Spike/Buffy season
4. NC-17. Receiving and keeping the gem of Amara makes Angel a tad too
happy. 30,000 words rewrite of a 500-word fic.
Falling
Part 1 - The first steps of an unlikely dance
He came to me the night after the funerals. It was a dark night,
moonless, cold. Lifeless. Or maybe I just remember it that way because
that was how I felt. I had felt just as frozen, standing by their
graves.
Within three days before that night, I lost everything. Everyone.
I’ve always known I’ll die young, I’ve known it since I first learned
what a Slayer is. What I am. What no one ever told me was that the
people around me would die too. They had been hurt before, there had
even been close calls – there had been Jenny Calendar – but until it
began, I had believed I’d always save them and the day. I don’t believe
it anymore. I can’t.
I sent mom away. She fought me on it, but in the end, I didn’t give her
much of a choice. I don’t know where she went, it’s better this way. I
asked Xander to go with her to protect her, but I think he understood.
I sent him away for his own safety. He didn’t protest. He only asked to
stay until the funerals. He’s the one who found Willow.
It started with the report on the news that a residential building was
burning. I was home for the weekend. After the Parker fiasco, I needed
to be off campus for a little while. Mom called me to watch the
afternoon newsflash. The live, wide angle shot, taken from a
helicopter, left no place for doubt. I ran to Giles’ place. The flames
and fire truck when I arrived there were the same I had seen on TV.
Now, though, there was also an emergency vehicle. And a body bag, as
black as the scorched walls of the townhouse.
I heard two words – neck trauma – and I sicked up.
It was just the beginning, though. Within hours, Oz’s van was found. He
was in the back. Willow never got to know about it. Small mercies. Both
her parents’ home and the dorm were torched. She was dead before the
fires started.
The taste of ashes was still on my tongue, when he knocked on the door.
My eyes were still burning, tearing up from the acrid smoke. I opened,
a stake in hand, ready to send Spike back to the hell he came from for
what he had done. I had figured it out, you see. I sent Oz to L.A. with
the Amara ring. Spike caught up with him, got the ring back, and
returned for revenge, using the ring to do it all during daylight.
Except…
Except when I opened the door, his left eye was swollen shut, and the
shaking hand that pulled a cigarette from his lips was blackened like
only the sun will burn vampire skin. And before I could move or say a
thing or even blink, he said three words that sank under my skin better
than a knife, better than fangs.
“Angelus is back.”
I couldn’t not believe him.
I’d rather have sent the bastard to hell myself, maybe after a round or
two of torture. He deserved as much, after what he had done to me.
Hell, he deserved worse than anything I can dish out. I’d have needed
to be every bit as much a sadist as he can be. Now don’t get me wrong,
I enjoy a spot of torture as much as any other vamp. But that kind of
things takes patience to be done right. The kind of patience I don’t
have. He reproached it to me often enough when I was nothing more than
a fledgling.
No, I wanted him dead, and I wasn’t particular about how it happened.
If I did it, fine. If she did, fine as well. Doubling our chances was
all that mattered. I wanted to see his ashes beneath my feet. I wanted
to know he’d never lay a hand on me, not ever again. Everything else
was irrelevant. And judging by the Slayer’s eyes, as haunted by pain as
they were by grief, I had a feeling she wouldn’t be too hard to
convince.
“How do you know he’s…back?”
Each of her words was heavy with blood and tears. They could have been
sweet, a few days earlier, but now the flavor in the air was only
bitter.
I shrugged, and regretted the movement immediately. I had to struggle
to keep the pain off my face and voice. It was bad enough that I
couldn’t hide my slowly healing eye and burned hand. I didn’t need her
to wonder what else Angelus had done to me. And I didn’t need or want
to think about it either.
“Seen him in action, didn’t I?” I tried to smirk, but I had a feeling I
was grimacing more than anything else. “Got there in time to see him
play with his friends. Quite a show, that. Vintage Angelus, straight
from the old days, nothing like the batshit crazy act he played in
Sunnydale.”
