At first you weren't sure, it'd been years and both of you had changed a lot.
He was polishing the floor of the departure lobby with a sonic scrubber, a slight little man wearing thick glasses with old-fashioned gold wire frames, the beginnings of a pot belly, and a limp.
That wasn't how you remembered him, but time changes people.
You stood there in your tailored Italian suit and heels, briefcase and DataBox at your feet, watching him cleaning the floor in that huge, echoing labyrinthine half-empty building as the sonic jets and upper atmospheric shuttles landed and took off in the snow-flurried darkness.
You debated, "Should I approach him? It's been a long time." "He's never once tried to contact you or anybody else." " Maybe he doesn't want to be found." "Is there anything left to say?"
To be frank, you really didn't want to and the dithering on your part was partially due to a guilty conscience because you disliked him when he was a part of your life and maybe you were a little mean to him.
Not that he didn't deserve it at the time.
Curiosity eventually won out over bad memories.
So you approached him as he steered the oscillating cleaning machine over the slick polymer surface of the main concourse, his face blank beneath its nondescript gray uniform cap, unlit cigarette dangling negligently from the corner of his mouth.
You stood there, about two meters away, just watching him.
The grace, the unearthly feline grace that you remembered so well was gone, to be replaced with a dull earthbound limp - one foot now turned subtly inward. There were fingers missing.
But it was still him.
"Spike?"
He started and then looked at you, really looked at you, the polisher still gliding silently across the floor.
His eyes behind the thick lenses were still blue, but they were softer.
Human.
So, the rumor was true.
He'd shanshued.
Spike shook his head, as if waking from a dream and said to you in a flat voice, "It's B-Bill now." before he returned his concentration to polishing the floor.
Oh.
By the time the news of Spike getting his life back made it to the Council, your employers, he'd literally disappeared from the face of the earth. Searches had been made - his experience was unique, needed recording, archiving, interpreting.
But it was obvious that Angel's grandchild didn't want to be found, so the project was aborted until more time and resources could be devoted to it. So like a lot of things from that chaotic time, Spike had simply been backburnered and conveniently forgotten for the last decade or so.
Now he was here, in front of you, cleaning the floor of a public building in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
The deliberate silence, the hiss of the snow-carrying wind against the building, the echo of footsteps down distant corridors was all you heard, accentuated by the sound of the fleets of automated baggage carriers gliding past on fat rubber tires. His face in the shadow cast by the brim of the cap he wore went from deliberately blank to nervously puzzled, his eyes darting at you furtively; almost as if he was afraid to look at you because you might turn out to be a lie.
Finally he released the handles and the machine whispered to a stop. He stretched, hands pressed to the small of his back, joints popping. "I-is that you, W-Willow?" The voice, the accent, was the same, though there was now a slight stutter, a slight hesitation to it, almost like Gile's.
What was endearing in your mentor, was unsettling in your...whatever Spike had once been to you, but still you smiled, cautiously, and nodded.
His face brightened, started showing some life; coming a little closer to the way you remembered him."It's been a long time." you said with a nervous laugh for lack of anything else to say.
He looked around, nervously, "Is she...I-I mean, is she, with you? Here?"
You told him that Buffy was in Japan, quietly setting up a training facility for the newest crop of Slayers.
He looked disappointed, almost puzzled.
And...
...relieved?
You shifted on your high heels, feet hurting because you'd been on them all day. You wanted to sit down. You wanted to run away, you wanted to...
...all right, you really wished you hadn't approached Bill, Spike, whoever, because just seeing him reminded you of a lot of ugly things that you'd made a point of forgetting.
Most of them weren't his fault, but some of them were very much his fault.
"So, how've you b-been?" he asked eagerly as he abandoned the machine and limped over to you, one hand out.
Feeling odd, you take it.
It was calloused, warm.
Real.
Suddenly he released yours and pulled back as if aware of having crossed some forbidden line.
After that, he hovered, just outside of arm's reach, both hands jammed deep down into the pockets of his shabby gray uniform trousers, cautious, eager, happy to see you...wary. Asking all about you, your life since, well, then. Weren't those the good old days when everybody was together?
How are the others?
Do they ever mention him?
Do they even remember him?
Wasn't it great when we were all together?
