Crossing into unchipped territory (3/?) by dutchbuffy2305
Rating: R
Timeline: Around AtS 5.09 or 5.10
Author's note: Big hugs to my wonderful betas, mommanerd, meko00, LadyAnne and Ayinhara.
Author's website: http://home.planet.nl/~dutchbuffy2305
Feedback: Yes, please, to dutchbuffy2305@yahoo.co.uk
An elastic cord stretches between Buffy and Sunnydale, and driving away from the town is making it longer and thinner. Any moment now it'll snap. She didn't realize how much she was longing for home until she smelled the scent of a Sunnydale night and heard the peaceful sounds of surf and highway rumbling in the background. In the rest of the world everything's so intrusive. The shape of the houses and the cars, how people dress, jumps on her retinas and hijacks them, fascinating and irritating her with the differences. Every city has a different shape to it and the McDonaldses are just plain wrong, with icky local specialties and just not hitting the sameness she longs for.
And there is so much weather all the time. Not only in Europe, which she on the whole only pretended to like, but also in Cleveland, rain, wind, snow, it never stops. You have to dress for it, it's on TV, people keep mentioning it in their small talk. Somewhere in her guts this just registers as wrong, as if the balmy unchanging warmness of Sunnydale is imprinted on her soul as the only right kind of climate.
She rolls her shoulders and tries to concentrate on the road. She's never driven this long at a stretch and it's hard. She has to force herself to go on, driven by a need to get back to Cleveland and be done with this too familiar alternate reality that taunts her with might-have-beens. She forces herself but actually she'd like to turn back and let Sunnydale's presence soothe her again and she can't let that happen.
The past summer, when the triumphant feeling of defeating the First started to fade she let herself go, just for a few days, she thought. She let out all the inappropriate mushiness and hurt and undigested lumps of maybe-love and wallowed in them. It was just a few days, and then she tried to reconnect to the others again, but it's as if they'd gotten so much of a head start in those few days that she's never managed to catch up again. They all have these plans and dreams, schools they want to go to, businesses they want to start, and she doesn't seem to have any. Not that she wants to have fantasies like Andrew, who thinks he's going to be the next great thing in script writing or comic book drawing, or a Watcher like Dawn or a contractor like Xander. But it's scary not to have any dreams, so she's been making them up when the others ask about hers. She dutifully enrolled in night classes when they got back from the confusion of Europe, but she doesn't know what she's doing it for.
Buffy suspects that if you take away the Slayer, the girl that remains is just kinda small. She has no wants and no dreams, she gave up on them a long time ago and she doesn't know what to replace them with.
She rubs her eyes with one hand and the car makes a sickening lurch to the left. It takes her endless rubbery moments to get back into the right lane and her heart keeps thumping in her throat. Her body feels full and hot, about to burst into flames or splatter apart into little shapeless pieces. She pulls the car over as soon as she can and rests her head on her hands. The vampire behind her stirs and mumbles something. She can't muster enough energy to reply to him and he stops moving. She's thirsty and tired, her head aches, but she can't make herself decide to go and buy some food and drink. She doesn't have any money on her; she didn't have her purse when she was snatched away from her friends.
The only thing to do is get back on the road and drive, back on the black ribbon that stretches all the way to Cleveland. She doesn't know where she is now, she's never had a head for distances or geography, it's just this dry and arid place, white from the glare of the sun, cars the only thing that give brief color to the landscape. She sits up and drives on.
Buffy waits as long as she can to replenish the gas. It's getting colder already. She buys water and food with Spike's money. No soda or hamburgers, just plain water and apples. She wants to be light as air, as insubstantial as she can, not weighted down with meat and starch. The feeling is familiar from when she Slayed, the later years, when not eating was a kind of power game she played with her body, to see if the Slayer energy diminished when she did, like she wants to be ready for take-off when the moment comes. She did fly once, jumping straight into that vortex swirling below Glory's tower, and secretly she'd like to try again. Snow starts at first powdering and then thickly covering the side of the road, and she goes on until she can drive no longer; she stops the car and feels herself falling, flying towards sleep spread out like a black landscape beneath her.
*
When she wakes up it's dark and Spike is driving again. She feels awful, dried out and headachy, thirty-two rather than twenty-three. She sneaks a peek at Spike at the wheel and marvels that she mistook him for her Spike for even a second. There's a wildness about him, a lack of containment that she thinks she remembers from meeting him long ago. But she can't be sure. It's not as if she paid a lot of attention to the original Spike at first. She does remember taunting him in the bathtub, all chained up and chalky pale with poor feeding, but even then he was stripped of real power. Or what he perceived to be his power, his ability to kill. There is no point in engaging this one in conversation. It's just hard to feel herself react to his face or a casual touch of his hand or the flare of his duster. She hopes her guts will catch up with her brain sometime soon.
