Chapter Eighteen
He was pulled groggily from the darkness by her voice, pleading, begging him to be someone other than who he was, and then he was slammed back into hopelessness with her last vitriolic declaration. The past year’s confidences were flung away as if nothing had happened and he could see the playing field now through her expectations. A slayer and a vampire—nothing important except for the predictable fight ending with one of their deaths.
It brought a tear to one dried eye and while his body screamed at him for its recent abuse, he let it slide back into his hair without a move to wipe it away.
His head hurt.
No, that wasn’t anywhere near close to the pounding, drilling pain he experienced ripping through his skull. It didn’t hurt—it bloody agonised over the decision to explode. And through it all was the pain that once again he was unloved, discarded as a thing of little value and the injustice of it all nearly ripped his chest apart.
The futility of his existence slammed him hard between the eyes and Will could have wept. Beneath all his assertions that it didn’t matter if Liz never loved him so long as he could be there for her and help her through the loneliness of being who she was, that her heart continuing its steady beat would be more than enough for him, it was little more than a devastating lie he had conned himself with. He could never be happy without her love—as a creature of the world’s making, he couldn’t exist without it. Maybe if he’d been Angelus he could exist alongside others with nothing but the sadistic pleasures of ruined flesh—but he wasn’t Angelus.
He wasn’t Angelus and he’d never really even come close.
Will had thought that, at the very least, Liz would come to value the friendship they’d struck up over the past year. He hadn’t expected her to welcome him with open arms. Then again, he hadn’t expected her to find out his identity from anyone else but him. He thought he’d prepared himself well for the heartbreak of her hate, but the daydreams had tricked him into truly believing in requited love.
The truth had ruined all his strength, torn him into useless shreds of the man he’d been behind the face of a demon. He was weaker than he had ever been and Will felt next to pathetic. He had no will to get up and save himself—where would he go if he managed to escape? What had been done to him and how easily could they track him if he actually broke free of this place?
He had no one to blame but himself for this less-than-favourable turn of events. Buffy and Spike had tried their best to warn him and he’d fobbed them off, thinking he knew better than two beings who obviously had a few more years experience of his changing nature under their proverbial belt. He’d been a git, sure enough. And now he was jailed in a cell of bloody Perspex with no way in or out, a monkey on display without even a peanut thrown his way.
A blood bag fell innocuously from the ceiling and his stomach rumbled at the vision of red. Mouth dry as chalk, he felt like he could feed for a week, if he found the right donor for his meal. Will nearly crawled to the packet and ripped it open with his teeth, poised to sink in his fangs and gulp down the sustenance when a warning had trembled from the lips of one of the unseen inmates on the other side of his wall.
His prison was complete—drugged blood on tap.
Not only had they taken his freedom, rolled him into some observation cage like he was nothing more than a rodent that could do a few tricks, but they’d even taken away the certainty of being fed. Will roared his fury; hurt and fear clashed violently within him and he had a bit of trouble trying to focus. He had to get out of there. He had no clue what these people were about, but with the spectacular view of demons upon demons opposite him as far as the eye could see, he wasn’t betting it was for the good of puppies and Christmas.
It certainly wasn’t for the good of him.
He needed a plan—one he could navigate through by the end of the day so it didn’t bugger up. Rudiments of one assembled in his mind and Will set to waiting for his opportunity. It’d come. It was the only thing of which he was certain; hoping to speed it along, he laid out on the floor as if unconscious.
~ * ~ * ~ * ~
Buffy rolled her eyes at the sobbing, broken vision of herself. Liz was sprawled defeated on a hill and clutching the sparkly pendant when she should be combining forces with them to save Will. The vampire had been missing all day and it really hadn’t taken much for Buffy and Spike to realise he’d been captured by the Initiative. Owing to Spike’s vivid experiences under the experimentation of Professor Walsh, they didn’t hold much hope that Will wasn’t already chipped. In fact, by current calculations, he should be waking up in a cold white cell, about to suck up some drugged blood from a sterile packet before the weak voice of a terrified inmate warned him off it.
“God, I am so predictable,” Buffy relished, eyeing the stirring form of her younger self as Liz sat up finally, a torn look of defiance on her face. “I knew I’d find you here.”
“Did you follow me?” Liz accused angrily, swabbing her tears from her cheeks with an agitated hand.
“As if I needed to,” Buffy refuted sweetly. “I’m you, remember? Didn’t need to do anything but wonder where I’d go if I had a mystical link to a super hottie with bleached hair and fangs. Alone time is definitely underrated,” Buffy quipped, smiling pleasantly as Liz’s expression clouded further.
“If I’d known this talisman bound me to a vampire there’s no way I would have ever used it,” Liz denied hotly, the blood rushing to her cheeks.
“Oh, I don’t doubt that,” Buffy agreed before walking up the incline and taking a spot next to Liz, looking out at the not-so-scenic view of trees and Hellmouth. “If it makes you feel any better, I’d have staked him as soon as I found out. No questions asked.”
The grin of justification burst onto Liz’s face and her body relaxed.
“But I’d be wrong.”
The frown heralded the sudden cool in the air and Buffy sighed, flopping back in the grass and staring up at the canopy of stars high above her. “There’s no way in Hell that I would have given Spike the time of day back in the early days. The only thing I wanted from him then was a jar of his ashes that I could display as a trophy in my room.” Sadness crept into her smile and Liz looked on in horror as the obvious love the senior slayer held for the vampire leached into the air around them and made her shiver. Her gaze abruptly fell from the sky and turned to the shining talisman Liz still gripped in her hand. “Not that this ever happened between us. I think things went kinda differently in my world, but one thing looks like it’s shaping up the same.”
