CrossingShadowRiver 24 by dutchbuffy2305
Rating: R
Timeline: About ten years after season 5 of AtS; sequel of sorts to Crossing into UnchippedTerritory
Author's note: Thanks to my dear betas, ayinhara & mommanerd, and idigress for the British slang.
Author's website: http:home.planet.nl/dutchbuffy2305
Feedback: Yes, please, to
Spike has many errands and very small time windows to accomplish them in, that is to say, between feeds if possible. Buffy doesn't like being left alone and he doesn't like to leave her. Things are both fragile and on the verge of being wonderful again between them, and he wants to enjoy every possible second with Phoenix. Human lives flit by like calendar pages in a forties movie, faster than you can possible track, and he knows he'll be standing over his son's grave in a mere eighty years or so. No time to lose.
Fatherhood is an experience the like of which he's never imagined. The love he holds for Phoenix is fierce and possessive and holds him in a ceaseless grip he's never known, not even in the early years with Buffy. It's a mixture of boundless joy and helpless terror, stretching his feelings between these poles like spider silk, gorgeous and complex in the right light, but ephemeral and easy to disperse with one gust of wind. He's very careful not to let any of this heart-crunching translate to his muscles. The grip he has on the baby is firm, but tender enough to hold a blown egg.
He paces up and down, holding the hot sleeping body of his small son against his shoulder. Every now and then, he stops his tuneless humming to check if Phoenix is asleep already, but every time there's still a glitter of blue between the dark lashes. Buffy's long since fallen into the sleep of the exhausted, and he registers the sleepy rhythms of her body as the background music to which he paces. Finally, he senses an infinitesimal slackening in the tiny limbs and he very gently puts the sleeping baby down on the big bed, next to Buffy, safely buffered by a pillow although Phoenix is nowhere near capable of rolling himself over yet. His most beloved people in all the world lie there together, his Slayer's smooth golden skin next to the crumpled little face of his son.
He takes a last lingering look and slips away silently. Out of here, now. There's a still a pit of roiling bitter emotion in his belly, and this fettered existence of feeds and sleep hasn't given him a chance to work off any of it. He needs an outlet, and he doesn't allow himself to vent any of it on Buffy, although he senses she might welcome it. Running around the block thirty times very fast, or physically exhausting himself hitting the punching bag in their small training room doesn't do it for him. It needs to be violence. So that makes the choice of which duty to perform first easy.
Therefore, errand the first: Find bloody Bert and bash his bloody face in. Two-faced bastard, scrapping and drinking with him like a proper mate, and then spiking his bloody drink so Willow could work her evil stuff with him out of the way. It's almost flattering in a twisted way, to think he was considered dangerous enough to need to be eliminated.
Spike's traversing tunnels he's only seen once, when he was tearing though them in a blind funk of anger and grief. Silly sod he'd been then. Couldn't have known fate would have worse things in store for him. Not just the thought of his beloved Slayer shagging another version of him to get pregnant with his child, but actually having to witness the whole terrible spectacle. He almost stuffs the memory back into its dank hiding place, but he changes his mind. He needs it at hand, to call up the anger so he can disperse it. Getting mad is no longer a habit, which, he supposes, says something positive about him and Buffy together. Let's hope he'll be able to feel happiness at that thought again.
Ah. He turns a corner and suddenly he hears the unmistakable sound of an English pub, a mixture of darts hitting boards, beer being drawn with exquisite slowness, talking and tinny music. Spike sidles up the door and tries to get a view of the interior without actually entering the pub or giving himself away. It's too dark. He gives up on stealth and enters the bar at full swagger, coat flapping about his ankles.
He walks straight up to the bar, nods to the buxom barmaid and turns around, leaning on his elbows. The sea of plush red-patterned carpeting and flowered upholstery is mercifully obscured by the tightly packed mass of demons, all kinds and all shapes, none of them looking very welcoming.
"Pint of bitter, love," he tells Gertie.
There's rustling and furtive looks all around the pub. They know him. He wishes he could remember more of his interactions with the other demons during his one sojourn here, but booze and emotional turmoil have blurred the edges of his memory.
