Takes place after AtS and disregards the comics.
Spike learns of a plot to kill the Slayer. Can he get to her in time?
Linchpin
Chapter One – Soldiering On
They started out with knives, slicing long arcs over most of his torso, but little did they know that knife-play had been a special favorite of his Dark Princess. She'd spent hours upon hours carving intricate patterns into his pale skin and then licking up the blood that spilled from the cuts, so it was more erotic than it was painful, and it confused them no end when all he did was moan in pleasure every time the knife blade touched his skin.
They left him hanging for about a week after the knives failed to elicit the information they were seeking, probably while they tried to figure out what to do to him next. They wanted to know where Buffy was. He'd known where she was all along, of course. Ever since he'd been spit out of that buggerin' amulet into the offices of Evil Incorporated, he'd used his demon contacts to keep tabs on her. What he was unable to discern was why these creatures wanted to know and why they thought he'd tell them.
He was good at enduring torture. Hell, he'd had enough practice, even though what they'd done so far hadn't been all that torturous. He'd spent nearly twenty years enjoying the 'kind attentions' of Angelus, and to a lesser extent, Darla, not to mention Glory and The First, so he tried to look sufficiently frightened when they came back to the cave, trying not to let them know that what they'd brought with them would tickle more than it would hurt. Apparently, they didn't know much about vampire physiology. Honestly, a set of jumper cables hooked to a car battery? He was starting to wonder where they were getting their information.
They hooked him up; clamping the cables to folds of skin they pinched up along his sides. The sharp teeth of the clamps hurt a little when they bit into his skin, but that small pain was far less than he'd endured as a fledge under the tutelage of his sadistic grandsire. They clamped the other end of one cable to the negative terminal on the battery then menacingly waved around the last free cable as they asked him again where the Slayer was. He stuttered and stammered that he didn't know and why were they doing this to him and a bunch of other bollocks meant to make them think he was almost broken, and all the while he was laughing himself silly in his head.
Finally tired of his rambling, they attached the free end to the positive terminal and he laughed out loud. Well, it tickled! He couldn't help it! The voltage in that piddling battery was barely enough to harm a human, and it certainly wasn't enough to do any damage to a vamp as old as he was. It might have stung a bit if they'd thought to douse him with water first, but it had taken hits from several demon strength tasers to knock him out when the sodding Initiative had kidnapped him. Hell, the warning spark from the chip had been stronger. He laughed and chortled and snickered for a full ten minutes before they figured out that the battery wasn't working, and he had tears of mirth running down his face by the time they unhooked the cables and left the cave.
He wasn't sure how long they left him hanging there that time – the days were starting to blend together due to immense boredom and ravenous hunger. Yeah, he'd gone longer without feeding before, but it had been at least a decade since he'd gone more than a day or two without eating and his demon was a little bit spoiled. Not to mention that he'd used nearly all his reserves to heal the cuts from the knives.
He was counting the cracks in the wall across from him for the thirty-eighth time when the creatures returned. So far, he'd come up with the same number – 312 – twenty-five times, but with nothing else to do, he'd kept counting. One of the creatures stepped in front of him and he vamped out and growled, "You buggerin' twat! Now I have to start all over! Shift your bleedin' arse!"
The creature made a noise that Spike thought might have been a squeak then it backpedaled across the cave until it collided with the wall. Spike was sure that his expression of complete surprise looked rather odd on his demon face, so he shook off the lumpies and grinned. "Never seen a game face before, eh? That's… interesting."
He waited until all the creatures were gathered in front of him then he vamped out again. They jumped back then moved forward slowly, examining his ridges, eyes, and fangs with great interest. Spike smirked around his fangs and drawled, "So… 'm guessin' you blokes aren't from around here, yeah?"
The creature he assumed to be the leader answered with a long, drawn-out explanation of what they were doing and why. And no, they hadn't known that he was a vampire because there was nothing equivalent to vampires in their home dimension. All they'd been told by whatever demon they'd made contact with was that Spike knew where the Slayer was and where to find him.
Spike took it all in, his brain careening along at a million miles a minute as he started to realize that these bumbling visitors from another dimension had a better than average shot at actually ending the world. Not with a bang or by trying to suck it all into hell, but if these creatures managed to complete the plan they'd laid out to him? Yeah, it would be game over for the human race.
Spike tried to keep them talking as long as he could. He answered their questions about the Slayer Line vaguely and in half-truths, but he gave them enough to keep them interested and babbling like the whelp on a sugar high. And wasn't that a kick in the pants? He hadn't thought about the one-eyed carpenter in years; didn't even know if he was still among the living. He'd kept tabs on Buffy and Niblet – and thinking about the tall, brunette girl caused a painful pang of sorrow – but the rest of her merry little band of white hats? Not so much.
Eventually the questions came back around to Buffy's current location and Spike clammed up. She was the linchpin to their plan and there was no bleeding way in hell he was going to say anything at all about her. He was afraid that any scrap of information, no matter how innocuous or useless it seemed to him, could be the bit that led them right to her, and he'd dust before he'd let that happen.
