The elevator spits them out onto a long metal walkway above a bustling floor.
It's different from how Spike remembered it; smaller, less impressive, fewer soldiers, fewer walkways, fewer corridors diverging off from the main gallery. When they rebuilt they obviously rebuilt on a budget.
Good.
Everyone's too busy looking at clipboards, moving without seeing as they move with military superiority. There's just one pit with a large control panel overlooking it.
Spike glances at Joyce and sees her eyes darting all over the place looking for Buffy, her hand gripping the handle of her ax so tight her knuckles have gone white.
"She'll be in a cell," he says, nodding to the mezzanine at the back, a few concrete steps leading up to a corridor that is lined with white rooms. "Come on. I'll walk in front. Try and look like you're escorting me there, yeah?"
"Alright," Joyce confirms, straightening the kevlar vest over her shoulders.
Spike flicks his gaze over the baggy camouflage jacket hanging off her frame and offers up a silent prayer to whatever deity might be listening. How they're gonna walk Buffy out all nice and pretty and calm in amongst a hive of soldiers he doesn't have a clue.
Find her first, and then figure it out as you go along, he thinks, swallowing down a fat lump of apprehension.
Yep, Great plan.
Always works.
Joyce hardens her eyes and nods slightly, following him as he starts down the grated stairs to the lower floor. They walk as unobtrusively as they can. Keeping their steps light but not too fast. As quick as possible without it looking like they're hurrying.
Spike lets out a huff of unnecessary breath as they make it unnoticed and unquestioned to the cells. Several demons are pacing behind the glass walls, and their eyes land on Spike with immediate interest, reading the tension in his shoulders as something to watch.
One cell window is splashed with blood.
Spike tears his eyes away to focus on the keypad affixed to the wall, the twin of the elevator's panel. Several thick black cables line the wall beside it, disappearing up into the rafters behind the fluorescent lights, and flowing down from the keypad into the floor. Spike is just drawing out the passkey when a scream stills his hand.
"BUFFY!"
Joyce's voice echoes around the room, drawing every single pair of eyes down on them as Spike's head whips around to the soldiers below.
And from their elevated position, he sees what caused Joyce to scream.
Buffy is in the pit.
Strapped to a gurney.
A man in a white lab coat holds a scalpel over her.
The coat and sweater she was wearing earlier have been removed, leaving her in a strappy camisole and jeans, her arm bare for whatever the man in white plans to do. In the brief half-second in which Spike takes it all in, the fact that they'd undressed her even that much makes a furious flare of anger boil in his gut.
Guns rise in their direction and Spike curses, and does the only thing he can think to do in the moment—it's a long shot, but that's all they've ever had. He pulls the ax out of Joyce's hands and drives it into the thick cables at the wall, severing them like veins torn from a neck.
The entire gallery plunges into darkness, and after a pause, the weak emergency lighting above the exits casts everything into dark red shadows, a growling low note of an alarm drowning out the sound of soldiers bellowing orders to each other. Fireworks of gunfire explode in flashes of white. Spike drags Joyce away from the corridor, back down the steps, ducking from bullets flying into the wall where they'd just stood.
"Get to the walkway!" he shouts over the din. "I'll get her out—"
"Buffy! She's—"
"I KNOW, JUST GO!" He shoves her in the rough direction of the stairs and she stumbles running in her too-big army fatigues. He turns and suddenly a gun is in his face. A soldier is only a few feet away from him, the muzzle aimed right between his eyes. Spike doesn't have time to flinch or raise his hands (not that he would) but he takes an instinctive step back—
Into a cold body behind him.
In his periphery, Drusilla is at his shoulder with thralling eyes. A slight height over Spike from where she stands on the concrete step.
He realizes most of the gunfire is being drawn by the demons surging from the cells opened by his opportunistic ax to the power lines. Blood hungry and desperate they're diving into the fray, fangs and claws and fists flying as bullets pummel their bodies but don't slow them down.
