Chapter VIII: Need To
"The human soul has still greater need of the ideal than of the real. It is by the real that we exist; it is by the ideal that we live."
-Victor Hugo
"I think, therefore I am."
-René Descartes
There was something else. Buffy could feel her face shifting in confusion even before she realized she was confused. There was a sound. A voice. Coming from far away. Almost like it wasn't in focus. She didn't know how a voice couldn't be in focus, but that's what it sounded like. What was it saying? If Spike would just shut up she could listen.
"Buffy?" Spike asked suddenly, breaking off his pontificating.
Buffy's attention was called back to the vampire and she felt herself sink even further in to the dirt if that was even possible.
"Not dead yet." She responded in something that wasn't exactly a whisper, but couldn't be called speaking aloud either. She wasn't sure why she was still holding on. Maybe she was still hoping for a miracle. The slayer in her, which was most of her, couldn't grasp that this could be her end. She couldn't believe that after everything, after all she'd been through, her destiny was to end up a vampire.
"Not ever." Spike responded. "I think you're failing to understand the concept of living forever."
"Vampires aren't alive."
"Well, that depends on what you mean by 'alive'." He said grimly. "Got vegetables lying in wait on hospital beds being fed through tubes. They've got the heartbeat, they've got the necessary expanding and contracting of the lungs, they may even still have the soul – for all the good that does them… but are they alive?"
Buffy said nothing.
"Then you have us." He continued, and Buffy didn't like the thought that maybe 'us' was meant to include her now, too. "If we close our eyes and lay real still, you couldn't tell us apart from a corpse in the ground… But you know that 'I think therefore I am' bit? Seems to me old Descartes knew that there was more to being alive than a great throbbing pulse."
Buffy didn't know who Descartes was, but she wondered if he had any clue that his "bit" was going to become a part of vampire credo one day. Probably not. In fact, if he had known, he might have just kept the whole thing to himself.
Still, she said nothing. There was nothing more for her to say. No more arguing, no more questions. Nothing she could do.
But then…
"—it's more of an idea—"
He kept speaking on and on, but she tried to tune him out. She heard the voice again. It was louder now, less muddled. Less like a voice trapped in a tank of water. She tried to focus on it.
/Buffy…/
It was calling her name.
/Buffy, can you hear me? Buffy?/
She realized with something of a start that the voice was familiar. The voice was Willow. Buffy swallowed and opened her eyes. She could still hear Spike going on and on about whatever he was going on about, but it was like background noise now. She took a deep breath. She didn't know if she was hallucinating or not, if the voice in her head was real, but she had to try to communicate.
I can hear you, Buffy thought as loudly as she could.
/Buffy, if you can hear me… Know that I can feel you. I know you're in trouble and we're looking for you. We'll find you. I promise we'll find you./
Willow's ethereal voice was pitched in panic, and Buffy knew she couldn't hear her in return. She couldn't tell them where she was, couldn't scream for them to come help her. It was almost funny, this last seed of hope thrown at her, and torn to bits before it could blossom. They wouldn't find her in time. She had no more time.
Willow… Buffy tried again, but the witch was no longer in her head. She could feel the emptiness where her friend just was, and now she was alone again. Might as well have never happened.
"Are you listening to me, Love?" Spike asked just in time for her to give her attention back to him.
"Do I have a choice?" Buffy asked with a little more force behind her voice than she would have been capable of just a minute before – the bit of adrenaline she'd just had at the thought of rescue coursing through her body.
"Seems like you're doing a pretty good job of having a choice to me."
"What can I say?" She asked. " I make it look easy."
"Always have." Spike responded, and Buffy wasn't sure what he meant by that. She also didn't care. She was tired and was ready to close her eyes and sleep. She didn't even know if she was scared anymore. Fear seemed to have taken a backseat to exhaustion, and if she was scared… it was the kind of dull fear that came with resignation. Which, she felt, was worse.
Spike was silent for a few moments, as he seemed to regard her in the darkness.
All I ever wanted… was for you to love me.
