice unmistakable. Another small part of Buffy's soul crumbled. She tried to steel herself against the pain, the relief afforded her in the dream forgotten. She was so tired, and it hurt too much. 'Only your pretty boy could defend you.'
Drusilla, ethereal in her dark beauty, emerged at last from the shadows of the cellar. She wore a flowing white gown, embroidered with lace, contrasting perfectly with her flowing, raven black hair that cascaded over her shoulders.
The last remnant of the defiance of reality to which the Slayer had vainly clung disappeared. Desirable though she knew herself to be, in body and mind, she realised for the first time that she could never compete with the dark, powerful beauty of Drusilla. In a any choice between his two former loves, Spike could only ever choose his first. Buffy, with her youthful exuberance and all-American vivaciousness, was but a poor shadow of Drusilla's age-honed darkness. And to which would a Master vampire be more easily attracted to when distance from both had leant him perspective?
'Come back to me, my boy has,' Drusilla crooned smoothly. 'Couldn't stay away from his queen, knew that he couldn't be happy without me. And the two of us are going to bathe Europe with blood.' Her alabaster face became dreamy. 'Just like the old days.' She began to pout. 'Just like the days when we were with Daddy and Grandmum.'
Spike, seeing her distress in a manner that cut Buffy almost more than anything he or Dru had said, immediately moved through the oppressive gloom to her side, taking her head and placing it on his shoulder. They looked so well-matched that Buffy had to think about nothing but control to stop herself breaking down in tears at the betrayal. 'There, there, luv,' he said to her softly. 'We don't need them to have a great time. We'll make them all think that the Ripper has returned. They'll all drown in their own blood.'
'Yes, they will,' she agreed, turning to the Slayer as she rested against Spike, his cheek on the top of her head. Drusilla stared at Buffy with undisguised malice. The Slayer tried to pull on her chains, but there was no give in them at all. 'We'll have to start with her, pretty Spike. She needs an education. Like those fairy boys with the bow ties and long coats, back home.'
'I don't think they take cheerleaders at Eton, luv,' he corrected her gently, pulling away and removing his duster, which he threw carelessly on the ground. He flexed his well-toned muscles ominously. 'But she does need to learn whose heart she shouldn't mess with.'
Buffy felt a mounting dread the likes of which she did not remember feeling since she had first fought Glory and realised how outmatched she truly was. The dream in which she had been buried before waking to this hell vanished as her mind was dominated by the simple task of survival.
She remembered Spike looking at her in the way he was now. It had been in the sunlight, when he had the Ring of Amarra, when all his thoughts had been concerned with vengeance. She never thought that she would see that look of pure hatred and contempt again. She could smell the alcohol from him, she knew that he had been drinking heavily, but that somehow made it worse as she remembered the old Latin expression, in vino veritas.
'And she'll learn the lesson good,' Drusilla whispered, her eyes hooded, her face half in the shadows.
Buffy closed her eyes against the agony that followed.
She awoke slowly, her entire body burning. She still hung from the chains but this time she lacked the strength to lever herself up against the wall despite the harsh, cold iron cutting into her skin A trickle of blood flowed down her left arm from the cut that had been made by the iron, but she ignored it, knowing without being able to see in the dark, torch lit cellar that her entire body ran red with blood. Slayer's blood. Summer's blood. Blood that days before she would willingly have given to Spike as a token of her apology had been forced from her in a hundred cuts, delivered by the artistry of torture learned in a century and a half by Drusilla.
Spike, she remembered, had done little. But he didn't have to. He had stood by, his smirk on his face as he indulged every one of Drusilla's sadistic whim. He had handed her the prongs, the knives, the cigarettes and the pliers. He had been as responsible for her agony as his Sire. All the months of searching, wanting only to tell him what he needed to know, wanting only to feel his embrace again, and it ended here.
The company of another betrayed love, an insane vampiress gone mad with power that she had stolen from a vampire lord whose name Buffy through her haze of pain could not recall. Patrick something. Something Roman.
Her clothes hanging from her bruised and lacerated body, she sighed, then moaned with the pain from her fractured ribs. The smell of burning tar mingled with the smell of burnt flesh and her own blood. She moaned again, this time with despair.
'I loved you , Spike,' she croaked, her voice unrecognisable even to her own ears. She forgot when she had stopped screaming.
She felt a tingle from her front, and stiffened, steeling herself against the wave of pain from her spent muscles. Vampire, was all that she could tell. Her eyes swollen closed, she could not tell who or what it was.
