AN: Thank you so much to my beta's RavenLove12 and foxfaceinthewindow for everything but specifically for helping me de-Brit my Buffy-voice.
Scratched, pissed off, and practically blind from the scent of blood filling the air, Spike makes his way through an endless barrage of trees in the moonlight, climbing higher to where he dimly remembers the Initiative caves once were. It seems like a terrible, terrible idea—traipsing about in these woods with more troops lurking around—but it's the only idea he's got.
Hours pass with nothing but dim stumbling through bracken until, like a beacon in the dark, he suddenly catches Buffy's scent. It drifts towards him with outstretched fingers beckoning him onwards.
He opens his mouth to bellow her name and then halts with it on his tongue as he remembers the potentially teeming masses of soldiers waiting for a new opportunity to dissect him. He shuts his mouth. Stealth it is.
He tracks her to a twisted tree in the shadow of an outcrop. It's out in the open enough for him to see scuff marks down the slope of the rock face illuminated in the moonlight.
Girl took a tumble- he wrinkles his nose as another scent assaults his sinuses. Harsh soap seems to be the prevailing ingredient. Hair wax too?
A soldier maybe? It's hard to pick out the specific notes over the blood stench that's evaporating out of a large dark pool at the base of the rock. Impossible to decipher if it belongs to anyone specific. He sighs, pinching his nose to try and stop the salt of it from washing through his brain.
Ok so… Buffy was here and then she went…
She went…
He glances around looking for marks in the dust, or crushed forest floor to indicate a path she might have taken. There's one set of boot prints walking in; a soldier coming to look at the blood and guts puree? Finds her too? And they leave together…
But then where are her footprints?
Oh fuck… No footprints, but her scent drifts off into the woods again alongside Sergeant Soap. Something happened and she was carried off. That's never good.
"BUFFY!" He can't stop himself this time as panic seems to lurch upwards like vomit into his mouth.
He runs off into the dark. The sensory mix of blood and Dru and Buffy crisscrosses confusingly, and he gets turned around more than once, cursing and swearing and feeling like if he had a heartbeat it would be aching in his chest, until he makes it to the mouth of the cave.
"Oh, God," he mumbles. All the aromas flow into the mouth of the cave. Buffy, Dru, the soldiers, and the blood.
Things feel painful and groggy as Buffy's eyelids pry themselves open. Her left arm throbs, radiating from the shoulder downward, and she groans as she rolls off it before struggling into a sitting position on the cot that's been placed against the wall of an entirely empty cell, devoid of anything but white ceramic-tiled walls.
"Buffy?" Riley's voice summons her further out of her disorientated dizziness. "Buffy?"
Her vision swirls as her head jerks to the glass that fills one wall like she's in an enormous fish-tank. Riley stands rigid behind the glass.
"Sorry for the rough treatment," he says, offering up a regretful smile that at least seems to have an ounce of shame underneath.
"What the HELL, Riley?!" Buffy screams from inside her box. Her voice seems to refract strangely off the tiles, stinging her already throbbing head more. "Let me out, you psychopath!"
"I wish I could." Riley winces in a way that Buffy finds she loathes, so unnatural and obviously affected. "We need your help and couldn't risk you saying no-"
"Gee, what a reasonable and not completely insane way of asking for it!"
Riley nods, stiffening his bottom lip like she's a child having a tantrum. "To clarify," he says cooly, the facade of sympathy slipping, "we aren't asking."
"Obviously!" Buffy raises herself off the cot with a slight wobble but recovers quickly. "Let. Me. Out!"
"So you can go running back to Spike?" he asks, no emotion rising in his voice whatsoever, just a chilling dead quality to the question. Buffy hardens her jaw and says nothing back. Denials at this point would be futile. Her silence seems to aggravate him further. "Don't you see what you're doing? You're corrupting yourself—"
She scoffs in disbelief. "Real rich coming from you!"
"That's not-" he shakes his head, seemingly exasperated as if she's driven him to this argument, "that's not the same at all. I did that to get close to you, but you just- no-," he cuts himself off with an angry shrug, "look, that's not important anymore. What we're doing now is important. We're going to help each other here-"
"Oh, I really doubt that," she snarls.
"You're slipping, Buffy," Riley continues as if she hadn't spoken at all. "And that's ok, you're just a girl, just a student, you shouldn't have all this responsibility! It's too easy for your head to be turned and lose sight of the ultimate goal."