Seems idiotic, now, to say that. Looking back on decades and decades of my life, most of them completely oblivious to you, years spent in complete blind rapture and chaos – how could I have wanted you? How could I have wanted your love?
You never believed I loved you. Not to begin with, anyway. You thought I was dirt. Disgusting. You wouldn't believe that a thing like me was capable of loving you the way I loved you, because that was too much for your watcher taught brain to handle. The soul was key. Always the soul. He had one, but I didn't. He could be good, but me? Never. Without a soul, I was just an animal. A thing. God, how many times had you called me a thing?
But, Buffy… I don't think "thing" was ever exactly accurate. I was always flesh and blood, dead as they both were – but flesh and blood. And heart. Mostly heart. How it did break… with every nasty word you flung at me. They all hit their mark. They all hurt. You didn't think you could hurt me; even though you tried, for reasons you didn't even understand, desperately to hurt me. You wanted to hurt me so you didn't hurt by yourself. And I did hurt, but you wouldn't believe it, because what was there to hurt if not the soul?
I let you do it. Why? Because you were my girl, and my girl got what she wanted from me, no questions asked. I would have given you anything. I wanted to give you everything. I wanted to wrap the sun up in a nice package and deliver it to you on your doorstep, because you deserved it. It may have killed me trying to give you what you deserved, but I tried anyway.
You never knew. You'll never know… how much I loved you.
And yes, all I ever wanted was your love. William wanted it, though he didn't – couldn't – know. He wanted you his whole life, but he wasn't ready for you. He needed to rise above what he was. He couldn't make his journey as a man. No, he had to have the man ripped away from him with jagged teeth and cold dead fingers. He - I - didn't know that it would lead, all of it, to you. I didn't know, but I did want it. I loved you my whole life, and then after.
Then we met. I watched you. Wanting you. It wasn't just about wanting to hurt you. It wasn't just about the overwhelming desire to rip you to pieces and then bathe in your blood. Absolutely not. If that were all it was, maybe things would have turned out differently. Maybe I'd have just killed you in your sleep, set your house on fire or something… but that wasn't all it was. I wanted to hurt you, to kill you, because I wanted that intimacy. I didn't want anyone else to have it. You were mine. You were the one I had died for. I knew it, even if I didn't know it.
Like I said, you were in my blood.
It's like water, Love.
The desire for blood can't be overcome. Not with a chip. Not with a soul. Not with love. I couldn't overcome my need for blood anymore than a person could theirs for water. It's not just something you want, it's something you have to have with a kind of absolution that the universe was built on. Days and days without water, and most people would be willing to kill for it. Always having to kill for it, and most people would get used to the killing. So used to it… some might come to enjoy it.
We have to come to enjoy the things we need, or they would kill us.
That's what the soul was to me. It was death. Not just mine, but all of them. It's something that I know would be impossible to grasp for someone who never experienced it. Even if the thought of all those dead that I killed, that my kind killed, makes you sad… it's still in an abstract, disconnected sort of way. You can't imagine closing your eyes and seeing their faces. Their terrified and blooded faces frozen in a silent and eternal scream of pain and horror.
I can't really imagine it either. Not now.
The soul made me hate the blood, but it could never make me not need it… and I hated that, too. I hated that a part of me still wanted that hunt, the chase, the kill. I hated knowing that was never going to change, that I'd always want those things even though the wanting of it broke my heart in two. If I was nothing without my soul, I felt more so with one. A soul didn't make me a man – it just damned me. Damned me more than Drusilla ever did. Being sired set me free, and regaining my soul set me firmly back in shackles.
Like I said, I don't know what a soul is. Could just be a flame inside that the demon blows out, could just be something we made up and decided to believe in… but whatever it is, whatever it isn't, it's not who we are. You can add sugar to water and it'll taste sweeter, but it's still water. Water can save a man.
Water can kill a man.
In any case, with or without a soul, blood reigns over us. It teaches us to listen to our impulses without hesitation. This is the kind of impulse that drives us, vampires, forward. We take what we want when we want it because we know nothing else. We know no limits or law.
You can't blame me for what happened in that bathroom.
But believe me, if I'd have known that was going to happen, I would have staked myself before stepping foot in your house.