'Its come to this, Slayer,' came a hard male voice with a cockney accent. The voice that haunted her dreams and preoccupied her waking thoughts for the past five months, the voice that had assured her countless times of his love.
The voice that she had heard only hours before laughing as she screamed as Drusilla rammed the stake into the half-plugged, seeping wound in her side. More than the pain, though, the betrayal shattered her. For the first time, she truly understood the death wish of the Slayer.
'Spike,' she said, trying to keep her voice from cracking. 'Come to give me some more?' Something occurred to her, and she almost laughed. 'Come to give me a second go?'
He stared at her broken, half naked body as it hung limply from the chains, his face expressionless. He looked behind him once, through the darkness beyond, and sighed.
Pulling a small, battered stool from beyond the shadows, he sat quietly in front of her. Lighting a cigarette, the lighter playing shadows on his smooth, angular face, he simply sat, in silence.
She stared back at him, a dozen emotions battling within her for control. A deep lassitude finally settled over her, too deep even for anger to gain a foothold.
'Why did you come after me?' he asked her after a pregnant pause that seemed to last an age. He sounded tired, more tired than she had ever heard him.
She was in no mood for pity. 'I guess I was stupid enough to believe you when you told me that you loved me,' she told him, trying not to remember what Dawn had told her about how he had behaved when she was dead. The pain now, emotional and physical, was so much more real than any memories, even of more recent events. 'I felt guilty for beating you in the alley, and …' she stopped, unwilling to share anything with him now. 'I wanted to apologise.'
He barked a laugh that sounded strained even for him. For the first time since she had met him, his voice last all traces of his normal accent, becoming articulate and upper-class, like a British lord. 'You wanted to say sorry?' he asked. 'You wanted to say, "oh, sorry I beat you senseless in a dark alley, sorry that I feel so little for you that I'm okay with using you for a punching bag." Why do I find that difficult to believe, Buffy?'
Her spirits lifted for a brief moment when she heard him address her by her name, but then she remembered where she was and to whom he was now answering.
'Because it's the truth,' she told him. 'The simple truth.'
He snorted. 'There's nothing simple about truth, luv,' he told her. 'It always hurts someone.' He leaned forward, his pale face ghostly in the candlelight. 'Why are you really here?'
She stared at him, having forgotten how deep were his eyes, like storms on the ocean. She remembered seeing them for the first time, that night in the alley behind the Bronze, how she had for a moment lost herself in those eyes, how that for a moment she had forgotten that it was her destiny and calling to kill him and his kind.
She shook herself, feeling once again the chains as she hung weakly against the wall, her clothes hanging from her in strips that made her flesh crawl beneath Spike's gaze, which contained nothing of the former love or lust that had once characterised every gesture of his around her. It was, once again, the cold gaze of the predator.
'I came to tell you that I was sorry, Spike,' she told him, resting against the chains, her entire body afire with agony that did not compare to the hurt that she felt within. 'Is that so hard to believe, that I simply wanted to say that I was sorry.'
He rose smoothly from the stool, taking a deep drag from his cigarette and crushing it nonchalantly against the hard stone of the cellar. 'I'm afraid that it is, luv,' he told her, looking directly at her, the grey smoke rising around him. 'You'll do well to get out of this place alive, and you telling me that you're sorry won't change it. I left that miserable Californian toilet because I finally gained some sense, some notion about myself, that no matter how much I did for you or how much I loved you, you were just too damned stupid to see it. What is it you want me to believe, that you wanted to say that you were sorry? Maybe you could have said that that night in the alley, when I stopped you from pissing your life away.' Despite the obvious sincerity of his words and the feelings behind them, his tone never changed from the same dead monotone. She had never heard him speak like that before, not even when beaten to within an inch of his … life … by Glory.
'You could have said sorry when threw my love back in my face in that shattered building when we first had sex. You could have said sorry a dozen times. You could have said sorry for ever assuming that you could know the strength of my feelings.' At last, some emotion crept into his voice, a slight quivering of pure fury and frustration. At last, he became Spike once again, not a soul-dead imitation. 'Me, Slayer. Me, who loved the same woman without straying for a century or more. You could doubt the sincerity of my feelings, knowing that? You never questioned the feelings of the sprog, Finn, and he had barely begun shaving. You trusted adolescent desire then. You never doubted the sincerity of Angel, when all he wanted was to atone for a century of sin by grasping at the easiest straw that he could. But I, who loved with my heart and soul, you couldn't trust. Me, who-'
'I was pregnant,' she said softly. 'Our daughter Spike. She was so lovely. Even stillborn, she was lovely.'