Drusilla is covered in blood, leaving a red smear on his leather as she leans around him, and from the sour scent of anticoagulate, the blood is from one of the bags the soldiers deposited through a hole in her cell's ceiling. Probably laced with whatever they knocked him out with the first time. Considering she's wearing it—coated in it—he doubts a single drop has passed her lips.
Her fingers curl over his shoulder and then gently move him out of the way as the soldier's eyes fall on her and then seem to go hazy.
"Be in me," she purrs over the sound of carnage behind them, and her voice travels all the way down Spike's spine the way he knows it's doing to the soldier.
The gun lowers microscopically, the soldier's eyebrows furrowing as Drusilla moves closer. A grateful smile stretches over Spike's face as Drusilla's fingers stretch out towards the man's eyes.
"Be in me," she insists and the soldier's gun falls from his hands with a sharp clatter—
At just the moment Drusilla's fangs descend.
In a flash they're in his neck, arterial spray coating her face and her arms and her chest as she bites down and pulls out his jugular to the sound of screams drowning in blood.
"Bon appetit, Dru," Spike mutters as he picks the ax up off the floor.
He deftly misses a werewolf's jaws as it leaps into a soldier running to his fallen comrade's aid. He rights himself, running to the edge of the pit and vaulting the railings, landing at the foot of the gurney.
The pit has been all but abandoned, the soldiers that had been standing over Buffy's body now in the battle above. No one but a quaking doctor in a white lab coat. With a trembling hand, he holds up the scalpel like a weapon and Spike cocks his head to the side with an amused raised eyebrow. He holds up the ax in response.
The doctor drops the scalpel and scrambles out of the pit, his feet scrabbling on the rungs bolted to the side, only for his terrified screams to surge and then gurgle out into silence as soon as he's out of Spike's view.
Spike leaves the ax on the floor and his hands are just on the first leather strap around Buffy's ankle when another pair of hands is suddenly in his field of vision, undoing the second. Joyce yanks the strap out of its buckle as he looks up.
"I told you to get to the exit," he shouts over the blaring warning sirens as he unbuckles the strap under his hands.
"I must have misheard," she replies, not looking up as she unties Buffy's wrist.
"You Summer's women really can't take a bloody instruction, can you?" he growls back as he releases Buffy's arm from its strap and hauls her into a sitting position. He lifts her in a fireman's carry as Joyce picks up the ax, murmuring words to Buffy as she strokes her daughter's back.
"S'alright, baby, I'm here, mommy's here with you, we're getting you out, just hold on, sweetie, hold on—"
Spike feels the vibration of Buffy's unconscious groan against his shoulder as he climbs the ladder's rungs out of the pit, running a soothing thumb over her calf where he holds her close.
"Got ya, luv, just hold tight," he says, though he doubts she can hear him over the rattle of bullets ricocheting overhead.
He casts a look back to make sure Joyce is behind him as he makes for the stairs leading up to the walkway.
They pound the steps to the elevator but the keypad is blacked out and dead.
"There!" Joyce points to a door further along with an emergency exit sign above it.
Spike readjusts Buffy over his shoulder and follows Joyce to the door. She reaches for the handle.
Locked.
"Fuck," he growls and digs in his pockets for something to try and pick the locks with. His fingers graze the silver key he'd taken off the soldier in the caves above and he pulls it out. He gets it into the lock and—miraculously—it turns, opening the heavy steel door onto a staircase heading up.
Spike turns with a relieved huff at Joyce, about to wave her through—
But she's not looking at him.
Down in the dark, illuminated by little more than red light and gunfire is Drusilla. Standing in front of a soldier.
"Are you coming or-" Spike starts before he realizes who the soldier is.
Riley sways a little as though hypnotized, following Drusilla's waving fingertips as they beckon him forward, the rifle in his hand scraping the floor as he drifts towards her.
If Drusilla was a sight before, now she looks like something straight out of the pits of hell. Her dress clings to her, accentuating sharp rib bones, the sweep of her hips, the curve of her spine. Her arms look like they're adorned with black gloves that hug her skin up to her biceps. Until she moves and the hand held out towards Riley glints wetly, the blood-drenched arm swaying as it pulls him into her eyes.
