Chapter Nine
Buffy settled down on the sofa, giving Spike a grateful look when he dimmed the lamp for her. In spite of her determination to stay awake, she fell into a restless, but dream-free sleep, while Spike pulled some papers from his desk and began writing out letters and instructions.
Sometime before dawn, he realized that the tenor of Molly’s heartbeat had changed and he leaped to his feet, heading for the kitchen and the small servant’s room just off the hall. In spite of his vampire stealth, his rising woke Buffy and she grabbed her stakes and slipped down the hall after him.
When they saw the kitchen door swinging on it’s hinges, both leapt toward the door of Molly’s room, only to find it opening onto a frightening sight.
Molly was standing in the center of the small room, staring mindlessly ahead, while Drusilla walked around her, lightly running her claws around the immobile girl’s throat, leaving thin trails of blood behind.
“Please tell me I’m having another dream,” Buffy said softly as she watched the insane vampire licking the blood off her fingers.
“Sorry, Slayer,” Spike breathed softly, “Looks like we have the real thing here. He held out his arm when Buffy went to rush past him, saying quietly, “She’ll be dead before you get there, pet.”
Remembering Kendra’s slit throat caused by those same talons, Buffy stopped beside him, her body trembling with the need to destroy the vampire dancing around the servant girl she was coming to like so much. Drusilla cocked her head at them, her claws never leaving their position over Molly’s jugular and said sadly, “It’s true, isn’t it, my grown-up William? You don’t love your dark princess anymore. You want to bask in the sunshine. I should be very cross with you.”
“No need to be cross with me, luv. You know you’ll always be my ripe, wicked plum. But we’ve moved on, we have. You left me, Dru. Left me for your ‘daddy’ and then for a chaos demon. A vamp’s got his limits, pet.”
Dru switched her gaze to Buffy’s cold, angry face and cocked her head in sudden understanding. “Oooh, Daddy’s going to get a surprise from this one,” she said with delight. “You must be careful, William. He will not want you to have her.”
“Not his choice,” he said flatly. “You’ll be wanting to stay out of it, Dru. Jus’ telling you that for old times’ sake. Now why don’t you be a good girl and let the chit go?”
The former seer cocked her head again and hummed to herself. “If I kill the girl, your sunshine will stake me, won’t she?”
“Most likely,” he agreed, still holding Buffy back.
“All right, my love,” she said, stepping away from Molly’s swaying body. “But Angelus is not going to be so kind.”
“You let us worry about the big poof, Dru. Just get yourself out of here.”
Buffy glared at him in fury as he backed away to let the brunette vampire out of the room. Her body thrummed with the need to plunge her stake into the other vampire’s heart and she couldn’t believe Spike was standing between them.
“What are you doing?” she hissed furiously, trying to get around him. “I’m not letting her walk out of here! Look what she did to Molly!”
“Molly’s alive, Slayer,” he said in a flat, cold voice that she hadn’t heard from him in years. “Let it go.”
By the time Buffy had shoved him away, Drusilla was out of the room and out of the house. Buffy whirled toward Spike, ready to beat him to a pulp for denying her the kill, when she saw him gently laying Molly down on her bed. He bent over the girl and quickly ran his tongue around the bleeding marks on her neck. Before Buffy could scream at him for taking advantage of the unconscious girl, she remembered how he’d stopped her lip from bleeding and saw that the very shallow cuts on Molly’s neck were no longer oozing blood.
She watched in barely restrained anger as he wrapped the girl in her blanket and carried her carefully into the study, laying her down at the opposite end of the couch from where Buffy had been sleeping. He didn’t even acknowledge Buffy’s presence until Molly was sleeping peacefully on her side. When he was sure she was as comfortable as he could make her, he stood up and took a deep, unnecessary breath before turning to face the still angry Slayer.
“Do you want to hear my reasons before you start hitting me? Or shall we just go right to the beat-down and get it out of the way?”
