“Angel’s looking into medical causes.” Spike hands her something sticky and round and undeniably British. She bites into it, choosing not to mention that she’s already eaten dinner two hours ago. On her way home from patrol. After Spike had been a no-show, for the third night in a row. Yesterday, he hadn’t even bothered to come at all, though she’d flipped on the television the next morning and concluded that he’d stopped by and watched late-night Adult Swim cartoons while she’d been sleeping. And the night before that, he’d come in just as she’d been getting back from patrol.
“Oh?” Her voice doesn’t waver, and she doesn’t look directly at him. It’s easier that way.
“S’not likely, but we’re out of ideas.” He’s staring at her when she turns to sneak a glance at him. “Angel’s even called in a doctor. Last I heard, he was explaining why she couldn’t take Faith to her hospital.”
“Explaining.” Buffy can’t help but quirk an eyebrow at the tone of Spike’s voice. “With fangs and death threats?”
He shrugs, grinning briefly. “Been a while since I‘ve seen him intimidating a helpless human. Brought back memories.”
“I’m sure,” she says dryly, and for a moment, they’re both smiling slightly at each other, angry and protective Angel something familiar and almost grimly entertaining even in this new, tense situation they’re trapped inside.
Spike’s eyes are warm and unguarded for a moment, and she opens her mouth to say something- she doesn’t know what, but something always does seem to come out when Spike’s looking at her like this- but then he freezes. A thunderous cloud of immense magnitude darkens across his face, a sharp second of pained hurt, and then he’s cool and unyielding again, back to the snit he’s been in ever since he’d found her at Xander’s.
She wants to call him out on it, and she undoubtedly should, but that means opening to him, too, and letting go of pent-up fears she doesn’t dare reveal. And she’d rather this awkwardness than his disappointment and dismissal. We are so screwed up, she thinks ruefully, blinking away sudden moisture in her eyes and turning to study her croissant with single-minded focus.
“I’m going to head back now,” Spike says.
She blinks at him. “Want to watch something instead? It’s not that late.” The request comes out needier than she’d intended, and she winces inwardly.
He looks startled. “Yeah, okay.”
A few days before, they’d been curled up beside each other on his couch, she brooding and he laughing and pointing out the best lines of the movie, “in case she’d missed them.” Now he sits stiffly at one end of the couch and she wraps her arms around her knees and watches him as he stares ahead at the television screen.
It’s sheer torture, and when he finally makes an excuse and hurries out the window, she watches him go without a word of protest.
--
Leanne isn’t working the next day, but the blessed silence that ensues is unwanted for the first time since Buffy had first started at the coffee shop. She doesn’t want to spend her days stewing over her nights, but it’s an impossible task when the cafe is quiet and empty and even Tina is absorbed in her book instead of chatting. So she moodily slouches into a seat and draws meaningless patterns into a napkin with hard, unforgiving strokes of her permanent marker.
Faith is seeing a doctor. Stroke. Angel’s out of leads. Stroke. Willow’s hit a dead end. Stroke. Spike is…Spike is driving her up the wall. Stroke. Strokestrokestroke.
The more she thinks about it, the more annoyed she gets. She knows she has the tendency to blame herself when it comes to wronging her friends, but she’s never had that same delusion when it’s Spike who’s on the other side. And this isn’t her fault, not really. Yes, she’s keeping a secret fear from him. But she’d gone straight to Willow with it and discussed it with Xander, and what right does he have to get snippy that she’s confiding in her once closest friends? Since when is he her keeper?
I don’t have time for this. There are more important things at stake than Spike’s funk, no matter how much her heart might argue otherwise. And she’s never put her personal pain ahead of…
Of…
She frowns at her napkin, tracing the latticework she’s drawn across it with weary acceptance. In the end, it’s the slayer that comes first, always, and the girl takes a back seat to her. She’d tried putting the girl before the world last year. It hadn’t turned out well.
She puts down her marker and closes her eyes, preparing a game face for the rest of the day. No matter if Spike doesn’t come again. No matter if he does. She’s going to go serve coffee, go patrolling, eat dinner, and maybe do some research online a la Willow before she gets to sleep. She’s managed years without a steady partner, and Spike’s absence changes nothing.
The smile’s already set on her face when she turns to check out the window for arriving customers. A man with hair nearly as blond as Spike’s pauses at the door, gesturing to his companion questioningly. The other shakes his head and they move on, and Buffy sighs, watching them go. Well. Maybe she can skip the serving coffee part of her agenda.
Unintended, her eyes meet the gaze of another passerby as she looks on, a girl a few years younger than she with dark features and cold, angry eyes. She seems vaguely familiar, but it’s only when she moves to lift her phone to her ear that Buffy makes the connection. A light smattering of the deadly latticework is visible even on the slayer’s dark skin, crossing the back of her hand to creep towards her sleeve.
