Title: Evil Hearted You
Author: Juanita Dark
Rating: PG - 13
Spoilers: BtVS S6 - somewhere...out there.
Disclaimer: Joss is 'The One'; I'm just the Operator. So does that make the FOX guys in suits Agents? No infringement intended, people - and definitely no profit.
Author's notes: Okay, already. The rose bushes are a complete work of fiction. Bite me. Anyways, consider this an alternate timeline. Or not. I really don't mind. There is nothing specific about this fic except that it's set in Season 6 after 'Hells Bells'. It's meant to be one of, erm, more than one but it can stand alone for the moment.
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Evil Hearted You
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Hey
Must be a devil between us
Or whores in my head
Hey Pixies
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"She loves me. She loves me not. She's hot for me, then she's freezing off my manly bits."
Spike grumbled to himself, grinding out his fifth consecutive cigarette under the heel of one heavy, black boot. As usual it was night, and as usual he loitered outside the Summers residence like he was part of the itinerary. No different, really, from the previous year - and even a little of the year before that. All part of the bloody show.
When the last household light had gone out - at least an hour ago - he had stayed. Waiting. Yet nothing was what had and continued to happen. Very, very slowly.
Losing patience suddenly, he thrust his hands into his pockets, retrieving the lighter from his right, and a sixth cigarette from the left. Buffy had returned the lighter to him with less of a grudge this time - didn't bother him though - he needed it more than she did (particularly in his lonesome moments). After several strikes he finally drew a flame; cupping a hand against the wind to preserve it, his thumb hovered too close for a moment. Taking the burning in his stride, the smarting made him think the better of lighting up at all. Filching the cigarette from his lips he shook his head and almost snarled:
"Standing here, wasting good smokes and watching the house like some wankerfied version of home security."
Clapping the lighter's hood shut, the flame vanished leaving him alone in the dark. "Like I haven't got anything better to do with my untime."
Roughly, he shoved the items into the leather duster's right pocket, pausing for a moment hand on hips. He sighed; but his hands were fidgety things and began stripping petals from the rose bush next to him. Joyce's overgrown rosebushes. Woman knew how to handle an axe but she knew bugger all about growing things. The roses had run wild, twisting out an existence that, though beautiful in product, was painful to look at. Maybe he'd take a leaf out of the great poofter's book and leave a great sodding line of petals across the front lawn - in the knowledge that she would have to cross it sooner or later...
No.
Sod that - he had a shred of dignity left and it didn't suffer any pretension to artistry. He was off - leaving and such. Man needs a decent kip - even if he's dead. He gave his silent regards to Her Stuck-Up Self-Righteousness and decided to meander back to his crypt - where he could hopefully get drunk and forget he was howling at the moon like a lovesick puppy.
The walk would do him good.
He didn't light up again, which - of course - meant he didn't savour the walk home quite so much; the night air - he decided - should have been warmer. Any demons or vampires he chanced upon, he left alone or avoided. Once or twice, hearing a noise behind him, he turned to check whether he was being stalked (quaint thought) or followed. Standing downwind as he was, he wasn't sure whether she had seen him and decided to come out and play. As it happened it was neither; it was nothing. He was just half-starved and jumpy and smoked up into a haze. He cursed himself for caring at all. See, it wasn't trolls and the like, vampires got anxious, sweaty dreams about - not him anyway; it was love. Love and blood and pain. Pain with the jaws of a pit bull that grabbed you by the wrinklies and wouldn't let go for the love of death until it had you on your knees in the dirt.
That was the one, no doubt. The one that had its mark on him and was never letting go.
-.-.-.-
Beer.
It was a lot like love. Gave you a good buzz - got the blood pumping (metaphorically speaking, from his point of view) - dragging you down having a nice time of it... until you woke up to the harsh reality of day, flat on your back with a beaut of a headache only realising part of you has been burning because it's presently going up in flames.
And that was always the least of his problems.
Tonight was the wrong combination of beer and cigarettes - he could sense it - and he knew he'd pushed it too much adding a bottle of Jack Daniels he didn't even remember buying; now the little voices in his head wouldn't stop.
