Spike woke late the next morning to find he was experiencing the first headache of his life. His head felt uncomfortably tight and was pounding relentlessly. This was strange enough, but it was coupled with the feeling that something else was off, that something was definitely not quite right.
He sat up and was pleased to find that he was able to do it with far more ease and far less pain than the day before. Buffy’s slayer grade blood had done its magic again, he felt almost as good as new.
He stood up and almost fell back down, his leg giving way with a sharp rent. Ah. Not quite good as new then. Spike sat back down and gingerly checked his stitches under the bandaging. The rest of him looked and felt pretty much back to normal, but this wound had yet to knit back together, it had obviously been the deepest he had sustained.
That wasn’t it though. That didn’t account for the weird feeling that there was something wrong... something he was forgetting maybe... something that was definitely important.
Spike threw out his senses and was immediately rewarded with the pleasurable brush of Buffy’s presence. He could hear the shower going upstairs, which explained her absence. Oddly the thought of wet, naked Buffy didn’t rampage through his head like he wanted it too. It was like his mind was full of soggy cotton wool. There was something in there trying to get his attention, but it was muffled. He got the impression of it, but not the sound.
Joyce suddenly came into the living room with a smile on her face and a cup of blood (held away from her body with as much distance as was possible) in her hand.
“Morning sleepy head! Buffy told me to give you this – “ She handed the blood to Spike with a wrinkled nose and obvious relief, “ – as soon as you woke up. She’s just getting changed, she should be down soon. I think she said something about another Scooby meeting.”
Joyce laughed when she saw the way Spikes expression dropped. “I know how you feel, when the house turns into command central I know it usually means crisis ahoy! I do sometimes wish Buffy was the kind of girl who had friends over to watch movies, not sharpen stakes.” Joyce suddenly got a tender look on her face “But then she wouldn’t be my Buffy would she? Now, you drink that up. She made me promise to be head nurse while she was upstairs, I don’t want her to think I’m slacking.”
Spike’s headache had eased seconds after his first sip of blood so he was able to come up with a quick reply, “Head nurse? Then why no uniform Joyce? I’m disappointed.”
Joyce blushed and her tone was light as she said, “You’re face doesn’t look too injured to me Spike, but I can change that if you keep up that sort of talk!”
Spike chuckled and drank the rest of his breakfast quietly. His head was feeling pretty normal again, but there was still that something... that niggling worry that there was something he’d forgotten...
But then Buffy came downstairs and the fact that he’d forgotten something was forgotten itself. Thinking about anything when all his blood had rushed south at the sight of his beautiful Buffy proved to be quite impossible, and by the time they’d shared their first kiss of the day everything but her had been entirely driven from his mind.
That day passed much the same as the previous one, with pointless discussion about their non-existent options regarding the werewolf, and Buffy’s horror of Giles and Anna related flirting.
The only difference was that Xander was there to share the horror, and to provide some entertainment for a merciless Spike.
Cordelia had also decided to tag along, though seemingly only so she could paint her nails and interject with non related comments.
The one time she actually said anything on topic it was markedly unhelpful.
“Seriously Buff, what’s the big? Just let the werewolf do its thing. It’ll move on when it’s run out of people to eat.”
As everyone else was too busy looking at Cordelia with open mouths it was Buffy who answered. “Right, and if one of the people it happened to eat was you? Would you care then?”
Cordelia rolled her eyes. “Well it wouldn’t get me, obviously. I’m not stupid enough to go waltzing round Sunnydale after dark. And honestly, the people who still are, after all the crap that goes on here, deserve to be eaten.”
Buffy bit down the urge to say something about Cordelia’s stupidity for Xander’s sake, and as if by silent communication they all ignored Cordelia after that. Buffy went back to her original point.
“Giles, I’m going to patrol. And I’m going to patrol alone. Even if the werewolf wasn’t a threat I’ve been neglecting my ‘duty’ lately, I know summers usually pretty quiet but if I don’t start patrolling soon there’s going to be vamps galore.”
Giles and Spike both opened their mouths to speak, but Buffy cut them off. She was using her most slayerish, speech giving, troop inspiring voice, and you just didn’t interrupt her when that happened.