Liz’s eyes almost glowed in the light from the dimmed moon as she waited nervously for Buffy to continue. Without being told she knew that the thing that was developing the same in her world was this connection between the vampire and the blonde slayer and the thought made her stomach roil in objection. It was wrong to have a link with the vampire; for the life of her she couldn’t work out what the Powers were thinking by instigating it in the first place. She was furious at the position they’d put her in and the mess they’d created for her—and blindsided by the untarnished truth of who she’d been fantasising about for the past six months at least.
“Spike loved me for a long time before I finally got the memo.” Buffy’s shining eyes bore down hard on Liz and she waited for the girl who was a younger, more stubborn version of herself to lose a little of the defiance before she continued. “I never gave him the chance with me he needed—and then he was dead. After three years of him professing to love me, of supporting me when no one else really did, of fighting on my side whether it made sense to him or not, I finally realised that what I felt for him was a lot deeper than respect. I’d ignored the way he made me feel for so long that it became a habit. Feeling tight all over and all mushy inside became my natural state and not once did my little Buffy brain realise that what I felt was a whole lot more than reluctant friendship. When I finally admitted it to myself, he was standing in the Hellmouth and looking so beautiful as he burned up from the inside and saved the world.”
Liz was alarmed at the sheen of tears that turned into perfect little drops as they slid gracefully from beneath Buffy’s lids.
“For almost a year I grieved for him, hating myself for being so stupid. And then I found out he was back and living in LA with Angel, all without one single word to me about it.” There was no condemnation in her voice; if there was one thing Buffy had learned during her romantic solitude, it was that there were many reasons behind everything and that she just didn’t have the heart to blame Spike for even one more tiny thing—even if concealing his return from her constituted a thing loads bigger than tiny.
“My point is, Will’s been your friend and look, he came here to save you. He’s a vampire, sure, but he’s going against his nature because he has feelings for you. Don’t be stupid like I was. Actually give him a chance to show you who he can be. You might be surprised at what you see.” Buffy winked and then jumped to her feet, swiping the ground from her ass with her hands as she quickly looked around. Liz watched her with her mouth hanging open and the talisman burning a hole in her palm. “Besides, he’s pretty much chipped now and couldn’t hurt you even if you bug the crap out of him. Which you do, but he loves you for it anyway. Or, I assume he does. Maybe he doesn’t love you, but I think that’s probably a long shot—otherwise he would have already bragged about hearing all your troubles for a year, really rubbed it in your face. Oh, and he might have been more on your Willow’s side when it came to it, instead of trying to protect you as soon as he got you home.”
Liz blushed. She didn’t like to think of what he’d done for her, but maybe she should. If he’d been anyone else—any thing else, she’d have showered them in her gratitude. It had taken a Herculean effort just to summon up the words to thank him.
“I…I can’t…”
“Fall for a soulless creature of the night?” Buffy guessed with perfect insight.
“It’s wrong,” Liz hissed impatiently. This entire conversation was pointless. She killed vampires, she didn’t make-out with them. A healing memory of Angel flashed into her mind and Liz gulped. Well, she had no leg to stand on if she denied there was an attraction—or had once been. Will was okay-looking at least.
“Oh come on, okay-looking? I may have hated Spike with everything I was back then but I was never blind. Spike’s gorgeous and I wouldn’t believe you if you disagreed—I’ve totally been Denial Girl. I’m you, remember. I know what you’re attracted to, and as much as you tell yourself it isn’t Spike, just try listening to your heartbeat when he’s around. Trust your heart and for once go for what you want. You can have it, no matter what the Council says.”
Liz watched Buffy walk off, her hips swaying with confidence as she descended the hill and quickly blended in with the trees at the bottom. Much had been said and she had a lot to think about, and as tiny alterations already began to sew together new and more objective thoughts, she surmised it possible she was seeing things a little bit differently. More clearly. Positively.
With a relaxed smile, Liz settled back into the soft grass and remembered some of the conversations she’d held with her faceless friend, recalling some of the amusing anecdotes he’d doctored for her slayer ears, and then the innuendo that had convinced her they could be more than distant talisman-buddies. Those nights of sorrow he’d been her figurative shoulder to weep on, when she was about to break from the hopelessness of it all and he renewed her will to live just by being there. Just by being her friend.
Liz swallowed hard. She’d been a fool, reacting first when she should have clung to the relief she knew she’d felt when he confirmed that Willow hadn’t destroyed him. He’d worried with her and laughed, cried and planned, all through a link that had grown in meaning without the need to really know an identity. Spike couldn’t have been pretending all this time. The vampire was renowned for his impatience, so if he’d planned to kill her by being her confidante for a year, she couldn’t believe it. The fact that he’d dragged his heels for so long to come to her—to finally reveal his face to her—indicated he was afraid of her finding out who he was.
Fear was something she had trouble associating with Spike.
Her response to him had obviously been too hasty. Liz bit her lip and grasped a handful of grass, staring at one particular star that was not exactly extraordinary but was shining brightly enough to catch her eye. And while she watched it seemed to fall from the sky, streaking fast to an atmosphere hostile toward it. Liz jumped to her feet and hurriedly made a wish.
She only hoped she wasn’t too late.
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Author's Chapter Notes:
Am I updating too fast for people? Spuffy realm can be both the worst and the best for support. Sadly, the readers for this fic seem to have dwindled drastically. Thank you so much to those that haven't deserted me. I hope you feel rewarded by the onslaught of chapters now. There will be another one up tomorrow.