AN: Thank you to those of you who took the time to review. I struggled a bit before I posted the first chapter here. I've been such an avid admirer of so many of yours for so long it was a bit intimidating to post. My welcome has been so warm that my posting jitters have mostly subsided. Thank you all for being so kind to a new writer.
As always :) I would love to hear your thoughts, if you feel so inclined.
*Thank you puddinhead for your wonderful beta talents! Any mistakes in this chapter are mine.
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2.
There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.
Oscar Wilde
When he was twelve, Spike’s mom came to visit him in London. She’d moved to the states many years before and he’d been discarded and left to live with his maternal grandparents. Anne Pratt couldn’t be bothered with trivial things like making sure he had enough to eat, or enrolling him in school, or sheltering him from her less than savvy relations with anything good-looking and male.
Spike, who’d gone by his given name, William, as a child was rather shy and bookish. He excelled in staying out of the way and making himself invisible. From an early age he’d known that something was wrong with his mother. That not all mothers stayed out and partied all night. That mothers weren’t supposed to need your help making meals, or drawing baths, or undressing when they were too wasted to stand. Something told him that mothers weren’t supposed to get wasted at all.
When he was six, his grandparents petitioned for custody. He wasn’t sure what took them so long, but was relieved when the courts awarded them with guardianship. He’d never forgotten the look on his mom’s face when he’d stood up in court and asked to be placed with her parents. It was like he’d struck her with the ultimate betrayal. Big, fat tears rolled down her cheeks as he listed all the ways she’d get sloshed and described in detail precisely the best way to smoke a bowl.
She couldn’t look him the eye for years after that. It was like she’d been awakened and for the first time had seen herself for what she was: a very sick, very broken woman. Even a six-year-old could see with perfect clarity that if he stayed with her he’d sink too.
When he was twelve and she came for one of her all too infrequent visits, he had forgotten about how bad it’d been. After all, it was a child’s natural tendency to forgive their parents anything. There was this deep yearning within his soul to be loved by this woman who’d born him. It was as if she’d been clued in to his secret desire. She began to profess her love for him she’d say it when she’d drop by or when they talked on the phone. She’d say the words and hug him and kiss his face but it felt like lip service.
When she offered to take him back to America with her because she couldn’t bear to be without him, for the first time in a very very long time, maybe ever, he felt wanted. It was a spectacular feeling that blinded him to her other less than desirable traits.
Spike spoke with his grandparents about his decision to leave with his mother but they declined his request to relocate. Even though he understood their concerns, his twelve-year-old brain reckoned that since he was the one who decided to live with them in the first place, he should be the one who got to decide when to leave. Unfortunately, they did not see eye-to-eye on this matter. His grandfather told his mother very firmly to leave and not come back until she got herself cleaned up.
Instead of the screaming match Spike had expected, the strangest, most wonderful thing he could have ever imagined happened. His mother checked herself into a rehab facility and stayed there for a year. After she left the facility she petitioned for custody of him and before he knew it he was on a plane to America. With his healthy, sober mother.
Unfortunately, her sobriety didn’t last long and Spike realized that she had never intended to stay clean forever, just for long enough. She relapsed before they’d been in the states a month and there he was… stuck with what he wanted.
At thirteen he began to slide into a downward swoop that he knew could only be depression. He was angry, too. Angry for being an idiot and believing that she could change, angry that he’d chosen this for himself, angry that the adults that were put in place to protect him had relinquished him so readily. His thoughts began to slip down, down, down until they hit “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” territory, which was a scary place for a thirteen-year-old living with drugs addicts and prostitutes.
One afternoon, shortly after his fourteenth birthday, he met this girl in the park. She was a runaway and made it seem fun and exciting, so he went AWOL for awhile. He packed his bag and he left his mother while she sat talking to herself on the couch, 3.2 seconds from morphine induced paradise.
The girl’s name was Dru and she, come to figure, was just a broken, younger version of his mother. He left her soon enough (the devil that you know…etc), but not before she’d left her mark.
He’d gone though a stage while he was with her, a stage completely influenced by her, where he’d been convinced that if he could alter himself in little ways, change himself to be what she needed, then they’d be fixed and he’d be happy. But he learned the hard way that he couldn’t fix anyone. That there was a deeper healing that had to take place in broken people, a healing that happened on a cellular, spiritual level. A level he couldn’t even hope to touch.
But he let Dru try to fix his broken places, and he tried to be the thing that fixed hers, until it all just fell apart and crumbled in their hands. They both lay hurt and bleeding at the end.
She was the first girl he’d ever loved, if you could call it love. It certainly didn’t hold to the definition of love in the more traditional sense. It felt more like needing or craving.