The silence became deafening.
She sat, cross legged, on a tightly cut green lawn, dew glistening and reflecting the bright sunlight. Around her on three sides was a copse of short, well cut trees, perfectly sculpted products less of nature than attention to detail. They swayed slightly in the light wind that relieved the heat, the climate pleasant and soothing. She closed her eyes and relaxed, enjoying the feel of the warm breeze on her face, a slight smile on her face. She felt the damp grass beneath her, the rustle of the bright green leaves on the trees surrounding her. Wearing a white, ankle length robe with a light blue sash hanging from her left shoulder to her right hip, with laced sandals on her feet, her arms bare, she knew that she should not be here, she knew that she was dreaming, but the garden was so peaceful that she could not quite grasp where it was she should be.
She felt a slight bump beside her, and opened her eyes, but slowly, feeling no threat.
Beside her sat a man, his skin bronzed with the sun, older than her by maybe five years. He was well built and handsome, his features strong, his dark eyes glowing with hidden amusement. Though he seemed young enough, his eyes betrayed more than his years, seeming ancient and weighed down with the experience of ages. On his broad, square shoulders hung a crimson cloak, over polished steel armour, engraved with a the head of a curled cobra, its vacant metal eyes seeming to follow her. Belted to his arms, criss-crossed with scars, were bronze greaves, and at his side hung a sword. She recognised him. She remembered the visions that had been plaguing her, and she knew that they came from him, the man called Legion. But unlike before, she felt no threat from him, no animus or hostility. If anything, she felt a kinship that she could not understand. Above all of that was a physical desire for him that seared through her. She had to hold herself still to prevent herself from sinking into his arms, despite him giving off no indication that he felt the same way. This before a word was even spoken. This with Spike still foremost in her mind.
He smiled slightly, his eyes never leaving hers, seeming somehow darker even in the bright early morning sun. 'You are the Slayer,' he told her, settling beside her, leaning back, his head turned towards her. 'Buffy Summers. She who destroyed the Master, sent Angelus to hell, destroyed Glorificus.' He bowed his head once. 'My compliments.'
'Who are you?' she asked him. Though she had only Jur'Khan Chung's assurance, she knew that Legion was not his real name. 'And where am I?'
He looked around. 'You are dreaming, girl,' he told her. 'In reality, you hang from rusted chains in a damp cellar with a mistress of torture waiting in the shadows for you to awake to attend to her most sadistic desires.'
She looked away, towards the horizon that lay at the end of what looked like an endless expanse of grass. 'And here?'
'Here? Here, you lie on the grass, an image of an estate that I once owned in what is now southern France. I thought it best to prepare you for what you face in pursuit of your desires.'
She smiled slightly, a bare shift of her lips. 'Why is it that more vampires in the last day have offered to help me than in all of my life before now?'
'I am no ordinary vampire,' he answered her in his deep voice, rising gracefully to his feet and offering her his hand. She took it, and rose also to stand beside him.
'We do not have a great deal of time before Drusilla tires of waiting for you to awake on your own and hastens the process,' he told her, his voice becoming cold as he referred to the infamous vampiress. 'By now she had learned that William … Spike … as you call him, has left far behind what remaining vestiges of affection remained for her.' Buffy's heart leapt. 'She will have learned that his unbeating heart and demon soul belong solely to you. She will leave him alive for the greater pleasure that she will enjoy in watching him watch you slowly suffer and die a forgotten death.'
Buffy shook her head. 'No,' she replied, becoming nervous for the first time since she had arrived here. 'Spike will stop her. She can't stand against us both.'
He looked at her, taking her hand. 'She can now,' he told her, his voice betraying his sincerity. 'She is far more powerful than you remember her, far more powerful than the two of you combined. She could swat either or both of you aside without the slightest effort. She, like myself and a few others, has transcended what it means to be a vampire. Unlike us, she has not acquired the experience to temper her desires. She is pure power and fury unleashed. There are few left alive to stop her.'
'Can you?'
'I am coming,' he told her. 'Believe me, I am coming as fast as I can. Not for you, I care little for Slayers, nor for your lover, for whom I care even less. But Drusilla is my match in power and strength – only my age and experience will give me the victory that my vengeance requires. Your blood, the pure unadulterated blood of one of the most powerful Slayers who has ever lived, would tip the balance against me. And I would be unable to help you.'