She wasn’t getting it, I could see as much right away. Confusion was
written all over her face. Lucky her.
“If he’s the one who killed Giles and Willow,” she snapped, “I don’t
see how that makes him any different—.”
“Because this time he’s not trying to send everyone to hell, including
himself. He’s making sure no one shoves a soul back into him. So he can
have his fun for as long as he wants.”
I brought what was left of my cigarette to my lips and took in a long
drag that burned my throat with the comfort of habit. As I did, I
considered the Slayer in front of me, just past the threshold. She
still had a stake in her hand, though she seemed to have forgotten it.
Confused, hurt, angry, depressed, but I couldn’t see or smell any guilt
on her. Didn’t she get it?
“So.” I exhaled smoke toward her face and she flinched. “Are you going
to help me fix your mess, or just wait for him to come at you?”
“Fix my mess?” She sounded almost indignant. “I haven’t seen him in
months! I didn’t—”
“You sent him my ring. You gave him the sun after centuries of
darkness.”
Understanding rose in her eyes, along with tears. My tone only
hardened, sharpened, and I lashed out again, annoyed that she wasn’t
showing herself any stronger. My accusations were like a whip slashing
the air between us.
“Of course you did this. And now you and I are going to make it right,
once and for all.”
I had known before talking to Spike that Giles and Willow had died
because of me, because of their involvement in my fight. But that had
been their choice, and I could distance myself from it. They had died
because of me, yes, but my guilt was manageable.
When he told me—God, even now it’s tearing me apart. When he told me I
was responsible in a more direct way than what I had believed so far,
that I had caused Angel to lose his soul, again, with another bad
decision…I could have died right there. My heart tightened and it was
hard to breathe and Spike’s words were buzzing in my ears and the world
was black behind a blurry curtain of tears.
I let go of my stake. I didn’t hear it fall. I fumbled and grabbed the
door for support, but it still wasn’t enough. Everything was wavering,
my knees were folding in beneath me, and I felt like I was going to
fall. I lowered myself to the floor and just sat there, just past the
threshold, and tried to get my mind and body under control again. In my
head, Angelus was laughing and his laughter was shards of ice and
blades of steel.
Something hitting my knee startled me and I jerked, the back of my head
hitting the door behind me. It happened again. I blinked, and my vision
readjusted to what was in the floor in front of me—two small rocks. A
third one hit my arm and this time I glanced up at Spike. He was still
standing on the doorstep, head tilted to one side as he looked down at
me. He had another couple of rocks in his hands and he looked like he
was pondering throwing them at me as well. For a few seconds I wondered
what that was about, and then I realized he couldn’t put a foot inside,
not unless I invited him in, and I had no intention to do that.
“Back to the world, yet?”
I would have expected him to mock me, or insult me, and shove in my
face that I had just broken down in front of him. He’s a fighter. He
looks for weaknesses, and when he finds them, he exploits them.
But he didn’t exploit this one. He kept quiet as I pull myself up, and
waited until I had wiped away my tears to say: “So, you’re ready to
help me dust him, now?”
I was.
We never really put it into words. She agreed to help me put him down,
and that was it. There were no promises on my part not to kill anyone
while we worked together, no promises on hers not to dust me when it
was all over. It was all about Angelus.
But then, it has always been all about Angelus.
We made a round together, that first night. Hit the bars in town, the
clubs, asked anyone who would listen if they had seen Angelus, and
convinced those who weren’t listening to listen anyway. I did the
arm-twisting, she did the questioning. Teamwork at its best. Except
that we didn’t get anything. No one had seen him, no one had any clue
of where he might be. Only when we ran out of options did we turn
toward the obvious – the mansion on Crawford street.
She smelled like murder, on our way there. I guess she’s just as fond
of her memories of the damn place as I am.
