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A/N The beast had me by the throat, it’s taloned hands choking the life from my fragile body. I felt the darkness approach and welcomed it’s release my flagging spirit finally ready for the shame of surrender

Then she was there and in her hands my flaming sword and a spear of righteousness. She drew the beast, called it out with the challenge of her golden spear. She threw me my sword and it felt good to hold it again.

We fought the beast together, for days the battle raged, then there was silence and the beast lay slain at her feet.

She was April

My wonderful proof reader who helped me through a terrible bout of writers block. Really could not have got past chapter 6 without her, she must also take all the credit for the basic idea for the final challenge. Thanks April you’re the best.

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Giles approached the kitchen warily, listening to the slayer's barked orders.

“Kennedy, you’ll be in charge of training: two sessions a day, weapons and hand to hand. Ask Giles if you need any help.” She sounded determined, business like, a slayer in charge just as he’d asked her to be.

“Willow,“ she continued as he entered the room, quietly observing her back. “It’s up to you to protect the house, wards and barrier spells. I know you can do it.” Any protest the witch might have offered was silenced by the certainty of Buffy’s tone.

“Xander and Anya, I’m gonna need you to look after the girls, make sure they’re fed and everything. Draft Andrew in to help you, okay?” She paused, waiting for a response.

“We got it,” Xander assured her, ignoring Anya’s petulant huff.

“Great.” She wiped her hands on her jeans. “I don’t know how long I’ll be, hopefully I’ll be back in a day, two at the longest.”

“And where exactly is it that you are going?” Buffy spun around, startled by her watcher's question. When she faced him, his expression was a study of neutrality just as his voice had been.

“I, er, I--” she floundered under is calm scrutiny, “I was going to the temple.” Giles raised an eyebrow in casual invitation for her to continue. Suddenly the carefully crafted reasoning the scoobies had accepted so easily deserted her. “I was just going to have a look,” she finished feebly.

“And what is it you expect to find?” he asked as he removed his glasses, his tone hiding just the hint of challenge beneath the careful evenness of the question.

She wanted to turn away, distract herself and him with activity, but his almost indifferent gaze held her in place. She shrugged. “I guess I’ll know when I find it,” she ventured, trying to make her tone light and casual. She could feel him out-manoeuvring her with his dispassionate questioning.

“And in the mean time you will leave the girls unprotected?” He dropped his eyes, focusing on the glasses in his hands as he circled a soft white handkerchief over the lenses.

She frowned, deep lines appearing on her tanned forehead, and fidgeted slightly. “It’s only a day or two,” she told him. “You guys can handle it. I just wanted to go and see if I can find…” she trailed off when he met her eyes again, his own full of compassionate reprimand.

“Spike,” he finished for her, sighing and running a hand over his face. “Spike is nowhere that you can find him, Buffy. Willow’s spell revealed that much. He has passed into the Temple of Areathan and you cannot follow him there. He must face the challenges alone.”

“I know that,” she protested weakly. “I just thought I might be able to find something out. About what happened to him.”

He nodded his understanding, but when he spoke his words where damning. “You have a house full of young girls who desperately need your protection. I hope you will not endanger them, but the choice, of course, is yours.”

She watched him turn and leave, her expression as blank and hollow as her voice. “Kennedy, get the girls ready for patrol.” What choice?

……………..

The room was well lit, ornate chandeliers hanging from its high coved ceiling. The walls were painted the colour of old wine and the floor was polished marble. It reminded him of the plush drawing rooms and reception halls of the fine houses that had hosted the most stylish parties during his human years.

The room was filled with the rhythmic sound of ticking emanating from the multitude of clocks that adorned the walls. Ornate grandfather clocks, primitive water-driven clocks made from beaten brass. Elegant carriage clocks polished to a bright finish shared shelf space with the ostentatious glass domes that displayed the clocks' intricate workings flanked by gilded cherubs. Mounted on the walls were simple wooden clocks with their brightly painted porcelain faces, their heavy pendulums swinging lazily beneath.