"Seen Bert around lately?" he asks Gertie, not turning his head away from the assorted customers.
Gertie hesitates. She continues washing a beer glass, but so slowly that Spike knows she's contemplating his question. "What you wanna see him about, then?"
"Got a score to settle with him. If he was a proper bloke he'd own up to it and meet me fair and square," Spike says.
That is all nonsense of course. No such thing as a demon code of honor, but it won't hurt to try.
Gertie jerks her head. "He's out back, hiding his sorry self from you."
Spike's eyebrows rise but he nods at her and enters the door she indicates. It's a little storeroom, kegs of beer, jars of pickles and condiments. Bert is sitting on one of the kegs, hunched over miserably, pulling on the last half inch of a hand-rolled cigarette.
"Fuck, Spi-!"
He hasn't time to get Spike's full name out before Spike hits him with his balled fist, fuelled by weeks of pent up anger and guilt.
Bert hits a row of shelves with an impressive hollow bang, spread-eagled in an attempt to cushion the impact. Tins and jars clatter to the floor, ringing and shattering with a chaotic salvo of impact sounds.
"Not 'ere, not 'ere," Bert gasps. "Take it outside, willya, Gert'll kill me if we ruin anymore of her storage!"
"I will kill you," Spike says, but he allows Bert to pick himself up and stumble outside through a wooden door, exiting in a tunnel that leads directly onto a railway line.
Once outside Bert regains some spine and starts defending himself with enough vigor that Spike can really get into it, throwing himself into the punching and kicking, allowing himself to let go of the tight leash he's been keeping himself on.
"Fucking bastard, ratting me out to the fucking Council? Are you out of your mind, dealing with humans? There's never anything good comes of that and you oughta know it, wide boy like you, not like you haven't been around for a coupla centuries, you fucking arsehole! Fucking insane witch nearly killed me and my woman and my spawn. You fucking deserve to die in screaming misery for that, fuckface!"
"Sorry 'bout the spawn, Spike," Bert gasps and hits Spike in the bollocks with a vicious swipe of his prehensile tail. "Weren't nothing personal. She paid good money, didn't know you. What would you have done, eh?"
"I don't rat on people, you slimy tosser, I make my own mischief if I want to! Fucking minion, that's what you are, you're not even demon enough to do your own evil!"
"Unh, Spike, hng!"
Spike's methodically hitting Bert in his breath sacs, preventing him from answering. He lets off and kicks him hard below the spine, breaking his tail, and Bert hollers in pain. He manages to twist away and snaps Spike's wrist, so that now they're both temporarily handicapped.
"Don't you go yammerin' 'bout your missus, Spike! Followed you round when you was drugged up. Saw you get picked up by that nice bit of skirt you've got going on the side, didn't I? Making cow eyes all over you, she was. I'm a one woman man, meself. I don't hold with all that fucking around you vampires do. Bleeding unnatural, but yeah, you can't get your wives with spawn, can you? Making offspring with humans, it's disgusting. Not even real demons, you lot are!"
Spike roars in anger and tries to wrench off Bert's head. "Mind your own business, you braindead dicksplat!"
He changes his mind and bashes Bert's head against the tunnel wall, the blue ichor splattering the wall in a bright glowing arc. "Shut up about my woman! She's my one and only and you got no business talking about them!"
"Them? What them? There's just one you said!" Bert says with glee and spits out a few teeth.
"Yeah, and they're both mine, and you keep your mouth shut about them! I don't go about badmouthing your wife, do I?"
"Sorry mate," Bert says and cracks Spike's head back with a massive headbut.
Spike ends up with his head inches away from a train rushing by. The flickering illumination from the train's windows shows Bert trying to pick himself up from the tunnel floor, only to be kicked down by another demon, a big hulking black fellow with spines all over. Where's he come from all of a sudden? The black guy's joined by three others like him and they start kicking Bert, their strange crested heads bobbing up and down on the rhythm of their kicking.
Spike rolls over and storms the nearest by rushing into him and bowling him over by sheer speed. "Hands off my mate! I'm the one who's beating him up, you sorry lot of spineless wankers! Hands off of Bert!"