With a shaky sigh, Buffy relaxed and dropped the stake still clenched in her hand. “I’ll listen,” she said tightly, “But they’d better be damn good ones.”
Holding up a slender, yet powerful hand, he bent one finger down as he said with no inflection, “Number one - we don’t know whether we are back in time in our universe, or if we have been sent to another dimension. So anything we do here can have permanent repercussions back in Sunnydale. That includes killing Dru, or Angelus or anybody else whose absence might have an effect down the road. Number two – if you remember your dreams, Dru never touched you, in fact she tried to warn you in some of them. Seems to me, if those Slayer dreams are gonna start coming true, it might be useful to have somebody on our side. Number three – if she’d wanted Molly dead, she could have done it long before we got here. She had her in thrall, all she would have had to do is walk out the door with her. I don’t think she was planning to kill her, I think she was trying to make a point.”
“Which would be?”
“That Angelus can get to us whenever he wants to. That we’re not safe here.”
“Anything else?” Buffy asked with the beginnings of a pout at being presented with such good reasons, none of which she’d thought of in her desire to dust the insane vampire.
He tilted his head at her and said quietly, “And I could no more stand by and watch you dust Dru than I could let her kill you. I’m sorry, luv, that’s just the way it is.”
Choosing to ignore the second part of his remarks as not fitting her preferred world-view, Buffy said haughtily, “I guess that’s all I can expect of a vampire, chipped or not.”
She saw the pain flash across Spike’s face, but before she could apologize he said coldly, “Right, Slayer. That’s all you can expect.”
He turned his back on her and walked to his desk, sitting down heavily and slumping back against the chair. He didn’t look up as he growled, “So then, I suppose that means if you get a chance to stake the big poof, possibly preventing him from ever finding his way to Sunnyhell and into your virginal little knickers, you’ll do it. Is that right?”
Buffy stood still; scenes of long, yearning kisses in the graveyard, fighting side by side against the Mayor’s minions, Giles’ devastation after finding Jenny’s body, memories of her one night of passion with Angel that ended so badly all flowing through her head. It occurred to her that not having Angel in Sunnydale or her life wouldn’t necessarily be such a bad thing. Then she realized that no Angel probably meant no truce with Spike; perhaps no Spike at all, and she opened her mouth to say so, only to discover she was too late.
His head was thrown back, his eyes squeezed shut as he gritted out between clenched teeth, “Yeah, that’s what I thought, Slayer. Makes a difference if it’s somebody YOU love.”
She wanted to blurt out that he was a soulless demon and couldn’t love, but she knew in her heart that was a lie. He’d loved and cared for Drusilla for over a hundred years, and he obviously still loved his long-dead mother. Then anger took over again as she realized he thought she wouldn’t stake Angel only because she loved him when she was sixteen.
Stomping over to where he sat leaning back in his chair with his eyes still closed and a sad look on his face, she stood in front of him tapping her foot until he opened his eyes and glared at her.
“What? You aren’t done yet?”
“No, I’m not done yet. I didn’t answer you right away because I was thinking about it. About all the things that would and wouldn’t happen if there was no Angel. And I decided that –“
“And you decided that it was important to have the great brooding one in your life. Yeah, I got the picture.”
“No you didn’t, you moron.” She was so angry her cheeks were bright red and her chest was heaving as she breathed in and out. Spike was so distracted by the way she looked, he almost missed it when she said in a growl that would have done credit to a vampire, “I don’t want there to be no Angel, because then you would never have come to Sunnydale and made that truce with me, and you wouldn’t be here with me now, and I…”
“And you what?” he asked carefully, sitting up straighter in his chair.
“AndIwouldmissyou,” she muttered quickly, turning away with a flushed face. She stamped back over to the couch and curled up at the end away from Molly, refusing to look at him anymore.
The vampire stared at her flaming face in astonishment for several minutes, then gradually relaxed back into his chair, a slow smile spreading across his face. “All right, then,” he said softly.