Directly in front of him was a raised platform, curved, with three marble steps leading up to it. The wall behind was painted with a Daliesque mural depicting distorted hourglasses and cracked clock faces. Upon the platform stood four full length mirrors, each one framed in dark wood, carved with intricate swirling patterns, the glass highly polished and sparkling in the crystalline light of the chandeliers.

He frowned, disturbed by the room's extraordinary elegance. He had expected something a little more gladiator style. Looking around, he understood that his fierce animal strength would not help him here, that a hundred years of picking fights was no preparation for whatever test the room would hold.

The ticking of the clocks broke rhythm, some speeding to a frantic clicking while others slowed to a languid pace. The great grandfather clock to his left chimed loudly, its notes hollow and distorted, echoing around the walls. Before him the monochrome images flowed in a hypnotic twisting dance across the smooth surface of the wall.

The chiming of the great clock reached a booming crescendo, then suddenly all was still and eerily silent. The glass of the mirrors turned to liquid before his eyes, each one shimmering into a frozen image, a point in time, a pivotal moment stilled before him.

In the leftmost mirror he saw himself. He had his back turned and his head tilted down as if watching something below. In the foreground crouched a uniformed figure, its face obscured by a knitted mask, in its hand a futuristic weapon.

The second mirror held a scene so instantly recognisable he felt his heart twist and tear in his chest. Buffy, clutching her sister's forearms, her beautiful face calm and tender, resolve, love and courage shining in her emerald eyes. Behind them, a bright tear marred the night sky, and in its light was the dark and unmistakable silhouette of a dragon. The tower. The setting for all his nightmares.

For a moment he couldn’t identify the third scene. Willow kneeling in the woods, her head thrown back in a silent scream of agony, her pale arms held out before her decorated with ragged bracelets of blood. The scoobies flanked her, candles clutched in their hands, their eyes filled with confusion and fear. Of course, the resurrection. No one had spoken about it—at least not to him—but he recognised the redhead's dark dress as the one she wore the night of Buffy’s return. Just as he remembered every other detail of that night, that single happiest night of his life. The night that the all the pain and grieving had ended, the night she came back to them.

To anyone else, the last scene would have been innocuous, just a man laying his coat on the banister as he started up the stairs. But he knew better; there was no innocence there, for it was a prelude to the single most shameful act of a life that had spanned over a century. He could hear the water running even now, smell her sweet scent wafting down the stairs, calling him to her as it always did. It would only be moments. Just a handful of steps and a few badly chosen words later, he would have her pinned against cold tiles, squirming and pleading beneath him.

He closed his eyes, forcing his mind to focus on the present. He studied the mirrors: a choice then, a chance, with hindsight’s elusive counsel to put right a wrong, to do something differently. To make a better choice.

He discounted the moment before his capture by the initiative without a second thought. No promise of freedom or circumvention of heartache was worth sacrificing his time with Buffy.

The tower. He swallowed hard looking at the scene. She would be dead a moment later, her body lying on the ground below, his beautiful slayer, graceful even in death, her thick golden tresses fanned out on the dusty ground, her back bowed over the rubble, one leg bent as if poised for the next steps of their dance. He bit his lip, focusing again on the scene. What choice was there? Dawn’s ancient blood was already tearing down the walls of hell and only blood could stop it. What then? Sacrifice Dawn in exchange for her sister’s life? For a moment he was tempted: step forward, fling Dawn into the waiting portal and let Buffy live. But she wouldn’t live, not really. Not if her sister took her place. Oh, her heart would go on beating. She would go on fighting, but live? Knowing her own sister had died in her place? No, Buffy couldn’t live with that.