Those were some days, great days!
Horrified you listened to him enthuse. Was he insane? Was he deliberately trying to get a rise out of you? He always was a master at that; how could your childhood and then adolescence on the Hellmouth have been great days? It was a slow motion nightmare/bad B-movie, complete with occasional intermissions for popcorn and potty-breaks. When you weren't terrified out of your mind, you were attending the funerals of people you loved, trusted, needed. - Jenny who was just beginning to initiate you into the Mysteries. Joyce, Buffy's mother, who was closer to you than your own, who was the first adult you intentionally came out to because you somehow knew that she'd forgive you for something that you had no control over. Tara, sweet, sweet Tara who tried so hard to teach you that grief and pain are both something to be endured and faced; not swept beneath the rug or magicked away - they'd all died stupid, unnecessary deaths, and Spike, no Bill had the gall to say "Those were some days, great days!"?
So, you stood there, watching this escapee from some of your oldest nightmares shift his weight from his bad leg to his good, good to bad, radiating anxious joy. Amazed at your own composure, you told him that you'd been doing all right, and since he'd asked, you and Kennedy were history.
("Goddess" aside, you'd been history for some time now, ever since the baby came and your own personal Slayer realized that being a mother to your daughter was more responsibility than she wanted, never mind that it was her that wanted a kid and had mercilessly nagged you to convince Xander to donate the necessary ingredients.)
But you didn't tell Bill everything, you just casually mentioned that you had a new lover and left it at that because soul or not, you never trusted him all that much.
Overhead the air churned and thundered as yet another shuttle took off, making the building shake.
You were tired, it'd been a long day, a long week, spent inspecting the data terminals for the Cleveland Hellmouth Center for the Council. You wanted to go home, you wanted to see your daughter, you missed your girlfriend. So you sat down in one of the long rows of empty seats at your flight gate, removed your shoes and began massaging them after you put your carry-on stuff on the seat next to you.
Uninvited, Bill sat down on the hard plastic seat facing yours, the polisher idle in the middle of the concourse.
He leaned forward, elbows on knees, mangled hands dangling loosely between them, face anxiously looking into yours, trying to smile.
Maybe wanting you to smile back at him?
To tell him that everything was all right?
What?
He wanted to talk.
So you let him tell you all about those missing years as you rubbed your tired feet and tried to be polite to him because you're a grown-up now and this is how grown-ups behave in public places.
He'd shanshued without warning in the middle of the night - he'd taken to keeping daylight hours because that's where all the action was.
The first thing he did with his second chance was walk straight into his own closed bathroom door that morning, breaking his nose because when he got his life back, he'd also regained his nearsightedness. He gave a nervous laugh, rubbing at the bridge of his nose, which is now crooked - "It never healed up right, never got a soddin' ch-chance." He pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose with a forefinger missing the first joint.
You couldn't help but stare a little.
For a man, he'd once had beautiful hands, well defined, with long fingers. Now the knuckles were scarred, the remaining nails black with old bruises. One of his pinkies jutted out at an odd angle as if his nose wasn't the only thing about him that had been broken and had never had a chance to heal right.
You shake your head, realizing that you'd missed some of the story - Angel had been so angry with him for beating him to the prize that he'd fled, fearing for his newly regained life, disappearing into the wilds of America.
(...how was P-p-pea...Angel, a-anyway?)
Angel's Angel.
You both smile, his sad, yours stiff.
You've never seen Spike, no Bill, sad before. This was so wrong.
After that, he'd drifted, taking odd jobs here and there because even though he was over a century old, he really didn't know how to do anything. He'd lost the unnatural strength of his condition, and his health wasn't all that great. Turns out he was a severe diabetic. But that discovery came later after he'd been a fry cook in Memphis, a shelf-stocker in East St. Louis,
...and...
...other...
...things.
He looked away, still fiddling with the unlit cigarette. Ashamed? Embarrassed?