There was no car in sight, but I knew, as soon as we got there, that
this was it. I could smell the blood before we opened the front door. I
caught her eye when she put her hand on the door handle, and nodded. A
muscle twitched in her jaw, and she nodded back. She pulled her hand
away, grabbed a stake, and opened the door with her left hand. We
walked in together.
If either of us had had any doubt at that moment that Angelus was back,
what we found would have given us the proof we needed. It was just pure
vintage Angelus, the same kind of stunt I had heard of, as a fledgling,
and witnessed just a couple of times, too. It was more than simply
killing a few people; it was another step into breaking the Slayer’s
mind.
She had stopped right past the threshold, eyes wide and hand covering
her mouth. I kept on, and looked around. The display was having its
desired effect, no doubt there, but that couldn’t be it. Even if he was
fucking with her head, there had to be a message beyond that. I found
it, pinned to one of the bodies with a slim knife. I almost expected
the letter to be written in blood, there certainly was enough around
and on the bodies for that, but no, it was written in black ink, the
lines clear, precise, even elegant on the heavy cream-colored paper. He
hadn’t just grabbed the first piece of paper he had found. He had
gotten fine stationery. Oh, yes, it was a game for him, and it was only
the beginning.
Blood was everywhere, and at first that was all I saw.
It was splattered on the walls and fireplace, small drops that rose in
large sprays, like impressionist flowers, all of them crimson. A garden
of death.
It was on the floor, large pools, so dark they seemed black. It was
still fresh, and when Spike walked in it, it made a sickening squishing
noise beneath his shoes. I wanted to shout at him to get out of the
blood, to just stop, but my throat was too dry to let out any sound.
All I could do was watch the imprints he left as he came back toward me.
It was on them. All seven of them. It was on the middle-aged man in
tweed, propped on a sofa, glasses in his right hand and a rose in the
left. It was also all over the red-haired girl sitting next to him, an
arm around the boy next to her. He had a guitar pick on a leather
string around his neck. They both held a rose. A dark haired boy was
sitting on the floor at their feet, leaning back against the sofa. He
was wearing a hard hat. Just by his side, a blonde girl was dressed in
nothing more than a silk nightgown. Her cheek rested against his
shoulder. A foot away from them, in an armchair, legs crossed, an older
woman held a doll on her lap. She was blonde too, and so was the girl
nailed in front of the fireplace, her body held up by stakes. Her arms
were spread out on each side of her, her head tilted to one side. All
she wore was a golden cross.
It’s only when I saw her – when I recognized myself in her – that it
started to make sense. That I understood who they were all supposed to
be.
“He’s going to kill us all.”
I didn’t realize I had spoken aloud until Spike answered. I had to make
a conscious effort to tear my eyes away from the scene to look at him.
“No. He’ll try. Doesn’t mean he will.”
He was just by my side, and he was holding a piece of paper. There was
blood on it too. I tried to take it from him, but I was too slow. He
pulled it away, and before I could try to get it again, he took out his
lighter and set the paper on fire. That small flame melted the ice in
my bones in a flash, and I could think and move again.
“What are you doing? Is that from him? What does it say?”
Whatever was left of the paper fell to the ground, and in seconds it
was ashes.
“It doesn’t say anything more than his little display. Let’s get out of
here.”
“Wait.” I grabbed his arm. “He might still be here. We should—”
He pulled free and walked away, throwing over his shoulder: “He’s gone.
Left town. Let’s get back to your place, grab whatever you need and we
can follow.”
I caught up with him and grabbed his arm again. This time, he yanked
himself free right away and glared at me. I had better not touch him
again, his eyes warned me.
“How do you know he’s gone? How do you know where?”
“The letter.”
It was my turn to glare. “You just said there was nothing important in
it!”
He shrugged and walked out of the mansion. I followed.
“So, I lied. Let’s get on with it.”