When he mentions food and a shower she practically slavers and wags her tail, so goodbye to staunch Buffy. She'd do almost anything to feel clean and taste a hamburger. They get off the road and check in at a motel. She has to put on all her Cleveland clothes again and her nose almost freezes off in the thirty feet to the motel office, her boots crunching snow with loud crackling sounds. Middle America weather is back. It's pretty clear what the clerk thinks when Spike asks for a room for a couple of hours and lots of towels, but she doesn't care.
She hesitates when she steps into the stuffy room with its bland ugly furniture and synthetic carpet. A motel room is so cheap, she thinks. And yet all Spike and she ever did was fuck in his crypt or outside. She fingers the slippery maroon polyester sheets. Spike's sheets were cream and of a good quality cotton. They almost never used them.
"No time to sleep," the other Spike says brusquely. "Grabbing a shower and eating is all we're gonna do. You shower first."
He leaves and Buffy is grateful for his tact. It's vaguely embarrassing to be in one room with him if there's a bed. The bathroom is barely clean, with strips of mold so thick she's almost afraid they'll tear themselves off the wall and attack her, but the shower is heavenly.
She's wrung out her hair and is trying to dry it with the inadequate dryer they've screwed to the wall here when Spike comes back in. He's wiping his face with his sleeve and the first thing Buffy thinks is that his manners are awful. Then the realization that he's been hunting hits her, that he's killed a person while she was blithely showering! The dryer whuffs jerkily next to her ear as she sinks down on the bed and stares at him.
"What?" he says, mildly irritated. He has a sated, lustful look on his face, lips full and eyes at half-mast, that she only knows after sex, in that minute before she kicked it off his face with her words or her fists. He flings a jacket and some other items of clothing on a chair.
"Brought you some warm things to wear, Slayer."
She can hardly speak, anger and betrayal clog her throat. "Did you rape before you killed her, or after? Was she Dawn's age?"
He lifts an eyebrow while he's shrugging out of his duster. "Didn't have time for fucking the food, love. Who's Dawn?"
She watches, paralyzed with choices, while he undresses nonchalantly and walks buck naked to the shower, swaggering and sleek. She stares but doesn't see him. She ought to stake him right now. He's a killer. She knew this in theory, but she's never seen the reality of it this close. When he was manipulated by the First, the bodies rising in the cellar were horrific, but she didn't feel him kill them as she feels the loss of the unknown life right now. She should have known he wasn't letting her shower out of chivalry, it was just practicality. He kills, she showers; he showers, she has a hamburger. Jesus, who knows how many people he killed just now?
The dryer dies in her hand. It needs another coin. She stares stupidly at it and stomps off to the bath room, stake in hand. She's gotta do something or she'll explode. She opens the door he hasn't bothered locking and freezes on the threshold. Spike hasn't bothered with trivialities like shower curtains. He's hanging lazily against the shower wall, cream against the blotched white, eyes closed against the water, his hands lazily stroking his erect cock. Buffy sees a tiny splatter of blood on his neck bleed down quietly, pinking a trickle of water and then getting lost in the fall of water running over his chest.
She's staring, heart clenching at this sight, and knows she won't be able to put a stake through those languidly bunching chest muscles. She's lost it, it's official. Her friends were right after all, she is blind to Spike, and she probably couldn't kill him if she saw him drink a victim right in front of her nose. She turns away, putting the stake in her pocket again, she needs to think. All her instincts are overset, they are too stupid to keep her Spike and this one apart, and her brain has never been a reliable guide.
"Leaving already, Slayer? Thought you were going to lend me a hand…" Spike drawls after her.
Yeah, yeah, enough with the innuendo already. She finds no funny quip ready on her tongue and makes do with slamming the door. The situation is impossible. She's on a road trip with a serial killer and she's just been letting it happen. From the moment he said they were leaving for Cleveland until now she's just tagged along behind him. It has to stop.
She tries to think over her options. She could dust him right now and drive on to Cleveland on her own. She'd have to take his money before it dusted with him, though, or she'll never get there. Does she need him? The trip will go slower without him, that's for sure. And didn't she just decide she couldn't dust a Spike, however evil? Might as well bow to the inevitable and let him whisk her to Cleveland with all possible speed. One they get there, when or if they manage to locate the vortex spiral, will be soon enough to have another try at killing him.
And really, this is another world. The weight of her own world was a heavy enough burden to bear, has had her on her knees and occasionally with her nose in the dust, and she's just learning how to stand up straight again and not doing a very good job of it yet. The Slayer of this world is the one to take care of this Spike, and her responsibility is to get back to Dawn in one piece. Crystal clear, if you just take a moment to check it out. If she can't prevent him from killing for ever after, at least she can see to it that he doesn't kill anymore in her presence.
Spike ambles out of the bathroom, drying his hair with a towel and not bothering to have one around his hips. Of course she looks, why shouldn't she? She'll just have to add one resolve extra to her new little stack, and that is not falling for the lure of this Spike's hot little body. That said, his dick is still half hard from his jacking off in the shower, and it makes her feel tingly, which is kind of shameful. How pathetic is it that she had no trouble at all keeping her hands off a Spike who was living in her basement, for God's sake, and yet this one is just oozing edibility? Best not think that thorough, or she'll like herself even less.
