Pairing: pre-Spike/Fred
Disclaimer: Not mine. No way, no how.
Summary: What it boils down to is this...
Author's Note: Thanks to Sam for beta duty.
Touchfeel
"I made my choice. Wouldn't change it for the world."
At the end of it all, Spike sits on the edge of Fred's desk, staring at the blue ceramic teacup that's pinched between two of his not-really-there fingers, and all he can think of to say is this: "I guess there's worse things than being a ghost."
There are worse things; he knows this now. He's been educated. He's had his horizons broadened. He's come out of this whole bloody awful experience a changed man. Vampire. Ghost. Whatever it is that he is now.
That's not the point, though.
The point is that he knows how much worse off he could be, how much worse off he would be if it weren't for the bird sitting next to him, and he owes her for that, he thinks.
He owes her for a lot of things. For trying to save him, for one. For believing in him, for another. For thinking that he was worth saving, because not many people in his life have thought that. He just isn't the type that people want to save, what with the fangs and the penchant for blood and the good hundred or so years of killing people, oftentimes with railroad spikes. Things like that don't build one a whole lot of sympathy in this world, he realizes, and he shouldn't get sympathy. He doesn't want sympathy. He's going to get what he deserves, whether he likes it or not, and he knows this now; he's not going to run. He's not going to be Pavayne.
All sympathy and evil ghost issues aside, though, he likes to think that maybe, at one point, Buffy thought that he was worth saving, too. Not early on in their acquaintance, of course, and not even when they'd been using each other for sex, hurting each other more than should have been possible. Not when he went out and got himself a soul and went absolutely, completely out of his bloody mind, either; any thoughts that she might have had on the subject at that time would have been rooted in pity.
He doesn't do pity.
He likes to think that it was sometime towards the end that she'd decided he was worth saving. When she'd tailed into her watcher and that principal bastard after they'd tried to kill him, maybe. Maybe when he became her only ally in a world full of supposed friends.
He could be wrong, though, because Buffy, for all of their history together—the good and the bad—has never looked at him the way that Fred is looking at him now. Buffy looked at him with desire, yes, with right and need, trust and pity and hate, but never, never with this fondness that's seeping off of Fred's face, tainting the air around her with enough care and compassion so as he can nearly taste it.
It's too close to pity, compassion is, so he sets the teacup back down on the desk, gently, lets his fingers fade back into nothingness, and then he stands up and walks around the desk and over to the window. He stands there, his nonexistent hands clasped behind his back, and he stares down at the street below, at the cars that look like snails and the people who look like specks of dust on a dark gray, street-like sunbeam.
"You know," he says in an effort to fill up the silence, "there are times when it doesn't feel like it's been a month since I got here." He pauses. Then, because she's on his mind: "Over a month since I last saw Buffy."
Fred doesn't say anything, so Spike looks over his shoulder, to make sure that she's paying attention to him, to make sure that he hasn't faded out again and he just hasn't noticed. She is looking at him, though, so he figures that he's still there. Her glasses-rimmed eyes are curious.
"Yeah," he continues, looking back towards the window. "Sometimes, late at night, I like to come up to one of the offices here and watch the city go by. Sometimes, then, it feels as if was only yesterday that I saw her. Two days ago, max." He pauses again. "Then it feels as if the rest of this has been a dream. One of those Hellmouth inspired nightmare-type things. The kind you get from living on top of evil for years and years of your life."
He doesn't tell Fred that he comes to her office when he makes his trips upstairs. He doesn't tell her that he stands by her window—this very one—as he stares out at the little red-blue-green-white lights set into the backdrop of living black that is the city. As he waits for the sun to rise. As he remembers.
"I can only imagine," she says.
He waits for her to say more, for her to stumble over her words, trying to find the right thing to say to him, to comfort him, but she doesn't continue. She's quiet. She's letting him talk, or maybe she's just too tired, too discouraged to talk back.
He waits a breath longer, a fitfully dramatic pause, before he says, "Mostly, though, I just feel old." He does. He feels as if he should be a whole lot closer to the big 2-0-0 than he actually is. He feels as if he's been aging a decade a week, at least.
"I feel as if years have passed since Sunnydale. I feel… old. I feel—"
He searches for words, words that would explain everything, to her and to him.
"—as if I'm living in a different world."