At first they were simply disembodied complaints that he heard but ignored. He had, in actuality, been sitting there for the past hour listening to them murmur incontinent noise, noting every now and again when he could distinguish the same discreet personalities. Because he knew them all - from his past to the present: the see-saw of Dru's voice whenever she was a conduit for unnatural excitement; the dry bone rattle of vampires he should have killed on the spot but had thought the better of (if only for two seconds); Slayers long dead and buried with their blood on his lips; Buffy's breathy moans; that great poof screaming. Those last two made him smile the most.
Normally they'd drift off a pace and he'd either sober up, or fall asleep and dream but they were growing - marshalling together - becoming a palpable presence within the room (and a palpable pain in the ass!). Whoever said life was a bitch only got it half right - death rode roughshod over every last puissant one of them. He knew it was only a matter of time before the damned things grew forms and faces, fucking a., identities even.
It had happened before, sure - once or twice; after the sixties, for an interim of twenty years or so, he'd had to be careful who he let himself and Dru bite down on - not that it affected her temperament much - but it was no fun realising he was hanging outdoors waiting for the sun to come up because the dawn brought out new colours in her cheeks. Still, the colours he was seeing now - in the crypt - looked about right to be normal. He stared suspiciously at the empty bottle of blood he'd consumed - it looked innocent enough - god knew he'd paid enough for it to be human (and it hadn't been). But he couldn't help wondering - and it was when he started wondering that history had a tendency to repeat itself.
It started with spots before his eyes - tiny dark and light spots - that's how they always manifested. Growing like shadows (though he could never catch the process in it's entirety) they would swiftly become figures moving at the periphery of his vision. Faint at first but slowly coalescing into three-dimensional shapes by coming into the light and out of the shadows; or, in this case, one shape; one three-dimensional figure. She looked like a ghost and
God knew he wasn't in the mood for that haunting crap.
The scorn on her face alone made him laugh without trying too hard - a high, dry whinny of a laugh that he'd only make when he knew he was drunk and alone, with no one to question his sanity. He marvelled that he could still get this wasted because she wasn't really there. No scent. The tailored shoes didn't disturb the dust either; and at that exact moment a low-flying moth had decided to fly through her coiffed mane as if willing to demonstrate his point.
Anyways, if she had been real he would have been watching the door - and his back.
"Anyone ever tell you, Spike, that you laugh like an ass?"
Darla was always fearless enough to be that haughty - or was it just the presumption on her part that she really would live forever? She never could get over acting like royalty; Spike always fancied it was a by-product of her lowly beginnings.
Rubbing his chin with a free hand, he decided not to let the insult pass:
"And you, luv, have a face like the back-end of one. Looks like I got the better deal." Definitely no love lost down the centuries. Besides he could afford to be flippant - he didn't anticipate anyone springing to her defence.
"Now, now, William, that's no way to talk to a lady."
Which would, of course, be his first mistake.
It's the smile. An ancient smile, hanging there for a moment in the shadows all Cheshire Cat-like. (No doubt, with this unscheduled séance, the evening could always get worse - but with him here not by much.) That smile - in its time - had meant indiscriminate death to all - man, woman, child and livestock.
In that day, Angelus had grown his hair longer - claiming it made him less aggressive and more thoughtful of the kill. Which was all the flowery talk Spike could take, before coming to the conclusion that - as had been his first impression - Angelus was a bloody nancy and always would be. He'd about said as much, as Angelus simply glared. The bastard had never staked him because Dru had given him cow eyes, and so much gibberish that she'd threatened to foam at the mouth. It was about the same time that Angelus had pulled her rail-like body towards him and smiled maliciously - the atmosphere of threat pervasive - because owning Dru was all the torture he'd ever needed against Spike.
Even now, just looking at the wigged and starched up phantasm made Spike's stomach quaver as all the injustices along the decades start racking up like the revenge stripes on a bloody torso. He was there - smiling - leaning complacently against the far crypt wall, like a hundred and fifty years had just evaporated (and Spike wasn't sure if Angelus had been indistinguishable from the shadows and cobwebs there and been overlooked, or whether he simply hadn't been there a minute ago).
