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Author's Chapter Notes:
Writen for the Watcher's Diaries (http://www.livejournal.com/community/watchersdiaries/) reverse Art-a-thon
Chapter 1: Spike

Spike walked across the desert, feeling uneasy. He didn't belong here, he knew that, but he didn't know how to get out. The desert stretched as far as he could see in every direction.

Only one thing marred the flat landscape. A figure in black. He moved quickly towards it since it was the only landmark to guide him. As he got nearer he saw that it was a woman dressed all in black sitting at a small round table. A long black lace veil covered her hair and face.

As he got nearer he could see that she was laying cards out on the table. Before he even heard her voice or saw her face he knew it was Drusilla.

He stood behind her and saw her turn over a card. It was labeled death and it showed a young girl with long brown hair. Her face was streaked with blood, and she held a knife in her hand.

She stopped, looked at the card, then lifted her veil. Brown eyes met blue and she said, "Run William."

He did. He ran without direction. She was behind him. Not Drusilla, but the hunter. He had no doubt that if she caught up to him she would kill him. So he ran as fast as he could.

There was nowhere to go. The desert stretched out in every direction. He glanced over his shoulder and saw his pursuer. It was a young girl no more than sixteen years old he guessed. Long stringy brown hair covered her face, obscuring her features. But he could see the most important thing. In her hand she carried a stake. He had no doubt that she was a slayer.

He turned his eyes back front as he ran down the streets of a city. But he didn't recognize where he was. There was no safety for him here, just row upon row of houses that he could not enter.

Behind him he could hear the Slayer, she was repeating the same phrase over and over, "Head and heart."

There was a crash of thunder and it began to rain. Then up ahead he saw Revello Drive. If he could only get there he would be safe. That was one house to which he had an invitation.

Off to his left he heard a young girl scream in terror. He didn't stop to think. He just turned and ran toward the girls crying, even though he knew doing so would allow the slayer chasing him to catch up.

He burst through the door of the house and ran up the stairs. On the top of the stairs was a grandfather clock that read 1:50. The air was heavy with blood and fear. He looked over his shoulder once again. There was a flash of lightning and he could see the Slayer framed in the door. But she didn't enter, as if there were a barrier keeping her out.

He hurried up the stairs, not willing to temp fate. He barely glanced as he passed a bedroom where a couple had been brutally stabbed.

He followed the sound of crying to a child's room. There stood a heavy set man covered in blood. In his arms he held a small girl with long brown hair.

"Don't cry," he told her. "They can't hear you."

Spike roared, and rushed to the man, snapping his neck before the blood-covered man could register what had happened. Spike caught the girl as the man's limp arms let go of her.

"It's all right, moppet," he told her. "But we have to get out of here. I know someplace safe."

She looked at him with wide eyes and said, "I thought it was you."

Behind him he heard a bestial snarl. He put the girl down and stood between her and the shadow figure that had entered the room.

Before he could tell the girl to run she said, "Big sister's angry, I have to go now."

Spike shifted to a fighter's stance, but he could feel his limbs trembling. He knew he couldn't beat the hunter that moved through the shadows. He only hoped that he could delay her long enough for the girl to escape.

She was on him. Lightning flashed momentarily illuminating her dark features that were coved with white clay and her wild tangled hair. She raised her stake and plunged to toward his heart.

He felt the wood begin to pierce his skin. It seemed to take forever as the wood pressed deeper and deeper into his chest. Then she was flung back, and a much paler but tanned hand pulled the stake from his chest.

He was lost in the beautiful green eyes that looked down on him.

"Are you okay?" his angel asked.

"Buffy?" it was the only thing he could say.

He needed to tell her something, something very important, only he didn't know what it was. Then he saw the shadow figure stand up behind Buffy, a bone knife in her raised hand. He wanted to scream a warning, but he couldn't say anything.

Just as the knife was about to be plunged into Buffy's back, Spike woke up.

It took him a minute or two to get his bearings. He still wasn't used to the small apartment Doyle had arranged for him.

He got up and went to the fridge to get a beer to calm his nerves. The dreams always unnerved him. He thought that he should be used to nightmares by now. He'd been having them ever since he got his soul back. Nightmares in which he relived all the horrible things he had done as William the Bloody.

Of course he'd had a brief reprieve while he was a ghost. Ghosts don't sleep so they don't dream either. But since he became corporeal again his dreams returned, although they were different now. They were more vivid than before. Sometimes they were filled with the gory details of his past, but most of the time they were just strange.

Often he was in the desert, desperate to get out of it. It was a little odd that it wasn't the sun that bothered him, but the desert itself. Of course, the sun in a dream couldn't hurt him, but he thought it was rather odd for a vampire to dream of the desert of all places.

There was one thing that all these dreams held in common. In them he was hunted. Sometimes by Nikki, sometimes by the Chinese slayer he'd killed. And often the wild girl with the white clay on her face whom he thought of as the hunter.

But they were only dreams, Spike told himself, no matter how vivid they might seem. He had never seen Buffy in his dreams before. Somehow she frightened him more than anything else.

She had seemed more real than anything else. He couldn't have said what she was wearing, or how she was doing her hair these days, but he could remember ever fleck in her green eyes.

Seeing Buffy tore him up. She had seemed so real in the dream that he longed for her, craved her. He wanted nothing more than to hold her again. But he couldn't go to her.

At first it had been fear that kept him away. Fear that she wouldn't really want him back. Not that they'd been exactly together, but it would be hard for Spike to be near her, and be forced to put a distance between them again.

He could not have asked for a better 'last night' than the one they shared in the basement of her house, even if she did have Angel breath.

He hadn't kissed her, he didn't dare. He understood that sex, that sort of intimacy in general was strictly off limits. He'd forever lost the right to that when he'd tried to rape her. But to just hold her, to be close to her was wonderful.

The closeness had amazed and frightened him that night in a stranger's house when he had comforted her. It had been twice as wonderful and twice as terrifying, when she had come to him again, this time strong and whole. It was one thing for her to take comfort from him when she was alone and scared. It was another when she was back in her own house, among her own friends.

If she had moved on however, if she didn't want him to hold her anymore, Spike didn't know what he would do. So fear had kept him from finding Buffy at first.

And then Doyle had come along, and that had changed everything. Sooner or later Spike would have given in and run to Buffy, even if it meant she tore out his heart and stomped all over it. But Doyle had given him a choice. Offered him something Spike had never had. His own destiny.

He didn't know what that meant, wasn't sure whether he really wanted it, but it was a chance for Spike to figure out where his place was now that he had a soul.

There were still a few hours before the sun went down, so Spike decided to head into the sewers, find out if any trouble was brewing, and maybe save an innocent or two.





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