With the coming of dawn, Spike knew they were safe for the day and he allowed himself to drift off to sleep as well as he could in his less than comfortable chair. When he woke up, it was to see Buffy shepherding a puzzled Molly back to her room with an explanation of how some animal got in her room last night and they couldn’t wake her up so they put her with them to keep her safe.
The confused girl nodded her head as though she knew what Buffy was talking about, and went in to her room to dress. She gave a little shriek when she saw the blood stains on her night gown and Buffy hastened in to show her how the scratches were already healing and that the blood made it look worse than it was. She could see from the girl’s worried frown that bits and pieces of the past night were flitting through her head and she hoped they could convince her she’d had a bad dream brought on by the “animal attack”.
Buffy said “good morning” to Mrs. Barstow as she bustled in the door preparing to start breakfast and then went back to the study to check on Spike. She could feel the older woman’s eyes on her back as she walked away, her nightgown swirling about her ankles. She giggled to herself at the idea of the woman spotting Spike sitting at his desk with nothing on but his own nightshirt, and determined to send him upstairs to sleep before he shocked his old family cook.
To her surprise, he was awake and yawning when she entered the study and they both looked away uncomfortably, neither one sure what to say about the night’s events. Finally, Spike picked up some notes he’d been working on and gave them to Buffy saying, “Give these to the boy who brings my blood and tell him to take them to Mr. Saint-John immediately. We need to get this situation fixed before sunset.”
Buffy wasn’t sure what Mr. Saint-John was going to be able to do to remedy their problem, but she nodded and took the notes back into the kitchen, repeating the message to Molly and Mrs. Barstow in case she wasn’t back down from getting dressed before the boy arrived.
When she was ready to go back downstairs, having managed to dress herself except for buttoning up the back of her dress, she ran into Spike as he came out of his room tucking a shirt into his unfastened pants. She resolutely turned her eyes away from the bulge in the front of his pants, thereby allowing him to see that her dress was not buttoned.
“Come here, pet,” he said with a sigh. “You can’t go downstairs like that.”
When she walked over to him obediently, he turned her around and began the tedious process of buttoning all the tiny pearls running up the back of her gown.
“Bloody brilliant, he was,” he growled, trying to fit his large fingers around the small buttons.
“Who was?”
“The bloke who invented zippers, that’s who.”
Buffy giggled and tipped her head back to look at him over her shoulder. “You don’t have to do this, you know. Molly’s right downstairs. She can do it for me.”
“I don’t mind,” he mumbled. “I kinda like it.” He brushed a chaste kiss across her lips, startling them both with its tenderness. To save face, he immediately leered at her and said boldly, “Course, I’d rather be undoing them…”
“You are such a pig,” she breathed in a voice that made it sound more like she’d just told him he was a hero.
“That I am, luv,” he answered, equally softly. “I truly am.”
“Okay then. Just so you know.” She blushed and moved away from the cool hands that had remained resting lightly on her shoulders. He shook himself and went back to fastening his pants.
“I’ll be down in a few minutes, pet.”
“Why don’t you stay up here and sleep?” she asked with uncharacteristic concern. “You were up all night.”
“’S’allright, luv. Got a lot to do this morning. I’ll catch a nap this afternoon if we’re done with everything.”
By the time Buffy got downstairs, the delivery boy had been and gone with the messages and Spike’s package containing his blood was sitting on the hall table. Buffy picked it up quickly and carried it into his study, putting it away in the drawer he’d used the day before.
While Molly and her aunt worked on preparing the evening meal, and the other girl went around dusting and polishing the pieces of furniture that hadn’t been cleaned yet, Buffy walked out into the garden. She sat on a bench for a while, almost falling asleep in the warm sunshine as she basked in the warm day that Spike assured her was not typical of London’s weather.
She didn’t see the blond shadow staring out at her from the upstairs window; the shadow that watched her hair glowing in the sunlight and remembered Dru’s “your sunshine”. He watched her basking in the light, head back and eyes shut as she absorbed the warmth and wondered what he was thinking, hoping she would want to spend time in the dark with him
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