Somehow you got the picture. Spike, no, Bill always had sticky fingers - you remembered that more than once after he'd been in your room in the dorms, and later in Buffy's house, things had always gone missing after he left: a comb, the odd tube of toothpaste, spare change, aspirin, shampoo, the remote, thumb tacks, crackers, ball point pens, matches, paper, and after Buffy died, a framed snapshot of you, Tara, Buffy, Dawn and Joyce eating ice cream at the beach on the previous 4th of July. You later found the empty frame back on the wall, with only the picture missing. Petty theft maybe wasn't the only thing he'd dabbled in. Prostitution, hustling, drugs, fraud, maybe some jail time in between his search for a place where he fit in after he got his life back wouldn't be too far fetched.
People started filtering into the waiting area and he stopped talking, eyes studying the floor between his beat-up boots, frowning slightly as if trying to figure out how best to say something.
Just to break the silence you asked him where he lived.
He looked uncomfortable about it; so not really wanting to know anyway, you didn't push.
Then he told you that at first he'd had to keep moving because he'd accumulated a lot of enemies over the years and becoming fully human again had made him extremely vulnerable. Things had slowed down the last couple of years, and he was lucky to get away with only a few fingers missing.
(You can't help but notice that his wrists where they stick out of his cuffs are scarred, long, almost surgical slices that run along the sides, near major vessels...self-inflicted? There was another old, ugly scar behind his left ear that straggled off somewhere near his Adam's apple.)
How did he get along, you asked, pulling your eyes away from the old wounds with difficulty, "Aren't you invisible? You shouldn't even be alive now!"
Bill laughed a little, and then told you that he'd been lucky - not long before Shanshuing, Wolfrum & Hart, after calling in some favors and purging nearly a century's worth of his fingerprints stored in various law agencies' databases, had provided him with forged documents that gave him a birth certificate and the right paperwork to give him an identity had anybody ever asked. - he was a U.S. citizen who had been born in England, the illegitimate child of a U.S. soldier who at the age of six had been sent to live with his father in Mississippi after his mother died of a heroin overdose in Piccadilly. The court had taken him away from his father by the age of ten for abusive neglect and he'd been shuffled through the foster-care gauntlet until he was eighteen because "Who wants a ten year old when they can have a baby to raise up as one of their own?".
He'd laughed a little semiconsciously at the word "illegitimate", which you found odd...but enough of that, he had news:
He had a kid.
A kid? The Big Bad had a kid?
A little girl, Anne.
She's eleven.
He's never met her, but he eagerly showed you her picture, a blurry one of a baby cut from a birth announcement from some now long extinct newspaper, encased in resin and worn on a chain around his neck like a St. Christopher's medal next to an old fashioned medic alert tag.
He'd met her mother at an AA meeting after the accident.
Accident?
AA?
You knew "Bill" drank, he drank a lot, but it never occurred to you that he was an alcoholic because his old strength had kept him together.
One night after getting fired from yet another job as a night shift convenience store clerk in Cleveland for being rude to one too many customers, he took his severance pay and drank it.
Then he'd sped his car straight into a bridge abutment. Splatto!
He woke up a week later in the local hospital, both legs broken, ribs cracked, right hip crushed, and slightly brain damaged, "But I g-got over it. B-best thing to happen, really, made m-me slow down and take stock." He sat there looking at you across the gap between seats with anxious eyes, eyes that were maybe trying to ask you for something. Approval? Yours?
He then took off his cap, running his fingers nervously through his now dark thinning curls, and briefly touching another old scar on his temple before putting it back on, his rapid-fire chatter continuing as he occasionally made tentative attempts to touch you. Nothing intrusive, it was almost as if he was trying to prove to himself that yes, you were real.
"I-I wanted to call you, r-really I d-did." He blushed, "B-but I d-didn't think that a-anybody would want to talk to me after.. after..." It was then that you noticed this his right eyelid sagged slightly, and that his right hand was slower than his left. So maybe some of what he was telling you was true.
After evaluation, the court ordered him into AA, an adult half-way house...and therapy. It was either that or jail. He had a lot of points on his license; this wasn't the first time he'd had an accident and he had a record. Not a big one, mind you, but enough to make the judge look at him with little or no sympathy.
(Somehow, remembering his erratic personality, you also thought there might have been a mental institution and anti-psychotics involved. You didn't bring it up because somehow you knew it would come out on its own.)
A bunch of drying out drunks and addicts was better than sitting in his room at the men's halfway house reading the want ads for jobs that he qualified for. And he'd already spent a week in the County jail for drunk and disorderly - it was something he didn't care to repeat if he could help it.