"And since when did that bitch qualify?" Spike had not forgotten that, quantitatively, he was talking to nothing - but it was his damned crypt and loud and profane was how he liked it. (So much for Woodstock, though, sodding hippies; this, he decided, was a trip of an altogether different kind and likewise he flickered between wary and annoyed.)
Darla and Angelus came about him in opposing arcs, meeting in the middle. They looked, perfectly, for all the world as if they'd stepped out of the 19th Century and into his own personal hell - as always with that invincible air of two who brought about tragedy without experiencing it.
Not quite yet impatient Spike waited for some cue as to their relevance here - he even waited to nod off - but Darla was in her element:
"When, I should think, I inadvertently brought you (and your bastard lineage) into this world."
Spike settled his back firmly against the frazzled and chewed up armchair that he had found and dragged from a dumpster, before considering how to reply to this bizarre intrusion. In the silence, the beads sewn onto Darla's dress rattled as she moved against Angelus, the corset stiff and tight at the waist, breasts almost cupped by his amorous hands.
"Yeah. Thanks." Licking his lips he tasted beer: "So, not dead yet? What's holding Angelus up this time? Conscience? Old age? Cheerleader?"
Now that Angelus had her in an embrace that pleased her, Darla smiled. She opened the ornate fan that had been hanging from her wrist - seething but never once out of her domain.
"Maybe deep down he loves me far too much to kill me."
This far from satisfied Spike: "Yeah, well maybe he sprained his arm from doing it so hard the last time. Or probably figured you'd fall over and land on something sharp and woody. Save him the bother."
Glad he'd made his point, Spike reached down behind himself, found a still-full can of beer and lifted it to his lips.
"Yet each man kills the thing he loves..."
Only to draw it away again. This was a new voice. Another bloody new voice.
The voice didn't slow down either: "Some do it with a bitter look / Some with a flattering word / The coward does it with a kiss / The brave man with a sword."
Ending, Penn placed his greatest emphasis on the word 'sword', while casting his most penetrating look far and long enough to land on Spike with significant gravity.
He too, had come from an ill-lit corner of the room, as pinched and Puritan as ever - again reminding Spike that nothing in the world could ever convince him that Angelus didn't have a thing for turning religious twits; no doubt to fly in the face of the God he claimed didn't exist.
Penn's soft hands indicated his sire, Angelus, across the room.
"He let a human kill me you know. Tough, little, Angelino police thing." Then he added, as if it were critically important: "Blonde," and gestured to the air as if it were that absurd. "He knew it's name and everything."
Christ, and wasn't that hot gossip. Not. "I don't recall him ever loving you, mate." Surly now, the beer was fast souring in Spike's mouth.
"Perhaps not," Penn admitted. "Perhaps if he had been a better father to all of us... " He made another broad gesture at the company of three crowding Spike's crypt before seeming to cut whatever he was thinking short. "I waited; I searched for him like he showed me. But to learn to care - it always ends in ashes."
What the bloody hell was he wittering about? But then, staking Penn was exactly the sort of thing the newly conscienced Angelus would do.
"Teach you to stay out of circulation. Should have heard he'd got himself a," Spike pronounced the word scornfully, "'soul'."
Penn seemed to abstractly appreciate this fact for a moment - it actually made him pause - for he had not yet stopped in his moving around the crypt since his materialisation. Even now, he appeared to be rubbing the dust from the sarcophagi to read their inscriptions - and Spike watched him, knowing he could remove nothing, see nothing.
"Is that what he called it?" Penn pondered; Darla (who continued to fan herself) whispered something to Angelus, who smirked, still octopus-arming her and fast beginning to irritate Spike, merely by lodging his despicable presence at all.
Penn went on (and on and on and bloody on, thought Spike): "We don't change, William. We can't. We're not like people; we stay the same."
"It's Spike, for chrissakes. And what's it to you? Why don't you all bugger off back where you came from and leave a demon to get drunk in peace?"
"Peace, luv?" Drusilla's sing-song was unmistakable, " Is that what you want?"
Dear God, not her.
