Title: Time Stitches You (18/?)
Disclaimer: I own nothing here except the plot. The characters and all things Buffy the Vampire Slayer belong to Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, UPN, Twentieth Century, the Pope, and whoever else wants to claim them and actually receives royalties from them. That's not me, so... there ya go.
Pairing: W/S
Rating: R
Summary: Spike uses Willow to go back in time to avoid being implanted by the Initiative. Has even one of Spike's plans ever gone right? They end up a little further back in time than he intended.
Dedicated: To all the people who have read this story, who've given me feedback, and still bug me to this day to finish this and all my other unfinished fics. Thank you all so very much!
A/N: I know, I know, 7 years, right? It's hard to believe, but that's how long I've slacked off on my BtVS fics. I feel bad about it, I really do. I have chapters written that I never posted and that's not right. So, here I go, hoping to get my muse back and to finish these old fics. *crosses fingers* Feedback is the best medicine. ;)
A/N #2: I'm so freaking nervous about posting again. I have to fix some of the new chapters for my different writing style, and take out/add some things, so, expect a week or more between chapters to be on the safe side.
They made pretty good time, all things considered; Spike's leg still had a hole in it, and Willow was still freaking out over burning a dozen or so vampires alive. Well, sort of alive. Ish.
Once they were far enough away from the Slayer's house, they sent the servant girl home.
Willow glanced down the dark street, lit only by gas lamps and shook her head. "We can't let her go on her own-"
"We can and we will." Spike took the girl's arm and gestured her down the street she'd told them led to her home. "Your safe now. Run home, don't look back." He pushed her away a little and she whimpered.
Her eyes stared down the street, lined in closed shops and pubs that were all-too open. "Please, milord, I'm frightened."
Willow felt her heart break a little at the tears threatening to spill from her huge eyes. "We can't just leave her, Spike." She saw the irritated roll of his eyes and knew the fight would be short and to the point, with her losing and them leaving without the girl in tow. And right now, though she felt bad about it, Willow couldn't really blame him.
They needed to get out of here, out of this time.
Pulling a stake from her skirts, she stepped forward, pressing it into the girl's hands. "Take this and use it if you have need. Straight in the heart." She tried to impress upon the girl the importance of her words, but she didn't think they'd reached her beyond the sound of her voice and them abandoning her.
The tears spilled over and she clutched the stake to her chest, darting quick glances over her shoulder as she backed away. "But I don't-"
"Run!"
Willow glared at Spike as the girl turned and ran, tripping on her skirts and stumbling a few times in her haste. Her shoes pounded down the sidewalk, the sound fading as Spike grabbed Willow's arm and pulled her in the opposite direction.
"She'll be safe... relatively safe anyway, from vampires."
Willow wasn't completely convinced. She felt bad for leaving her. She should've insisted they escort the girl home. The poor thing was frightened and terrorized.
But she wasn't in the best state of mind; her thoughts were scattered and a little freaksome from the night's events. Once again, she'd lost control of her powers, and herself, and done something horrible. It'd been in self-defense, yes, but for god's sakes, she'd set a bunch of vampires on fire, and not just because they needed to be eliminated, but to maximize their pain. To hurt them.
And that scared her.
What would happen if she got angry at Spike one night and turned her magick on him? Would she do that? Would she take a stake to his heart? Maybe rain fire down on his head just because he said something she didn't like?
Was that what she was destined to do?
Drawing in slow, deep breaths, she glanced his way. His limp was more pronounced and he was glaring at everything and nothing. His attention was focused on getting them back to the boarding house and getting them the hell out of Dodge. She was right there with him in that. But his injury was concerning.
He winced as his foot slipped and she felt his fingers tighten on her arm as if to hold himself up. He didn't loosen the grip right away, even after steadying himself and continuing at an even pace. Her concern turned to fondness for a moment, until she remembered the look in his eyes when he'd seen Drusilla. Her heart hurt a little.
She'd definitely been right about not getting too close to him. Apparently he still only had eyes for one woman.
Well, no, that wasn't completely true. He'd slept with her, and with Harmony. It was just his heart that belonged solely to Drusilla, the woman Willow had quite readily, and happily, bashed in the head with a piece of wood.
And it'd felt good too.
"Just about there," Spike told her unnecessarily, lips tightening in pain.
She looked up with an absent nod that turned into a deeper frown when she saw that they were still a mile away, maybe more. Maybe to him a mile was like a block. Just a hop, skip, and a jump away. "I am so ready to leave this time. Past ready even."