He grabs a few spines, cutting his hands on their filed edges, and breaks them off. The demon howls and while the biting fluid seeping from the cuts burns into Spike, he gets a better grip on the spiny horns jutting out from the guy's head in place of ears and yanks hard. The whole head comes off and Spike howls in victory and in pain from his wrist. Nothing he hasn't felt before. Pain is better than remorse.
"Take that and get your bleeding hands off my mate!"
Bert's regained his footing and is busy killing demon number two. Spike takes on the other pair. His hands are slashed to ribbons from the sharp spines, and his broken wrist isn't working too well either. He keeps the demons occupied until Bert is done with his designated opponent and then they take on one each. The colors in the dimly lit tunnel seem twice as their normal brightness to Spike, black and red of double intensity, enhanced by danger and violence, spiced by pain. It's like lancing a boil, a lot of unspeakably nasty stuff comes out, but it's such a relief when it's over, pus or no.
Spike breaks his black demon in two and leans against the wall with his good hand, panting and giddy. Bert joins him, using his shoulders, as both his hands are flapping down uselessly and dripping ichor.
"Rain check, Spike? Don't feel I can put in the sparkle like before," Bert gasps.
He's breathing moistly, punctured breath sac, Spike guesses, and he lisps more than before, due to the missing dozen or so needle teeth.
"Let's make Gertie happy and drink ourselves utterly rat-arsed," Spike says, and closes his eyes for a moment, to see where the sudden colors in front of him are coming from. Oops. Hit on the head and the eyes, he supposes.
"First one's on me," Bert says as they limp back to the pub through the trashed storeroom.
Gertie's waiting fro them, arms crossed over her massive bosoms. "Right, lads, and who's going to pay for my pickled thumbs and the imported Indonesian livers you ruined? Well?"
"We will, Gert," Bert says meekly. "Pint of your best for me and my mate, love."
"Men!" Gertie sniffs a huge sniff, making her triple row of massive boobage quiver alarmingly.
Spike buries his stinging, cut lips into the thick stiff collar of foam Gert has tapped for them. "Aaah. Does a man good, it does. Scrapping, killing, getting pissed. What more could a fellow want?"
Bert nudges him knowingly. "Good shag would be nice, eh? Stagger back to the missus, get her egg sac up your sperm channel?"
Spike imagines this for a few disturbing, yet interesting moments. "It's a thought, mate. A really good thought, if you change the bits around a little."
Bert belches comfortably. "There's nothing a woman won't forgive you if you give her a good shag, mate. And you lucky bastard, you have to do two make-up bonks. It's a pity you're built the wrong way around to have 'em both at once, innit? Having two egg sacs up your thing, that's a sensation you'll never forget."
Spike grins. "I'll mention it to Buffy. No, on second thought, I won't."
He pushes away the unruly thought of having himself and another dimensional Spike doing Buffy both at once. He should have thought of that ten years ago, he reckons. Although, if there are more than two Taras, god knows how many Spikes there could be, scattered over the dimensions. It's not a good thought after all. No more dimension travel for Buffy. She's his and only his.
Bert keeps nudging and winking. "Buffy, eh? What's the other one called? The dark haired one with the lovely set of jugs?"
Spike is getting annoyed now. "Stop about Dawn, willya? She's not my woman. She's my sister-in-law."
Bert hoots. "Naughty, wicked lad! You been doing your sister-in-law? What does the missus think about that then?"
"I'm not doing my sister in law. That was just once, and it was an accident."
Bert guffaws and elbows him in the side. From the pain that paralyzes him for a moment Spike deduces he's got at least one broken rib. "Accident, eh. You just accidental-like fell into her pussy? Good excuse. Hear that, Gert? Spike accidentally fell into his sister in-law's fanny?"
Gert puts down two more pints in front of them and gives him a derisive frown. "And now you're sorry, I reckon. Men."
Spike stares in his beer. "Well, I am. Don't know how to make it up to her. Don't want the ladies to fall out over me. Family's important. Stupidest thing I've ever done."
