Buffy's disembodied voice echoes through the air, frantic, still far away but coming steadily closer. Reflexively, Dawn draws in breath to call out to her sister, but with blinding speed Spike's hand clamps down over her mouth. She tilts her head up to meet his gaze questioningly, with a healthy dose of indignation, and he cocks an eyebrow at her, silently but effectively conveying the reprimand: "Thought you had more brains than that, Bit. Keep quiet."
He slowly removes his hand and nods toward Willow, who takes Dawn's elbow and draws her gently but insistently into the shadows of the nearest alleyway. Spike watches until he's satisfied that they're properly hidden, then slips away.
"I don't like this," Dawn whispers. "If he thinks it's not really Buffy, then why the hell is he going to confront her?"
Willow takes a deep breath. "Well … I don't know. I guess we'll just wait and see."
"So what if it isn't Buffy?" Dawn's eyes grow wider. "Or what if it is her and she mistakes him for Not-Spike and attacks him? Or what if Not-Spike finds Real Buffy before Real Spike does and Real Buffy thinks it's Real Spike and she gets attacked? I think we need to follow him."
Willow frowns. "Please slow down, Dawnie. You're making my head spin."
"Can't you do something? This is your spell, right? You've gotta know how to get us out of here."
"I—I'm working on it. It's just … this one's a little complicated, and I'm kinda rusty."
"Rusty? Come on, Will, it wasn't that long ago that you were a yellow crayon short of ending the world. You really want me to believe that after a couple of Wiccan behavior-mod classes with Giles's coven buddies, all the good stuff just slipped your mind?"
Willow looks stung. "It's not that simple," she says plaintively.
An odd expression, equal parts frustration, disappointment, and disbelief, flickers across Dawn's features. "Sure it's not."
"Dawnie—"
"Tara would know what to do," Dawn mutters under her breath, pointedly averting her gaze and feeling a sharp stab of guilt even as the words escape her lips of their own volition. "She'd get us home."
There is no answer, but in such close proximity, Dawn can feel Willow's body stiffen and hear the breath catch in her throat. Witnessing the physical impact of her own insensitivity makes Dawn immediately ashamed, if not quite ready to embrace and beg forgiveness. No more tears, Dawnie. She shudders.
xXxXx
Spike pinpoints her exact location and knows that if this is a trick, it's a bloody fine one. That scent. Her scent—it's unmistakable. Still, he must act carefully, if for no other reason than the sake of Red and the Bit. He isn't too keen on leaving them back there clinging to each other in the shadows like lost children straight out of some bloody fairy tale. They're depending on him to save the day. To come back with Buffy or to come back with one less manifestation of evil to worry about for as long as they're stuck in this sodding place Red insists is his own psyche. And he'll do it, he will get them out of this. Because Dawn is starting to trust him again, and because no one else ever has.
He sidles up next to a stone wall at the corner of one of the looming odd-angled buildings, beyond which lurks Buffy—or something doing a damned good impersonation—and waits, listening, trying to tap into the preternatural vampire senses that usually give him the edge in situations like this. She's there, all right, standing as still as he is now, perhaps trying to detect telltale signs of danger with her own heightened Slayer senses (or those of the First, as the case may be), and he feels an absurd urge to hold his breath. Funny, how ingrained those human impulses remain long after they've lost all purpose.
Steeling himself, he steps around the corner—at the same moment she chooses to do the same. Any two ordinary people would have collided; instead they stop just short of it and stare at one another. He tilts his head to the side and narrows his eyes, studying her carefully for the minutest hint of wrongness. He senses her unease, the inherent holding back that's so often the closest she comes to showing fear. He senses her worry, hears her shallow breathing, the rapid rhythmic thump of her heart and accompanying rush of blood through her veins, knows the stillness that belies her perpetual readiness for battle.
An unbidden and too-recent memory floods his mind—Buffy, bleeding, wrecked, lying broken and lifeless and hollow on the ground in a jumbled heap that spells the end of him as well as them—and the rush of relief at seeing her so vital and fresh and complex and real staggers him, makes him uncharacteristically lead-tongued. He's lost for words beyond the obvious.
"Buffy? It's you?"
Her expression, wary and charged, doesn't waver. "Last I checked. Why are you looking at me like that? Where's Dawn and Willow?"
"Safe; they're safe. I wasn't sure—I didn't know if it was—" He breaks off, shakes his head impatiently at his fumbling. When he continues it's with a trace of his trademark smirk. "Listen, pet, I'd feel a bit better if you'd drop the stake."
She glances at her raised right hand, where the business end of the weapon protrudes from that deceptively delicate fist, and she seems taken aback, as if her arm has betrayed her somehow. Even so, she doesn't lower it immediately, and when she does, she doesn't lower it completely. Their eyes lock, and the heavy hesitation tells him all he needs to know. This is most definitely Buffy, in the flesh, and she's even now pondering the possibility that he's done something to Dawn and Willow. Bitterly he acknowledges the inevitability of that mistrust. What's he done, after all, to give her reason to do otherwise? Surely nothing of late. Surely little, ever.
"Where's Dawn?" she asks again.
"I left them hidden together, back this way. I didn't want them following me into danger if it came to it." He starts down the path that will lead back to the others. Buffy hesitates a moment longer before falling in step with him.
"They're all right?"
He pauses, stomach clenching at another memory, this one real and all the more unbearable for it, of turning a corner with the red-haired witch and coming upon that—thing(himself, it was him, and he was killing her, sucking her dry, and bloodyfuck why did he always fail them when it mattered?)— with a barely conscious yet still weakly struggling Dawn in his arms.
"They're fine," he says smoothly.
"Good. Then I'm going to kill her."
"Yeah, Niblet does some bloody stupid things—'specially when she thinks someone she cares about's in danger." He glances sideways at Buffy with a tight, not-altogether-amused smile. "Wonder where she gets that from?"
"Watch it. I've still got this." She twirls the stake expertly in her hand, and he acknowledges the offhand threat with a melodramatic eyeroll.
"Please. If you were up to that, you'd've done it long ago and we both know it. Point is, we're in a hell of a mess now, stuck here in what Willow s'poses is my bleeding mind, and it was complicated enough before you and your brat sister came charging in here to play hero."
"I'm not playing," she counters. "But I wasn't going to just stand there in that basement while you guys got the psychic mind-meld mojo out of your system and Dawn was nowhere to be found. This is me, being proactive."
"This is you, being a pain in my arse."
"Well, the second half of my mission is accomplished, then. Good to know. Can we just find Dawn and Will, and figure out how to get out of here?"
He stops walking so suddenly that she outpaces him a few steps before realizing he's not beside her any longer. Backtracking, she looks around at their shadowy surroundings, trying to follow the direction of his rapt attention. "Earth to Spike," she says. "What's up? What do you see?"
"Not what I see," he says mildly. "What I don't see."
"What are you talking about?" Buffy asks impatiently, unnerved by his suddenly wary demeanor and fixed stare.
"I left them right here," he says, his tone still mostly steady but, to the practiced observer, betraying a ragged edge. He tears his gaze away to meet Buffy's wide eyes.
"They're gone."
xXxXx
To be continued…