“Look guys, we’ve studied this from every angle, but when it comes down to it there’s just one option. My way is the only way. Slayer good, werewolf bad right? Well I won’t let one more person get hurt because I was too scared to fight back. It was always going to come to a fight, whether we brought the fight to it, or it brought the fight to me. So it’ll have the upper hand, the element of surprise. So what? I’ll fight it, and I’ll win. I’ve fought worse, and I’ll fight worse in the future. This is my duty though, and mine alone. You guys can’t be in this with me. You’ve been great in the past, and I know you’ve helped me during similar situations. But this is different, we all know the process with vamps, we know and understand the methods, the risks and the limitations. I can’t risk bringing you out with me against a werewolf. If Spike’s legs better by then, great, I’ll take him with me and he can stop giving me the evil eye. But if it isn’t I am going out alone. I can’t do what has to be done if I’m worried if you’re ok. If I can find it, find it and track it without it noticing me I’ll call you guys in for back up. You can come out guns a blazing and we’ll take it down and it’ll be peachy keen. But I want you to do what I’m asking. I need you to stay inside, stay safe, until I call. Ok?”
Xander was the first to speak, Giles was too busy polishing his glasses and Spike was too busy grinding his teeth.
“Uh Buff, little problem with that, you don’t have a cell phone remember? Unless you were planning to shout for us? But I don’t think your voice would carry that far, and it would kinda undo the whole stealthy, stalking bit.”
Buffy tried to smile at his attempt at lightening the mood. “I’ll borrow Spikes, he won’t mind.”
Spike raised an eyebrow, “Won’t I? And you seem to be ignorin somethin else slayer, we’ve got Anna here haven’t we. You do remember Anna don’t you? The professional werewolf hunter? She’s already told you she’ll help in any way she can. If you’re gonna ignore that and insist on goin out alone, like a bloody martyr, you’re an idiot as well as a stubborn bint.”
Spike spoke more harshly than intended due to his anger. He wasn’t angry with Buffy, despite her ‘I’m the slayer, what I say goes, even If I say I want to march off to my death’ speech. He was angry with himself for not being healed, for being a hindrance rather than a help. There was only so much good drinking blood would do, his leg needed time to heal. Time they did not have. If he went out as he was he’d be a liability. If anything the smell of blood from his still open wound would attract the werewolf’s attention, making them the tracked rather than the trackers. He hated the whole damn situation, but he knew Buffy’s sense of duty would not allow her to sit at home while something was killing off the population.
Buffy took no offence from Spikes words, mainly because she knew they didn’t stem from anything but concern, but also because she had actually forgotten Anna.
Buffy turned to her now with an embarrassed smile. “Sorry Anna, I kinda completely forgot you’re the queen of kicking werewolf ass.”
Anna had been sitting silently for a while, unsure of what to do, of whether to interject or not. In light of all Spike had done for her she was ready and willing to do whatever was asked, and the thought of taking down a lone werewolf didn’t frighten her in the slightest. “I was going to ask if you’d like me to patrol also? We could fight together, or split up and have double the chance of finding it quickly." Spike growled. "Or not. The spell which blocks me from tracking it means I won’t be able to sense it from far away, but if it came relatively close I’m sure I would get the same reading as you, as though it were any other demon. I would have offered straight away Buffy, but you’re the slayer, this is your jurisdiction as it were, and it’s up to you.”
Buffy grinned sheepishly, “Yeah, well I can’t say having you with me wouldn’t make me feel majorly better about the whole thing, so if you’re game I think that team us would be awesome. Plus I won’t have to put up with Spike insisting I just get him ‘a bloody wheelchair’ and take him along.”
Spike was very pleased that Buffy would now have Anna fighting beside her, but he still frowned, “For the record slayer, even if I broke both my legs, you wouldn’t get me in a soddin wheelchair!”
Buffy smiled and smacked his arm playfully. Just then an errant thought occurred to her, “I’d better call Willow later, see how she is and fill her in. Poor Will, she must have something really nasty not to be keeping in contact.”