As a vampire, it's nearly impossible to control impulse… but not impossible to feel regret.
You shouldn't be afraid.
Drusilla hadn't told me not to be afraid. Maybe she'd wanted me to be… and I was. I didn't know what was happening. She'd promised me something glowing and glistening. She'd looked in my head and my broken heart and promised me all the things I wanted. When her face changed, I was too hypnotized to care. When she bit me, there was some pain. Panic began to settle in my slowing heart for a few seconds, but when the pain went away, the panic went away with it.
When she stopped feeding, I felt drowsy and cold. I was slumped up against a light post and she kneeled in front of me with glowing yellow eyes, licking her lace-gloved fingers. I stared at her, feeling the life slip from me – knowing that my heart would beat only a minute or so longer, and then never again.
She pulled one glove off, a finger at a time and then used one long nail to slash at her wrist. When she brought it to my mouth, it was with a vague sort of realization that I understood what was happening to me. I would die there that night, but if I drank what she was offering me, I would wake up and be what she was. My body couldn't manage the kind of fear that it was attempting to feel… but I was afraid. I didn't want to die, I was still so afraid of death, but I didn't want to be one of her kind either. I didn't want to hunt lonely people in alleys and do to them what she was doing to me. I didn't want to hurt anyone. I didn't want to be a part of something so ugly.
"Be a good boy." She said, pressing her wrist to my lips… and I drank for the first time. The blood was cold and thin and tasted like rusted metal. I managed only two long drags before the darkness overcame me.
My last thought was of my mother.
"William," My mother had said to me once as we took a carriage to Covent Garden to see some play that I had been excited about. I couldn't have been older than sixteen at the time. I took my eyes from the passing scenery and lay them on her face, though hers were unfocused. "I had the strangest dream."
I tilted my head.
"Dream, Mother?" I asked.
"Yes." She said, seeming to be far away in her thoughts – barely aware that she was speaking. "I dreamt of you."
I lifted my eyebrows in confusion.
"Me?"
"You stood in the dark reading a poem for me." She began. "And you seemed somehow older, and terribly unhappy. You insisted on apologizing to me for…" She stopped, suddenly.
"Apologizing to you for what, Mother?"
It was then that she looked at me, and she was herself again. She smiled suddenly, almost embarrassedly, and waved her fan offhandedly in the air.
"Oh, it's nothing. Darling. Just foolishness."
I settled back farther in to my seat, watching her quietly – wondering what I had been apologizing to her about in her dream. Wondering why I would ever have reason to apologize to her.
"All right." I said, not wanting to push her to tell me something she didn't want me to know.
It couldn't occur to me then, and it wouldn't occur to me until the night I died – … that my mum had somehow known this was going to happen to me. Maybe my soul knew what was to come before I did, and it was sorry. It was sorry for me and for her, and it apologized to her years before it happened. Seems like something William might have done, had he the chance. Anyway, stranger things have happened.
I woke up hungry.
When you're first turned, there's no immediate thought – only instinct. I didn't stop to wonder why I was suddenly cramped inside what felt like a wooden box. I didn't stop to think about what had happened before I ended up there. I didn't stop to think about what I was. There was a humming in my head and in my blood that told me what I needed to do without approaching a conscious idea. I knew that I needed to claw out of that box without knowing it. I had to get out. I had to feed.
I didn't have much room to punch up, but I was filled with such amazing strength now that the wood gave like the shell of a raw egg. Dirt immediately began to spill over me and I had only one instant of panic before I realized I didn't need to breathe. I wasn't breathing. I kept hitting at the wood and pulling myself further up through the earth. It was like I had done it before, like my body remembered it and knew exactly what to do.
When I finally pushed my hand up in to the cold night air, I felt a surge of excitement. I climbed out from the ground and on to my knees – basking in the moonlight, feeling more alive than I'd ever felt before. I could feel that Drusilla was near, but I didn't see her. Layered in with the overwhelming need for something that I didn't quite understand yet, there was the desire to be with her that had done this to me. I wanted her. My whole body tingled for her touch.