"She's gonna kill him, isn't she," Joyce says. It isn't a question.
Spike meets Joyce's gaze, and for a moment there's almost pity in them, an unsaid "should we help him?"on her lips. Until she looks again at her unconscious daughter hefted over Spike's shoulder. The marks of the restraints still imprinted on her wrists. They'd been strapped too tight.
Joyce casts a last look down at Riley as his rifle clatters to the floor. Then hefts the ax back into her hands, and with a remorseless sniff, walks through the exit.
Spike watches for a second more as Drusilla's fangs descend, then shuts the door behind them. A dark smile on his face.
In the comparative silence of the stairwell Spike shifts Buffy into a more comfortable position, carrying her like a bride with her head resting on his shoulder as he climbs behind Joyce, letting her set the pace.
It's several flights of trudging upwards. Spike readjusts Buffy in his arms once they reach a new level and another door. A large stencil-painted number on the wall informs them they're at minus three. Then two, and after what feels like forever; one and no more stairs
He unlocks the door to another cave. No prone soldier in the dirt, no elevator, and only twenty feet or so away is the mouth of the cave, framing the trees of the woods beyond.
"Must be the back entrance," Spike says, relief flooding through him at the sight of moonlight lined by wispy clouds.
Once out in the open Joyce heaves a great sigh, leaning against the rock wall as she drags in a breath of fresh air
"You alright?" Spike asks, noting the sweat beading on her brow.
Her gaze flicks to Buffy curled in his arms. She strokes Buffy's hair back from her face and breathes a sigh.
"I am, now," she states. "Just need a minute."
A flicker of a flashlight in amongst the trees gets Spike's attention. Soldiers are moving in the woods below and Spike swears under his breath. "I don't think we have a minute," he hisses but she's slumped against the rock, breathing hard as adrenaline deserts her. "Joyce!" he growls because he certainly doesn't have enough hands to carry her too.
"Spike?"
He freezes. Then turns towards the figure coming through the trees.
"...Watcher?" he asks disbelievingly as the whole cast of Buffy's entourage bursts out of the trees towards him. "What the bloody hell are you lot doing here?"
"You left… message… answering machine… parents… very confused…" Xander puffs before sinking to the ground. "I want it on record that I am not hiking-man."
"Neither are you carry-the-heavy-crossbow man, it seems," Giles scolds as he lowers said crossbow, somewhat out of breath himself.
"If we're adding things to the record; that was a very steep hill," Willow pants alongside Xander, leaning against a tree with a hand holding a flashlight.
"Well, aren't you the bleeding A-team," Spike snorts, hefting Buffy up again as her head starts to slip off his shoulder.
"Buffy," Giles chokes, suddenly seeming to realize the scene he's come into and taking a step forward to the unconscious Slayer. "She's… is she—"
"She's alright. Heart rate's normal, far as I can tell," Spike grunts. "No blood loss or cuts anywhere either, if I'm any judge."
"Gross," Xander says by rote but is too winded to put any feeling behind it.
"And you're…?" Giles prompts, eyes narrowing, "...saving her?"
"Got a problem with that?" Spike bites back, and can't help but hug Buffy a bit tighter as though she's about to be wrenched out of his arms.
"Questions are what I have," Giles answers.
Spike glares at the accusatory inflection souring the Watcher's tone. "Maybe we can save them for afternoon tea and crumpets, yeah? Meanwhile, would quite like to get the hell away from these caves, if it's all the same to you." Spike nods pointedly towards Joyce who's still breathing heavily against the rockface.
"Quite," Giles mutters and drops the subject (for now) and the crossbow (into Xander's arms). "Shouldn't you be on bed rest?" he asks Joyce, reaching out a hand.
"Yes. Yes, I should," she grumbles, accepting his arm up, and then yelps as he swings her into a lift that is the twin of Spike's. "I canwalk," she protests.
"I'm sure you can," Giles agrees but doesn't put her down and Joyce smiles gratefully.
She twists her head around as they pass Xander and Willow.
"Willow, could you grab my ax?" she calls over her shoulder. "Thank you, dear!"