Stop Buffy’s resurrection? Unthinkable. Leave her in the cold ground to rot away to dust? No. He recalled that awful summer, the worst in a century. He and Dawn lost in their grief, her small broken voice when she had come to him for comfort he didn’t know how to give. Her hot tears under his thumb as he wiped them away, pulling her close with meaningless murmurings. "It’ll be okay, pet. Just give it time." Time. He had an abundance of that, and he knew he could not spend an eternity in mourning, could not condemn himself with the ceaseless torture of reliving her death night after night into forever.

It was easy then. Go back to that fateful night, stop yourself from hurting her, keep her safe. "For how long?" his mind asked. How long would she be safe? A year later she would face the First. He’d be there to help her, really help her with no soul to hamper him, and she’d trust him because he wouldn’t have hurt her. At least not that night. He quashed the thought. No, he wouldn’t hurt her. It was just that night, that combination of events at that moment of weakness; he wouldn’t hurt her again. Oh, really? He heard his own scathing voice in his mind. Could he, without the knowledge of that terrible night, guard against the possibility of repeating history?

He ran his eyes over the mirrors again and was suddenly tempted by the first. He could be free of all of it, of her and his all-consuming love for her, of the emasculating torture of the chip, of Dawn and the scoobies and the unwelcome pressure of responsibility that came with them. Persuade himself to head back to Dru and never think about Buffy again.

Buffy. As if he would ever be free of her. She had shone her light into the darkest recesses of his being long before he had acknowledged his love for her. Bright, beautiful Buffy. He sighed. Perhaps there was another way to avoid her death. Perhaps he could die in her place. No, the portal had no thirst for his blood. Only she and Dawn could stop it. He could not keep her safe from that fate.

His eyes went again to the third scene; her voice drifted into his mind, her first confidence. A secret they had shared before he became her secret and lost her confidence. "I was warm ... and I was loved ... and I was finished. Complete." He shook his head, not liking the direction of his own thoughts. "I think I was in heaven." No. If she… if they didn’t bring her back, there wouldn’t be anyone to fight the First. Memory pricked at his mind: she’d saved him from the First, she was cleaning his cuts, telling him softly about what he’d missed, about her fight with the uber vamp, the girls they’d lost. He was out of it, barely able to stand, but his sensitive hearing had picked up something else, voices from downstairs arguing in hushed whispers.

"There’s nothing we can do about it now," Giles had hissed, his voice tired and exasperated.

"So we don’t tell her?" Anya had questioned in kind. "This is all happening because of we brought her back to life."

Beljoxa's Eye. They’d seen the oracle. Been told that the slayer’s resurrection had caused their troubles with the First. He glanced at the third mirror. He could let her rest, leave her in peace, save her all the pain of that year. The pain of living again that had driven her into his arms, his bed. He couldn’t give it up, wouldn’t swap that awful abuse-filled year for anything, except perhaps her happiness. "I was Happy."

With a roar, he leapt at the mirror, throwing himself through its liquid surface. He landed just feet from her headstone. Looking over Willow’s shoulder, he saw an ancient urn, could smell the animal blood within. He didn’t give himself time to think, to back out, to be persuaded by the scoobies or his own heart. He ran to the centre of the circle, ignoring their alarmed voices, and brought his booted foot down hard on the fragile pottery, shattering the urn into a thousand pieces.

He fell to his knees, ignoring the shouts of the people around him, Willow's agonised cry as the flow of magic through her body smashed against the broken conduit, the backwash of energy melting her insides to liquid. Tara was crying, reaching for her lover's lifeless body. Xander pushed him down, rage written on his face, “You son of a bitch!” he hissed angrily, a stake appearing in his hand.

All Spike could think as he watched the slow motion arc of the stake towards his chest was that for once in his miserable life he’d actually done the right thing.


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A/N Finally i managed to get something written and posted. So sorry for the delay, I just couldn't get anywhere with the final challenge.

All the wonderful reviews helped keep me going.

Thanks for your patience caroline, you like the Spike I like that's why I keep taking his soul away in my stories, he doesn't need it.

Glad you like it yvonne soory for the wait, hopefully I'll get my rhythm back now I've got over this chapter





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