There was no pain, Buffy. No fear. No doubt.
I was what I was and would be forevermore. I felt connected to something bigger and stronger than myself, and it wasn't humbling. It was empowering. I knew that something was gone now, I could feel an empty place somewhere deep inside… like something you're trying hard to remember because you knew it once, but don't seem to know it anymore. It didn't concern me.
It won't concern you.
Later, after I'd gotten my soul back, Dawn would ask me what hurt the most to think of. It was one of the few times she spoke to me after I came back… She'd walked down in your basement likely looking for you. I was lying on my cot with my arm draped over my face, having a particularly nasty time of it, the voices being extra angry that day. Dawn stopped at the foot of the stairs and asked.
"Which memory hurts the most?"
I was startled a bit, but not much. Hard to be too startled without a heartbeat. I took my arm down and sat up.
"Dawn, you shouldn't—"
"I know what I shouldn't." She said, maybe trying to assert her age. She was older, wiser. She didn't need me protecting her or giving her advice anymore. This wasn't her asking me for anything. Not like she used to. She was just curious. I sighed.
"Is it Buffy?" She asked. "Is it what you did to Buffy?"
I looked down. Maybe I should have just told her it was. Maybe I should have let her walk out of there thinking the worst thing I ever did was try to have it off with you when you didn't want it. Personally, it was the thing I regretted most… but it wasn't the worst thing I'd ever done. Didn't even come close. You know that.
"No." I answered honestly. Time was I would have lied to comfort her, but she didn't need that from me. Not anymore.
"What then?"
"Look," I said, "I can't hide from the things I've done. I can't pretend I didn't do them. Do enough research and it's all there in red and white… but that doesn't mean I need to run my mouth and fill your head."
She paused, her face hardening in the same way it had when she told me if I hurt you I would wake up on fire.
"You live in my house." She said. "Seems to me a girl has a right to know what the monster in her basement has done."
Monster. She'd never called me that. God, that hurt.
I stared at her steel face for a moment, and then nodded with a slight resigned smile. It hurt, but I was proud of her. The sooner she figured out that none of us, and I mean none of us, were to be trusted, the better.
"The first one." I answered her.
"The first one?" She asked. "The first one you killed?"
I nodded again.
"A little girl." I started, and I could see a shiver run through her. "It wasn't pretty, and no… I won't tell you the whole long and short of it, but I regret her the most."
"Because she was a little girl?"
This time I shook my head.
"Because she was the first."
Years and years after I was turned, in Prague, Drusilla and I lay sprawled out on a bed covered in blood stained white linen - a body of some nameless man crumpled in the corner watching us with the glassy stare of the dead.
"She's all sunshine and lilies, the new girl." She had said dreamily, staring up at the ceiling. It was just before an angry lynch mob attacked us with holy water bombs and burning crosses. I sat up against the headboard of the bed and smiled to myself, but didn't look at her.
"Is that so?" I asked, having no idea what she was talking about, but I loved to hear her talk in those days.
"She's got a halo round her head, but it's all made of woody thorns… they poke little bloody holes in her skin even when she smiles."
I ran my fingers down her arm.
"Sounds like my kind of girl."
She turned her eyes to me then and smiled… reaching up and spidering her thin fingers over the top of my head in spirals.
"My William is one for all sorts." She said, and then growled at me. I grabbed her wrist and placed a kiss to the place that I'd drunk from more than a hundred years before.
"No. Only for you." I said, moving suddenly and positioning my body over hers – pinning her beneath me. She let out a sound that was something like a giggle, but not quite.
"We'll be ready for her, won't we, my darling?"
I still had nothing in the way of a clue as to what she was talking about, but I loved it when she called me darling. I leaned down close to her face.
"Anything you want." I said, then pressed a hard kiss to her mouth. She pulled away and placed a finger to my lips.
"Shhh…" She whispered, and then she seemed to stare through me to the sky. Maybe even beyond the sky. I adored her so much it made my insides hurt. After a few moments, she turned her eyes back to me. She pulled me down so that my head rested on her chest, and she ran her hand over the back of my neck in a motherly sort of gesture.
