An actual update! Of this story!
I’ll give you all a minute to rub your eyes and convince yourself you’re not seeing things. I know, this must come as a shock.
However, my lack of updates has NOT been due to writer’s block or an overly busy schedule or anything of the sort. I’ve been writing another story under my other name (found here). Now that said story is complete, I may return to my sorely neglected other WIPs.
Thank you SO MUCH to my betas for the speedy edit. And to all my readers who believed me when I said I’d be back. Thank you all for sticking by me.
Previously: Unaware she’s been claimed by Spike, and having unwittingly claimed him back, an emotionally-battered Buffy abandoned Spike in their motel. She later discovers later that he knew she was planning to run and provided her with money. Once the effects of the claim and separation set in, Buffy travels to the local library to find a solution to her ailment, where she rescues a certain young woman from being sucked into an alternate dimension.
Buffy wasn’t accustomed to relying on the kindness of strangers. In her experience, the notion itself was a living contradiction. And yet, here she sat in the welcomed comfort of a stranger’s home, sipping tea the same stranger had made her and awaiting a bowl of homemade soup. This was the sort of thing she would normally dismiss without much thought, but with her body aching at the slightest twitch, she was suddenly faced with the awareness that if it came down to it, she could be at the stranger’s mercy.
Buffy was either entirely fortunate or entirely foolish.
“What was that thing?” the girl called Fred asked, her Texan accent stronger now than it had been on the streets.
The Slayer’s eyes flittered shut. Distantly, she knew she should come up with some outrageously bogus lie, but she hadn’t the strength or inclination to protect people from the truth of the world anymore. She shouldn’t be the only one burdened with knowledge. The Powers had chosen her, and now she was choosing someone else. There wasn’t enough will left in her to give a damn.
“It was a portal,” she said without ceremony, swallowing a mouthful of tea.
In a perfect world, one would take the revelation at face-value without need for explanation. What ensued was nothing but proof that the world was not and would never be perfect.
“A…” Fred’s voice was trembling. “A portal?”
Buffy would like to think she would have been inclined to comfort the girl were she not hurting, but after everything she’d been through, she couldn’t muster much sympathy for people who got to live with a perpetual blindfold. Not with everything she’d been through. Everything she’d given up. Everything she’d suffered.
“Yeah…a portal.”
“A portal to…to what?” Fred rounded the sofa with a cup of tomato soup in her hands. She placed the offering on her worn coffee table and took a seat in the rocker opposite Buffy. “It’s not some kinda code, is it?”
Buffy blinked. “A code?” The excuses people made to guard themselves from the truth were frightening at times. Then again, she could be cranky because she felt she’d been poisoned. If she didn’t know better, she’d swear her insides were diseased and rotting, chipping away until there would be nothing of her left.
She felt she was melting from the inside out.
The girl flushed and glanced down. “I guess not, then.”
“Chances are it was to another dimension,” Buffy said, reaching for the proffered cup of soup. It smelled wonderful, and even through the gnawing pain eating away at her, she could discern a good amount of it was due to hunger. “That…that demon…came out of it.”
Fred paled visibly. “D-demon?”
Buffy’s eyes fell shut and she suppressed an inner groan. After so many years fighting evil, there was no good way to cushion people from the truth of the world around them. Even if she wanted to, she hadn’t the slightest idea where she would begin. There was no easy segue.
She didn’t know how much Fred truly wanted to know and how much was just curiosity.
Oh, to hell with it. She asked.
“Demon. As in monsters.”
“L-like…werewolves? A-and zombies?” Fred’s eyes went wide. “Oh my God, is it actually possible to reanimate dead flesh? Because that sort of research could be incredibly beneficial to the medical community. Think of all the diseases we could cure. The milestones we could overcome. The…what?”
Buffy just stared at her. “I think you might be the only person I’ve ever met who’s gone from ‘zombies’ to ‘medical breakthrough.’”
The girl flushed and glanced down. “Sorry,” she said self-consciously. “I’m…I’m a scientist. My brain just goes there.”
“You’re a scientist?”
Fred’s eyes went wide, scandalized, as though she’d never heard the word, much less applied it to herself. “Well, I…yeah, I am. I majored in mathematics and physics and I’m working on my doctorate. My knowledge of other sciences is also…well, out there.” Her blush deepened and she glanced down, shaking her head. “I normally don’t brag, I promise. But I am…”
“Wow.”
