It was out in the open now, the truth that had driven her across the world more than any feeling of love that she genuinely cherished. She looked once again into his eyes, seeing only the impassive stare of a vampire that she no longer recognised as the man she had come to love so deeply when he was absent, and with which she had treated with nothing but callous cruelty when he was around.
The baby had changed her feelings more than any act of his, but it was apparently not enough for him as he simply stared at her, his cigarette glowing in the darkness, burning down, forgotten. She was telling the pure truth, but she did not know if he trusted her any more enough to believe it.
The only evidence was buried in a tiny, hand-crafted coffin in the Sunnydale cemetery. Their daughter, Elizabeth. Five months premature, and dead within minutes. She slumped against the wall, the forgotten pain rushing back as her despair mounted. The only tangible evidence of their love, their dead daughter. For Spike was truly, once again, Drusilla's creature.
Through eyes closed against the tears that threatened to engulf her as her last vestige of enthusiasm for life dwindled and she felt once again the rise of the death wish that before she had been grimly told was the curse of every Slayer, she heard his whisper.
'I had a daughter?' she heard him ask, his voice so soft that it was almost lost behind the sound of water dripping against the stone.
She opened her eyes, looking up at him through the limp tendrils of her uncared-for hair, her head still bowed. She could feel the dark circles under her eyes as she watched him, but she could also hear the dazed awe that suffused his rich voice.
'Yes,' she told him, beating down with experienced disillusion the faint stirrings of hope that welled within. 'Five months ago. I realised that I was pregnant two weeks after you left. She was born five months later.'
'A child?' he whispered. He moved closer, slowly, lacking now the smooth grace of the predator. For a brief moment, through the shadows, he looked more human than ever she had seen him before.
'A daughter, Spike,' she continued. 'She was born prematurely, and died within minutes. But she looked at me for a moment, William.' She deliberately used his original name, the better to try to get through to him. 'Just for a moment. She had your eyes. The same blue eyes.'
He stood perfectly still, his cocked slightly to the side, his mouth slightly open, his eyes wide and clear.
But he said nothing.
'Do you not believe me?' she asked. At that moment, she could tell, she was not the victim and he not the one in control. At that moment, they were who they always were - diametrically opposed people, with an incomprehensible connection. 'Because if you don't, I can show you the grave, I can show you the medical records, the birth certificate, the-'
'I believe you,' he told her, breaking his silence, his voice softer than she remembered hearing it since … since she was brought back, she realised. His expression was the same as the moment when he had first seen her on the stairs, weak and shaking, her hands bloodied and bruised. Her heart melted as she saw him, and heard him, but she showed nothing.
'Its happened before,' he continued. 'I never thought that it could happen with me. Something to do with the uniqueness of the line of Aurelius, some spell that Nest … the Master … had cast on the line centuries ago, when he was searching for the Anointed One. He believed that the child would be of his own blood, meaning his own seed. He never conceived, but I know that Angelus had a child with Darla before she died.'
He must have seen the shock in her face. 'I keep current,' he told her wryly. Slowly, he removed his duster, folding it carefully and placing it on the stool behind him.
He moved towards her slowly. Despite the pain, despite her clothes hanging in rags where Drusilla had used both knives and burning coals, despite the manacles biting into the soft skin of her wrist, she could feel every movement that he made as though they were her own.
The first thing that she felt was the soft touch of his fingers, lightly brushing across her cheek. The candles burned around him, lending the air an ethereal glow. He moved his hand up her face, slowly, tracing a pattern known only to him, moving his fingers through her hair. The water, dripping monotonously, continued to echo through the chamber, the only noise. Closing her eyes, she leaned into his touch forgetting, as she had before, what he was and what he had done, knowing only in her sensation-numbed mind that this was a man who loved her totally, without reservation. With the kind of strength of feeling that no one she had ever known could offer her, a strength to match her own.
Her eyes closed, she felt his cold lips against hers, the kiss passionate and tender at the same time, powerful but subtle. She leaned into it, pulling at the chains, yearning to bury herself in him, in his power and the strange warmth that came from his cold body, a warmth that she was sure only she had ever felt.