"Yeah," he muttered, stopping for a moment to lean against the side of a small, white building they were passing.
"Spike-" she began, about to ask him if he was okay. Seeing another frown, this one aimed at her, she reconsidered. "Can we rest for a second? I- I'm sort of tired." She chanced a look up at him as she leaned against the wall, not completely having to fake being winded.
He winced, lips twisting up, trying to hold in a groan. Her concern ratcheted up a few notches. What if he didn't have her super healing powers? What if he didn't have the- wait, of course he did. He was a vampire, they had super healing powers even without some spell backing them up.
Still, he was so pale, and while that was a normal thing for him, he was also panting heavily, which was definitely not normal.
"I'm sorry," she told him softly, looking down at the nasty, bloody wound in his leg, feeling an uncomfortable rush of guilt. She was responsible for hurting him. She wanted to fix it, to take the pain away, but she was afraid to touch him, afraid of hurting him even more than he already was.
Afraid of losing control again.
Fire, burning, singeing, screaming vampires wailing in pain.
Shoving the fresh memories away, she let her breath out in a rush. Trying to balance everything, to fix things and be everything that she needed to be was tiring. Slowly, but surely, she was losing the fight to not become something she hated, something that killed for revenge, or set vampires on fire just to watch them burn.
She was so tired.
Watching him try to regain his own sort of control, she fluttered her hands around his leg. "Do you... do you want me to try to heal it?"
He tilted his head to the side, a puzzled look crossing his face, like he just couldn't figure her out. Like she was a complete mystery to him.
If she allowed herself to admit it, she liked that he wanted to figure her out. Liked that he cared enough to want to do so. But maybe it wasn't caring, maybe she was just a puzzle that he wanted to solve. Or, maybe it meant that she wasn't just a body for him to slake his lust with.
Dangerous territory thinking that.
"No, I'm all right. Save it for the trip to 1880." He smiled just the slightest bit as he leaned his head back, closing his eyes briefly. A sigh slowly slipped past his lips, then, after a minute, he turned his head to the side and looked down at her. "Are you okay?"
She nodded, pushing away from the wall. He did the same, more slowly than her. His limp was becoming more pronounced, his face more drawn, his skin paler. He needed to feed. "You should... go. Eat, I mean." Her mouth went dry at the thought of him leaving her behind to hunt and kill. And at the thought of him killing. Was he killing?
"Not likely," he snorted, the scoff in his voice and on his face saying more than his words. He wasn't about to leave her alone.
Secretly, she was happy about that, but being the big bad Wiccan that she was, she insisted with a little more surety. He needed to feed. Needed to keep his strength up and heal. "Spike, go on. I can take care of myself, we both know that. Your leg knows that."
Straightening up in front of her, his tired eyes took in every scratch and scrape and bruise showing on her face and arms and chest. "Let's go. Angelus and Darla probably aren't far behind."
She let the subject go. For now. "Probably not," she agreed, slipping under his shoulder, catching a strong whiff of sulfur and other burned things. "Ugh, I think I may just bathe for a week straight to get this smell off of me."
"You should smell it from my end," he said, grinning wearily.
Hearing a sound behind them, she jerked her head around to look, relaxing a bit when nothing jumped out of the shadows. Still, she was jumpy and exhausted. They both were. Despite her brave words about taking care of herself, neither one of them would be able to defend themselves against an attack by- well, anything really. Not in the state they were in.
Which made her think about the servant girl again.
"Do you think she made it home okay?" She saw his sideways look and felt her heart sink a little. "Lie to me," she told him, glancing away briefly before returning her gaze to the sidewalk in front of them. "I think she was-"
"She wasn't raped."
"How do you know?" She straightening up slightly. What, did vampires have some kind of sex radar? Is that how he'd known that she'd almost been raped? She wasn't very comfortable with that.
Not at all.
He shrugged a little, sighing and shifting against her. His hand tightened on her shoulder, fingers tracing absently against her sleeve. "Didn't smell the- didn't smell them on her."
"Oh. That's... that's good then. Very good." Relief poured through her, though it was just a little thing in the bigger scope of things. She hoped the girl did get home safely, and hoped she wouldn't have too terrible a time with the aftermath of being terrorized by creatures that she now knew existed. "Huh. You and Oz have something in common."
Her mind, being a big annoying brainy thing, jumped to all the really private things that Spike could have smelled on her at any time, not the least of which were sweat, bad breath, and other not quite so mundane things.