“Yeah, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to…just…the idea of reanimating dead flesh is fascinating.” The girl’s eyes flashed with said fascination, adapting the sort of look Dr. Frankenstein might have worn before he created his monster. “I don’t suppose you’ve ever…seen a zombie, have you? Or do they prefer to be called Non-Living US Citizens?”
Buffy fidgeted uncomfortably. For whatever reason, she’d thought Fred to be her age, but admittedly learning the woman had a few years on her did put things in a clearer light. Like why she lived in not-a-slum and had credit cards. “I don’t think there’s a PC term for zombies, no. None that I’ve come across, anyway.”
“So they do exist? Have you seen one?”
She made a face. “I…ummm…well, a girl I know last year was…uhhh…targeted by a zombie to be his undead eternal girlfriend. Really, from what I’ve seen, the whole thing is messy and icksome.”
Great. She’d used a standard Buffy-nonword in the presence of a scientist. She might as well go around telling people her age and her IQ were identical.
Fred nodded. “I’d imagine so,” she said, seemingly oblivious to Buffy’s discomfort. “That sort of knowledge in the wrong hands could go a long, long way. Wars never ending, the resurgence of dictatorships. We’d potentially have a world filled with Machiavellians.” The possibility seemed to alarm her. “This is definitely the sort of thing we should keep to ourselves.”
“I’ll have to go take down all my Fabulous-Job-Opportunities-For-Zombies signs, but I think we can manage.” Buffy shifted again, wincing as her body rebelled and surged with another wave of pain. “But…I think you get the idea. Zombies. Werewolves. Demons. Vampires—”
The poor girl looked horrified. “Vampires?”
Buffy had to bite back a mildly bemused grin. It always surprised her how vampires somehow warranted a larger reaction than the litany of other non-human creatures which prowled the night. “Yeah,” she agreed. “Vampires.”
“The kind that suck blood?”
“Do you know of another kind?”
Fred worried a lip between her teeth and appeared to give the query serious consideration before ultimately shaking her head. “I guess not.” She frowned. “It’s kind of funny, I guess.”
“Oh yeah. A regular barrel of laughs.”
“I just mean…I’m sitting here learning about vampires and Non-Living US Citizens and portals and…it sounds so crazy.” Her eyes narrowed. “Doesn’t it sound crazy?”
A soft, sad smile tickled Buffy’s lips. “I think I’m long past the point in my life where anything can surprise me,” she said. “Even when…when I was Called…it was all with the wiggy and the ample amounts of huh?...but it never surprised me. The part about the demons and the apocalypses and the—”
“Apocalypses? As in more than one?”
Buffy winced.
Whups.
The look on Fred’s face became distant, almost hopeless. “I…wow…I think I…I think I need to sit down.”
“You are sitting down.”
“Oh.” A beat. “Good for me.”
“It’s okay,” Buffy offered lamely. “I…I might not look it right now, but I…I’ve gotten pretty good at stopping the end of the world.”
Fred glanced up again, wide-eyed.
The Slayer waved her hand. “Professional world-endage stopper,” she asserted. At the girl’s blank look, she sighed and figured it was time to get comfortable. It looked as though she was going to be here for a while. “I’m what they call the Slayer.”
“Who’s they?”
“The people who continually muck up my life,” she replied. Then, hesitating, she decided to throw the girl a bone. It was only fair; Fred had brought her into her home. She’d fed her and gotten her comfortable, and had offered more than once to pull out the sofa fold-out bed.
Trouble was, the longer Buffy stayed, the slimmer her chances of leaving for the night became. And while she knew it was dangerous to form attachments, there was something about having someone to talk—someone she didn’t know but found herself liking nonetheless—which offered more than its fair share of comfort.
Fred deserved a chance to escape with only a few shocking revelations to mull over. Many people managed to accept the fact the world around them was a fake, covering for the subculture of demons, and continue with their lives relatively unbothered.
Buffy sighed. The part of her which was angry enough at her situation—at the world—to want to condemn Fred to the same knowledge she had to live with every day was quickly shoved aside by compassion. None of what had happened was Fred’s fault; Buffy was furious with her body, and she missed Spike like one might miss an arm or a leg. Her every cell screamed for him. Her blood pumped for him. Her heart was sick for him.
Maybe if she kept talking she would forget how much she missed him.
Shaking her head to clear her thoughts, she slowly turned back to Fred and swallowed hard at the girl’s wide-eyed anticipation. “Do you…” she began slowly, “do you really wanna know?”