She felt the chains snap, and the kiss broke. For a moment, she stared into his eyes as he lifted her from the wall, noticing once again the clear beauty. Then the injuries came flooding back, and she sagged against him. He lifted her easily, and placed her gently on the ground, using his duster as a pillow.
He stroked her hair again, murmuring softly to her. 'I had a daughter,' he whispered.
'She was beautiful, Spike,' she told him as he sat beside her. 'Perfect. For the few minutes that she was alive, she was exquisite.' She pushed herself up, the stone freezing and damp, a shallow puddle of stagnant water just under her. 'They said that there was something wrong with me, something that made it impossible for me to have children. They said they had no idea how I had become pregnant in the first place.'
'Slayers never have children,' he told her, his voice soft, his tone bitter. 'Don't know why.' He grunted. 'A Slayer bearing the child of a master vampire. The daughter of Buffy Summers and William the Bloody. Elizabeth.'
'You left before I found out,' she told him, an edge of bitterness entering her voice. She loved Spike, and had suffered enough to be able to finally admit to herself, and to him, but there were some things that were difficult to easily forgive. The fresh scars on her body were the least of them. 'Just like Angel, just like Riley. You left.'
He reached across for her, his face pleading, but she pulled away and stood, albeit with some difficulty, her leg muscles sore and strained.
He looked up, not bothering to rise, content to sit in her shadow, cast by the dim candlelight. 'I had to leave, Buffy,' he told her, his voice dead. 'It hurt me more than anything that has ever happened to me in a hundred and fifty years, but I had to leave. I couldn't just hang around and hope that you would realise what your feelings were, pulling me in and pushing me away at the same time. It was torture.'
'No, Spike,' she replied. 'This was torture. Having our baby and seeing it die was torture. Knowing that the one man in my life who loved me for everything that I was leaf just as I began to realise what I felt, that was torture.'
'Being beaten in an alley because I didn't want you to throw away your life was fun, by contrast, I suppose,' he asked sarcastically.
She closed her eyes and sighed. 'When I said I wanted to find you to say sorry, I meant it, Spike.'
'I know you did, luv,' he told her, rising. He drew her to him, and she sagged against his chest. Her throat began to burn as she fought to keep the tears down. 'I know you did.'
With Angel, her feelings had been manipulated by the childish expectations of what she had been told by countless books and films of what love was like, of the certainty with which it was felt and the absolute sureness of the truth of an emotion so powerful that it could not be described to someone who had never felt it. Scarred by his leaving, the dashing of the fondest hopes of her early childhood before the darkness of her calling covered her, she retreated to what she fondly imagined was the simplicity of Riley, only to learn that he was far from simple, the product of years of training, subtle mind-control, and narcotics. But she had clung to the illusion, hoping that one day she would forget that it was an illusion. The shattering of her last tie to the world in which her friends could choose to move freely but abandoned only through loyalty to her was the worst moment of her life. Seeing Riley leave in the military chopper as she ran to try to convince him of the depth of her feelings was like seeing her last chance disappear.
And then Spike. Always a constant in a life that had precious few others. The one thing that she could be sure of was the purity of his hate and malice, the sheer malevolence. That was why she had not killed him when she had had the chance, when he had come to her for help that Thanksgiving. Of all the things in her life that could and did change, as she saw Xander and Willow gradually slip into their own niches, leaving less time for what they had as a group in Sunnydale High, Spike remained a constant. When he had told her that he loved her, when he had Drusilla chained to a post, when he held the stake above her unbeating heart and when she had seen the anguished sincerity in his eyes, and believed him, she could no longer deny it to herself that the darkness was as much a part of her of the light for which she fought. To fight evil in a pit, one had to become dirty. That was how she had felt that night - dirty, sullied by everything that Spike professed to feel.
She knew that when she had hatefully spat that he could not love without a soul, she was deliberately lying. She knew that he could, that other vampires could. But what was love to them? Was it the same as it was to people, the unconditional surrender of feeling, the willingness to be completely vulnerable in the knowledge that the other person was feeling the same? Or was it far darker, rooted in base urges and a need for gratification that were alien to her? She had wondered to herself, some nights when alone and in the dark, listening to Willow cry herself to sleep because she was alone, if she returned Spike's feelings, would they be hers? Or his? Would it be the love of which she had always read and seen, or would it be something else entirely?