So he'd gone to the meetings held at a local mental health clinic because they were within walking distance.
Religiously.
Eventually he stood up and admitted his alcoholism and got himself a sponsor.
Things got ugly when he started to total up his life and forgot that he wasn't around the Scoobies or Angel any more. He told his sponsor and then his therapist everything.
The next thing he knew, he was being shot full of thorazine and diagnosed as a dangerously delusional paranoid schizophrenic at the nearest state-run mental hospital, where he was repeatedly told that everything that had happened to him: William, the vampirism, Dru, the Hellmouth, the Initiative, was a lie and that all he really was was some soldier's unwanted fucked-up kid all grown up with no place to go, because that's what all his records said.
He had desperately wanted to call you, Angel, anyone, just to prove to himself that he really wasn't crazy, that you, that Buffy, that everybody was real but there were no phones in the locked ward he was incarcerated in.
He'd been so lonely that he felt that if he wasn't insane already, he was heading that way fast. For all his bluster, he'd never been on his own before, not like this. There'd always been someone else, Harmony, his weird almost-family with Angel, Darla, and Dru...the Scoobies. Before that there had been his mother and a huge circle of not-friends and relatives.
He was released two years later after Drusilla crashed a group therapy session he was in, looking for her "baby" and leaving behind six dead - she'd looked right through him before walking back out the hole she'd torn in the wall, leaving him behind. His surviving therapist willingly re diagnosed him from a hopeless cause to something that could be...controlled with the right medications and released as an outpatient. Granted the real reason for his release was never given. But the bloke simply didn't want to wind up in the same locked ward as Bill, and so had made the decision that he was now in enough control of himself to move out the main facility and into a men's group home with close supervision at all times.
With a long drawn-out quivering sigh, Bill stared down at a wad of gum on the floor between his feet for what seemed an eternity before looking back up at you, right eye slowly twitching.
You realized that it had taken a lot out of him, telling you this.
Relieved that he wasn't as crazy as they thought he was and now smart enough to confess, but not completely, he'd started going to AA meetings again because they helped...there were pills...at least he'd finally learned how to control the diabetes.
Did you know that his body wouldn't take transplants, grafts or implants of any kind and that he was one of the few diabetics left in the country who had to shoot up with insulin after every meal?
No, you'd said, reflecting on that double irony.
Anyway, he still goes, for the company mostly, he said as he fingered the pendant of the little girl around his neck. He'd sponsored at least fifty others and had been dry for nearly eleven years. He recited the 12 steps for you, from memory, word perfect You knew this because he first handed you a card with them printed on it like he was daring you to challenge his recitation.
Bill, Spike was always like that, a contrary creature - you never knew what you'd get but it would inevitably be something confrontational. One minute he'd be picking a fight with the largest person in the room, the next he'd be slouched down sullenly on your best friend's couch, boots up and sucking on a beer bottle. And then he'd disappear for days, always a welcome occurrence only to show up unexpectedly like a tomcat, acting as if he'd never left. Why Buffy never staked him, you'll never know.
Maybe even back then she felt sorry for him and just couldn't do it despite what he did to her near the end?
Uncomfortably you sat across from him as he went on and on. Eventually you realize with growing horror that he's contradicting himself, admitting that he grew up abused and neglected in Mississippi... how he'd once sat behind you in History class and cheated off of your test... how much he missed his mother's fine house in England... attending lectures at Cambridge... being a member of the Fabian Society... rowing on the Thames at dawn... juvenile detention... Dru...
Frozen, you let him talk while wishing you could run away from this painful little parade of horrors, but you couldn't because in ten minutes you'd be boarding the shuttle that was just then easing up to the departure gate.
Then back to his ex, Ava...
He'd sponsored her at AA - she was bright, petite, blonde and ambitious. She came to the meetings after classes let out at the local University. Smitten, he'd done everything he could to help her, and she returned his affections. She didn't seem to mind his little eccentricities and fears, which was a relief.
One night he'd quietly, nervously asked, and she said yes.
He showed you another picture, a creased Polaroid, from the back of his wallet. (There were a lot of pictures crammed into that little piece of greasy leather.)