He never told me what was in that first letter. I stopped asking after
I found the second one.
Two hours after we found Angelus’ messages, we were driving out of
Sunnydale and north. The note had said that was the direction he would
take, though not how far he would go. As it turned out, we didn’t have
to go far before we picked up his trace.
I had to stop for gas in the next town. As soon as we got off the
highway, we knew something was up. There were newscast vans all over
the place, even more police cars, and despite the late hour there were
people being interviewed on every street corner.
“You think that’s him?”
That was the first thing she had said since we had left the mansion.
She sat very rigidly in the car, keeping close to the door, and I had
begun wondering if she was having second thoughts.
“Only one way to find out.”
After filling up the tank, I stopped at a crowded all-night dinner. The
locals barely looked at us when we got in, all of them focused on the
television set on the counter. We found a small table and sat down, and
it wasn’t long before we got the whole story.
A child had been snatched off the street that morning. She had been
found again by nightfall. The Slayer blanched when she heard the
details. For me, they just confirmed that yes, this was Angelus’ work.
And then we saw him. Right there, on the television screen, affecting
the sad features of a concerned citizen and lamenting the state of a
society that left its youngest members to be butchered by savages.
The Slayer and I stood together. At the bottom of the screen, the words
‘Live from Main Street’ were flashing in red. He was just a block away.
“Wait.”
Spike didn’t seem to have heard me. I grabbed his arm, pulling him to a
stop, and he hissed as he snatched it away again. Too late, I
remembered the state of his hand, and realized that his arm had to be
burned the same way.
“Don’t. Touch. Me.”
I raised my hands, palms out in an apologetic gesture.
“Just stop and think for a second. He probably put that show in front
of the cameras to draw me out here, but he can’t know I’m in town
already. And he doesn’t know either that we’re working together. We
have the advantage of surprise twice over.”
He pulled out his cigarettes and lit one, taking a deep drag and
nodding before he answered.
“Keep going down the street, find the news crew that interviewed him. I
bet he’s still close, enjoying his work.”
“What about you?”
His grin sent a cold shiver down my spine. I’ve never seen a rabid
wolf, but I imagine they look like that, just before they bite.
“I’ll be there when you get him away from the crowd.”
Another exhalation of smoke, and he was gone. It wasn’t exactly what I
had had in mind when I had stopped him. I’d much rather have come up
with a real plan, rather than this “I’ll be there” that told me
nothing. My throat was dry suddenly, and my heart was beating faster
than I would have wished. I checked the stake in my jacket’s pocket,
and the one up my sleeve. If there hadn’t been so many people around,
I’d have taken it in my hand. I’d have felt better.
I found the journalist who had interviewed Angelus easily enough; the
guy was thrusting his microphone into everybody’s face, including mine.
I walked around with the rest of the crowd. A lot of people were
holding vigil candles. A few held signs protesting everything from the
incompetence of the police to the corruption of the mayor’s office or
the anger of God over the killing of baby seals.
And then I saw him, just a few yards away. Actually, I think I felt his
eyes on me before I saw him. He had a small smile, and he pursed his
lips as though blowing me a kiss before turning on his heel and walking
away toward a nearby side alley. He glanced back, once. The invitation
couldn’t have been any clearer. I clenched my hand over the stake in my
pocket and followed.
Small town. Not so many alleys branching off the main street lined with
stores. The Slayer had been right when pointing out surprise was our
biggest advantage, and so I took some height to see more without giving
myself away too fast.
I hadn’t imagined they’d come to the roofs as well.
They were two buildings over, just far enough that I could see them
trading blows but not hear what else they shared. Just close enough
that I could see her get mad as he got under her skin. I cursed a blue
streak as I climbed down my building then up theirs. I had told her I’d
be there, a promise in intent if not in words, and instead I was
nowhere near enough to help.