It had taken the birth of Elizabeth, and her quick death moments later, to understand that it didn't matter. It had taken a baby, the purest symbol of the love that they felt for each other, for her to realise that it was real. And when their daughter died, as she held her in her arms, her face bathed in sweat from labour, her body aching from the effort, she realised that she had made that effort because something positive had to come from what had existed between herself and the vampire that had stolen her soul.
When Elizabeth died, her heart broke. But the need to tell Spike what she felt for him, and what the result of those feelings had been, had kept her sane.
Standing in the cellar, his arms around her, shielding her from everything while the tears flowed in soft rivers down her drawn face, all the repression of the last five months vanished as the need for it evaporated.
She wept for their daughter.
Her knee wet from kneeling in a pool of stagnant water, Buffy buried her head in Spike's chest and wept, her tears falling slowly down her cheeks. She felt his hand gently move the length of her cheek to wipe away the water, and felt solace in the touch of his cold skin. But it would take far more for the memories to vanish that easily, for the anguish to retreat into the small, forbidden corner of her mind where lay the rest of the hurt and betrayal that she had experienced.
Her sobbing slowly ceased, as he crouched above her in silence, waiting for the emotions that she felt to play themselves out. His hand moved away from her face to caress the burns and the cuts that she had been forced to endure at the cruel, though skilled, hands of Drusilla's expert torture. His lover was a mistress of her craft, with a vocation for the infliction of pain that would have impressed the most brutal servant of any medieval despot, and she brought tools of modern agony to bear in a way of which they would have been jealous. That pain, she knew, as she felt her throat gradually relax from the coarseness caused by the repression of her deep sadness and anger, was greater within her heart, the heaviness that weighed it down only slightly ameliorated by Spike's presence.
Nor could she yet relax.
She gently pulled away, to sit on the floor opposite him. He tried, ever so faintly, to keep her close, but for the moment she needed distance more than she needed his touch. Though she had longed for it for what seeemed an eternity, for this she needed not to feel his hands, for that way lay only the oblivion of ecstasy, the end of rational thought. And she needed to think.
'Spike,' she breathed, keeping her eyes on his, trying not to see the rest of the chamber, the spluttering candles and the stench of death. 'What are you doing here? Why are you back with Drusilla?'
The silence hung between them, empty but full of anger and disappointment.
'Long story, luv,' he replied at length, rising smoothly, his duster hanging about him like a cloak in the darkness.
She said nothing, waiting.
He sighed, hanging his head and turning away, addressing the far wall rather than her eyes, so much older than they had been even a few months before.
'Left you behind ten months ago, Buffy,' he told her, his voice reflective. 'Left you and Dawn, Sunnydale, everything. What we had was everything and nothing of what I wanted when I realised that I was in love with you.' Once again, his voice had lost all traces of his accent. For one of the first times, he was showing her more than the image that he projected with such practiced skill that it had become a second skin. 'I wanted to be close to you, as close as I could be, but there was nothing coming from you but lust. I knew that you felt more, I knew that there was something there, that you would never have let me do any of the things that you did without feeling something, but until you realised it I might as well have been nothing more than your whore. I didn't want that, Buffy.' He turned to face her. 'I wanted everything. I deserved everything.'
She said nothing, for there was nothing that she could say. She knew that he was right, she had known that he was right for months. She had become used to the guilt that she felt, it was a compliment to the anger that she felt at both him, and herself.
He reached down and took her hand in his, his cold skin against hers. 'But I never left with the intention of not coming back, luv. You have to believe that. I just wanted to get away for a while, maybe no more than a month. I just needed time away from you for a while to clear my head, to try to sort out what it was I felt for you, to try to figure out what it was that I wanted.' He smiled slightly, a sad smile, the likes of which she had never seen from him before. It was only a pale shadow of his old, confident smirk. It was the sad smile of a broken man.
'What happened?' she asked, almost afraid to hear the answer.