The slayer who’d accompanied Simone.
“This is all your fault!” Simone had hissed, and Buffy, long accustomed to being blamed for the slayers’ ills, had shrugged it off as yet another attack to be placed on the long list of much deserved Things That Buffy Has Done. But what if she hadn’t been talking about the slayer line or Twilight? What if she’d known something?
Buffy jerks up, mumbling something about a break, and she’s out the door just as the girl breaks into a run. “Hey! Wait!” she calls out, but how does one reassure a girl who hates her on principle that she only wants to talk?
She attracts stares as she runs full-tilt toward Second Street, a tiny blond dynamo with fierce eyes and little regard for decorum. Making a scene has never been much of a concern for her, though, especially when there are more vital worries than others’ stares. Her only goal is to catch a slayer, even as the other girl makes a sharp right down an alley and disappears from sight.
But the latticework is already doing its fatal job, even in its early stages, and Buffy follows the slayer’s path to find her braced against the wall, one hand keeping her steady while she heaves strained, ragged breaths that hurt Buffy’s throat with just their sound. “I’m sorry,” Buffy whispers. “I know that doesn’t mean much, but…”
The slayer doesn’t look at her, doesn’t react at all.
“We’re trying to find a cure,” Buffy says tentatively. A choked snort.
“Is there…do you know anything? What’s causing this? Simone said-“
The girl turns to glare at her, pools of hatred flashing unfettered in her eyes. “Do not talk to me about Simone.”
“You know something,” Buffy presses. “How’d you get those markings? Why are slayers catching them? What happened to you and Simone?”
The girl sneers. “Go to hell. If you think I’d tell you anything…”
She moves to leave, but Buffy has had enough of tolerance and shame and letting slayers she doesn’t know walk all over her. “I think you are,” she informs the girl, grabbing her roughly by the arm and swinging her against the wall, back pressed to the stone of the building behind them and Buffy looming over her in full-on slayer mode. “Now, I’ve had a really, really bad week. You’re going to make it better. Got it?”
Hatred emanates off the girl in streams of potent fury. Buffy doesn’t flinch. “Got it?” she repeats.
The part of her brain that is permanently in Spike-world is almost proud, envisioning how delighted he’d be by her intimidation of another slayer. He’d be watching from the other side of the alley, grinning unrepentantly and calling out horror-inducing tips that he’d pretend he was suggesting just for laughs. She’d have to tell him about this later.
Or not. She scowls at the reminder that Spike’s still mad at her and directs it at the slayer in front of her. “What. Do. You. Know.”
“Nothing!” the girl sputters, struggling under Buffy’s grip. “Nothing, I swear! What’s wrong with you? You’re supposed to be the good one!”
“Yeah? They still telling you that?” But she lets go of the girl, tossing her a cursory glance to make sure that she hasn’t actually hurt her. “If you know anything…anything at all that can save the other girls with the disease…” Her voice is low and threatening, her eyes fixed on the angry girl in front of her.
The girl shrugs. “I didn’t even know there was anyone else. I don’t know how I got them,” she protests, staring at her hand. “It’s a disease? I…is that how Simone died? I’m going to die?”
“A lot of slayers are going to die,” Buffy confirms grimly.
“No.” The girl’s eyes are wide and frightened, and she spits out what sounds like a prayer before she turns and runs, and it’s only once she’s gone that the words start to untangle into English in her mind.
“She never said…” Said what? Who said? Simone? Had Simone known something before she’d died?
“This is all your fault!”
The coffee shop has never seemed quite so far away before.
--
She picks up Mexican as a halfhearted peace offering on her way home. Spike loves anything that sends his taste buds on fire, but she always nixes it, all too cognizant that there are no toothbrushes on patrol and her slaying partner has the nose of a bloodhound. Tonight, though, she dawdles over her food for much longer than is necessary and pretends that she isn’t waiting for Spike to join her until she runs out of excuses and heads for the door.
And it isn’t annoyance or spite that sends her out to the neighborhood where she’d seen that monstrous demon, nope. Uh-uh. Not at all. She just hasn’t been there in a while, so of course she’s going to check it out. It has nothing to do with how furious Spike was that she’d “endangered” herself last time.
Endangered, my ass. This is my job. And if Spike’s going to be tetchy about it, well, maybe it’s time that he stops sulking and gets back to doing what he does best- standing at her side while they fight back the nasties.
There aren’t many demons out tonight, though, and her kill count is frustratingly low even for a late patrol. Two vampires. One nasty spiny-thing. And when she finally makes it deep into the area of the city where half-finished buildings dominate a gloomy landscape and vampires cower in fear from more than just a slayer, silence reigns supreme.