Fred didn’t hesitate. “Absolutely.”
“It’s gonna change things for you.”
“Things are changed for me anyway. I don’t think I could manage now knowing even this much…without knowing all of it.”
A smile tickled her lips. “All right,” she agreed. “I…I might take you up on your offer, then.”
“My offer?”
“Unless it’s no good, which is fine. I just…this might take a while.” She paused before clarifying, “The staying here thing. I thought—”
“Oh!” Fred jumped to her feet. “I’ll go get you blankets and pillows and…and…I have a teddy-bear you can borrow if you want. His name is Wilsbury and he’s…” She froze and the pink in her cheeks deepened. “I’ll just…you’re free to ignore that. The part where I still have a security blanket at the age of—”
Buffy held up a hand and smiled. “I have a pig,” she said softly. “He’s back at my hotel…so I’ll be glad for some company.”
Fred looked appalled. “A pig?”
“A stuffed pig.”
“Oh. Oh, right.” She glanced down self-consciously. “I’ll just…go get the stuff.”
“Don’t you want me to tell you?”
The girl nodded. “Oh yes. But we have all night, don’t we? I don’t go to work tomorrow and I want to get you comfortable. I mean…you saved my life. The least I can do is get you a teddy-bear on loan.”
Buffy’s eyes bounced between the cup of soup and the half-consumed tea. “You’ve done a lot, Fred.”
“You saved my life.”
“We don’t know that. You might have been taken to a fluffy bunny dimension.”
Fred waved a hand. “I’m getting you stuff. You just sit tight, all right? And let me know if there’s anything else I can get you.”
She disappeared down a hall and Buffy collapsed wearily against the sofa. She knew the helpful thing to do would entail climbing to her feet and setting up the pull-out bed, but she doubted she had the strength to make it to her feet, let alone do lifting of any kind—heavy or not.
God. Her life was such a wonderful mess. She was sitting in a stranger’s living room in the company of perhaps the last genuine person Buffy had ever known, and her heart felt like it was dying.
Spike.
Where was he tonight? Was he thinking about her? Did he even care anymore?
A long sigh rushed through her lips. Of course he didn’t care. She’d given him no reason to care.
None whatsoever.
Not after she’d left him.
Touching her note gave him some comfort, but not much. Not enough to quell the resounding scream piercing his every nerve. For the first time since he’d fought to liberate himself from his own grave he could feel his demon clawing at his insides as though trying to rip its way to freedom. He needed to touch her—he needed her skin beneath his hands and her taste in his mouth. His need for her eclipsed anything he’d ever experienced, burning a hole in his heart so deep the universe was in danger of falling inside. He’d known it would be hard, of course. The separation. The first stages. The pain. He’d known what to expect.
Buffy had not. She’d left before he could tell her.
Before she could know.
God, what a fool he’d been. He should have told her immediately—the second her blood hit his tongue, the second she solidified the claim with her acceptance before initiating one of her own. He should have told her. He should have told her what that made them.
He should have told her immediately that she was his.
Perhaps then he wouldn’t be where he was. Standing outside the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza, the place where the claim had dragged him. He was pleased; she had at least followed his request. She was being taken care of here. She was taking care of herself.
She was hurting and she didn’t know why. He’d done that to her.
I’m so sorry. Goodbye.
The note remained in his duster pocket. He rubbed it between his fingers.
It had only taken him a day to catch up with her, and from there an hour or so to discover where she’d checked-in. The money he’d given her wouldn’t last indefinitely, but it was enough for now. Eventually, however, she would find herself without a roof over her head and a stomach begging to be fed. And as much as Spike wanted to respect her need for distance, the burning desire to touch her was too bloody painful to ignore.
He’d be inside the hotel now if he thought he’d find her. But she wasn’t there.
She hadn’t come back here tonight.
Spike sighed and fished out his half-smoked carton of fags from his other pocket. Buffy’s scent was ripe around him and it wouldn’t take long to pick up a trail. He could find where she’d gone. He could track her down. He could.
Or he could wait. Gather strength. Give her more time.
I’m so sorry. Goodbye.
His eyes fell shut, will battling need.
She was out there. She was somewhere. And she needed him.
“Buffy,” he whispered.
He liked to believe she could hear him, or at least feel he was near. He needed her to know he was near.
If she knew, she’d know he was coming for her. That he had found her as he’d promised.
He could only hope she was ready.
TBC