'Heard something,' he answered shortly. 'Something about a vampire lord who was chasing Dru. I heard about it in San Francisco - that was where I went by the way, its the vampire capital of the West Coast, all the big boys live there. A guy called Legion was supposed to be chasing her across the world, she stole something from him.'
The real face of Legion flashed across her mind, but she kept her battered face impassive. She did not want to yet reveal anything of the knowledge that she held. Less because she was still doubtful of Spike's loyalty, for she knew that he could have killed her whenever he wanted, and she could still fell the love in his touch, than because the strange bond that she felt with vampire prince forbade her on an instinctive level to reveal anything about it. She doubted that she could have even had she wanted to.
He continued. 'Most people don't have a clue who Legion is, they think that he is a myth, something used to scare the stupid. His name was being whispered through the dark streets like a scent on the wind, something to shy away from. But I know who and what he is. I met him once.'
She kept the shock from her face with the skill of a liar of long habit, though inwardly she felt her heart begin to beat faster. She would never have believed that Spike could have met Quintus Eranus, that he could have survived the meeting. More than any creature that she had encounted, Patricius Quinus Eranus was power, unlimited and unapproachable, relentless.
'There was another rumour, that he had been chasing her because she had stolen something that he had intended for someone else, a treasure or some such that made vampire's incredibly powerful, something that would make the youngest fledgling more powerful than any but the oldest Master, even a Lord.'
'The Charm of Ba'quavar,' she told him without thinking.
He cocked his head to the side as he heard her, though she was barely looking at him, searching deep within for the origin of the knowledge. She knew, though she knew not how, what the Charm was, and what it did, but she still did not want Spike to know anything about the images that she had seen since she had arrived, or the dream that she had had when she had been waiting to awake to the malignant attentions of Drusilla.
'How do you know that, Slayer?' he asked, his voice devoid of the suspicion that covered his face, visible even through the shadows that half-obscured his angular visage.
'Its a long story, Spike,' she told him. 'I'll tell you when I hear the rest of what you have to tell me. I promise.'
He drew away from her in a manner which, she supposed. was earily similar to the way in which she had drawn away from him that morning in the crypt, when he had joked that they were actually having a conversation. She knew now what it felt like, and didn't like it. Indeed, she wondered how he could still feel for him after the things through which she had put him over and over again in a deadly cycle of denial. This, though, was worse.
'Did you even come back for me at all, Slayer?' he asked, his voice low, and more menacing than she had heard it in a long time, back to the dark depths of their initial enmity. 'Or did you come for Dru? Did the Watcher send you on a quest to eliminate her once and for all? Do they think that they can?'
She sighed with frustration, and tried to rise, shaking the broken chains above her in the process, the metallic noise echoing throughout the chamber, joining with splashing water.
He pushed her back to the floor, roughly, more roughly than he had for what must have been years. There was hostility in his eyes now, the kind of hostility that she barely remembered.
'No, Spike,' she told him as earnestly as could manage through the fresh pain that landind hard on the stone caused her. 'Its hard to explain, really really hard.'
'Try,' his voice cracked through the silence, remote and icy.
She briefly went through all that she knew, though she left out any mention of Jur'Khan Chung, because she did not want Spike to know of the deal that she had struck with the vampire lord. Less because she had any qualms about it, but rather because she knew that it would make Spike think that there was even more danger to Drusilla and, while she was certain that he still loved her, even after the things through which she had put him in her quest to remain as remote as possible, she also knew that he would try his best to defend Drusilla. If nothing else, she was his Sire, and that still meant something, even to someone as against tradition as he.
He listened carefully, though his face did not change, marble carved by a master sculptor, reflecting the light with all the angularity of carved crystal.
At length, she finished, and waited for his response. It was long in coming, the empty silence deafening in its own way, as he remained still and unmoving.
'I believe you,' he replied at length, reaching down and giving her his hand.
She took it carefully, wincing as he pulled her gently to her feet to face him, face to face for the first time in ten months and a lifetime of experience.
He took his duster, picking it up casually, though his face was anything but casual, reflecting as it did a multitude of emotions that she had missed so much for so long.