"Family," Bert sighs. "Only got the one brother left from our whole nest, but I know what you mean. The smell of them will always take you back to those brilliant moments in your youth, squabbling over sewer rat, up to your ears in their body odor and shit. My brother and me were the last eggs left. I helped him get his shell off, coz his beak was too short. Always had a soft spot for the silly bugger." He sighs again. "Like I said, Spike, a woman will forgive you anything if you do her good. She'll have the memory of the many egg-spurts you gave her and she'll look upon you kindly."
"Um, well, stopped halfway, I suppose. Came to my senses and sent her off."
Bert stares at him as if he's growing horns. "You are a daft one, mate, make no mistake. Didn't finish the job properly? You're right, you silly sod, she will have your guts for garters."
Spike's confused. "What? Because I saved the both of us from having even more painful memories?"
Gert shakes her head, and her row of bosoms. "Spike, lad, you know bugger all about women, that's for sure. You have to go back to her and make her realize you're sorry."
Spike frowns. "Of course I will. Was planning to all along. Say I'm sorry, give her flowers, and hope she won't hold it against Buffy."
"No Spike, you have to make her feel you're sorry." Gert winks. "Know what I mean?"
Spike feels his ears glow and an embarrassing mix of emotions does the rounds in his body. He's not blushing, is he? Vampires don't blush. "Wouldn't that make it worse? What would Buffy say?"
"Don't tell the missus about it, you great galumphing idiot," Bert says. "She doesn't have to know how you two made up, right?"
Spike's had enough of this conversation and orders another round. "Say, Bert, what do you do for fun around here?"
Bert's face goes green with mischief. "Heh. You know what? You put me in mind of an old game us kids used to play with the trains. Drink up and come along."
"Wait, I need a bottle," Spike says.
Gert gets him a JD. "Shall I put it on your tab, Spike?"
Spike tries to cover his surprise. She thinks he'll be back, doesn't she? It's nice to feel that he could have had his friendly local right here.
"Sorry, Gert," he says regretfully. "Gonna go back to Florence. The missus doesn't much like it here."
"Too bad, Spike. Look up a taverna called the Spiny Prick in Siena, if you're out that way. About three hundred feet below the big church. Cousin of mine runs it."
"I will, thanks, Gert."
"What this game, then?" Spike asks, as Bert and he amble through the tunnels, sharing the JD between them. He's feeling pleasantly buzzed from the booze and leftover adrenaline, as well as the low sizzling pain in his wounds. A nice meal wouldn't go amiss, though, make him heal quicker.
Bert grins widely and takes a hefty slug from the bottle, clasped between his wrists because his hands are useless. "I'll show you. We wait for a train to slow down here and jump on, see? Work our way around to the windows. Don't forget to put on your real face or it won't work. And get off when I give the signal, coz the tunnel gets really narrow after a bit."
"I know," Spike says. "I've ridden the tube once or twice, you know."
"Really?" Bert says wistfully. "I'd like do that once. What's it like?"
Spike shrugs. "Just…the tube. Filthy, noisy and full of people. You never got on a train in all the time you've lived here?"
"Nah," Bert says. "That's for humans."
A fast train flashes by, already slowing down for the curve, and Bert yells to Spike. "This one. Get on the back!"
Spike jumps and scrabbles for a handhold on the dirty butt end of the old carriage. Bert is hanging by his tail and fingernails, face scrunched up from the pain, and jerks his head to the side. "To the windows! Scare the passengers!"
The train sways and lurches, coming perilously close to mysterious bundles of power lines on the tunnel wall, so thickly encrusted with grime that they look to be as old as the tunnels themselves. The wheels shriek with abandon at every possible opportunity and Spike feels drugged by the rhythmic thumping and shaking the carriage does.
It is fun. They shove their scary bleeding demon faces against the carriage windows and growl. The passengers react with gratifying terror, screaming and pointing and stumbling away from them. It's pretty juvenile, Spike has to agree with that, but it suits his mood perfectly. Playing at being a feckless demon again for a bit, not a care in the world except where to get his next meal and his next bottle. He throws his head back and hollers into the hot smelly tube wind.
TBC