She was veiled in white but dressed in a red dress, the one she had worn for the Judge's little coming out party, back when life in Sunnydale could have still been considered a loud, boisterous party that hadn't yet gotten out of hand.
Seeing her again, dressed like that, Spike was almost reminded of a simpler time between them and had to bite down on the entire thing before it lulled him into the wrong kind of nostalgia.
"Oh bloody hell! What do you want?" He launched the words with a thousand venoms.
"Peace. We all want peace, bro," Spike had to turn around to see that one coming. Typical. A new incarnation of Angelus - in addition to the one already standing beside Darla - sidled up to Dru, keeping his tone conversational but contemptuous, and as had all the ghosts in the room, aiming his barbs at Spike. "Well that and a small farm in Idaho."
Leather panted, open shirted, with a wide belt and heavy buckle, Spike observed that this Angelus was from the same era as Drusilla: Sunnydale 1997. The same year the good but daft Angel had lost his soul by bedding the Slayer. As he spoke his attention sauntered a fine line between Drusilla standing beside him and Spike sitting before him: "But then, Dru here never could stand for peace. She wasn't made that way."
Drusilla widened her already significantly wide eyes and shimmied, at an invisible dance with the universe.
"Makes all of the voices in my head roar," she said.
Spike didn't bother to ask where they'd come from and why - it was already starting to become too familiar - his suspicions however, were starting to grow. Looking from one Angelus to the other he asked:
"How many of you are there?"
The short-haired Angelus swayed along with Drusilla's dance, behind her now (and comfortably so by the expression of rapture on her face).
"Lots," he replied. "And each one? Better than you."
Offended, Spike's retort was immediate: "If you want to think so. Didn't think you got out from under the Slayer's thumb that much."
This one seemed to smack home, and pertinently, as if to gain ground, Angelus ran a thumb up the inside edge of Drusilla's thigh just stopping shy of her pubis, making her trill: "Oooh, Angel."
Fondling her now Angelus, snarled in that peculiar, petulant way he had - without once raising his voice:
"I did and I have. Strange place to be. Though you'd know that since I hear you live there now." Forgetting Spike for a moment he ran his thumb up from Dru's sternum, under her collarbone, up her neck and to the corner of her mouth teasing her - which Dru openly enjoyed so that her voice quivered and sang:
"Sticks and stones..."
Without hesitation, Spike threw the still reasonably full beer can he'd been holding at them. It passed through both harmlessly.
Angelus picking up Dru's comment, continued: "...Will break my bones. But beer cans? Can't hurt if I'm not really here." Pulling Dru to him roughly, she emitted a sharp and savage bark. "Still Spike, you never were the boy genius. Can't figure out how to satisfy Dru. Can't figure out how to get that chip out of your head. Can't figure out how to kill The Slayer..."
"At least I didn't have Little Miss Perky sending me to hell." Spike pointed out.
"Maybe not. But I'm all better now. And while we're at it I didn't have to use spells for her to put out for me. She did it for me once; she'd do it again. Doesn't matter how far away I go."
"Aren't you a real love 'em and leave 'em hero." Now sufficiently bored of Angelus' baiting Spike crossed his arms and stared him down while his grand-sire, unruffled, kept going.
"And I, Spike, am all in one piece. Given the right circumstances, I can come around. You on the other hand are just..."
"Around The Slayer, like, all the time? And when you're not she's all I hear you talk about." Harmony's childish, nagging shriek erupted into the un-ended sentence, making Spike nod to himself.
After all it made perfect sense that she'd be here if the idea behind this entire gathering was - indeed as he suspected - some kind of chip-induced psychological torture: "Should have known you'd turn up as some point. Going to preach at me now?"
Harmony's surprisingly restrained ensemble still sparkled like glitter around her lack of cleavage in the low crypt lights, and even in his imagination she still reeked of that exasperating combination of desperation and optimism.
"I don't preach. I say what's on my mind-"
"Yeah, sure. Whatever half of a mind you have, luv."
Her face seemed to clench as if the remark hurt. He rolled his eyes.