'What about Jur'Khan Chung?' she asked him, unsure of what side to take, or whether to simply stand aside.
His eyes grew cold. 'He has involved himself in a game that is beyond him for the sake of avenging a woman who cared nothing for him. I will deal with him if I can get past Drusilla.'
'Why is she so powerful?'
He looked towards the horizon, towards which the reddening sun was sinking fast. 'We have little time left. Suffice it to say that she stole something from me, something that cannot be replaced no matter how many more millennia I live, something that gave her such power as normally takes thousands of years to accumulate. I had intended it for another. For that Drusilla will die. But you must survive for a while longer, you must ensure that she does not feed from you.'
Buffy felt the first stirrings of despair. 'How? If she is that powerful.'
He smiled, one last time, as night fell and her vision began to waver, as she felt herself being dragged away by the first stirrings of pain. 'Tell her that she not escaped me. Tell her that she will never escape the vengeance of Patricius Quintus Eranus.'
Buffy stirred, being ripped from the pleasant haven of her dreams to the harsh reality of the damp cellar of which she had been told. It was dark, lit by spluttering torches that gave off the claustrophobic smell of burning tar. Water dripped with slow monotony to the floor, echoing around the dank chamber. The ceiling was low, almost to Buffy's head.
Unable to see much beyond five feet, the first thing of which the Slayer became aware was the sharp pain of metal digging into the soft flesh of her wrists as she hung on rusted chains from the roof. Sighing softly with discomfort, she levered herself from the floor with tired, rubbery legs, shifting herself upright, feeling the brush of the ceiling on her hair. She pulled once at the manacles that bound her, but they gave not one inch. She pulled again, harder, grunting with the effort, and felt one begin to loosen, but it would come not further. Straining to see, all she could sense was that she was surrounded by gloom without visible end.
No, that was not all that she could sense. Her right side tingled, meaning only one thing, that a vampire was near. She stiffened once her foggy mind began to clear and scream at her that she was uncomfortably close to a creature that lived only to feed from her. She was about to pull away when she felt something in front of her, also. There were two.
There was a click to her right, and a brief burst of flame that illuminated the chamber with soft, sickly yellow light. She gasped once.
Spike lit the cigarette dangling from his lips, his expression impassive as he looked at her. She lost herself for a moment in the depth of his ice blue eyes, then pulled away, knowing that she could afford to take nothing for granted, despite what she had been told in her dream by the vampire who had, at last, identified himself.
Her lover, the man for whom she had searched these last five months, stood about ten feet from her, staring at her coldly. She shivered once. She had not seen him regard her in that fashion since they had first met, outside the Bronze what seemed like a lifetime of experience and agony before.
'Slayer,' he greeted her, his voice level, and colder than the grave. She did not recognise his tone. Even when angry, he had always been so full of life, but now he seemed more dead than the corpses of his past victims. 'Long time.'
'Spike,' the answered, her voice equally cold. She ignored the rush of bile in her throat, the physical manifestation of the deep hurt that dragged down her rapidly beating heart. She straightened.
If her time searching was wasted, so be it. She would not let him see her disappointment, the shattering of the illusions about the depth of the love that he felt for her that he had assured her had suffused his entire being in a manner that could never die. A tear fell from her eye, though she knew that even he could not see it in the dark, the silver lighter in front of his face, making it glow as yellow as his eyes when feeding.
She felt once again the bitter ache of betrayal, that just as she had once more allowed herself to open to a man he ripped himself from her in such a way as to ensure the maximum pain. Her heart heavy in her chest, she stood as defiantly as possible, ignoring the chains, looking straight into his eyes.
'Dru took your sorry ass back, then?' she taunted, trying her best to keep her voice from cracking. Of all the ways that she imagined they would meet again, this was one that she had never thought, so certain she had been that his love for her had been as pure as that she felt only when he left. 'I'm surprised that she took the time.'
A dreamy voice came from the shadows in front of her, unseen but powerful. 'My boy couldn't stay away,' Drusilla's voice drifted from the darkness. 'The past was chasing me, and only the present could protect me.'
'That's right, pet,' he told her, the fondness in his voice unmistakable. Another small part of Buffy's soul crumbled. She tried to steel herself against the pain, the relief afforded her in the dream forgotten. She was so tired, and it hurt too much. 'Only your pretty boy could defend you.'