At first it had gone well, he'd even got his G.E.D., enrolled, and did his best, but the debts from his accident and hospitalization, the lack of money to pay them off with, and the black marks on his record which kept him from the better paying jobs, put a strain on the marriage so that by the time his daughter was born one year later, she'd divorced him.
The papers came in the mail after Anne was born, along with a court order specifying two things: child support and that he never try to approach either mother or child.
Remembering the old Spike, you found yourself agreeing with his ex. But still it hurt to see him so unhappy.
Rolling the unlit cigarette between the remaining three fingers of his left hand, Bill looked away, eyes wet. He had been so angry, so miserable that he'd found Dru, wanting his old death back so that he could get back at his ex in the worst way possible. Dru didn't want her favorite toy any more because he was now so old, so broken, and no fun at all. She didn't even want to feed off of him because the medications he was on made him taste nasty.
He approached others, but they'd laughed him off.
They knew who he was.
A spatter of sleet hissed against the dark window, another baggage cart whirred past. You could hear some of your fellow passengers making last minute netphone calls as part of the dull background roar.
He gave up, realizing that even if he was furious with his ex, and if he succeeded in losing his life and soul, he'd probably kill Anne too. Even though he'd only seen her picture, he didn't want that. He looked down at his ruined hands, swallowing hard. "D-does tha-that count for s-something?" and you pitied him.
You found this odd, feeling sorry for someone who'd caused so much turmoil, so much discord, anger and pain.
Maybe because now he seemed so small, so lonely, so dead-end.
You wished the shuttle would hurry up so you could be at Giles' flat where you lived in between assignments abroad when your own daughter got home from school.
He told you that he held two jobs now, his "lit'l" girl would only have the best - he'd found mentions of her on the 'net, contests won, graduations, parties - her mother owned a successful law firm in Boston and Anne went to an exclusive academy - "Very bright, m-my lit'l girl, very bright!" he said enthusiastically, "And very, very pretty, I wish I could...I-I wish that I could in-introduce you to her. Y-y-you'd l-l-like h-h-h-hher. "
The shuttle finally docked, and passengers began to disembark, scattering and hurrying around where the two of you sat in a flurry of human motion.
He looked at you. Expectantly.
You didn't know what to say.
Finally he looked away, eyes following the last of the disembarking passengers as they rushed to make their connecting flights, "Well," he says, "B-best get back to work, can't afford to get f-f-f-fired again, c-can we?"
But he didn't get up.
The boarding light went on and you stood up. He handed you your purse and DataBox, his hands lingering nervously on yours. They had a slight tremor to them that you hadn't noticed before.
You thanked him before asking him if there were any messages that he wanted you to pass on to anybody?
"N-no." The shame in his quiet answer is so heavy you can almost touch it.
"Bill" stands next to you, silently asking for a hug, anything...
You don't want to, remembering him feeling you up more than once, and that one horrible time when demon-faced he'd pinned you to your bed in your Freshman year at USC-Sunnydale...and though you aren't a violent person, how good it had felt to smash a lamp over his head afterwards.
Out of pity, you allowed him to embrace you.
He clung to you tightly, resting his head on your shoulder for an eternity. (He smelled of floor polish, cigarettes, and sweat as his heart thudded violently against yours.) before anxiously pulling back. "D-d-d-don't want to mmmmake you l-late." he mumbled as he turned and limped back to his polishing, hands back in pockets, thin shoulders hunched.
You began to walk through the docking gate that led the shuttle, but you heard a familiar limp coming behind you so you turned.
He was back, nervously holding out a scrap of paper torn from a cigarette pack. He evaded the flight attendant who tried to stop him in an unexpected burst of leftover dancer's grace, took your hand, put the scrap in it, and gently folded your fingers over it as if it was a baby bird, "I-if you're ever back this way...I d-don't have mmm-much room, but you're...you're always welcome?" You nodded, pulled away and entered the shuttle.
A few minutes later, high over the curve of the earth in first class, you took out the scrap "Bill" handed you and looked at it.
On it in pencil was a netphone number and the address of a local men's group home.
You stared at it for a long time
And because you couldn't deal, you tore it up and handed the pieces to the flight attendant to throw away before you settled back in your seat and dozed off.