But sometimes he was sure he loved her, just as he was sure at times she loved him; it just wasn’t healthy or whole or healing. And just like anything soul-damning you had to claw your way out or surrender.
.
When Spike was fifteen, he went back home to a mother who hardly recognized him but welcomed him with open arms anyway. He decided to choose to be happy. He finally realized that this was as good as it was going to get for him and he might as well have fun with the hand he was dealt, whether it be aces or a bust. His mother admired the changes she saw in him, remarking, “You go away and come back to me a man. Let’s order pizza.” At least he thought it was a compliment.
After his return, his mother let him keep his “punk kid” look, as she was fond of calling it, and let him smoke her cigarettes. Unfit as she was, she never let him abuse any substance that was more lethal than smokes or peroxide.
They came to this crossroads in their relationship where he realized that the chance of his mother ever stepping up to play the adult in their relationship wasn’t at all likely. He would never be her first priority she had cast that role already. He was done going without electricity and running water. He was tired of going hungry because there was never any food in the house. His mother was a slave to her first priority, her all consuming addiction.
He got an after school job at an auto shop in their small town where he received under the table payment which he used to keep them in groceries and rent. His mother continued to do what she always did, selling whatever she had at hand for drug money, which he refused to think on, and that’s how they made it.
As he pulled into the parking lot of Sunnydale High he checked his reflection in the rearview mirror and flicked his cigarette butt out the window. Some days he felt too damn old to be merely a high school senior.
“Hey you English bastard! The fuck!? Thought we were supposed to go to Willy’s last night. You totally bailed on me, prick.” Declan, one of his only friends had jet black hair and bore a striking resemblance to Mick Jagger. Deck accosted him as he slammed the door of his junk yard classic 1957 DeSoto.
“Suck my cock, Yank.” He smiled fondly at the taller man. “Your weekend as shitty as mine?”
“Didn’t have to be as shitty if you would have shown up. I sat at a table all by myself for 20 minutes looking like some loser who got stood up before I realized you weren’t coming. Trouble in paradise?” They walked together toward the school building ignoring the majority of students who milled around them.
“Must have just slipped my mind, Deck.” The truth was Anne Pratt had gotten herself into yet another scrape with Sunnydale’s finest and had needed a ride and bail money. But he’d be damned before he uttered a bad word about the woman.
Spike sniffed and thumbed his nose. In mock seriousness, he goaded, “Anyway m’sure you didn’t stay lonely for long. Wasn’t Kelsey working last night? That woman can’t stay away from you.”
“Yeah, yeah, she was there. She’s also old enough to be my mother.”
“When has that ever stopped you before?”
“Point.” Declan laughed. “You see Faith this weekend? She was looking for you-- said she’d dropped by your house Friday night but you weren’t home… something about you being a poor ass boyfriend. Said some other things too but I value our friendship too much to repeat them.”
Spike let out a low moan. “I’m not her bloody boyfriend and the chit needs to stop coming by my home. Don’t want her pestering my mother or snooping around.”
Declan stopped and gave him a funny look. “What the hell is wrong with you? Faith Lehane has to be one of, if not the, most gorgeous girls in our class. She puts out without needing an emotional attachment and she wants to put out for you! Now I know you don’t give it up easy, man. You have ‘standards’,” he air quoted with an eye roll, “whatever those are. But an eighteen–year-old guy doesn’t say ‘no thank you’ to her. No one says ‘no thank you’ to her!”
“Well maybe it’s time that someone did. She really needs to stop telling people that we’re together. We’re not together. I don’t need any more crazy women in my life.”
They made their way into their first period English class and as he passed Buffy, a vision in pink and cream sitting in the middle of the second row, he didn’t even spare her a glance. They were strangers in this place - only acknowledging one another if they got into one of their knock down, drag out fights in the cafeteria or a harsh stage whispered argument in the library. There was that time she punched him square in the nose, right in front of everyone, in the center of the quad. He’d bled like a stuck pig and he’d never been so turned on in his life.
So maybe they weren’t strangers in this place, but they definitely weren’t friends. By some unspoken rule, they could never be friends. There was a hierarchy in their high school much like there was a hierarchy in their town. She was the shining star that graced the top of the pyramid and he wasn’t even sure he was apart of the pyramid at all.
They had little contact throughout the rest of the day, much like every other day. They only had two periods together and lunch. It wasn’t until after the final bell as he was making his way with Declan through the quad, on the way to the parking lot, that his ears perked up as they always did when she was in the vicinity and he caught the tail end of what she was saying.