Drusilla, ethereal in her dark beauty, emerged at last from the shadows of the cellar. She wore a flowing white gown, embroidered with lace, contrasting perfectly with her flowing, raven black hair that cascaded over her shoulders.
The last remnant of the defiance of reality to which the Slayer had vainly clung disappeared. Desirable though she knew herself to be, in body and mind, she realised for the first time that she could never compete with the dark, powerful beauty of Drusilla. In a any choice between his two former loves, Spike could only ever choose his first. Buffy, with her youthful exuberance and all-American vivaciousness, was but a poor shadow of Drusilla's age-honed darkness. And to which would a Master vampire be more easily attracted to when distance from both had leant him perspective?
'Come back to me, my boy has,' Drusilla crooned smoothly. 'Couldn't stay away from his queen, knew that he couldn't be happy without me. And the two of us are going to bathe Europe with blood.' Her alabaster face became dreamy. 'Just like the old days.' She began to pout. 'Just like the days when we were with Daddy and Grandmum.'
Spike, seeing her distress in a manner that cut Buffy almost more than anything he or Dru had said, immediately moved through the oppressive gloom to her side, taking her head and placing it on his shoulder. They looked so well-matched that Buffy had to think about nothing but control to stop herself breaking down in tears at the betrayal. 'There, there, luv,' he said to her softly. 'We don't need them to have a great time. We'll make them all think that the Ripper has returned. They'll all drown in their own blood.'
'Yes, they will,' she agreed, turning to the Slayer as she rested against Spike, his cheek on the top of her head. Drusilla stared at Buffy with undisguised malice. The Slayer tried to pull on her chains, but there was no give in them at all. 'We'll have to start with her, pretty Spike. She needs an education. Like those fairy boys with the bow ties and long coats, back home.'
'I don't think they take cheerleaders at Eton, luv,' he corrected her gently, pulling away and removing his duster, which he threw carelessly on the ground. He flexed his well-toned muscles ominously. 'But she does need to learn whose heart she shouldn't mess with.'
Buffy felt a mounting dread the likes of which she did not remember feeling since she had first fought Glory and realised how outmatched she truly was. The dream in which she had been buried before waking to this hell vanished as her mind was dominated by the simple task of survival.
She remembered Spike looking at her in the way he was now. It had been in the sunlight, when he had the Ring of Amarra, when all his thoughts had been concerned with vengeance. She never thought that she would see that look of pure hatred and contempt again. She could smell the alcohol from him, she knew that he had been drinking heavily, but that somehow made it worse as she remembered the old Latin expression, in vino veritas.
'And she'll learn the lesson good,' Drusilla whispered, her eyes hooded, her face half in the shadows.
Buffy closed her eyes against the agony that followed.
She awoke slowly, her entire body burning. She still hung from the chains but this time she lacked the strength to lever herself up against the wall despite the harsh, cold iron cutting into her skin A trickle of blood flowed down her left arm from the cut that had been made by the iron, but she ignored it, knowing without being able to see in the dark, torch lit cellar that her entire body ran red with blood. Slayer's blood. Summer's blood. Blood that days before she would willingly have given to Spike as a token of her apology had been forced from her in a hundred cuts, delivered by the artistry of torture learned in a century and a half by Drusilla.
Spike, she remembered, had done little. But he didn't have to. He had stood by, his smirk on his face as he indulged every one of Drusilla's sadistic whim. He had handed her the prongs, the knives, the cigarettes and the pliers. He had been as responsible for her agony as his Sire. All the months of searching, wanting only to tell him what he needed to know, wanting only to feel his embrace again, and it ended here.
The company of another betrayed love, an insane vampiress gone mad with power that she had stolen from a vampire lord whose name Buffy through her haze of pain could not recall. Patrick something. Something Roman.
Her clothes hanging from her bruised and lacerated body, she sighed, then moaned with the pain from her fractured ribs. The smell of burning tar mingled with the smell of burnt flesh and her own blood. She moaned again, this time with despair.
'I loved you , Spike,' she croaked, her voice unrecognisable even to her own ears. She forgot when she had stopped screaming.
She felt a tingle from her front, and stiffened, steeling herself against the wave of pain from her spent muscles. Vampire, was all that she could tell. Her eyes swollen closed, she could not tell who or what it was.
'Its come to this, Slayer,' came a hard male voice with a cockney accent. The voice that haunted her dreams and preoccupied her waking thoughts for the past five months, the voice that had assured her countless times of his love.