Then the first bottle of holy water came crashing down on top of us from out of nowhere, and I never had the chance to really think about what Dru had been saying… so I'm not exactly sure when I figured it out.
Because, of course, she was talking about you.
Looking back on memories like that, it's weird to think that only a few years later I would be in Africa battling to the death to regain a soul that had been mine for less time than it hadn't.
I didn't know what it was going to feel like. I didn't know how it was going to happen… I just knew that it was what I wanted. I lay on the cold dirt ground, ready to die or ready to get the soul back. Whichever came first. I think I might have been passed the point of caring. But then the thing told me I had endured the required trials, and I knew that that was it. No more tests. No more torture.
"Bloody right I have." I said, with a little bit of that false bravado that I learned from you. Honestly, I was scared. I pulled myself up to a sitting position on my knees. "So, you give me what I want. Make me what I was… so Buffy can get what she deserves."
Funny, that. Like I knew what you deserved.
"Very well." The demon said, and I thought, not without a kind of respect. "We will return your soul."
A word to the wise, Love… once your soul's gone, I wouldn't suggest running off trying to make friends with it again. Even if you don't have a century of murder to feel guilty for, the actual receiving of the soul is unpleasant at best.
So I screamed.
I could feel the light inside me, exploding behind my eyes. Every nerve ending tingled with burning agony. I didn't know how long it was going to last, but I wondered – as much as I could wonder while the pain pulsed through me – if I had been tricked, and if this was another trial. Maybe there were a hundred more to come, and I would die there in that cave after all.
When the light was gone, the pain remained… but it was different. It wasn't hot like the end of a branding iron anymore, it was cold. Cold and heavy. I kept screaming. I could hear the sounds escaping my mouth like they were coming from someplace else, and I hadn't felt such crushing despair since the day you died.
I couldn't hear what the whispering voices were saying yet, but they hated me. That much I could tell. Every voice in my head hated me. Even my own.
I could see you crying out underneath me again, but there were others standing the corner watching us – faces covered in blood, some of them with their throats ripped out. They hadn't really been there in the bathroom with us, I didn't think. I was pretty sure I'd remember them.
"Oh… God…" I managed to stammer out, but the thing that had done this to me was gone already. Hiding again. It had given me this "prize" that I had come to claim, and then left me with no way to cope with it.
I fell back to the ground and passed out.
My last thought, was of you.
I tried to hide from you, tried to pretend, tried to be the me that I wasn't anymore. I thought if I pretended hard enough, the voices in my head would go away and the searing guilt that knotted in my throat and squeezed my chest would disappear.
You followed me in to that church, and you listened to me speak, and you watched while I draped my body over the cross.
"Buffy… Can we rest?" I had asked you. I could smell my flesh burning, and I could hear it sizzling, but I couldn't exactly feel it. I was numb and tired and if I withered away to nothingness against that cross, I wouldn't have cared. You didn't attempt to pull me away from the place where I stood slowly burning, so maybe you didn't care either.
After a very long silence, you spoke.
"You did this… for me?" You had asked quietly.
I let my hands slip from the cross and fall to my side, and lifted my head. The sizzling stopped immediately, but the smoke still lifted from my body. I didn't turn to look at you. There were things running through my head at that moment that didn't add up to what was happening, things that didn't make sense. Thoughts and ideas whirred around in my mind so fast that I couldn't really latch on to any of them.
And, of course, there were the voices. Mostly screaming.
And you. Crying.
"You seem disappointed." I said.
You said nothing. I furrowed my forehead and turned to look at you, and watched as the burns across my chest and face instantly registered in your eyes.
"Are you disappointed?" I asked. You only stared at me, open mouthed and wide eyed – tears slipping down your face. That was when I noticed the stake in your hand. I stalked slowly closer until I was standing just a step or so away from you. You hadn't moved away. You hadn't moved at all. I looked down at the stake you held and reached for it. You didn't pull away as I brought the stake and your hand up to my heart. "If it's what you want." I whispered.
Everything for you.