I missed the entire confrontation, though I heard the last of it when I
was reaching the roof – the Slayer shouting, and Angelus laughing. All
I saw of him was his back as he walked away from me, jumping to a lower
roof. I looked around, expecting to see the Slayer’s mangled body, gold
and blood on the tar. I didn’t. Instead, I saw her hands, bloodied
fingers clinging to the edge of the roof as she dangled over three
stories. I went to help her – and as soon as she saw me over the edge,
she yelled at me.
“Get him! Don’t just stand there and get him!”
I ignored her. Angelus was gone. I grabbed her wrist and pulled her up
to safety. As soon as I let go of her, she took a shot. I couldn’t
avoid her fist.
“What the hell--”
“I told you to go after him! Now he’s gone!”
“You needed help.”
“Yeah, five minutes ago I did! Where were you?”
I had no answer to that. To this day, I still don’t.
Ever trusted someone with your life and been let down?
I have. I don’t recommend it.
The entire time I was up that roof, I had only one thing in mind.
Angelus was going to die. I would kill him, or Spike would, or we would
do it together. All that mattered was that Angelus would soon be dust.
And I gave it a fair try, if I can say so myself. It was a good fight,
at first, I got a few nice blows in. Drew blood. That only made him
laugh. When he stopped laughing, he started telling me about how Oz had
cried, before he had finished with him. How Willow had pleaded until
her voice became rough and painful. How Giles had never made a sound,
and how it had lasted that much longer for him because of it. How he
would take special care of my mom when he found her. When, not if.
I lost it then, and just attacked, without thought or planning. Without
remembering that Spike was supposed to be close, supposed to help.
Without caring about stopping his feet and fists when they flew toward
me. I took risks; I paid for it by falling off the roof. He laughed at
me, standing over the edge, and stepped on my fingers where I was
clinging to life.
“Next game in San Francisco. I always wondered what the Golden Gate
Bridge would look like by daytime. See you soon, darling. And don’t
delay too much, things could get even bloodier if you do.”
He was leaving. I was letting him leave.
And so was Spike.
He was finally there. Too late. And when I shouted at him to get
Angelus, he ignored me.
I was so mad, I could have killed him.
“This isn’t going to work. I’ll hunt him down on my own, and you can go
to hell.”
I started going away, but before I had taken three steps he was right
there by my side again.
“No.”
I ignored him all the way down to street level. And then it dawned on
me that I had very little money, no way to go to San Francisco, and my
travel bag was in his car. I stopped and gave him the hardest look I
had in me.
“I don’t trust you. And I never will.”
He didn’t reply, just raised an eyebrow at me that said “So what?”
“But if you’re ever not there again when you’re supposed to be, I’ll
stake you before I do anything else.”
He still didn’t answer, but he nodded, just once. We went back to the
car. He drove until morning, then found a motel, got us two rooms, paid
for them I’m not sure I want to know how. I lay down on that bed
without looking too closely at the bedspread and spent my day replaying
the entire evening in my mind. I couldn’t let Angelus get under my skin
like that, it would only get me killed.
And I couldn’t rely on Spike for anything more than transportation, for
the exact same reason.
When we arrived in San Francisco, Angelus had already been there for
several hours. His handiwork was, again, all over the news.
“Are you sure it’s him?”
I didn’t bother answering. The Slayer knew it was him, as much as I
did. Three cheerleaders had disappeared, at three different schools,
within the space of three hours. All three were blonde with hazel eyes.
All three had gone missing at a game, leaving only one pompom behind.
“How do we find him?”
I could have tried to get his scent from the schools, but it had been
hours, and too many humans had traipsed over those grounds. Thing was,
he wanted to be found. We just needed to figure out what clue he had
left for us.
By midnight, we were there. But by midnight, it was too late.
We found them in a school gym. He had made two of the girls stand on
chairs, with the last one on their shoulders. It could have just been a
cheerleading thing. Except I don’t think cheerleaders usually put ropes
around their necks.
