Chapter IV: Balance
"The first step to eternal life, is you have to die."
- Chuck Palahniuk
The pain in Buffy's wrists was on the verge of becoming unbearable as she was no longer able to support her own weight and she more or less just hung from her chains. Her throat felt dry and her head was swimming faster than Michael Phelps—
Okay, if she could still make funny quips to herself, she was still here. She was still okay. If she could just keep from going unconscious again, Spike couldn't get near her to stick her with the muscle relaxants. He couldn't know how weak she was. He wouldn't risk trying to poison her while she was awake. Her blood was regenerating; she could feel it. In an hour or so she knew she would have some semblance of strength again. If she could just stay awake.
"Am I losing you again?" Spike asked. Buffy somehow managed a scowl.
"Well, yeah." She said, and was surprised by the raspy sound of her own voice. "I have the tendency to space out when you start talking about my friends as dinner."
"I want you to understand what I really am. I'm just being honest with you."
"Not loving the honesty."
"You never did, did you?" Spike asked, tilting his head a bit. "Not from me."
"If you haven't noticed, your brand of honesty has never been that much fun for me."
"You just don't like to be told things that interfere with what you'd rather believe."
"You're right, Spike. I'd much rather believe that you never once thought about eating my friends… but wait, I already knew that you were a disgusting pig, so no surprise there." She had to pause. It was taking a lot out of her to not sound as spent as she felt. "All you're doing is wasting my time."
Spike laughed.
"Gotta' love the false bravado." He said. Buffy was silent as he stood. "You think I can't hear how slow your heart is beating? That I don't know just how far gone you really are? I am still a vampire, you know." He finished, sounding a little offended. "Everyone seems to forget that."
"Spike—"
"I guess it's my own fault, really." He turned away from her. "Got no one to blame but myself."
Buffy took a deep breath.
"What happened to you?"
There was silence in the dank room for a few moments, before Spike turned back to Buffy.
"Something." He said quietly.
"What is it?" She swallowed to try and moisten her burning throat. "Is it The First? Are you being controlled again?"
"Oh, give me a little credit." He answered. "Fool me once and so on."
"That's too bad, because that would have been the only good excuse for this. Now I'm pretty sure I'm going to have to kick your ass."
"You don't seem to get what's going on here, love." Spike said, and then picked up the chair he'd been sitting in and threw it against the far wall forcefully. It crashed apart loudly, breaking the silence. Buffy felt a brief surge of adrenaline that made her blood rush a little quicker and made her feel more alert. "You think I did all this just to let you go? Right, properly piss off the slayer and then prepare to be served a nice spot of death." He walked to her and grabbed her suddenly by the upper arms. "How stupid do you think I am?"
Buffy managed a smile.
"How stupid?" She asked. "Average stupid. How dead? Soon to be very."
Spike took his hands away from her.
"Still not grasping your situation."
"What situation? Are you going to talk me to death? It took a lot more than that to kill me both times."
"And isn't that what makes this so anti-climactic?" Spike asked cryptically. "I suppose I should have planned something a little more grandiose than this. Should've invited your mates or something. Maybe a 21-bloody-gun-salute."
Buffy stared defiantly.
"Can't you taste it?" Spike asked, suddenly very quiet.
Buffy went still as a wave of cold fear crashed over her. That was when it finally hit her. She hadn't paid it much attention before, the taste in her mouth… it'd been so faint. She could have bitten her tongue earlier, or her lip. Anything could have put that taste in her mouth. The bitter coppery taste of blood. But now she knew. She finally understood what this was about.
"Oh my God." She said.
Spike looked in to her eyes.
"Now she gets it." He nearly whispered.
Buffy took every last ounce of strength she had left in her body and began to thrash about in her chains. She twisted and pulled, and fought as much as her tired and weak arms would allow. This couldn't be happening. She couldn't let this happen.
"Spike, please!" She said. "Don't do this!"
"It's already been done."
"You can still let me go!" She pleaded. "I'm the slayer. I can heal. If you let me go now, I can heal. You don't have to do this!"
Really, Buffy couldn't remember a time in her life when she was more scared… but this was the selfish kind of scared that had nothing to do with anything but herself. Usually when she was scared, it was for the world or for her friends, or for Dawn. Now she was just scared for her own life.
And she'd never felt so alone.
"I love you, Buffy." He said, caressing her cheek. "I can't let you go."
They didn't tell me what they were doing. All those nights when the scoobies slipped away in to the shadows to plan your little welcoming home party. All I knew was that they needed me to stay with Dawn at night, and I honestly didn't care enough to try and find out what they were up to. All that mattered to me in those days was Dawn. As long as I knew where she was, and I knew she was safe, I didn't care about anything else. What better way to know where she was and that she was safe than to be her protector? I figured that whatever the sainted pack were doing, it worked out well for me because it put me right where I wanted to be. In your house, watching over the girl.
"I'm really loving these slumber parties, Spike." She had said once, shoveling popcorn in to her mouth, as we sat on the couch in front of the TV. I gave her side-glance, understanding that a teenager was teasing me and that this was a perfect example of how sad my life had become.
"I can see why some animals eat their young." Was the response I gave her. Usually that kind of thing shut her up. Sometimes it didn't.
" Do vampires eat their young?" She asked with that look of morbid curiosity on her face. I turned to her and just stared. "Right, dumb question. Vampires don't have young."
"Why don't you just wash up and go to sleep like a good pain-in-my-ass?"