The voice that she had heard only hours before laughing as she screamed as Drusilla rammed the stake into the half-plugged, seeping wound in her side. More than the pain, though, the betrayal shattered her. For the first time, she truly understood the death wish of the Slayer.
'Spike,' she said, trying to keep her voice from cracking. 'Come to give me some more?' Something occurred to her, and she almost laughed. 'Come to give me a second go?'
He stared at her broken, half naked body as it hung limply from the chains, his face expressionless. He looked behind him once, through the darkness beyond, and sighed.
Pulling a small, battered stool from beyond the shadows, he sat quietly in front of her. Lighting a cigarette, the lighter playing shadows on his smooth, angular face, he simply sat, in silence.
She stared back at him, a dozen emotions battling within her for control. A deep lassitude finally settled over her, too deep even for anger to gain a foothold.
'Why did you come after me?' he asked her after a pregnant pause that seemed to last an age. He sounded tired, more tired than she had ever heard him.
She was in no mood for pity. 'I guess I was stupid enough to believe you when you told me that you loved me,' she told him, trying not to remember what Dawn had told her about how he had behaved when she was dead. The pain now, emotional and physical, was so much more real than any memories, even of more recent events. 'I felt guilty for beating you in the alley, and …' she stopped, unwilling to share anything with him now. 'I wanted to apologise.'
He barked a laugh that sounded strained even for him. For the first time since she had met him, his voice last all traces of his normal accent, becoming articulate and upper-class, like a British lord. 'You wanted to say sorry?' he asked. 'You wanted to say, "oh, sorry I beat you senseless in a dark alley, sorry that I feel so little for you that I'm okay with using you for a punching bag." Why do I find that difficult to believe, Buffy?'
Her spirits lifted for a brief moment when she heard him address her by her name, but then she remembered where she was and to whom he was now answering.
'Because it's the truth,' she told him. 'The simple truth.'
He snorted. 'There's nothing simple about truth, luv,' he told her. 'It always hurts someone.' He leaned forward, his pale face ghostly in the candlelight. 'Why are you really here?'
She stared at him, having forgotten how deep were his eyes, like storms on the ocean. She remembered seeing them for the first time, that night in the alley behind the Bronze, how she had for a moment lost herself in those eyes, how that for a moment she had forgotten that it was her destiny and calling to kill him and his kind.
She shook herself, feeling once again the chains as she hung weakly against the wall, her clothes hanging from her in strips that made her flesh crawl beneath Spike's gaze, which contained nothing of the former love or lust that had once characterised every gesture of his around her. It was, once again, the cold gaze of the predator.
'I came to tell you that I was sorry, Spike,' she told him, resting against the chains, her entire body afire with agony that did not compare to the hurt that she felt within. 'Is that so hard to believe, that I simply wanted to say that I was sorry.'
He rose smoothly from the stool, taking a deep drag from his cigarette and crushing it nonchalantly against the hard stone of the cellar. 'I'm afraid that it is, luv,' he told her, looking directly at her, the grey smoke rising around him. 'You'll do well to get out of this place alive, and you telling me that you're sorry won't change it. I left that miserable Californian toilet because I finally gained some sense, some notion about myself, that no matter how much I did for you or how much I loved you, you were just too damned stupid to see it. What is it you want me to believe, that you wanted to say that you were sorry? Maybe you could have said that that night in the alley, when I stopped you from pissing your life away.' Despite the obvious sincerity of his words and the feelings behind them, his tone never changed from the same dead monotone. She had never heard him speak like that before, not even when beaten to within an inch of his … life … by Glory.
'You could have said sorry when threw my love back in my face in that shattered building when we first had sex. You could have said sorry a dozen times. You could have said sorry for ever assuming that you could know the strength of my feelings.' At last, some emotion crept into his voice, a slight quivering of pure fury and frustration. At last, he became Spike once again, not a soul-dead imitation. 'Me, Slayer. Me, who loved the same woman without straying for a century or more. You could doubt the sincerity of my feelings, knowing that? You never questioned the feelings of the sprog, Finn, and he had barely begun shaving. You trusted adolescent desire then. You never doubted the sincerity of Angel, when all he wanted was to atone for a century of sin by grasping at the easiest straw that he could. But I, who loved with my heart and soul, you couldn't trust. Me, who-'
'I was pregnant,' she said softly. 'Our daughter Spike. She was so lovely. Even stillborn, she was lovely.'
The silence became deafening.
