She made a face. "No. You're safe for the moment. Talk."
He loosened his grip on her arms and set her down gently beside him.
"I don't know where to start. Do I start with what I knew then or what I know now?" He said.
Buffy rolled her eyes, "You've been trying to talk to me about this for a month and you haven't decided what to tell me yet?"
"I never got past the, 'Buffy, we need to talk' part before! You always ran off!" Spike glared at her.
"Start somewhere. I'm listening now." Buffy said softly.
His gaze softened. "Right,” He gathered his thoughts. “So Dru had been traipsing around Europe with some guy and apparently he got fed up and left her in Paris with no money. She called her father and he said he'd buy a one-way ticket home for her, but he wouldn't give her any more money. He was cutting her off until she went into rehab." Spike paused.
"She didn't want to go back to rehab, so she thought the best option was to find a way to get back together with me. After all, I'd taken care of her for years and I'd loved her, she'd just make me love her again, yeah?” He rolled his eyes. “It seemed like a brilliant idea to her. She was in rehab after we broke up and I guess travelling since then, so she didn't know about you.
"So she used the ticket her father sent her, but instead of going home she came here. I guess either he must've sent her some travelling money or she sold something, I don't know, but she had enough to set herself up in a hotel in town.
"She was going to surprise me.” He closed his eyes briefly. “Instead, she was the one who got a surprise, because she saw us together and figured out that we were dating. Now she had a small flaw in her plan. If I was with you, I wouldn't take her back." Spike got up and started pacing.
"So she had to break us up, somehow. Since she didn't have any better ideas, she started following us around. Sometimes me, sometimes you, hoping an opportunity would present itself. She did this for about a week, she said. I can't believe she didn't get caught." He shook his head. "Dru as an unobtrusive secret agent isn't something I can picture. She also has the attention span of a bloody gnat. I don't know how she managed it. Well anyway, that day she had a stroke of luck." He turned to her.
"Apparently, she overheard you call someone while you were at a cafe, Dawn I'm guessing, and you said you would be by to pick something up and would then be heading to my apartment."
"Yeah," Buffy thought for a minute, "there was a problem with a delivery; the courier only had your name on it for some reason and we needed your signature. They wouldn't release it to me. You were home that afternoon, so I was going to grab the release form after lunch and bring it by for you to sign. They were going to retry at two."
"Ok so, she didn't really have a plan before that, but you know Dru's insane, not dumb. She thought fast. She knew you'd be a few minutes paying and going back to the gallery so..." Spike continued relating the events of the day.
Dru knew she only had about a half hour. It was risky; she had to work fast and for it to work everything had to go perfectly but with a little luck she could manage it. She hurried over to Spike's apartment and knocked on his door. When he opened it, she burst through the door sobbing. "Please Spike," she begged. "I don't know what to do. Please you have to help me. "
"Dru, what's going on? Help you how?" Spying her suitcase beside the door, he groaned. "You can't stay here."
He guided her over to the couch and grabbed her suitcase. No need to give the neighbors a show.
But he couldn't get her to calm down. She made a grab for her suitcase and starting tossing through it, spilling the contents everywhere. She grabbed a bottle of something just as he grabbed her wrist. "Dru, stop it!" The bottle's cap was loose and when she jerked to pull out of his grasp, she splashed most of the contents of it all over him. "Oh, bloody hell, now I reek of whiskey," he complained, looking down at his drenched clothing in disgust. It dripped from his hair, it trickled down his neck, it was all over him. He brushed aside drops heading for his eye.
She looked up at him with repentant eyes. "I'm sorry, my Spike. I just…I needed…"
He sighed.
"Maybe," she said meekly, "you should go take a shower. I'll sit and be good. I won't do anything else. I'll just sit here. Then you can help me when you get out?" She stared up at him sadly.
He eyed her suspiciously. She seemed to have settled down and returned to herself. She just looked pale and tired now, but calmer. "Yeah, ok. I'm gonna go wash this stuff off. You stay there and don't touch anything." He wagged an admonishing finger at her. "I'll be back in five minutes and then we'll get to the bottom of this."
He'd just gotten into the shower when he heard a shriek from the living room. "Bloody hell, Dru, what now." He hastily threw a towel around his waist and rushed out.
He had a split second to realize that she'd stripped to her panties before she threw herself into his arms. He staggered back and automatically grabbed at her to keep her from falling.
Just then a key turned in the lock and the door opened. He registered Buffy's stricken face and realized what it looked like. He let go of Dru and ran after her, but she was already gone. He frantically dialed her cell, but she wasn't picking up. On the third try, the cell started clicking over into voicemail right away. She'd shut it off.
He called the gallery and Dawn answered. "Dawn, when your sister gets there have her call me, or if she won't, you call me and I'll come over." She started to ask questions and he cut her off. "Just do it, Dawn, please." He hung up and dialed Buffy at the house.
