P.S Before I start, it has recently occurred to me that I don't mind if anyone else posts this story on their sights or recommendations, or anything. Just tell me, 'cos I would like to see it in cool fonts. Mark it as a WIP, though, because updates are few and far between.

Dietrich Vost stepped away from the corpse in front of him, regarding the twin wounds on her neck, made with perfect precision as a surgeon would analysing his most recent success. He wiped a drop from his chin and licked it, closing his eyes against the ecstasy of it, the purity.

It was night in Hamburg, a pure night so cold that he breathed to see the mist form in front of him in a brief white cloud before it dissipated in the cool breeze. He looked up at the pale moon above, regarding it with eyes that were equally pale, almost white. His black formal suit clashed with his pale blonde hair, cut short in the manner of the SS that he had helped to found for his amusement. Behind him waited two of his minions, fledglings not of his making who had crossed the Atlantic to learn from a true Master what it was to be what they were, for few there were in the New World who remembered.

A brief shudder coursed through him as he thought of his Sire of three hundred years before. Surely Lord Patricius had not crossed the great expanse of the ocean, for he would have heard.

And, at that moment, he heard something else, and with it a feeling that ripped through his consciousness like the blade that he had once wielded with such power and elegance that had titillated the decadent nobility of his day with skill that they could not master. It was a Call, something unlike anything that he had ever felt, drawing him to the East.

He pulled his long heavy coat around him, and gave the pair behind him brief orders to summon his jet. Then he turned, and stared in the direction of the rising sun, five hours away. His eyes reflected the urgency of what he felt, and he ached to move.

Hatukani stopped, her razor sharp sword paused in mid-swing behind her head, her practice interrupted in a way that she would never have expected. The mortals in front of her, for whom she was demonstrating the ancient ways of the samurai from whose caste she had been drawn by Lord Qui'chi, so many years before, waited for a moment, then began to whisper among themselves, wondering what had stopped her.

They did not wonder long, for it only took her moments to dispatch them. Cleaning the pristine blade on the expensive suit of one of them whose name she could not recall and for whom a large family on the outskirts of the ancient Imperial capital of Kyoto would soon begin to grieve in the classical Japanese manner, she sheathed the blade behind her back, her face impassive.

She looked to the west as the call of her Order went forth.

Angel woke suddenly from a deep sleep, thrusting upwards from the bed in the dark with an sucked breath that left him feeling drained. He threw aside the silk covers, and stepped towards the window, the same one through which he had crashed having consummated his twisted love of his Sire, years before. The soul that had anchored him and his actions for the past century melted away as chaff on the wind, as though it had never existed and, for the first time in four years, the demon took full control, for no human soul could compete with the primal summoning for the final end to the war that had been left for far too long.

Angelus grinned, turning to the east, anticipating the battle to come, from his extensive knowledge of vampire lore knowing that all the Masters of the Three Orders were being summoned for one, final, battle. He knew nothing of the fourth.

But the prison guards whose throats were ripped from them in bloody sprays that horrified even the hardened criminals over whom they had charged were the first to see the glory of Thoikaris reborn as a former Slayer stepped out into the night, not bothering to turn in any direction, gleeful at finally having escaped her prison. She was sure that the Slayer whose soul she had crushed with so much more ease than she had experienced in the body of the other would have hated the thought of freedom so soon after her voluntary penance for such petty crimes as torture and murder, but the Vampire Queen knew that three thousand years and more of captivity were enough to pay for her crimes. Now, it was the turn of others.

She turned her head towards the evening sun, closing her eyes. And she, too, sent forth a call. It would not be long now before these children learned the folly of opposition to the will of one of the First Four.

Jur'Khan Chung belted his scabbard to his belt, welcoming it as one might an old friend. It had been so long since he had fought with a sword, preferring the endless ingenuity of the mortals that surrounded him for the invention of better weaponry. But he had been among the best in the Golden Horde in his day, before he was turned, and it had been four centuries later that he had finally relinquished the blade that had been given to him as a prize by the great Batu Khan himself, a reward for his valour. It had been that achievement that had first brought him to the attention of his Sire, Qui'chi, and it was fitting that he would use it to cement the dominion of Jounn'i. For that would be outcome of this battle, he was sure. He could feel the replies of the seven Masters of his line, their unspoken assurance that they would heed his call for the final battle, and would glory with him in the power that they would gain from knowing that, when it ended, there would be nothing left to oppose them. He smiled grimly at the prospect. Dominion had been too long denied him by the very existence of the others. Now, he would make the earth tremble, and the mortals cower as he achieved the destiny of his race. Too long, they had cowered in the shadows, content to let the scepticism of the humans be their best weapon. After this, they would have others yet more potent.