When we arrived, all three were hung. Angelus wasn’t anywhere to be
found, but he had left a note at their feet. I went and picked it up
when the Slayer stopped walking.
“Too late this time. I’ll give you a couple of days to cry your little
Slayer heart out, and then we’ll try again, sweetheart.”
When I looked up again, she had come to the girls, and she was reaching
out toward the closest one.
“Don’t touch her,” I warned.
“We can’t leave them here. We have to—”
“We have to get out of here.”
She turned to me. She looked enraged, I thought she would stake me,
right there and then.
“I know you don’t give a damn about them, but you could at least
pretend! It’s your fault they’re dead! If you had gotten after him on
that roof, we wouldn’t… no, wait. If you hadn’t looked for that damn
ring—”
“And if you hadn’t given it to him—”
She hit me, right over the mouth. I tasted blood, as strong, as heady
as anger. I struck back, and I wasn’t the only one bleeding anymore.
“Let’s get this straight right now, Slayer. You and I are here for one
thing. Kill Angelus. If we spend our time deciding who’s most to blame,
there’s going to be a lot more of dead girls on our way before we
finally get to him. And if we’re still here when the cops get a clue,
we’ll never get to him, and then who will stop him?”
I don’t know if I was getting to her. She still reeked of anger. But at
least, she wasn’t hitting me anymore.
“You’re ready to get out of here?”
She didn’t answer, but she followed me out.
For a month and half, that’s how it went. We hunted. Angelus killed. He
made elaborate displays for me to find, wrote me notes that, in his
twisted mind, might have passed for polite correspondence. He still
didn’t know Spike was with me. What he probably did know was how much
his words and actions affected me. My stomach emptied too often when we
found his ‘gifts’, so I took the habit to wait until we had come back
from the hunt to eat.
I wasn’t the only one affected by his mind fuck. The entire country was
following the path of this mad serial killer who seemed to be acting at
random, leaving no one, nowhere safe. The police and the FBI were on
edge, which didn’t make my job any easier.
Our job, I suppose I should say.
Spike and I were still arguing. It’s hard to be a step too late, night
after night, and not try to find someone to blame. I was blaming him
for just about everything, just because there was no one else for me to
blame. I yelled at him for driving too slow. For driving too fast. For
stealing money for gas, food and motels. For not stealing enough for us
to always have separate rooms. For the way he’d wake me up when my turn
in the bed was up. For not waking me up at all whenever he decided I
needed more sleep. For not being any better than I was at figuring out
where Angelus would be going next, or what he would do.
He gave back as good as he got. From my hair to my clothes to how
little I ate, he criticized everything about me. Jabs about how being a
Slayer wasn’t helping me much, now, and how I hadn’t had a Slayer dream
since we had left Sunnydale, only nightmares. He kept the reminders
that I had sent the ring to Angel and caused him to lose his
soul—again—for particularly stormy days.
As much as we shouted, though, we were still in the same car, every
night at nightfall, hunting a madman. Some nights, neither of us said a
word. Some nights, we argued non-stop. It came down to blows, a few
times, but never anything bad, never enough that one of us still had
marks by the next night.
Never, until we reached Kansas. I’ll always remember the name of the
town; Lawrence. Always remember the smell of dust and lilac in the air,
and how low the full moon was, just above the horizon, casting our
shadows on the ground like oversized puppets. One more night when we
had arrived too late. One more grotesquely set scene of blood and
death. One more shouting argument. And then something new.
That was the first night since all this mess had started that Spike and
I fought—really fought, no holds barred, his game face to the front and
a stake in my hand.
That was the first night, also, that when the dust settled, we weren’t
glaring at each other. Instead, we were tearing each other’s clothes
off.
That was the first night we slept in the same bed. Although sleeping
didn’t happen right away.
The characters and names used in these stories do not belong
to me. All copyrights remain with Fox and Mutant Enemy. No profit is
made from this fanfiction.