"Why do you stay here if I'm such a pain?" She asked, crossing her arms over her chest.
"Because I don't want to be blamed when you burn the house down."
"I'm 16 years old, I'm not a toddler with a set of matches."
I ignored her, mindlessly flipping through the channels.
"She's not coming back." She said.
I looked at her.
"What?"
"Buffy…" She shook her head. "She's not going to come back and fall in love with you because of your baby sitting skills. She's gone."
I knew that. Deep down, I knew that nothing I was doing amounted to anything in the end… but hearing it from her, knowing that even Dawn saw the truth of it, killed me.
I looked away from her, and shut the TV off.
"It's late. Time for bed."
"What? It's only—"
"Go!" I asserted, raising my voice but not looking at her. She jumped a little, and then slipped off the couch and was gone. I listened closely to make sure she went upstairs, and then listened closer to make sure I didn't hear any windows creaking open. Dawn had an uncanny way of disappearing if you let her.
I sat forward on the couch and held my head in my hands.
Before you died, when I realized I was in love with you, I rebelled against it. I tried to hate you; I tried to want you dead. I tried to forget about you… but there was nothing to be done about it. My heart had always had a mind of it's own, always wanting something it knew it should not have wanted. My first love, Cecily, was a wealthy aristocrat's daughter, and I was nothing. My heart wanted her like it had a right to want her. Drusilla was crazy and could never really belong to anyone. She went where the darkness was… and that wasn't necessarily where I was. You? You were something of a triumph, even for me. It was an amazing bloody feat of epic proportions for me to fall in love with you. Not because you were the slayer – all vampires are drawn to the slayer… but because no matter how much I wanted to believe in the darkness in you, I knew it wasn't really there. I knew I had fallen in love with something pure and beautiful, and that my ugliness would destroy it if you gave me half a chance.
That's what I meant, the night you died, when I said I knew you would never love me. You couldn't love me. It wasn't in you to love me. You could give me the little respect I deserved as someone who had helped you, but at the end of the day I really was beneath you. I didn't know you were going to die within hours of that moment, Buffy… but I knew that for however long you lived, you would fight the good fight and that you would die a good woman. I knew that I couldn't be a part of that. I couldn't have you. At that moment, I understood completely my place in your life, and your place in mine. To you, I was nothing. To me, you were just the blink of an eye.
That was, of course, when you were standing right in front of me. When me reaching out to touch you, while probably not being warmly accepted, would have been possible. I was feeling uncharacteristically self-sacrificing. In that moment I was ready to give you up to save you from me… but the next moment, when you were out of my sight, that was when the real truth struck me. The woman I loved was mortal, and one day I would be without her. Without her in the very strictest sense of the word. There would be no happy reunion if or when I died, because I would not be going to the same place you went. Your last moment alive would be my last moment with you.
Something inside me broke with that thought – something more than just my heart. How could I live without you, Buffy? My life had no point without you.
Maybe I was addicted to the pain at first. Maybe that was why my heart always found its way to women who only wanted to chew on it and spit it out. I don't know, but what I do know is that when I saw you dead a couple hours later, there was nothing addicting about that pain. I would have done anything to have you back. To have you always.
The night, the only night, I had angrily sent Dawn up to bed; the witches came home looking oddly… out of sorts. I should have known something was going on then and there, when neither one of them asked about your sister. They looked tired and pale… but asking about it might have given the impression that I cared, so I didn't.
"You two look like hell." Was what I opted for instead as I stood up from the couch. Will was well weathered against my barb at that point, and only looked mildly offended. Tara's feelings were still insultingly easy to hurt, and it showed plainly on her face.
"It was a long night." Was all Willow said as she shrugged off her jacket.
"Speaking of long nights, Dawn wouldn't go to sleep so I was forced to kill her."
"Dawn." Tara said, not scared, but visibly upset that she had forgotten to ask about your sister. "I'll go check on her."
She was gone the next second, which left me alone with Red.
"Would it hurt you to pretend to be worried?" I asked, opening the front door to leave. Once the two of them were home, I didn't like sticking around too long. "I'm still a vampire. Still capable of all sorts of… very bad things."
She furrowed her forehead.
"I guess this would be a bad time to ask if you could come back again tomorrow night?" She asked. I glared for a moment, but then lightened up.
"Fine. But I'm going to feed her junk food and let her stay up to watch scary movies all night. If I can't kill her, I can rot her teeth and her brain."
"I would expect nothing less."
I stepped out of the house and in to the cold night air, but something seemed suddenly very strange to me. I turned back to Willow and grabbed the side of the door before she could shut it behind me. I smelled something on her. Something deep and dark. I knew enough to know I was smelling magic and that it had to be strong for me to sense it at all.
"Getting in to the black stuff now, are we?" I asked, standing up straight. She looked surprised. Uncomfortable.
"Wh-what? No. We just—"
I put my hand up to interrupt her.
"Save the explanation for someone who's interested." I said, and began to walk away. "Just promise to save me a seat if it goes bad."
It all made sense two nights later when I saw you walking down the stairs. The late nights with Dawn. The weird smells coming from Willow. It all made sense… but none of it mattered to me. Looking in to your eyes, all that I knew in that moment was happiness. There was no darkness or ugliness. There was no pain. I was just a man looking upon the woman that he loved more than life when he thought she was lost to him forever. I had never been as happy before, and would never be as happy after. I didn't deserve that moment. Something like me didn't deserve to experience that kind of moment.
But I guess I'd be made to pay for it, so it balanced out.