"Hey! Okay, that should hurt but... it doesn't anymore because I'm a new woman and I don't need you in my life anymore." She said not too convincingly.
"Really, Spike," The short-haired Angelus said, silently sizing Harmony up. "You let this one get away?"
"I staked her," Spike said casually as if the explaining it over and over again to a younger, retarded cousin was finally trying his patience. "Bloody bint wouldn't stay dead. You know how it is."
Harmony nothing short of squeaked: "Hey! I'm standing right here! Anyways," (She flicked her hair off of her shoulder indignantly.) "He didn't have to say 'I rather crawl after The Slayer because I'd get off on her staking me'- I know how to take a hint."
Drusilla chimed in, her voice rising but her expression remote as if receiving the news from a far-flung satellite: "She's floating. All around your head. Like vultures."
"Yep, she'll have your bones soon enough."
The last comment marked the introduction of yet another new arrival, looking taller than he was cheekbones brutally pronounced with a tight non-committal resignation of the mouth and his demon visage, his expression was somewhere between predatory glee and utter disgust.
"So, what are you? The ghost of me?" Spike asked, eyeing what he could only refer to as the himself. The himself of three years past - the rebel before the cause.
"The ghost of what you used to be." It said, grinding out a cigarette under its heel and losing it's game face. "You know, I used to wonder how this sap," (he indicating the short-haired Angelus who was still occupied with melding his and Drusilla's forms into one undulating body) "got so whipped. Trailing around after her like a big, girl's blouse. But I suppose now I know... " He, it, him, paused and turned to Angelus: "It's the blood isn't it?"
Drusilla, who had now managed to curve around Angelus and hang about his neck like a sable fur looked, for the first time with interest at the version of him currently taking the floor. As did Angelus to took up his sentiment and ran with it:
"Without fresh, hot human blood you can't quite wash the 'feeling' away." (Penn, across the room playing with an etching of a cross, nodded absently as if in agreement; Harmony, however, rolled her eyes, crossing her arms curtly over her chest. The Elizabethan Darla and Angelus seemed oblivious to the comment, lost in their own private whisperings.) Angelus continued, obviously warming to his subject: "It lingers and festers. Eats away at you from the inside. Leaving you an empty, violated shell. Hollow. Nothing left to fill it with but..."
"Love."
It was her.
"Buffy." Spike said brightening. She looked almost exactly the same as the last time he'd seen her that evening except for a change of top. Relieved that the evening was at last making it's turn for the better, Spike watched her from where she stood at the door of the crypt, afraid to take his eyes off her.
Her eyes found him easily, as they always did despite the mood of the crypt that could best be described as uplifting as mud.
Suddenly she spilled through the door walking towards him with a single-mindedness of purpose, as every ghost figure in the room shifted to admit her, like the parting of the Red Sea. At this, Spike's expectancy piqued. She was the bride coming up the aisle, hair bouncing vitally with every step - it was the way everyone stopped talking, moving and thinking to watch her. When she reached him, Spike stood up with effort, as if mesmerised merely by her walking. (Which she did well.) Looking up at him she smiled - one that he unhesitatingly, if guiltily, returned before she hauled off and slapped him.
His ears rang, vision blurring for a moment.
"Ow! What the bloody hell-"
She suddenly launched on a tirade, which he admitted he should have seen coming: "Do you love me, Spike? Do you?"
His response was pitiful, even to his ears. "You know I do."
She considered this for a moment as if his heart-felt distress meant something: "Well I don't. Love. You. I can't."
He felt himself go down in flames but held it away from his expression, hoping to salvage some face in the eyes of the ghosts still crowding the room and watching the scene play out. His words however, swelled with the raw bitterness he obviously felt: "Yeah, yeah luv, because you're a heartless, stuffy bitch? Or 'because I'm evil'? Ever ask yourself why I'm evil? Because I've killed your kind? Well here's a news flash. I'm a vampire. It's what I do. Ever hear war break out because a lion decided to nibble on a zebra?"
Visible disgust hardened Buffy's features making him consider for a moment just how far out of her arm's reach he was.
"You don't know what real love is," she said not holding back.
