And she was furious with herself for getting into the situation in the first place. She should’ve just stayed at home, not let her jealousy and boredom get the best of her. Or at the very least, eaten before she’d led whathisface out to the alley. Her stomach’s growls were fiercer than anything she felt she could muster at the moment.
However, when he came back into the bathroom, she pushed her fear away and worked up a good glare. “I’m not telling you anything, asshole,” she snapped. “So you can just fuck off.”
“The name’s Spike, actually,” he told her as he walked casually over to the tub and took a seat on the edge, safely away from her manacled hands. “I don’t think we ever took the time for proper introductions.”
“No, you were too busy chaining me up and subjecting me to mental tortures,” Buffy replied. “Thanks ever so.”
“You don’t have to keep suffering, you know,” Spike told her, his voice eerily calm, making Buffy wonder what his angle was this time. “All you have to do is give me an address and this can end.”
“Yeah, when you shove a stake through my heart.”
Spike responded with a shrug. “You’re going to be dead by the end of this either way. I’m not going to allow a vampire to keep feeding if I can stop it. But you could talk now and get it over with, or you could spend the next several days in agony. It’s your choice.”
Buffy decided to make her own choice.
Which was to spit in his face.
His jaw ticked, but Spike didn’t lose his temper as he wiped the spittle from his cheek. Instead, he walked out of the bathroom, leaving Buffy alone again. She let out a deep breath as she leaned back against the tub, hoping he was going to leave her alone again.
He didn’t. He came back into the bathroom, this time holding a cup, and before Buffy could ask what exactly he was planning on doing, he stepped over her, letting some of the cup’s contents spill onto her cheek.
Buffy screamed, pulling herself as far away from him as she could get as her cheek smoldered, the pain searing. “You bastard!” she yelled, panting in an effort to block out the pain.
“Oh, come on, it was just a little splash of holy water,” Spike replied with a cold smirk. “It’s not like I filled the bathtub with it. Yet, anyway.”
Buffy shook her head. “You…you wouldn’t do that.”
“No?” He leaned forward, speaking low. “How about I put just enough in the bottom of the tub to burn your legs off? Think maybe you’d talk then?”
Buffy trembled with fear. She’d seen Angelus torture someone with holy water in a similar way once, and she knew it wasn’t overly quick. It had slowly eaten away at that vampire’s skin like acid…
Suddenly, she was wishing he’d let her burn in the sun…
“I’m not going to sell him out,” Buffy replied, forcing herself to hold her head up high, though she couldn’t seem to stop the tremble in her lip.
Spike said nothing. Instead, he merely tipped the cup again, this time letting the water run down her chest, over the skin exposed by her low-cut shirt. Buffy screamed, bucking helplessly in her chains. It was one of the most painful things she’d ever experienced in her life, and again tears were forming in her eyes.
Only this time, she refused to let them fall. Instead, she vamped out again, snapping at him with her fangs.
Spike jumped back, then splashed the rest of the holy water on her, keeping her back from him.
Buffy screamed again as the water burned her face, chest, and arm. By the time the liquid stopped searing her skin, her tears were falling, and she didn’t need a reflection to know the damage it had done. She couldn’t even see out of one of her eyes…
She’d had enough. “Kill me,” she snarled at Spike. “Just fucking do it. I’m not going to talk and I don’t… I don’t want to be tortured anymore.”
“No. You have to tell me,” Spike insisted, letting the empty cup fall to the ground. “You’re going to tell me.”
“No!” Buffy screamed. “I’m not betraying him! I love him, and he loves me!”
“You’re a monster!” Spike bellowed. “You don’t know a bloody thing about love!”
“I know more than you!” Buffy yelled. “You’re the one who’s a monster!”
Spike whipped a cross from the back pocked of his jeans then knelt by the tub again, pressing the cross hard against Buffy’s neck. She screamed in agony, struggling futilely to escape his latest attack. “I know about love, bitch,” he snarled. “At least I did until your precious Angelus murdered my wife.”
A choked sob escaped Buffy as she finally understood why he was doing this. “Please,” she begged through tears of pain. “I’m…I’m sorry about your wife, okay? But I didn’t do it. Don’t…don’t hurt me anymore. And…and don’t make me hurt the person I love, too.”
Her voice was so small, so weak, that Spike actually felt himself faltering. He knew she couldn’t mean it, but… He pulled the cross away from her neck, flinching from the smell of cooked flesh.
Buffy slumped in the tub, the pain coursing through her body more intense than anything she’d ever known. “Please…just let me die now. I can’t…I can’t anymore…”
Spike stormed out of the bathroom, slamming the door hard enough to shake the tiny room.
Buffy crumbled into sobs.
Spike ran out of the apartment, barely making it down the stairs and to the grass before he doubled over, throwing up what little had been in his stomach. He tried to tell himself it was the effect of too much to drink the night before and the revolting smell of charred vampire flesh, but he knew there was more to it than that.
This had all gotten out of hand. He hadn’t expected any of this to be so difficult, and he had been certain she would’ve cracked by now. He thought the holy water and cross would’ve done more, but instead…
Fuck, she looked like a teenaged girl. He knew she was really nothing more than a demon, but listening to her screams, seeing the fear in her eyes…
Maybe she was right and he really was the monster.