“I said no Parker.” Her voice was a fervent whisper.
When he glanced her way and noticed the way she was struggling to free her arm from Parker’s firm grasp, Spike’s feelings were hard to describe. There was no thought - should he or shouldn’t he intervene? Without waiting to hear another word, he cut Declan off mid-sentence as he veered left in her direction, not stopping until he reached Parker Abrhams. Spike gave the boy a good hard shove that sent him sprawling on his ass.
“Spike,” Buffy shouted, clearly upset. Didn’t matter. He was going to kick the shit out of this motherfucker.
“Think the lady doesn’t want your mangy hands on her, you disgusting pillock,” he said, all cool as a cucumber as he lifted Parker by the front of his t-shirt and knocked him hard across the jaw.
“Spike!” Buffy tore at his right arm with both hands, trying to pull him away from Parker as his left cocked back for another go. “Stop it! You stop it right now. Do you hear me?”
Of course he heard her; she was screeching like a banshee right in his ear. He just didn’t care because you don’t ever EVER lay your hands on a lady after she tells you not to and you certainly don’t ever EVER lay your hands on Buffy Summers PERIOD. And if you broke either one of those rules, Spike would break your face… another one of those unspoken rules.
Declan jumped in and captured his left arm on the downward swing so it barely grazed Parker’s rapidly swelling face. There Spike was - caught between the two people that knew him best in the world - when a teacher bellowed from the school’s front steps, “What’s going on down there??”
“You need to go, now!” Buffy commanded as she dropped his arm and knelt next to Parker, touching his face all reverently as the crowd around them grew.
Spike looked on, aghast. Feeling betrayed and confused, he stood there like an idiot staring while Buffy tended to her abuser’s wound. Declan tried futilely to pull him away.
“So help me if you don’t get your ass out of here right now you’re going to get suspended. Leave now, you idiot!” Buffy’s tone and eyes brooked no argument
Spike finally let himself be led away by Declan. By the time they reached the parking lot, they were running like the hounds of hell were at their boots. Spike did a Dukes of Hazard slide across the hood of his DeSoto as Declan climbed into the passenger’s seat.
Settling behind the wheel, he gunned the engine and threw the car in drive. The DeSoto screeched out of the parking lot and down the street on their way to the outskirts of town as Spike and Declan hooted and hollered like bandits
Spike laughed. The entire debacle was all so incredibly ridiculous he couldn’t help himself. He had raced to Buffy Summers’ rescue like some lovesick pup and all the stupid girl could think about was making sure the asshole he was trying to save her from was okay. What a loony bitch!
Declan was shooting his friend nervous glances and Spike realized that his laughter had taken on kind of a desperate awful sound. He cut himself off abruptly.
“I can’t believe you hit Parker Abrahms! What the hell happened man? One minute we’re walking and the next you’re beating the shit out of the guy.”
“Buffy didn’t want him to touch her and he did it anyway,” Spike muttered, sinking a little lower in his seat. The adrenaline that coursed through his system was fading fast in light of the situation, embarrassment rapidly multiplying to fill its place.
“Buffy didn’t look like she minded his attention there at the end. You know, when she was yelling at you for hitting her boyfriend.” Declan smirked.
“Parker has never been and will never be Buffy’s boyfriend!” he replied vehemently.
Declan chuckled at this, “Man, oh man! How come I never noticed? You’ve got the hots for Summers! Is that why you wont bone Faith? Everyone knows her and Buffy don’t get a long so well. Afraid you might be cast out of Summers’ good graces?” Declan thought that last part was absolutely hilarious and burst out laughing.
“You’re a fucking prick, Deck,” Spike grouched as he sped down Main Street.
Oh, come on, man. Since when have you ever given two shits about that self-righteous, uptight little bitch? Who cares if Parker holds her a little longer than she likes? She’s the one who let that snake get close in the first place.” Declan reached down and started fiddling with the radio. “And don’t think your lack of denial of the serious crime committed here has escaped my notice.”
“She’s just a girl.”
“A girl you’re going to get expelled over all because another boy was touching her arm!” Declan was quick to point out.
“Still, just a girl and I would have done the same for any other girl. It’s about the injustice, them being too weak to defend themselves, damsels in distress-- all that rot. To think that I have some secret crush on Buffy Summers is flat out crazy and just shows how little you know me.” Spike scoffed.
Declan rolled his eyes. “Yeah, right man.”
It wasn’t a lie. He didn’t have a crush on Buffy Summers. What he felt for her was so complex it went far beyond something as simple as that. Spike turned up the volume on the radio and the Sex Pistols screamed the tumultuous thoughts right out of his head.
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