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Author's Chapter Notes:
every time i post a new chap. i review the old ones and fix more mistakes. nothing big, but it helps alittle.
i own nothing but my truck and just like to take the characters out for a ride.
The choice to call Buffy hadn’t really been a hard one. Spike was just getting too reckless. There were many days that I cursed myself when I noticed an escape technique that I know he learned from me. In the five months before I called her, I only saw him smile a hand full of times, but I’m sure he was smiling every time he thought about using my own teachings against me.

He was still in the hospital bed, week two, when I made the call.

*******

“Spike, where are you going now?” he had a determined look in his eyes, and that could only mean one thing.

“Ta m’room, like a good li’boy aught ta.”

He didn’t even turn around to answer me. I had just finished yelling at him for abusing his expense card; no one needs three 62-inch plasma T.V.s.

“Do you intend to stay there, so I can get some sleep tonight, or should I not bother to go to bed?”

At least if I knew he was going to sneak out I could not be half asleep as I traipsed after him.

From the other side of the foyer he turned around and winked at me, with almost a smirk on his face.

“Of course, Pops.”

I rolled my eyes, Yeah right, that wasn’t even a yes or no question.

He would be gone first chance he thought it was clear. Therefore, I stayed up that night in a fairly comfortable chair down the hall from his room. The nights I sat guard outside his door gave me time to go over neglected work, and on the off occasion to catch up on some reading. Books were really the only thing I had left in the world, besides Spike. After pushing Nina away for safety purposes while fighting the Black Thorn, she didn’t want anything to do with me. Which I would have understood, except it was to save her life and I…. just got to upset about something that doesn’t matter anymore. Anyways. In the first few weeks after that rainy night of hell, I had recognized a person here and there. However, it slowly seemed everyone that I knew in the building was replaced. I even chased after a girl with long blonde hair hoping it was Harmony one day, just to be able to talk to somebody from before. But it wasn’t her. There wasn’t any one left. Even Illyria had left.

**

She stormed into my office in the guise of Fred with a bag over her shoulder. I had put down my papers and raised an eyebrow at her as she dropped her bag to the floor.

“Going somewhere?”

She had told me once before how much she despised Fred’s body, so to have her standing here in it was more than odd.

“There is nothing for me here,” her voice was still Illyria, so I began to wonder if this was another lessening of her powers.

“There’s plenty here for you.”

I started to panic a little, I couldn’t lose another team member, there were so few of us left. Gunn’s body had been found and buried, along with Wesley’s and even Lindsey’s. There was no point in holding grudges anymore. No expenses spared on a midnight funeral that three people attended.

“I have become even more bored now then I was before our great battle. My...” her head tilted to the side as if she didn’t quite know what the right word would be, “My… heart hurts.”

Straightening her head, she held me in her gaze as if she thought it odd that mine didn’t as well. Little did she know, I’d just had years to perfect the ability to not show it.

I sighed, as much as I wanted to give her something to do; I had lied, there really wasn’t anything. Not for her abilities, or mine really. Everything I did these days was superficial busy work. None of the decisions I made meant anything, and none of them were enacted even if they did. The Senior Partners had taken over and worked around me, without even really trying to hide it.

“Where do you intend to go?”

If she was becoming human she would need money and a home. Hell, even if she were a super being she would need those things as well.

“Back to my family.” She stated matter-of-factly.

My brow furrowed in confusion, her family, did she mean…

“You mean Fred’s family?” she bowed her head in a half moment of… shame, maybe.

“Yes,” she paused to look out the window, “I am tormented with all of these memories and I do not know what to make of them. The human has helped me to understand the possibility that I may be becoming human myself.”

She stopped; being human was obviously something that didn’t sit well with her. In addition, all the time she was spending with Spike wasn’t helping, he cursed his own race every chance he got now. No longer were they the greatest things to ever walk the planet.

“If I am to be human, I would like to spend the few years I will have left on this world with people who will believe that they love me. Wesley…” she stopped, the pain on her face heart breaking,” Wesley taught me that to be loved is one of the greatest gifts a human may receive. It will be the gift of another, but in my short time being loved, I found that it was enjoyable. I wish to return to that environment.”

I just stared at her. How lucky was she to be able to have someone TO go to. Every one that I loved had died, didn’t want me, or didn’t want to remember me. What could I say?