His silence aggravated the creatures, and they pulled out what they thought was the big gun – an actual gun. He sniggered and chuckled as they loaded the .22 rifle and pointed it at him. "Uh… you do know all that's gonna do is brass me off, right? And when I get out of these chains, I'm gonna rip all your soddin' heads off then stomp your twitchin' carcasses into grease spots."
They looked from the rifle to Spike and back several times before the leader asked, "This weapon does not frighten you?"
Spike shook his head with a chuckle. "Not even a little bit. You wanna get any info outta me, you're gonna have to come up with somethin' a helluva lot scarier than that bitty peashooter."
They left again and he hung there, thinking. She thought he was dead. And he was – it was his normal state of being, after all – but as far as she knew, he'd burned up in the Hellmouth and she'd moved on. A low growl rumbled through his chest at the thought of who she'd moved on with – the sodding Immortal, of all people. Even after all this time, that still stung. Well, to be fair, a decade, or even two, isn't all that long when you've lived for well over a century, but still. He didn't think she'd loved the prancing wanker, that he'd just been an 'orgasm friend' like the Demon Girl had called them – and why was everyone from Sunnydale suddenly parading through his thoughts? – but even now, the thought of that prat touching Buffy fed the flames of Spike's anger and jealousy. He shook his head, making his body sway slightly from the chains that held him suspended above the floor by his wrists. No time for unpleasant reminiscing now, he had to focus. Had to find a way out of this and get to her before they did.
He hung there for days, going over every possible escape plan he could come up with, but they all hinged on one thing – being able to get out of the sodding chains – and as weak as he was, that wasn't going to happen without some kind of miracle, and those usually weren't on tap for creatures like him, no matter how good his intentions might be.
He gave up thinking about escape when his hunger delirium started making him see things… and people. Angel, Buffy, Dru, Niblet, pretty much everybody he'd ever known. They all traipsed through the cave at some point, but not a one bothered to let him out of his chains. Bloody tossers. He was arguing with Peaches over which one of them had drunk the last bottle of Irish whiskey in the penthouse when the quake hit.
XXXX
For a while after Sunnydale she'd soldiered on, helping to train the new slayers that kept popping out of the woodwork and the ones that Xander would travel to the ends of the Earth to track down. Then he'd died. Not from anything supernatural or magical or demony. No, he'd caught some kind of virus in some far-off land and had died sweating and shaking in some dingy little hospital that didn't even have running water. She still blamed herself for that. Every day. If she'd been told, she could've gone to him, Willow could've done something, transported him home, a healing spell… something. But no, Giles hadn't wanted to risk her or Willow on some unknown, which had turned out to be fatal, disease. So he hadn't told them until after. When it was too late. So Xander had died alone. And that broke her heart.
Willow had gone right off the deep end… again. Warren had gotten off easy when she'd skinned him alive. Giles… not so much. She was so much more powerful, you see. Had much more control of her magicks by then and could aim them with pinpoint accuracy. Giles had screamed for three days. At least that's what Buffy had been told after she'd finally dragged herself out of her room, her face still puffy and red from weeping. She'd also been informed that they were burying what was left of her Watcher the following morning.
Willow was gone, not in the not physically present sense, but in the whatever made her Willow had vaporized sense. She'd stopped by long enough to drop off the remains and tell the tale of the Englishman's death then she'd touched the emerald-green amulet around her neck and… poof. Apparently, D'Hoffryn's offer had been too good to pass up this time, and after seeing what Willow had done to Giles, Buffy had to assume that he'd been impressed and had offered her a top position in the vengeance business. Buffy had tried to care about that for a while and had found that she just couldn't. So she'd stopped trying. At least Wils was still alive and doing something she apparently enjoyed and was scarily good at.
And Buffy had soldiered on. More slayers all the time until she'd stopped even trying to learn their names, there were just too many. She was surrounded by super-strong girls bombarding her with their questions and fears and hopes and dreams, day in and day out. Dawn was a trooper, though. She'd taken up the reigns of the fledgling, barely rebuilt Council and had made everything work. Some days had been rougher than others, but all in all, it had flowed… like a huge river. And Buffy had been pulled along, sometimes going under and fighting her way back to the surface, sputtering and choking, and sometimes slamming into the large and unyielding boulders that seemed to pop up out of nowhere.
Dawn never should have gone after that slayer by herself, but she'd insisted that it was a simple pick up, and besides, she'd never been to Greece. She didn't have any powers, aside from whatever made her the Key, but whatever that was had absolutely no use in a fight. Sure, she was good with a sword and could stake a vamp with the best of them, but even Buffy would've had trouble with the three huge demons that had cornered her in that dark alley. There wasn't even anything left of her to bury, and the slayer she'd gone to fetch was probably still restrained in some mental ward somewhere, drooling on herself. She'd been sixteen at the time and it was only through her terrified ramblings that they'd even found out what had happened to Dawn. When she'd died, her body had just disintegrated, and she'd turned back into a glowing ball of green energy.