Growing a bit uncomfortable at that thought, she cleared her throat. "Um, you know, just the fact that I have two-make that three-men in my life that can smell a person enough to track them... and, and, uh..." she dropped her eyes to the ground again and then glanced sideways at him. "So, when I'm..." she gestured with her hands as best she could, "you know, you... um, know?" Her face burned with embarrassment and shame, even though she knew it was a natural and inevitable part of a woman's life.
Yeah, blah, blah, blah, that was only true in women's empowerment books. In real life it was painful and annoying and something Spike really didn't need to know about. It was her body, not his.
He shrugged again. "Yeah, I know when it's your time of the month."
"Oh," she whispered, looking away, cheeks burning even hotter. "Could you try not to... you know, smell me during those times? I mean, is- is that a possibility? 'Cause it's really kind of personal. Not to mention gross."
Rolling his eyes, he straightened up, muttering, "Humans. It's not gross to me." Leading her away from the building they'd stopped at, he quickened their pace, lean a little less heavily on her. As they reached the end of the street, he looked over at her. "It's the sweetest perfume for a vampire."
Willow stared at him, trying not to let her disgust show, but she couldn't stop it for long. "That is seriously, seriously gross, Spike. I mean really nasty. And," she added primly, starting them moving again, "we shall never speak of it again."
Spike chuckled in her ear, his hand tightening around her shoulder.
********
They reached the park across from the boarding house a few minutes later. Once there, Spike stopped for a minute, his arm staying around her shoulders as he settled his back against a nearby tree trunk and drew in a few deep breaths. His trousers, which were soaked with blood, were crusting over, sticking to his wound.
Willow watched with a wince as he lifted the material away from his leg, peeling it off like a second skin. "Ow," she breathed in sympathy. "Is it healing at all? Like mine?" She wiped her hand against the bite Dru had added earlier that afternoon, showing him the half-healed mark. "Almost gone."
"No." He shook his head, eyes settling uncomfortably on her neck. His frown was replaced by longing, which was gone completely after a moment. "I haven't been healing well this trip. Remember the knife wound?"
Remember? she scoffed silently. No. No, she really didn't remember him biting her. Or scaring the living daylights out of her. She also didn't remember the few precious moments of pleasure he'd insisted could be present during a vampire's bite. Mostly though, she didn't remember how much she'd wanted so desperately to feel more than fear.
She didn't answer, just stared at him.
He nodded, sighing as he looked past her, squinting into the darkness. "Yeah, guess you'd- anyway, that knife wound took longer than normal to heal, remember?"
"Maybe it had something on the blade. Like magick?" Seeing his unconcerned shrug, she rolled her eyes. He might not be worried, but she was. Something was keeping him from healing, and that was dangerous. And if it was a someone... that was just as dangerous, if not more so. "Who stabbed you?" she asked suddenly, hoping to catch him off guard, get him to spill the beans finally. "Anyone I know?"
He briefly dropped his gaze to the ground before pushing away from the tree, shaking his head as his eyes returned to her face. "No. Just a couple of plonkers." Taking his arm from her shoulders, he settled his hands on her waist, drawing her closer, until her chest was pressed up against his.
"What are you doing?" She glanced down, startled when she felt her leg pressing against his. "You're gonna hurt-"
He kissed her softly, halting her protests, hand settling lightly against her cheek. Again and again he pressed his lips gently to hers. There was such a sweet tenderness there that she wanted to cry and sink into him. This was why she couldn't do this with him, it was too easy to fall into feelings that would only leave her hurting. Even so, when he pulled back to rest his forehead against hers after a minute, she blinked rapidly, staring over his shoulder, fighting against disappointment.
And gratitude, because she hadn't been strong enough to pull away and insist on space.
"These time travel spells are, at best, unpredictable," he murmured, breath fanning against her mouth and cheeks, "I just wanted to do that one more time in case we don't see each other again for a few years."
She nodded in understanding. She wanted more than just a few kisses from him, and her heart rebelled at the idea of them being separated, but she'd already been over this in her head. No intimacy with Spike because it led to badness. He was her friend and she wanted him to stay that way, not lose him altogether.
Smiling past the sadness flowing through her at the thought of never knowing Spike's kiss again, never feeling his touch- it was hard, but she managed it. "Your confidence in me warms my heart," she whispered with a chuckle.
"You have no idea," he said enigmatically, then started out of the park, cool hand wrapped firmly in hers.