He sat back down on the arm of the chair: "What you say. Last time I looked you liked the hands-on demonstration." He could have killed for a smoke at that moment but his jacket was resting on a sarcophagus across the room. Busy concentrating on that rather than listening to Buffy's next verbal volley, he missed its significance until a full sentence later.
"That 'thing' is not me. If it was, you know you could never lay a hand on me."
He ran his hand absently over his back pockets. Yep, the smokes were in the jacket. "Then what is it, pet? A figment of my chipped imagination."
Buffy held up her hands in mock hysteria. "Yikes, we have a winner."
How very close to hating her and wanting her was he at that moment?
Harmony, checking out Buffy and her clothes from behind, took a moment to split her formidable focus between that and filing her nails.
"Yeesh, talk about scraping the bottom of the barrel."
Buffy's head snapped around at the same moment he caught Harmony with his glare aiming it at her like a sniper: "Shut up!" They both said simultaneously.
Harmony wisely withered back with a derisive sneer.
"Buffy. You know I love you. You're in my blood. You are my blood. Do you really think for one second I want to be like this?"
The cruelty that she couldn't be the real one - the real Buffy - dawned on him but the doors or his emotional dam were already far too wide open to clam up now. Besides, confession in this increasingly bizarre theatre of the mind would probably be good for his considerable lack of soul.
Drusilla's voice drifted over to him, though he never once took his eyes off Buffy.
"The Jack of Hearts stole some tarts. The Queen of Spades said 'off with his head!'"
Buffy glancing back at this apparition, as if noticing it for the first time: "Looks like your ex-honey has the right idea."
To which Dru commented innocently. "Well...he did try to kill me."
A twinge of a smile appeared on Buffy's lips despite herself. "Maybe she's not so mad after all."
"And me!" Spike wondered when Harmony would ever learn the value of silence. Never, he realised, as she continued to squawk, as incensed as a girl like her could pretend to be. "He tried to kill me!" She pointed at her chest as if the emphasize.
"You're not insane, Harmony," Buffy drawled acidly. "You're just a moron."
Harmony's eyes snapped to Spike as if expecting an extreme act of defence on his part. "Are you just going to let her talk to me like that?"
Off of Spike's silence, the short-haired Angelus tried not to laugh: "Guess so," he said.
Hackles rising now, and still slightly drunk, something in Spike erupted: "SHUT UP! The lot of you."
Both Angelus' drew back mockingly, the Darla by one raising an unimpressed eyebrow but saying nothing; Penn remained in his own corner but brought his attention back to the group; while Drusilla simply giggled.
The ghost of him - who was still there - did what he, himself, had been longing to do: pulled out a long, unfiltered cigarette, and lit it, taking a lungful before blowing smoke into the air above his head:
"You know, it's a wonder your 'stones' haven't retracted right back up into your body."
Drusilla, who had been paying him a bit more than the scant attention she had been paying everyone else, stared intensely at him before purring: "Mmm. He's been a bad, bad boy."
The version of himself took this as a hint and stalked over to both her and Angelus. "Hasn't he just."
Drusilla said nothing but draped her free arm around him, making he, her and Angelus once again the triumvirate of old.
Angelus on the opposite side of this triangle looked at Spike - the real one - as if weighing up the pros and cons of some private deduction: "Well he's tried to be but I really don't think he's got it in him anymore."
"Any real vampire would have killed with or without a chip. Even if it drove him mad." Darla remarked from her considerable pause of adding anything but antique glamour to the group consensus.
Always irked by her queenly way of appraising things from the height of a ten-foot mule, Spike could feel himself responding before he knew what his words would be.
"Didn't see your Angelus doing that."
"Spike, dear boy, that's why I got rid of him."
Buffy watched Darla and Angelus for a moment over her shoulder before turning back to him: "Kind of makes you think, doesn't it."
"About what?" He was miserable now. The entire room had a bounty out on his utter humiliation - not that he couldn't stand such an onslaught ordinarily but the reasoning behind it and the collusion of what must have been his own wretched psyche in these mirages that wouldn't fade, had left him bereft of any plausible explanation other that he must hate himself deeply and on a fundamental level - very, very much.