That had been the final straw, the one that had broken Buffy almost beyond repair, and she'd tried to commit suicide. She'd taken her sharpest dagger and had sliced her wrists to ribbons, watching the blood flow over her pale skin to pool on the floor between her splayed legs. She'd sat there until her blood had covered the small bathroom's floor from wall to wall… but she hadn't died. She had passed out at some point, though, and when she'd woken, she'd been sitting in a congealing puddle of her own blood and her wrists had been whole and unmarked.
She'd never told anyone about 'Bathroom Incident 2.0,' not that there'd been anyone around she'd wanted to tell. She'd just cleaned it up. And then she'd kept trying. She was going to end her life. Period. And when she set her mind on something, that something happened, come Hellmouth or Hell God or First Evil. She was Buffy Anne Summers, dammit, the Chosen One – Slayer comma The – and the freaking world was going to bow to her wishes, one way or another.
So instead of doing damage to herself – which had failed spectacularly – she'd tried to commit suicide by demon. She'd figured that the Powers had had something to do with her failed suicide attempt, but maybe they would let her die if she did it in the line of duty. So she'd started hunting alone, unarmed most nights, hoping that some big bad would finally put her out of her misery. And every morning, she'd awakened hale and hearty, covered in blood and lying next to a demon's carcass or puddle of goo or pile of dust, but she'd been alive. She'd tried it over and over again for months until she'd finally given up and had consulted the Council's new head witch, Agatha.
It turned out that dying and being magically resurrected had changed her. Well duh, she'd already known that. Tara had told her she had a cellular suntan but was basically the same Buffy as before. So not true… well, not totally. Yeah, her cells were bronzed like a construction worker in Texas in July, but there was just one tiny thing that Tara had apparently missed. One tiny thing that made all the difference. Buffy couldn't die.
Couldn't age either, evidently. Of course, by then there'd been only two people still around from the old days, the pre-Sunnydale falling into a crater days, and as much as she hadn't wanted to deal with the annoying little nerd, he was the only one who could tell her that what she'd been seeing in the mirror wasn't a lie. That her eyes weren't playing tricks. So, she'd called Andrew.
He'd confirmed it. He still had those videos. She'd looked exactly the same as she had those final few days in her old house. It had been a decade since Sunnydale and she hadn't aged even a day. Agatha had theorized that the transfer of Slayer power during the fight with The First had been what had sealed it. Had said that she would go only that far and no farther. Buffy didn't like to think about what that meant. That if the transfer hadn't happened, and she could still age but not die… yeah. Wrinkly Buffy decades down the road that no amount of moisturizing, skin firming formula could ever fix. Ew. Or would she turn into nothing but a big face like on that British TV show? That guy couldn't die either… well, he could, but he always came back, and several millennia later, he'd gone from being tall, dark, and handsome to… yeah… a big wrinkly face in a tank full of smoke. That's why she tried not to think about it.
Seeing Spike in those videos had been almost more than she could take, but take it she had. She'd made Andrew burn copies to DVD and she'd watch them now and again when the melancholy overtook her and she needed to see Spike again. She'd watch him stomp around the basement pretending to be angry or just leaning against the wall in the kitchen, in the background of the action happening in the video, but so very much in the forefront of her heart. It still hurt just as much and still made the tears fall just as hard as they had that day when they'd gotten the injured fighters to a motel and she'd finally been able to be alone. She'd howled into her pillow in the most far away room she'd been able to get, shredding it in her anguish. The bedding and mattress had been next, sacrificed on the altar of her pain.
After she'd found out about the whole immortality thing, she'd decided to quit the Council and all the Slayer business. If she had eternity, then she was finally going to do something she wanted to do, not what the Powers dictate she do. Not like they could kill her or anything so… screw 'em. And besides, they had buckets and buckets of baby slayers to handle things, and they could bring Faith over from Cleveland to lead them if they wanted, so there was no need for her anymore, she was superfluous to requirements.
Agatha had understood her feelings and had made a charm that would render Buffy invisible to locator spells. She'd also helped Buffy concoct a believable story so the Council would send her back to the States on their private jet, supposedly on a mission to track down a demon. Once she'd been able to slip away from the two slayers accompanying her, she'd secured a used car that had been in fairly good shape and had set out on an epic road trip. She'd had no specific destination in mind; she'd just driven, changing direction on a whim until she'd finally drifted into Wyoming after three months on the road.
Well, drifted wasn't exactly the correct term. Her car had died a horrible and painful death on the side of a lonely gravel road with only slow blinking cows and those dippy-bird oil wells to keep her company for the two days she'd waited for someone… anyone… to come along. Finally, an old rattle-trap pickup had stopped, and a plump, round-faced woman had asked her if she needed help.
Clara had taken her to a large, rambling ranch about forty miles down the road and had offered her a place to stay for as long as she needed one. Almost ten years on and she was still there.
Wyoming was different from any place she'd ever lived. A lot different. Things moved slower, people were friendlier, and the wind blew pretty much all the time. And there weren't any vampires or demons or Hellmouths. She'd checked. Okay, not very thoroughly, but at least there weren't any within three hundred miles or so of Clara's ranch. It was a quiet kind of place. A place full of wide-open spaces and small towns that a person could just get lost in. A place where someone could try to escape their past and start again.