While he still couldn’t figure out why she was so stubborn in her refusal to turn on Angelus, he didn’t doubt her reaction to his interrogation of her had been genuine. Those were authentic cries of pain, and despite what she was, it had sickened him to listen to them. And to know he was the cause.
He’d killed more vampires than he could count in the years since Drusilla’s death, but he’d never attempted to torture one before. Not like this. He thought he could do it, had been completely convinced when he walked into the bathroom armed with holy water and a cross that he’d be able to stomach doing whatever it took to get justice for Dru.
But this was too much, even for him. He remembered he’d been a good man at some point in a distant past, and that part of him was apparently more alive than he’d previously thought.
As much as he hated to admit it, Spike knew he couldn’t do this anymore. Part of him said he was giving up on his closest link to Angelus, but he also had a feeling he was never going to get anything out of the girl. Whatever the true reason for her loyalty to Angelus, if torture and the threat of death hadn’t made her give him up, Spike didn’t think anything would.
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and stood on shaky legs, knowing this had to end now. Angelus was somewhere in Los Angeles. That much he knew for certain now. He’d find him some other way. If he had to personally stake every single vampire in the State of California until he got to Angelus, he would.
Spike went back into the apartment, pulling his stake from his pocket as he went back into the bathroom. It was time to put the creature out of its misery.
She was curled up in the bathtub when he reached her, sobbing uncontrollably. Her face and half of her upper body were both horribly disfigured, the holy water leaving red, angry skin and boils in its wake and patches of her long, golden hair burned away. A black cross-shape mark marred her neck, and the smell from it was still fresh in the air.
“Sit up,” Spike said, trying to fight down his stomach’s urge to rebel again.
She slid around in the bathtub, doing her best to sit up in her weakened state. “You’re going to kill me now, aren’t you?”
“Yeah.”
She continued to cry, though it was softer now, and she didn’t argue with what he was about to do. All she uttered was one weak request. “Please, just be quick about it. No…no more torture. Please.”
“Don’t worry, pet. Just a stake through the heart, and it’ll be over,” Spike said, allowing a small amount of softness to seep into his own voice.
“And…and could you not wash me down the drain?” Buffy asked, sniffling through her words. “Could…could you maybe…bring my dust outside? Let…let them go in the wind or something?”
Spike swallowed hard. He supposed he could give her that much, after torturing her for two days. “Yeah. I’m gonna need to get you out of the tub, though, if that’s what you want. It’s still wet in there.”
“I know,” Buffy said. “It’s…it’s still burning me some. My…my legs.”
Spike didn’t know why that made him feel a pang of guilt. He hadn’t thought about the holy water past pouring it on her, and he didn’t think about the fact he’d done the equivalent of leaving her in an acid bath.
He unchained her from the tub, though he left her feet and hands bound, noticing with a wince that she did indeed have more burns on her from where the holy water had pooled in the tub. Burns went up her leg, disappearing beneath her skirt, and again, Spike felt sick.
“She’s just a vampire,” he told himself, trying to fight the guilt he felt from doing this to her. “She’s a cold blooded killer. Probably did worse than this to people in the past…”
He didn’t know why he asked his next question, other than he felt like he needed to know before he did this. “What’s your name?”
She looked up at him, one eye frightened and green, one eye pale, milky, and clearly sightless. “Buffy…” she said barely above a whisper.
It was such a girly name, it took Spike completely by surprise. He hadn’t thought vampires would have names like Buffy. And she couldn’t possibly be very old, though he didn’t think she was quite a fledgling either. “What year were you turned?” he found himself asking before he could even think about why he felt the need to get to know someone he was about to turn to dust.
“1983.”
“Angelus do it?”
“Yes. He…he found me at the mall.” She looked down again. “Can I just die now? Please…it hurts so much…”
“Yeah, all right,” Spike said, tightening his grip on his stake. He raised the weapon, his jaw tight as he brought it down.
Buffy clenched her eyes shut and waited for it to end.
It didn’t. She opened her eyes when Spike roared and watched as he threw the stake against the wall.
He let out a long string of low curses before fishing the keys to the chains out of his pocket. Buffy was silent as he unlocked all the chains, letting them fall to the ground. She didn’t understand what was happening, and she was suddenly filled with an overwhelming fear that this was some sort of mind game and he was just about to start hurting her again.
He looked down at where she was huddled on the floor. “I don’t want to ever see you again,” he snapped. “You got that?”
She whimpered but managed a nod of consent.
He stormed out of the apartment with another heavy door slam.
Buffy stayed curled on the floor, clueless as to what had just happened.
The sun had set, and Spike still hadn’t returned. Buffy wasn’t sure if he would, or possibly if he’d even gone. This could all be a trick to lure her out of the apartment so he could…
Well, what exactly, she didn’t know, but she didn’t care anymore. This could be her chance to escape. If she could only get back to Angelus…
He’d take care of her. Buffy had no doubt of that. Even with everything that had been going on recently, if he saw her like this, he’d take care of her. They were in love…
It was the thought of seeing her sire again that brought her back to her feet, and she fought to block out the pain as she stumbled out of the apartment. Spike was nowhere to be seen, and she realized with surprise that he actually had let her go.
Determined to make good of her unexpected freedom, Buffy started towards home.
That was not an easy chapter to write. Feedback would be very appreciated.