'Lord, you leave yourself vulnerable,' one of his servants pointed out, watching as the Mongol armed himself, stretching into the armour that he had not worn for almost five centuries, perfectly though he had caused it to be maintained. Overhead, the paintings of the greatest warlords of history, including one of the Great Khan himself, stared down. With approval, he knew. Ambition, he had learned, was a constant among the great. 'There are many weapons from which to choose.' The younger vampire, barely fifty years of age, swept his arm over the arsenal. Guns, both ancient and modern, hung side by side with every sword the endless imagination of Man could dream up; katana's hung side by side with rapiers, scimitars with broadswords.

He shook his head, though he knew that the younger creature would not understand. 'The Order War has been coming for three millennia,' he told his servant, his dark eyes making the youth quail before him, though he had yet to show any malice. 'And its conduct is governed by the taking of mighty oaths that bind even our kind. The blades alone will decide. And it has not been for nothing that I have wasted endless hours in practice, waiting for this day. They will be blades of grass before me, and I and our Order alone will stand when the dust settles.' He smiled grimly at the pun. And Patricius will pay for Julia Erenia, he thought, relishing the moment when he would hear the Roman beg for his life. And more, the moment when he would end it.

'This will not do,' Patricius told his underling calmly. A Master of no small means himself, Vost stood in awe of the sheer power of his Sire, though he knew that he and the others that were coming to reinforce the order of battle would be necessary for the ending of this. He knew the lore as well as any who had lived since before the time of Luther, and he knew that only one order could emerge from this, the rest falling to the dust which God himself had decreed would be the fate of everything that lived, and everything that died. After five centuries, still he had yet to destroy the last remnant of the pious priest that he had been, and he no longer wished to, for it gave him strength. 'Five more have heeded the call, and that will be enough, I think, but we lack arms, and we lack unity of command.'

Vost was surprised. 'None deny your authority, Lord,' he told his Sire. 'None has the power, nor the will. And swords are easy to obtain, for we inhabit the Old World, not the charmless sophistication of the New.'

The Roman smiled, then frowned as, once more, the pain of Helena's loss burned his dark soul, shadowed by three thousand years and more of bloody havoc. He thought again of Drusilla, and the exquisite pain through which he would put her, for years if necessary, once he and his had dealt with Jur'Khan Chung and his pitiful legions, and the even less significant threat of Thoikaris. What use would she be while she battled the soul of a Slayer who had twice denied the siren song of mortal death? He would forego the dominion granted by victory for a century, just to hear the bitch scream with perpetual agony. He had endless patience.

'None has the power,' he agreed with his second, 'or the will. But this will be first time that we seven will have been together in one place, the first time that all the Orders will gather in one place since the exile of Thoikaris. My power alone will not be enough to guarantee unity in the face of that. There must be more.' He patted the hilt of the shortsword that he wore at his side, in memory of the mortal legions that he had commanded to continuous victory against the barbarian hordes of Carthage. It would lead him to victory again. And more, to revenge.

'We must ensure that we are ready, then,' Vost told him, with respect but no deference. For he, too, knew what victory would mean, the final victory for the Order of Akhenaton.