This time, Fred's answer is quick.
"You are," she says. He hears her move on the desk behind him, shift her weight around, maybe so that she can full on face him, maybe not. He doesn't turn around to check. "You are living in a different world, Spike. This isn't Sunnydale. This is—"
"—Wolfram and Hart," he says. "I know."
"I was going to say 'Los Angeles,'" she says, "but yes, this is Wolfram and Hart."
It's not that, though, he thinks. Not exactly.
It's that this is a world where Buffy is only a shadow, a memory of the past instead of the center of the universe like she was in Sunnydale. The center of his universe like she was in Sunnydale.
It's disconcerting, that whole 'having the center of your universe disappear' thing, and he can't say he likes it. He can't say that he's used to it even though a month has gone by and he's already admitted that it feels as if years have passed. Buffy was the one, after all. His one, and the fact that he's a ghost-type-being now, the fact that he's slipping closer and closer to Hell with every passing moment, doesn't change anything. Not at all.
Yet everything has changed. Changed because of him. Changed because he made a choice.
What it boils down to is this: he had the chance to save himself, to possibly have a future with the woman that he loves, to already be on his way to Europe to find Buffy, and what did he do? He didn't take it.
He chose to save Fred instead.
He chose to save Fred, to push Pavayne into that re-corporeal-form-eator thing (or whatever the bloody hell it was called) in his place, and now, as he stares out the window at the world that keeps on moving below him, he can only ask himself why.
Why, why, why.
Why.
It's not an easy question to answer. He only knows what he thinks and what he thinks aren't answers. What he thinks only adds fuel to the questions.
What he thinks is this: he misses the feel of Buffy's skin against his own, the feel of her touch against his body. He thinks that if he concentrates really hard, he can still remember what she feels like.
Her fingers had been hard, where Dru's had been soft and delicate, not of the 20th century.
Her hands had been needy when he was sure that the world had given up on needing him: a chipped, souled vampire who had fallen in with the Slayer.
Her touch had hurt him when he'd needed pain and when he'd needed love and when he'd needed attention, whether she'd been hitting him or kicking him or kissing him. He loved her for it at times and he hated her for it more, but now he even misses the pain, because the fact that she was able to touch him at all had meant that he was real.
Solid.
As alive as he was going to get.
There.
And if touch is what it takes to make him feel real, then he hasn't been real in far too long. In well over a month, because that's how long it's been since he last saw Buffy, since they stood together at the edge of Hell, holding hands for the last time before he tried to die to save the world.
If he concentrates really, really hard, he can still feel the press of her palm against his, and it's that touch that he misses the most. He would give just about anything to feel her hand pressed to his again, he thinks. Because he misses touch. He misses reality and he was real when she held his hand, when she said goodbye.
Or, more like, he would have thought that he'd give just about anything to feel her hand pressed to his again, to have the opportunity to erase that goodbye touch with a hello, except that he'd stood there in the lab and he'd made his choice. Not the right choice if he ever wanted to see Buffy again, he knew, and in fact, it was a choice that might very well have guaranteed he'll be spending the rest of his existence—however long that'll be—in a Buffy-free world.
And again, all he can do is ask himself why.
Why?
Maybe because he's truly one of the good guys now.
It's the obvious answer, if not an easy one to admit, because that's not who he used to be.
Then again, he's not who he used to be. He has his soul. He helped to save the world this last go round, rather than trying to destroy it in the guise of saving it like any self-respecting vampire would do. He gave up his own life to save it even, and if that doesn't just bloody well scream 'good guy,' he's not sure what does.
It's that somehow, sometime along the way, he became self-sacrificing. It's that he chose to do the right thing—and he had done the right thing, he was sure of it—no matter what the personal cost to himself was. It's that for a hundred and something odd years he hasn't been that sort of vampire, he wasn't an Angel-type being and now, all of a sudden, he is.
With that thought, he turns away from the window and he finds that Fred is looking at him. Her eyes are wide, if somewhat tired, and her hair is falling limply around her face. She's slouched, defeated looking, and his heart that's not really there, that hasn't beat in centuries, does a little ghostly pitter-patter.
It's as he looks at her looking at him that he realizes there's a second answer to the why, one that isn't as obvious.
That answer is this: it was Fred that he was trying to save.