Fury makes Buffy's skin prickle with a cold, unstoppable hatred. Just a girl!?
She takes a deep, stabilizing breath in and visualizes kicking Riley in the balls so hard he turns inside out. It doesn't really help.
"Just a girl that threw you bodily across a room," she says as she stretches the arm still stiff from the needle's puncture. "Something I'm very much not regretting anymore. I held back, by the way."
"That's exactly my point," Riley says as he leans on the glass. "Power like that, abilities like that, shouldn't be in the hands of just one individual—"
"Heeere we go," Buffy mutters under her breath. He means one woman. He'd probably be fine with it if it turned out Xander was the Slayer-calling guy.
"I mean, think about it, the entire fate of the world rests on your shoulders," he says, and Buffy raises her eyes to his and sees they're glassy, not focused on her but on this speech he's clearly rehearsed. "And if you have an off day? Or some other monster turns your head and you decide that actually things aren't as black and white as you once thought? What then?"
"Oh, so this is for the good of humanity," Buffy says acidly, eyes narrowed. "Gotcha."
"It is," he insists, glaring back at her. "You think the hellmouth is the only place with these problems? Newsflash, darling, it's not. This is global, and you're one person, in one location. We need to branch out."
"And I'm not stopping you from doing that. This has been a great conversation. Let me out."
Riley rolls his eyes. "Buffy, we don't stand a chance without your abilities. If you'd just let us run some tests, see if we can reproduce some of your—"
"No."
"-strengths, don't you understand how—"
"NO!"
"-incredible that would be? We could put a stop to the entire demon population. A resistance in every country! We need that. If you're the ultimate weapon, then we need to replicate that!"
"Just so we're on the same page, the Initiative would be paid for whatever super-mystic-weapon-DNA you think you'd be able to extract from me, right?" Buffy growls. "You'd be selling it, wouldn't you?"
He makes an aggravated snort at the back of his throat. "Don't be naive, there's no such thing as a free lunch. Labs and equipment don't grow on trees. It's not about the money, it's the results that counts."
"Ends justify the means, right?" Buffy sneers, the memory of that time-and-space-altering moment with Spike at the Bronze practically choking the air from her lungs. Riley's nostrils flare with impatience and she bites the inside of her cheek.
Oh God, I'm not getting out of here…
There's an angry pause that seems to stretch endlessly between them before Riley averts his eyes, looking pained. "Ellis thinks you're a demon."
Buffy snorts disbelievingly, shaking her head to try and stop angry tears from amassing. "And I just bet you fought my corner." There's probably already a tinfoil pit with my name on it…
"You need to do this," Riley persists, pointedly ignoring her sarcasm. "Prove him wrong. It's just blood tests, some muscle biopsies, that's all."
"You want to literally cut pieces off me after kidnapping me, and you have the nerve to say that's all!? Have you completely lost your mind?!" Riley opens his mouth to respond but she doesn't give him space to. "I'm saying no. No, no, no! And if you don't let me out THIS SECOND I'm going to personally rip both of your arms off."
Riley flinches, composes himself and then sighs, shoulders relaxing minutely as if their argument is over, filling Buffy with utter dread and frustration.
"Miller was right," he mutters as he types something into the keypad on the wall next to her window. "We were hoping not to have to do it this way-"
"Riley-" her heart stutters with panic at the blank, clinical look on his face.
"Look, it'll be alright, you'll see."
"RILEY!"
He walks away, and as he does a fine mist starts leaching from the vent in the ceiling. It smells sour, like air circulated in an airplane too many times, mixed with something that dries her mouth and sets her lungs straining. "R-Riley-"
But he's gone, leaving her gasping in the white-tiled cell.
A little tap-tap-tap gets her wavering attention and she glances over to the cell opposite her. Fear fills her lungs even as the air is sucked out of them.
Drusilla stands, pressed against the window, smiling calmly like a gore-covered vulture. Half the glass is smeared in blood that she's splashed across it from an empty plastic baggy discarded on the floor. With the tip of her manicured finger she draws a dot and branches it out into waving petals. Buffy slumps to the floor, the last thing she sees is Drusilla's rose sketched in blood…
Spike waits outside the cave mouth in the shadows for as long as his already minuscule amount of patience allows. Praying for Buffy to return any minute now, every second willing her to materialize out of the dark.