He placed it around her shoulders tentatively, as if unsure that she would be willing to accept that had been taken from the broken corpse of a former Slayer, something that represented the triumphs of what were, to him, a past life. She took it anyway, relishing the feeling of soft, well-worn leather against her skin, the smell of cigarettes and liquor, and the unique scent of the vampire that held her soul in his cold grip, with nothing stronger than the regard in which she held him after a multitude of trials of her own coldness. The sudden warmth, and the weight, almost made her swoon, and her knees wobbled.
He caught her, seeing that she was about to fall, and their eyes locked, as they had so many times before, even to the first time that they had met, the time in the alley when he had sacrificed a minion with cold calculation merely to see how she fought.
She was able to lose herself in the depths of those ice blue eyes. So lost was she that she was only barely aware of his lips edging closer to hers with infinite slowness. Their eyes remained locked for the whole time before the first shock of contact.
Their lips met in a passionate lock that held within it, for the first time, a mutuality of love and affection, which made it sweeter a thousand fold than anything that she had experienced before. The feeling contained within it made it more powerful than the physical, which itself was shattering. Their lips touching, their tongues running over each other with the desperate need of prolonged absence and the shared, separated fantasies of reunion, the kiss was the closest thing to paradise that the Slayer could imagine. It was not like the other times that they had kissed, when it had been about lust and a desperate, consuming passion that had little to do with feeling. He did nothing with his hands other than gently run them through her hair, slowly, as if unable to believe that she was once more in his embrace, or that this time her feelings matched his own with equal fervour coupled with equal desire.
They pulled away after an eternity of shared need, her feelings for him no longer repressed or buried by the pain of missing him, at last consummated by nothing any more impure than a kiss.
'I'm so sorry, Buffy,' he told her. She was able to see the tears forming at the corner of his beautiful eyes, and had she been blind she would have been able to hear the anguish in his voice. 'I'm so sorry that I wasn't there. Had I known, I would never have left. I would have been there with you, in the hospital.'
The pain rushed back, all the feeling of sorrow and grief, of lost opportunity, both in the past and, worse, for the future.
'I know,' she told him softly, touching his face with her bloody hand. He closed his eyes and pressed his cheek against her palm, relishing the touch of her as much as she did him. 'She was us, Spike. She was the two of us, the only pure thing that we ever did together.' Her voice caught. 'Our daughter, Spike.'
'I know, pet,' he said to her, his voice also close to breaking. 'I'm so sorry.' He laughed shortly, bitterly. 'I could say it a thousand times, and it would never be enough for that.'
She looked up at him, her face dirty and stained with tears. 'It is, Spike. You would never have left if I has not pushed you to it. If I had not pushed you away. If I had not been so damned stupid and arrogant.'
'Not stupid, luv,' he told her, easing her away, though keeping his hands on her shoulders as he looked directly at her. 'Not arrogant either. Just experienced. If I had been treated the same way that you had by the wankers that have screwed you over in the past, I probably would have reacted the same way. It was as much my fault as it was yours. I never should have allowed what happened that night in the wrecked building. It was too fast and too soon. It only confirmed everything you thought about how shallow you thought my feelings were. I should have been able to show you that I could have been more.' He took her chin in his hand gently as she closed her eyes against his touch. 'I can be more, Buffy. I think I've proved that to you.'
'You did,' she told him, remembering both the torture that he had gone through at the hands of a God, and also the beating that he had endured at her hands to stop her throwing away a life that at the time she had not valued.
That it had taken the stillborn product of their incomplete union to make her realise both the value and the sanctity of her life and that of others was a tragedy for which she alone could bear the blame.
'Buffy,' he said, his voice lowering to a whisper. 'I love you, more than anything or anyone that I have ever known in more than a hundred and fifty years. If you never believe anything that I tell you, believe that.'
'I believe it, Spike.' She swallowed, and closed her eyes. Though the words had been practised through endless, private repetition, they would not come with the ease that she had imagined countless times in the silence of her mind, accompanied by the loneliness of separation.
Without warning, they came. 'I love you too, Spike. I always will, I promise.'
'You're not my boy any more, Spike.'
Of all the things that she had hoped or feared hearing when at last she summoned the courage to make the awful admission, that was the last.
Drusilla, resplendant in the stolen power of a vampire prince, stood at the door, her eyes burning.