While the others talked about Willows illness, before moving on to a contest of ‘the worst illness I ever had was...’, Spike stayed quiet and thoughtful. The second Buffy had said Willows name the feeling he’d had from that morning had returned in full force.
His head definitely wasn’t working right, there was something he was forgetting, and it was something to do with Willow. What the hell was it?”
It seemed funny to Buffy that after all the fretting and plan making and worrying they’d done for the last two weeks they'd ended up with a very simple, normal result – patrolling with a side of improvisation.
As the best chance they had of killing the werewolf without the need to engage with it was through the use of guns filled with silver bullets, Anna and Giles took Buffy to the nearest deserted area to practise. For someone so good at wielding stakes she was a worryingly horrible shot, so they were gone most of the afternoon.
Xander went too, partly for the laugh factor, and partly because his ‘army experience’ during Halloween had given him a thing for guns, and Anna was bringing a few.
Cordelia tagged along too, stating to anyone that would listen that ‘if they started shooting any cute little animals’ she was so outta there. After a couple of hours of listening to her babble on about clothes Buffy was almost tempted to find a squirrel to aim at.
Buffy had been worried about leaving Spike alone in the house, but hadn’t wanted him to risk an even slower recovery by coming along. He shooed her off with the insistence that as good and as sexy a nurse as she had been he’d had enough women fretting over him in the last few days to last a lifetime.
In truth though, Spike would have loved to have spent the day with Buffy, even if it had meant putting up with Xander for longer, but he was convinced now that there was something wrong with him and he needed time to figure out what.
Hours had passed and Spike was sat on the couch with his head in his hands, the dreaded headache had returned. Now that he knew what they felt like Spike vowed to never again deliberately make loud noises when other people had them. He had also been overcome with a strange lethargy, which seemed to pass over him in waves and prevented him from wanting to do very much but sleep. He wasn’t sure if that was a result of the spell or not, since his injuries he had been sleeping a hell of a lot more than usual anyway. It was very annoying. Thinking, never one of Spikes favourite pastimes, seemed more difficult than ever.
He was certain now that he had been spelled. Without magical ingredients or even textbooks handy Spikes theories were the result of a few incantations and some guesswork. A spell of memory argumentation, or forgetting, had been used against him. But who had cast it and why was a mystery.
So too, obviously, was what he had forgotten. Spike remembered everything, his whole life in vivid detail up until the present day. Every memory that involved Buffy was particularly fresh and filled with colour. But a memory of something, something that obviously hadn’t affected him physically, had been removed.
Spike had taken great measures to protect himself from magic, to guard himself against exactly this kind of thing. The fact that someone had managed to bypass the barriers he had erected was worrying to say the least.
Spike knew though, in some instinctive way, that what he had been made to forget was not only important, but also connected somehow to Buffy’s red headed friend.
A vision perhaps? Spike had had visions about Buffy’s watcher after all, it wouldn’t be that strange if he’d had a vision about her friend. And Willow wasn’t just an ordinary girl, she had the ability to become a potentially extremely powerful witch.
The only people Spike could think of who would have reason and means to remove the memory of a vision from his mind were The Powers That Be. They had tried to do so before, and just because all the methods they’d employed in the past had failed didn’t mean they hadn’t found a new one that worked.
That thought made him very, very angry.
Spike considered calling Willow, to get her advice and maybe enlist her help in retrieving the memory, but according to Buffy she was very sick. He also didn’t want to worry her unduly, it was only a hunch after all which made him believe the memory involved her.
Spike could call the Powers, he’d found ways over the years of making contact, but they could chose to ignore him, and they very often did.
The full moon was the next night and Spike knew he should be focussing all his attention on making sure Buffy got through it without his vision of her becoming reality. He couldn’t tell her about this and risk her splitting her focus from the task at hand.
As frustrating as not being able to remember something was it wasn’t as important as dealing with the werewolf. Spike decided that when the next couple of nights were over he would put this puzzle to the scoobies, and they could sort it out together.
Once he had reached his decision Spike succumbed to the unnatural sleep which to him seemed perfectly natural.
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