An hour passes and he feels it in his gut that she's not going to be walking back out. Especially seeing as she didn't walk in in the first place.
This is bad. Need to get her out of there… how the hellam I going to get her out?!
He drags his top lip in between his teeth as his gut plummets. Gonna have to get the bleeding B team on the case. Fan-fucking-tastic.
This can only end well considering we're such good pals.
It takes another hour to untangle himself from the woods. Half an hour more to cross town in a dead sprint heading for the Magic Box. He tries to rehearse what he's going to say in his head. What words in the right order would unify her gang quickly and efficiently with the least amount of back and forth?
Preferably no back at all. Just forth.
The Magic Box windows are dark. He ignores the We Are Closed sign and rattles the handle loudly. "Oi! Open the door! Watcher, open the fucking door!" He hammers on it several times before accepting that there's no signs of life within.
"GREAT!" He kicks the door hard enough to hear the doorbell on the inside tinkle obnoxiously. "THE ONE TIME YOU DECIDE TO HAVE A PERSONAL LIFE, YOU STUFFY TWEED-WEARING GIT!"
A couple more blocks of furious running brings him to the Bronze. It's busy, but not packed, and a brief sweep of the floor and balcony is enough to confirm none of the rest of her entourage is there either.
Shit!
More running and he dimly ponders on how it's a good thing he doesn't need to breathe or he'd probably be coughing up a lung at this point, but it's not too much further to the street where he keeps his beat-up DeSoto.
He rarely drives it and as such it doesn't always obey, choosing inopportune moments for the battery to stutter and die.
"If you don't start I'm going to bloody well set you on fire," he threatens as he slams the door shut and turns the key in the ignition. As if it heard him the engine flares to life, seemingly out of terror. He hits the gas, breaking the speed limit and running two red lights as he careens empty streets to the watcher's house. No police cars follow him, no one tries to slow him down, as is usually the case with anything that occurs after the sun sets.
Dark windows greet him as he pulls up to the house.
"ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?!" How can he not be home?!
He slams on the horn maliciously in case the asshole has just decided to retire for the evening, though he knows from experience Old Rupes reads well into the night, and that bedroom window is totally pitch.
What now!?
He takes a couple of unnecessary breaths, hard sharp ones to try and get himself calm enough for a plan to surface.
One last option; maybe Joyce has a phone book or something. He could call Harris, see if there's some sort of emergency number he's not privy to because until 24 hours ago he was the de facto outsider to the entire operation. Cruel irony.
Mercifully, lights are on at the Buffy residence as he tears the front door almost off his hinges.
"JOYCE!" he shouts, wincing as he turns and sees her on the sofa watching TV with a mug of tea only a few feet away from him. "Need your phone, can't find the bloody watcher or any of the- phonebook, where's the bleeding phonebook!?" he babbles and she blinks at him before she catches wind of what he's trying to say.
"I think Giles said he had a date tonight, but I don't know where it's supposed to be—"
"Christ!" Spike snarls as he hunts for an address book amongst her bureau. "Murphy's sodding law." He finds the yellow pages and tears through it to the H's.
Harriford-Harringway-Harrion-HARRIS! He dials the number into the phone. Come on pick up, pick up, PICK UP, PICK UP-
"What's going on?" Joyce asks as she joins him by the desk.
"Slayer's been taken by the Initiative," he bites out without fully thinking just as the phone's ringing clicks into voice message.
"What!?" Joyce practically yells. "But it burned down! How can they- taken?!"
"Apparently they rebuilt headquarters-"
"And they have Buffy?! Oh my God—"
"Look, calm down I'm handling it, just—"
"CALM DOWN?!"
"I have a plan," he lies badly. "Would you sit down before you pop a seam!"
She glares at him, and instead of taking a seat, she storms off to the downstairs closet with a murderous look on her face.
"What are you doing?" he asks, the phone in his hand forgotten. "I said I'm handling i- BLOODY HELL!"
With a harsh clatter Joyce pulls out an ax.
"You kept that thing?!" he sputters as she sets it by the door and pulls on her coat.
"You're driving, let's go," she says as she hefts the ax into her hands.
"I'm not driving you anywhere, pretty sure bedrest doesn't include storming the sodding Bastille- Joyce?! JOYCE!" But she's already out the door. "Oh, balls!"