It wasn't Angel, or that ex-watcher, or that lawyer bloke, or that 'sing and I'll read your mind' demon guy. It was Fred.
Fred, who had put herself in danger by trying to help him.
Fred, who really was trying to get him back to the way he used to be: a solid, souled vampire with good hair.
Fred, who laughed with something resembling joy when he picked up that blue ceramic teacup on her desk, no thought given to the fact that not even two months before he'd been fighting the evil that powered all evils and now his best trick involved teacups. Teacups!
Fred, who unlike the rest of Angel's little do-gooder friends, thought that he was worth saving.
Fred.
And as he looks at her, as that second answer crashes around in his mind, he tries not to think of everything that he might have had with Buffy—everything that he's dreamed about—had he ended up on the inside of that contraption that Fred had built him. For him.
He tries not to think of his dreams of showing up at Buffy's door, wherever she was now, surprising her. He tries not to imagine the wide eyes that might have stared up at him, crying tears of happiness because he's finally there, alive, when she'd been sure that he was dead.
He tries not to think of his dreams of kissing her again, of holding her, of staying with her for as long as he's able to and protecting her from whatever evil it is that she might find herself confronted with next.
He tries not to think of loving her.
Instead, he stares at Fred. He stares at the way she's sitting on the edge of her desk, staring back at him, her expression showing that she doesn't know what he's thinking, what's going on inside his head.
For a brief, bitter moment, he allows himself to think that Buffy would have known, but then he makes himself acknowledge the fact that Fred's not Buffy and she never will be.
He knows that, because Fred's here with him now, real, and Buffy isn't and probably never will be, and will more than likely never be anything more real to him than a dream ever again. He won't have his second-third-hundredth chance with her, to prove that he loves her or to see if he can get her to love him back the way that he wants her to. He's all chanced out on Buffy, he realizes, and maybe, unconsciously, he knew that when he made his choice in the lab. Maybe that's the answer to the why.
Maybe that answer, coupled with his other answers, is the reason he chose the way he did.
Because he's a good guy now.
Because he knows that he did the right thing.
Because it's Fred that he chose.
He starts walking towards her—she hasn't moved from the desk since he entered the room—his feet moving silently across the floor. She's following him with her gaze, moving her head in time with his movements and her eyes are still wide, slightly damp. She's smiling in his direction, though, all friendly-like even if her lips are somewhat quivery, and that, he thinks, says something. What, he's not quite sure.
Then he's standing at her knees, staring down into her eyes, and slowly, concentrating as studiously and as deliberately as he can, he reaches out for her hand with his own solid, but not-really-there one, and he wraps her thin, chemical stained fingers in his own.
It's right to choose reality over dreams, he thinks briefly, but then the thought is gone, lost in sensation.
He can feel heat where he'd almost forgotten what human warmth felt like. He can feel her pulse beating beneath her skin, her fingers flexing to curl around his. He can feel her, because he's concentrating as hard as he can, harder than he has ever concentrated before.
This is real, he thinks.
And in this moment, he knows even more than he knew before that his choice was worth it, because what it boils down to is this: Spike is a vampire. He's a ghost of a vampire with only Hell to look forward to and the only thing he wants now, before he descends into its firey depths, is a little bit of reality. Dreams can't give him that.
What it boils down to is this: this moment, where he wraps his white fingers around Fred's smaller ones, where he feels warmth against his ghostly coolness and bone moving beneath flesh and muscle and skin, is the most real thing that he's felt in a month, maybe more.
He allows himself a moment, two, and then he stops concentrating, stops willing substance to his non-corporeal form. He watches as his hand melts into Fred's, as they suddenly become one.
Moment of reality at an end.
She looks startled for a brief instant, as one might when they discover that the solid thing they were holding has suddenly become air, but then she giggles, a happy, tired sound, and he steps back, fully pulling away from her.
He says, "Thanks, pet," imbuing the words with as much meaning as he can, and as he vanishes, he thinks, what it boils down to is this: there're worse things than being a ghost. What it boils down to is this: touch and feel and reality are better than dreams any day. What it boils down to is this: he's truly one of the good guys now, because he made a choice and the knowledge that it was the right choice is enough for him to not pay much heed to regrets.
He thinks, what it boils down to is this: he'd chosen Fred and he really, honestly wouldn't change his decision for the world.
End