Drusilla, her power reinforced by the amulet she absently fondled as it lay between her breasts, sending shivers of power through her in a flood of near ecstasy, regretted every moment of the insanity to which she had been subjected for so long as she stood in the deserted cellar of the Winter Palace. The clarity that she had envied in others for the century and a half of her existence was hers again, more lucid than she had ever been before she had stepped fatefully into the confessional that Angelus had chosen for his amusement. Though she could think now, her mind was like a blade that had been left out in the rain for too long. She had been scrubbing the rust from the corners of her consciousness for months now, in preparation for what she had put in motion when she had crept into the pristine crypt maintained by Quintus Eranus, but still a few specks remained. And that for which she was preparing now needed every shred of sanity that she could summon. Patricius had cleverly neutered the potential power of Thoikaris by driving her into the body of the more powerful of the two Slayers the night before, and it was fitting that Buffy Summers should suffer the eternal damnation of her soul at the hands of the most powerful of the race that had ever lived, for it was to her that the Slayers owed their lives, such as they were, but that still left Jounn'i and Akhenaton, meaning the forces of Jur'Khan Chung and Quintus Eranus. Against which she could summon the foretold seven Masters of the Order of Aurelius, but she idly wondered whether or not her leadership would be enough.

The sword that she sharpened lovingly was an original, a sabre of eighteenth century vintage, and with it she knew in her unbeating heart that with it she would conquer, and rule, but it would be a close run thing.

'Dru, Dru, what has my little girl gone and done now?' came a deep, sarcastic voice from behind her. A year ago, she would have been ecstatic to hear it, now all she felt was irritation. Time Angelus learned the virtue of obedience, she thought to herself. The others would be coming soon, and they would have to learn who was the Lord of the Order, and that could only be her.

She turned, her dark eyes meeting those of here Sire and , for the first time, her inferior. He stepped back slightly from the power in those eyes, but he had forgotten what they could so as he found himself drawn towards them, the human soul buried deep within wailing in anguish.

'Come to Mummy, my little angel,' she crooned, and prepared for some maternal discipline.

Buffy wept, cold tears falling slowly from her cheeks onto the floor, to mingle with the filthy water of the cellar the likes of which, she knew, would be all that she would ever know again for the rest of eternity.

Thoikaris was gone, thankfully, though Buffy was certain of her return in some form, for such will as could sustain survival for millennia in oblivion would not be so easily thwarted. Buffy found that she missed the Vampire Queen, perverse though it was, for without her there was a hole in her mind where she knew something should have been, something that had vanished as soon as she had felt the first flow of power from the deadly hand of the Lord of Akhenaton. It would be so simple if she could simply describe whatever it was as her humanity, but she knew that it was not so simple. It was hope, the last whiff of it dragged from her. Consigned by the inheritance of a three thousand year old feud, she was damned to spend the rest of her life in the moonlit darkness, the sun her enemy where so long it had been her most important ally. No more. That fight was no longer hers.

She lay in Spike's arms. He said nothing to her, for there were no words of comfort that could ever be adequate. He stroked her hair, occasionally, as though refusing to believe that she was actually there. She was though, she knew. This could be no dream, for no dream of hers could ever be so terrifying. Even the worst nightmares she had had when she was a child, of nameless terrors that chased her through the labyrinth of her fears, before she was chosen and knew that the world contained still worse horrors, could compare to this. This was every waking dread come to life. And all because of love,

That the twisted irony of all this. 'I know you feel something, Slayer,' he had told her a year before. And she had not, then, though it had not taken long for him to worm his way into her affections with loyalty and devotion the likes of which she could never have expected from anyone. Nor had it taken them long to consummate what he had felt, and what she was coming to feel, though she would never admit it. The result of that had been barren and dead, but the purity of the intention that lay behind it was enough. And for that she had left friends and family behind in search of its realisation.

For that, she could never return.

She tried to dry her tears, but more came. She could not control them. She smiled bitterly at the naivete that she had once shown when she had said that vampires were incapable of feeling. She knew, now, that the opposite prevailed. She could feel no demon within her, calling for her soul, but she could feel a strength of rage married to despair that no shallow mortal mind could ever appreciate. At the back of it, she could feel the love that she bore for the man who held her, magnified a hundred times by the strength of immortal anticipation.

'I love you, Spike,' she murmured through her sobs, her head hard against his motionless chest, her hand on his waist. She could never have really admitted that when she was mortal, but the strength of her feeling then was as nothing to what she felt now. It was that alone that could sustain her through what she knew imagined would be an eternity of bitterness at her fate.

'Love you, too, Slayer,' he told her, caressing her cheek, wiping away the tears as though his touch alone would be enough to console her, enough to drive away the reasons for her weeping.