That was when you wrenched yourself away. You took a few steps back, staring unbelievingly in to my eyes. A second later you threw the stake to the ground, turned, and ran away from me and out of the church.
I wasn't surprised. You had always run away from me.
"What did you expect me to do?" Buffy asked, a little of the old irritation Spike had always stirred in her coming forth from the shadows of her fading consciousness. Also, as much as she didn't want to be, she was interested in the last few things he had been saying. He was talking about the soul now, his in particular – but it concerned hers now, too, didn't it?
"I didn't expect anything, did I?" He asked, seeming a little surprised that she had spoken up. "There may have been some grand plan before, but after the great rebirth it was completely at sixes and bloody sevens up here."
She assumed he meant his head.
"But the plan was to be with me." She said more than asked. "Like the soul would wipe your past clean."
"Had done for Angel."
If she could have, she might have laughed at that. Even now, comparing himself to Angel.
"I loved Angel before I knew what he was."
She never realized she had thought about it that way, but after she said it, she realized it was nothing more or less than the truth.
"Right…" Spike said quietly. "Never had a chance then." He finished. She had a feeling he was talking more to himself than to her.
"You can't make someone love you, Spike." She said shifting, with quite a lot of effort, on to her back. She couldn't stand the smell of dirt in her nostrils anymore. It reminded her too much of the cemetery. Too much of death.
God, when was this going to be over?
"No. You can't." He agreed with her. "But a man can live on less than love. I've proved that before."
"Please." Buffy said, wincing as she readjusted the way her weight rested. "You were like a dog begging for scraps at the table."
Something strange was happening now. Buffy wasn't exactly sure what at first, but as she felt herself sinking back in the ground in her new position… she realized what she had just done. She moved her whole body. She'd turned completely over. That had taken strength. Strength she was sure she had not had even minutes before.
"Better to live on scraps than to starve."
"Was it?" She asked, wiggling her fingers slightly at her side… feeling for how much energy she had.
"I loved you so much that even the pain you caused me was better than nothing at all."
"It was all pain."
"Mostly, yeah. Not arguing that." He paused. "I told Riley once that it must have been torture being with you and not really having you, that I thought maybe I had the better deal."
She never heard of that conversation from either of them, and maybe she'd have found herself wondering if it had had something with him leaving so suddenly… but she was too busy trying to figure out how much strength she had, and what's more, how much more she'd be getting. Also, she was doing this while trying not to alert Spike to the fact that anything had changed. Any elevation in her body temperature, any difference in her heart rate, she knew he'd notice. She couldn't overpower him right now, that much she knew for sure. She was using every bit of that Zen stuff that Giles had crammed down her throat when she was younger. Meditation made you stronger, or something. Maybe it did, maybe it didn't… but at least it made it easier to control her breathing.
"I loved Riley." She said absently.
"I bet you told yourself that every night." He laughed a little. "Anyway, it only took me a second to know that I was wrong, that he had the better end of it… but I guess I was right, too. It was torture."
Buffy said nothing. She didn't like to think that she had "tortured" anyone, and she didn't want to hear anymore about that.
It was all out of her head the next moment, though, when the tips of the fingers she was moving at her side came in to contact with something cold and smooth. Her thoughts flew back to earlier. She had said something to make him mad… so mad that he'd thrown his wooden chair against the wall. It had splintered off in to at least a dozen pieces. One of which must have bounced off the wall from the force… and landed right here, where Buffy was laying.
A cold, smooth, long piece of wood.
She took hold of it slowly and quietly in her hand.
"Spike." She said. He didn't answer right away, because she was certain he could hear her heart pounding now.
"I wouldn't try anything." He said in an eerily stony voice. "This is almost over. No point in making the end any harder than it has to be."
"You know what I have in my hand." She stated, didn't ask. As soon as her heart had begun to beat faster she knew he would have changed to his demon face to see what was going on. He had to have seen the stake.
"I do." He said. "Won't do you any good, Love. You're about as weak as a kitten and hundred times more appetizing."
But he had it all wrong.
"I know I can't fight you." She said, then slowly brought the splintery point of the piece of wood she held in her hand up to her heart. "Don't need to."