“Will you need anything?”

“I shall continue to utilize the ‘expense account’ until I find my host’s family. After that, I do not except to see you again. I am just here to say good bye.”

“What about Spike?”

After ‘the breath’ they had been nearly inseparable, and there were times that I only found him because she had known where he was going to be.

“He knows of my plans and has made plans of his own. We have said our farewells; you are the last to know.”

Like always, I thought. Spike has made plans of his own, what did that mean?

There was nothing left to say, I guessed. My heart was heavy to see her go, but I couldn’t stop her, physically, or any other way. All three of us were just trying to find some kind of happiness these days, and if she thought to return to Fred’s parents, pretending to be their daughter was the way, well then, more power to her. At least one of us would have a semblance of serenity.

“You’ll be missed.”

“As will you, vampire, as will you.”

She picked her bag up and turned away from me. At the door she paused turning just slightly, her final words to me before she walked out, closing the door behind her were, “He grieves greatly for all of his losses and will not be able to maintain his false bravado for much longer.”

I had thought her words were about me.

***

I was pulled out of my reverie that night by the sound of the door at the end of the hall opening.

“Ya gonna sit down there all nite or d’ya wanna join me fer a drink?”

He stood at the end of the hall, black T., black pants, and strangely enough white socks. He looked like a backwards Oreo. However, even without his vampire attributes, he still managed to always know when I was around. It was uncanny.

“I’m supposed to be guarding you, not hanging out with you.” I called down the corridor.

“Cause I’m such terr’ble comp’ny? Com’on Peaches, how lame ya gotta be ta stalk a man wi’ no super powers?”

I stood up and began down the wall way, “I’m not stalking you.”

I stopped in front of him before I entered his room to look into his sad eyes. They were always sad these days.

“Coulda fooled me, ole man.”

He chuckled lightly, something that was never true anymore and headed inside. I followed him in, figuring if I was with him he couldn’t sneak out.

And he didn’t, that night.

Or for the next week after that, even. We started hanging out; talking. About books, movies, girls, the good old days. I had thought it would be a sore spot for him, seeing as he would never be able to do many of the things we rejoiced over the most, but those seemed to be the only times he wasn’t in a pit of despair. We spoke of Buffy in reverence, and of the thrill of the kill. Of the many regrets we had, and of the things we still kind of wished we had done before we got our souls.

He taught me how to play Crash Bandicoot, and we argued endlessly over the battle of cavemen versus astronauts using many of the firm’s resources to enact battles and scenarios. He was right. Like always it seemed. He lulled me, in to what I now know, was a false sense of security.

It was three maybe four weeks after his broken arm fight (I had started categorizing them by the worse injury he received; broken arm fight, head stitches scrap, and so on), all of almost two weeks since we had started hanging out together, when I got the call.

Ring.

“Yes.”

“He’s gotten out again, sir,”

I was only about an hour late for when I usually got to Spike’s room, so I hadn’t thought that much about it. I mean, I didn’t go over there every night, but I had thought we were becoming friends. Something that neither of us had ever thought imaginable. So to hear those words, I thought they were about something else.

“Who’s out?”

I’m sure I sounded like a moron.

“Spike, sir, we figure he’s been gone about an hour, maybe more. We have a team on it already. Do you know where he might have been headed?”

An hour, maybe more. With Spike's ability to piss people off, he could be dead already. But why? Things were better, we were better. I was so confused, and so mad. He had done it again. Not that I didn’t expect it, but… I shook my head and scoffed at the man on the other end of the line. As if Spike would ever tell me where he was going to go. Come to think of it now, he didn’t even talk about himself any more, not in the last couple of days.

“No, I don’t, try his usually haunts, the seedier parts of town. Send someone to show me were you think he may have exited the building from.”

An hour wasn’t that long, and I had spent enough time with Spike to know his sent anywhere.

“Yes, sir. This is a capture only mission, as per usual, I assume?”

I rolled my eyes in my empty office. Did they really expect me to send out a death warrant for my only connection to this world?

“As per usual.”

“Roger, sir, out.”

Shaking my head, I grabbed my coat from the back of my chair and headed for the door. I didn’t know what I was madder at, the thought that the Senior Partners were now hinting at killing Spike, or that I had let myself believe that he and I were becoming friends and he wouldn’t skip out on me again.






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