She took a breath and pulled away, sitting up and looking him in the eye. It was dark, but her eyes were enhanced as never before, she could see every imperfection in the skin of his face. Not that there were many. She had always appreciated his beauty, she thought before, but now she knew her error. She could never have really done so before now.

'Slayer?' she breathed, fixing him with her eyes. She took his hand and held it to her breast. 'Does this feel like the heart of a Slayer?'

He knew, of course, what she meant, but he answered the question. 'I mightn't beat, Buffy,' he told her, 'but its still yours. Not hers, not a demon's, no one's but yours. And you are still the Slayer. Until the day you finally die, that will always be you. And that will always be what I love.'

She had dried her tears, but they well up again with the purity of his sincerity. It had taken so long for her to admit that she returned the feelings that he had with anything like the intensity with which he felt them, intensity that had burned its way through all the barriers that she had erected, that had battered aside every objection and that had, in the end, achieved that for which it burned. That it had come months too late to prevent this from happening was a tragedy for which she could berate herself for centuries to come, for this was a fate that she would never wish, but she remembered the words that had been spoken to her by Patricius, whose primal attraction she could still feel, fighting the feelings that she felt for Spike.

'What was it like? he asked her, gently pulling her upright and wiping away a cold tear from her newly-pale face. In that moment, he had never before felt so attracted to her. He had never considered bringing about what had happened to her himself, because he had known that it would destroy the very thing that he loved about her, leaving her but the shell of what he had desired, animated something that he would loath, but for this if nothing else he was grateful for the maliice of Drusilla in killing the beloved of Patricius and bringing about the termination of the Order War, that this could be the result. He could still feel the summons of his Sire, beckoning him, and he knew that he would not have been able to resist without Buffy as his anchor to something new, something that was not tainted by what he was. His love for her was like a primal rush, greater a thousand fold than anything he had ever felt for Drusilla even when his love for her had been at its peak, when the world itself was but a pale backdrop for the all-consuming devotion that he had felt for his Dark Queen. That anything could transcend that was something that he would never before have been able to believe, but it had.

She took his had away and rose with a feline grace that she would never have been able to muster as a mortal, that sent a shiver of pure desire through him as he watched. Walking to the small and filthy window, she stopped, staring out as the last rays of the sun fell below the horizon, bathing the decrepit city once again in its darkness, a darkness that portended the final end to a war that had demanded its termination millennia before. From fighting her own quiet war every night for years, she knew that war was a living, breathing thing, that had its own demands and its own needs, that twisted those who fought it into parodies of what they were. In her case, this was now the literal truth, but she remembered when she had been in college that she had understood at an instinctive level, beyond the shallow intellectual analysis that had so distracted the others around her, what had allowed the German people seventy years before to commit the acts that they did in the service of the worst evil ever to come from the minds of men, in service of Hitler's demented view of the world, actions that had led to the starving citizens of this very city being trapped within for more than two years of siege, battered relentlessly day and night by the artillery of the Führer's Wehrmacht.

'It was strange,' she told him, her voice quiet. 'I never thought that I would ever become pregnant. When I was younger, and I thought of having children, playing with them in the sunlight, on the grass, it was like I was thinking about someone else's life, you know? Like watching a film that you know isn't real. Whenever I tried, it just didn't work as an image. I mean, there was never any reason that I knew of that I couldn't. I got my period every month the same as every other girl, but it just never seemed as though it would happen.

'The others freaked, though.' Her voice lowered to that of an emotional whisper as she fell back into the halls of reminiscence. 'There was no morning sickness or anything. I just woke up one morning and I knew. That was all it was. I knew. I checked up, same as anyone else would, but I knew before the tests were completed that I was pregnant, and that it was yours.'

He watched her, silently, knowing that there was nothing that he could say.

'The last guy that I had been with was Riley, and even on the Hellmouth you can't have a pregnancy that's delayed by a year and a half just because its not convenient for you to have a child while you're taking on a Hell God. I knew that it was yours. That was what scared the others, especially Xander. Its strange, you know. It wasn't that I was pregnant that scared him, I think he was happy for me. It wasn't even that I was pregnant by a vampire, It was that I was pregnant by you,'

She turned back, the last sunrise that she would ever witness over behind her, the darkness beginning to encroach. He stared up at her from his seat, his expression wary of what else she would say.