The machine was full. "Fuck!" He yelled and threw the phone against the wall.
He rounded on Dru. "Put some clothes on." He growled. "What the bloody fuck is going on here, Dru?"
She cowered and slumped to the floor, huddled against the wall and turning her big sad eyes at him again. "I was hot…" she said weakly.
This time, Spike wasn't falling for it. "You were sodding hot. So you decide to take off all your clothes and…what the fuck was that yelling about?" He took several aggressive steps forward and stopped, not trusting himself to get closer to her. He'd never wanted to hit someone so badly in his life. He stayed a safe distance away. "Why did you yell, Dru?"
"I tripped." She said, pointing to the whiskey bottle, now rolling on the floor. "I tripped and then I fell on that knife." She pointed again, this time to a wickedly sharp knife lying amidst the mess of her belongings.
"Why are you walking around with a-" he started, "No, wait, I don't care."
"I hurt myself." She whimpered and held up her other hand which was dripping a small trickle of blood from a cut on her palm.
He grabbed a shirt from her bag and went over to her, wrapping the shirt around her hand. Then he grasped her shoulders tightly and held her against the wall. "You are going to tell me what's going on, right now, Drusilla." He said in a low, frighteningly calm tone. "Then we're going to figure out what to do with you and I am going to do my bloody best to explain to Buffy what just happened."
"But Spike," tears welled in her eyes.
"No 'but Spike'. The only talking you're going to do is telling me what you've done, Dru. Because I'm finding this far too much of a coincidence that Buffy showed up just then. Because," he continued in the same even tone, "in order to fix things with Buffy, I need to know everything. So talk." On the word talk, he was unable to keep himself from shaking her slightly.
Tears poured down her face, "But you don't need her, my Spike. I love you. We're meant to be together, not you and Sunshine. I need you," she wailed.
He clenched his teeth. "Tell me, Dru." He said again.
"I can't. I won't." She pouted. "My hand hurts and now my shoulders hurt too. You're hurting me," she frowned petulantly and turned her face, refusing to look at him.
He yanked her to her feet and shoved a shirt at her. "Put that on."
She did.
He then picked her up and dumped her back on the couch.
"Comfy?" He asked her. "Now talk. You're not leaving until you do."
"So eventually, she told me everything I've told you. She'd watched for you out the window, gave you a few seconds to get most of the way up the stairs and yelled.” He looked disgusted. “I don't know why she thought I'd buy it. I mean, at best, I think she's crazy again and that's not any incentive to take her back," he shook his head in wonder. "At worst, I think she's a manipulative, scheming bitch in addition to the crazy."
"Gee, I don't know, you only did crazy for five years with her! No idea why she'd think you'd put up with that, no sir." Buffy said dryly.
"She wasn't that way when I started dating her, Buffy!" Spike protested. "You know that, you knew her then too."
"Oh, much better, it's obvious you contributed to the crazy." Buffy joked lightly, giving him a half smile.
"Yeah, well," he scrubbed at his hair absently with one hand, freeing more random curls from the gel, "I'm done with crazy." He smirked. "Except for possibly you, of course…"
"Hey!" Buffy threw her shoe halfheartedly in his direction.
"Oi!" Spike ducked and laughed. "What did I say about violence!"
Buffy sniffed. "You said nothing about shoe throwing. It's a loophole."
He laughed again.
"So what did you do with her?" Buffy asked.
"Huh?" Spike looked puzzled for a moment, "Oh, I called her father. I kept her there until he came to get her. I didn't like the thought of that knife, so I couldn't just let her go and go looking for you," his tone deepened. "I don't know what plan B was and I don't want to think about it. I told him if he didn't get her locked up somewhere, I'd go to the police and have her prosecuted for stalking, breaking and entering, assault…anything I thought I could pin on her."
"She's out." Buffy said quietly.
"She's what?" Spike strode back over to her. "She's out and you know this how?"
"I saw her tonight," Buffy said, "at the opera."
He strode back to her and dropped to his knees. He cupped her face in his hands. "God, Buffy, if she'd-"
"She didn't. She said her typical wacky, cryptic things. I think she's off the drugs though, she was pretty coherent." Buffy said.
"Is she why you came to talk to me tonight?" Spike asked.
She looked into his eyes. "She said something that made me think I'd been horribly wrong and I needed to get back here and fix it." She slid her arms around his back and when he dropped his hands she rested her head on his chest.
"I'm so sorry, Spike," she whispered softly.
He buried his nose in her hair, inhaling deeply the sweet smell of her shampoo. Was it melon? Maybe.
He never had pinned it down. It mixed with the soft vanilla fragrance of her skin and he was lost again in the scent that was uniquely hers. "Where did you go?" He asked hoarsely. "I tried to find you. Couldn't."
She sighed. "I went to Xander's."