"About Willow," Buffy stated matter-of-factly, either oblivious to or ignoring the fact that she had completely changed tack. "This is kind of her fault isn't it? I mean, you don't think grabbing her and trying to kill her twice didn't tick her off just a little?"
He wasn't expecting this. "What?"
"And I'm supposed to be the one with no brains," Harmony snipped (occasioning a hearty: "Shut up!" from everyone in the room).
"Who cast that spell that made you fall for me in the first place?" Buffy kept up, circling him now.
"Will - ow." It actually hurt to make the mental leap.
Buffy went on: "And who sent you up to that tower to fail?"
"Willow."
"And repaired the robot of me though you hated it?"
Catching the skewed but not illogical logic he felt his hands closing into fists, his lips drawing back from his teeth, half-snarl: "The little witch!"
"And who resurrected a demon with my face, body and memories - even up to the heaven part, which - even I've gotta say - is nothing short of inspired."
Penn virtually floated at this suggestion: "Oh, heaven. You should always mention heaven. Makes the Godless fear."
"Riiiight!" Buffy announced, her sarcasm beyond audible. "So who got in your head, Spike?"
Everyone in the room concluded unanimously, as if he couldn't guess for himself: "Willow."
Buffy gave the room a round about consideration, despite flickering revulsion at them all. "Guess that's a unanimous vote."
Rising unsteadily to his feet, Spike tried to be sure of what he was hearing. "All right, so you're saying that Red is making me do this."
"Perhaps we should write it down for him," Darla said, echoing Buffy's earlier sarcasm.
"The witch girl hurt my daddy." Drusilla put in sounding genuinely saddened.
"She gave me back my soul."
It took less than a second for Spike to register that this could only mean a new apparition - yet another incarnation of Angelus - had entered the playing field. And the bloody wankerfied version at that. He was at the crypt door as Buffy had been, and likewise strode to where Spike and Buffy had come to rest.
There it was: the swishing black coat and the over-abundance of hair gel that Spike had spent so much time lampooning on his one failed escapade to L.A. two years ago.
"Angel," Buffy said softly, unable to keep the infatuation out of her voice.
"Buffy." Angel replied, looking down at her the way had when, as Spike recalled, he'd had to give them the speech about love being between them until it killed them. That they were idiots then, and idiots now, did nothing to dispel his sense of an overwhelming and abounding irony.
Aggravated, he rolled his eyes (unconsciously reaching for again for a cigarette): "Oh not this sodding crap again."
"What's the matter Spike? Truth starting to hurt?" Angel said, turning his fully soulled gaze on Spike.
Emptied of any will to adequately argue or resist Spike threw up his hands and threw his full weight back into the arm chair. He sensed his own defeat but he really couldn't be driven to care:
"I don't need a soul. None of this is real."
The vision of himself, who was now standing by himself having wandered towards the door, pinioned him with a comprehending look: "At last, something we agree on. Might be hope for you yet."
And as if that were the final word everyone - Buffy, Angel, Angelus, Penn, Harmony and the others - disappeared and he was left staring at the walls. Staring into nothing.
In the middle of the room something fluttered and his gaze fell upon it, grateful for the distraction. It was a rose - one from the Summer's house - crushed almost out of recognition from several footfalls. Moving suddenly, he crouched to pick it up, already knowing it couldn't, shouldn't be real. Only one petal had survived the trampling.
Slowly, as if moved by its tragedy he removed the last petal, watching it and the flower fade from his hands.
"She loves me not."
-.-.-.-
Outside, squatting back-to-wall behind the crypt - nearly covered by the shadows there - Amy tried to stand. She had lost all feeling in her legs from crouching for so long. Her hair was now limp and stringy with sweat, and she shivered, covered in a film of the same leeching as it did, the warmth from her body. Her clothes clinged to her skin.
Ungainly, she struggled to her feet, like a newborn foal, apt to fall over again. She didn't but finally, she opened her eyes - both black, shining in the dark like polished onyx.
Coming to herself and her surroundings, she slowly dared to smile.
-fin-