'I never really understood how much he hated you, Spike,' she continued, her welcoming green eyes locked on his glacial blue. 'I knew that he did, but never how much. It took Angel to bring him around, to show him what real hatred was.'

Spike uncoiled like a serpent from his position and crossed the small space between them with the hard intent of a predator. She would have been frightened, had she not ever felt so secure as she did with him now, knowing now what she had become.

'And what was it that my beloved grandsire had to say?' His lip twisted with the bitterness that he felt, one that time would never erase.

She sighed, slumping her shoulders, a lock of her lank hair falling in front her face as she sat beside him. 'I'm not going to go into it, Spike. Eventually, I told him to get out and never come back.

'But it hurt. It hurt even more when she … died. When I went through all that for nothing.' Her heart twisted with the memories, the horrified expressions on the faces of her friends in the delivery room, the sweat bathing her face as the lights burned through her, the sad looks of the doctors as one of them put his hand gently on her forehead and broke the news. She got one look at her daughter's beautiful clear blue eyes, and that was all.

The tears came again unbidden, and again there was nothing that he could do to make it better, nothing that he could say that would take away the intensity of the pain that she would feel, magnified by the strength of vampire emotion, for as long as she lived, until time itself stood still, so determined was he that, now that he had her, more of her than he could ever have hoped for, that she would live until the stars themselves burned out, until God Himself in his infinite vengeance decided that he had had enough of his worst ever mistake.

She felt his hand on her shoulder again, and reached across to grasp it with her own. Contact was enough, for the moment, though he would never be able to understand what it was through which she was gong through the reliving of memories that she had buried for months beneath the single minded desire to find him again. That she had received more, and endured more, than she could ever have expected, was secondary. She remembered telling him that vampires couldn't feel. In this, she had been right. The strength of vampire emotion was more than she had ever expected, a rush of primal magnification of shallow mortal feeling that would have overwhelmed a human. She had loved him before, she knew, but it had been nothing to this, this all-encompassing need.

He lived with this very feeling for more than a year without any signal from me that I would ever feel anything for him, and knowing that, whatever could ever be reasonably expected, that I would never be able to return the depth of what he felt with anything more than a pale shadow of the emotions of which he was capable. Knowing that I would die quickly, knowing that he was allowing himself an eternity of grief to match a brief moment of love, and still he would not leave.

For the first time, perhaps ever, she understood why he had not left before what she had done, and even then why he planned to return as soon as he could before fate itself had taken a hand in a separation that was as necessary for her as it was for him. For, she knew, had he been there when she had discovered that she was pregnant, had he been there when their daughter was born, and had he been there when she had died, she would have hated him with all that she was for being the cause of such heartache, because he would have been such an easy target. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. It seemed such a stupid saying when she had first heard it, but now she understood its truth.

She took a reflexive breath that she needed no more than she needed food, ever again, and turned. She looked directly into his eyes, seeing not the false empathy that she had seen on the faces of her friends who could never have understood, or the righteous arrogance that she had seen on the face of her first lover when he had found out. On Spike's face, all she saw was the care and attention that he knew was all he could give her, that he knew would all that she would need from him, five months since the wound had first opened.

She marvelled again at how he knew exactly what she needed, when she needed it.

She took his hand in hers, his strength as ever matching her own, and felt with her cold skin the coldness of his, saw in his glacial blue eyes the mirror of her determination and strength and, placing her other hand on his chest, felt … nothing. Any more than she would ever feel again anything beat within her own chest though, she knew, her heart was no more dead than his. As he had told her, as she remembered as they shared a moment of pure clarity and unspoken understanding that he had never thought that she would be able to share with another living soul, her heart may no longer beat but, like his, it was not dead.

'I love you, Spike,' she told him, her voice soft though, to him, it lit up the darkness in which he had lived for months. 'I think I loved you long before I even met you.'

'That's the difference between us, Buffy,' he told her, lifting his own hand to stroke her cheek gently, his face a mask of wondrous awe at the preternatural softness of her newly cold flesh. 'I know that I loved you, a century before you were even born.'

Their lips met in the sealing of an alliance that would shatter the world with its intensity.