Spike dresses while she watches. He rakes his hands through his wet curls with a sigh and she guesses he wants gel to flatten it down. He never could be persuaded that the curls are cuter. She refrains from saying this.
"Let's get your dinner, Slayer."
"I'm not made up," she grumbles but complies. She's made her resolve now, she's gotta be strong to see it through. And she'll have to get some clothes at the next stop, because it's just awful to be wearing these totally smelly old ones. Vamps don't sweat, but she does.
At the B-rated hamburger place across the road she demolishes her burger with gusto. Spike smiles.
"You tear into that burger like it's a pumping artery, Slayer. Some things don't change."
What does he know? She hasn't eaten this much in years.
Spike plays with a cigarette but doesn't light it, which would get him kicked out in no time. Very cool and controlled for Spike, she thinks. Must be the Master thing that's taught him patience like this, or maybe he always had it. She wouldn't know, after all.
"So," he begins, "why don't you tell me a bit about your world. I think the branching off point is your not killing Dru, right?"
Buffy nods, too busy eating to reply just yet.
"Why didn't you?"
That's a good one. She tries to cast her mind back to that moment in the underground club, holding Dru at ransom to get the clueless vampire groupies out.
She swallows a big bite. "I guess I saw your reaction to Drusilla. And I knew some of what Angel did to her, and maybe I felt a little bit sorry for her."
Spike snorts. "Just because she was driven insane by Angel and Darla before they raped and killed her doesn't mean she wasn't a killer, love. All vampires were human once, remember? Doesn't make us any less evil."
Buffy chews on that while she demolishes her second burger. "I know. You started out a sensitive Mama's boy, William, and still you got to rank pretty high on the Evil Top One Hundred."
Spike preens a little. "That I did. Do." He puts the cigarette on his lips and absentmindedly pats his pocket before he remembers and lays it on the plastic daisy patterned table cloth. He's making a little daisy himself, from cutlery and salt shakers, and the cigarette makes a petal. Buffy looks at it in wonder. Geez.
"And how can you be sure Dru is still around? Or did we stay in Sunnydale all those years, same as I did?"
Buffy thinks deeply and takes a few big swallows from her nice cold Coke. "You helped me defeat Angelus because you wanted her back, and then you left…"
Spike's hands grip the pepper shaker hard. Oh, bad boy, I could cut you to the quick…"What? Wanted her back? From who?"
"Angel…Angelus I mean. You were in a wheel chair. I dropped an organ on you after you captured Angel to restore Dru to health."
"Ah! So that panned out then!" Spike nods in satisfaction.
"Uh-huh. Well, I understood from you she was kind of too fond of her Daddy…"
Spike growls and his fingers tear eight little holes in the long-suffering table cloth.
"And?"
"I saw you again a year later, when Dru had dumped you for a Chaos Demon. Then you returned to Sunnydale for…" She just manages to swallow "the gem of Amara." She's not responsible for this world, true, but to let loose a Spike in it who's invincible would still be a very bad idea. "….and got captured by the Initiative soldiers…"
"Must have been out of my mind," Spike grumbles.
"Dru returned to Sunnydale a year later, with burns on her face, and tried to get you back. But you'd fallen in love with me by then and offered to stake her for my loving you in return."
Spike looks as if he's swallowed something bad. "I find that bloody hard to believe. Why the hell would I fall in love with a Slayer?"
"You tried killing me first," Buffy says pointedly, kind of enjoying this. "Many times. But you failed."
"Huh."
Buffy looks up and away, trying to think how to phrase this. "Time passed. You tried to rape me in my own bathroom and felt so bad about it you went and got a soul."
Spike curls his lip. "In your own bathroom? How'd I get in then? You must have invited me! And I don't rape Slayers, I kill them in honorable battle."
"Yeah, well. You lost it for a few, I guess. It was a bad thing to do, and you repented. You got your soul, went crazy, became sane, and sacrificed yourself to defeat the First Evil and the Turok Han from the Hellmouth. Sunnydale slid into a great big crater, end of story."
Spike looks gobsmacked. "That's just…rubbish. I would never do any of those things. Don't even know what they are."
Buffy shrugs. "Get your head around this: you loved me. A lot. Everything follows from that. Weren't you the same with Drusilla? Love's bitch?"
"Hey!" Spike says, pointing his finger at her. "You don't get to say that"
Buffy shrugs again and thinks about a third hamburger, but decides on a milk shake. Chocolate. She's not vanilla girl anymore. Spike gets one too, and they slurp up the frothy stuff in tandem. Buffy smiles, imagining how they must look, Slayer and vampire drinking from straws together, like skewed mirror images. It's a sad smile, because this is the wrong vampire.
TBC