A twinge at the back of her neck comes as a welcome interruption to a quiet night, and she turns swiftly, tracking her vamp sense down to a figure passing through an empty lot a few hundred feet away, swaggering from side to side with the lazy confidence of the recently sated. Not happening again.
Speed and a stake. That’s all she’s ever needed, and a year reminding herself of that after all the fancy trappings of life post-Sunnydale have finally sunk in. She’s grabbing the vampire by the arm and swinging him around with practiced strength, throwing him backward and tensing in anticipation of a decent fight.
He laughs, his eyes unfocused and glazed over with contentment. “Two of you in less than an hour. I’ve been undead six years and I’ve never had a night this wild.”
“Two of us? Two of who?” she demands, aiming a flurry of blows at his chest. He parries with unskilled blows, blocking her wildly from his heart.
“Slayers?” The vampire squints at her. “Aren’t you one? And that chick definitely tasted something different.” He grins with replete satisfaction and Buffy tastes bile.
He’s on his back with a livid slayer crouched over him before he has a chance to blink, stake pressed to his heart and her hand tight around his demon-scarred throat. “What the fuck did you do?” The slayers may have renounced her, but Buffy’s heart still cries with fury at the loss of a sister, especially to someone as incapable of granting a worthy death as this half-assed vampire. “Where is she?”
“Hey, she was asking for it!” the vampire protests, lying limp beneath her in ready defeat. “Just walked right over to me and asked me to kill her. I didn’t even know she was a slayer until I had a drink. And I was so freaked that I just snapped her neck, like she wanted. She was asking for it!”
“Nobody asks for it,” Buffy murmurs as dust wafts away below her. “Not even a slayer.” Spike had claimed that all slayers had death wishes, back when there had been only one and the only way to retire had been the permanent one. But even after Twilight, suicide-by-vampire had been rare, and slayers quitting had been the norm. For a slayer to give up so completely that she’d beg a demon to finish her…
It’s inconceivable.
She tracks the vampire’s steps back before the lot to an abandoned street lit by only one flickering streetlamp, and she’s only halfway down the block before slayer-honed senses catch sight of the corpse dumped indifferently against the side of a fence. And if she hadn’t recognized the features immediately, the dark tattoo of bruises climbing the girl’s arm is clue enough to her identity.
Her neck is snapped, just as the vampire had declared, and her heartbeat is long gone, along with any information Simone’s slayer might have had concerning the disease that hadn’t been given the chance to kill her. Her last expression is one of grim determination, a slayer set on one goal only, and Buffy stares at her for a long time before she can finally close her eyes and move away.
It’s a somber Buffy who finds a pay phone and calls 911 to get the body before she turns to head home, early anger with petty problems long forgotten in lieu of more serious issues. A slayer is gone, killed rather than to deal with the disease that’s attacking her sisters. And Buffy still has no cure, no leads, and no plan.
Her apartment is empty, the food she’d left on the table untouched, and she’s almost relieved to see it. It’s no time for awkward Spike conversations, anyway. It’s time to shower off the dust of a slayer’s murderer and recount everything that’s happened since Simone first arrived with a pattern of death on her skin.
Simone. Willow calling with news of a dead slayer. Spike admitting Faith’s malady. Spike taking her to see Faith. Satsu and Kennedy and a death ward of their own. And now another slayer lost.
She pads to her room in a towel, barely noticing the vampire now standing in the living room, licking chile con queso off his fingers and his eyes glued to her legs as she passes him. It’s only once she’s in her room that Spike’s presence registers, and she pulls on a black tank top and pajama pants and heads back out to greet him. “Hi.”
“Mm.” His gaze drifts above her top to register her expression. “What’s wrong?”
She looks away. “It’s nothing. How’s Faith?”
His concern doesn’t abate. “Not well. That doctor thinks it’s a miracle that she’s still hanging on. And she doesn’t have much more time.”
“Oh.” Her voice cracks even on the single syllable, and it’s the guilt that’s back in spades, propelling her away from Spike and to the couch behind him where she doesn’t have to look at him and see the worry in his eyes. This is…this is worse than it’s ever been before, watching friends and sister slayers slowly succumb to debilitating illness and the nagging suspicion that it may have been Buffy to doom them. And she can’t battle her way to save them this time.
“No, love.” Spike is unrelenting, standing behind her and waiting expectantly. “There’s something. There’s always something. We just haven’t found it yet. But that’s never stopped us before, yeah?”
She leans back, seeking his presence almost unconsciously. “I saw the girl who’d been with Simone earlier today. She had the markings. I think she knew something…or maybe she knew that Simone knew something, I’m not sure.”
He grips her shoulder, a thumb moving to stroke the side of her neck. “Well, that’s something, innit? We’ll track her down and…”
“She’s dead.”
He lets go of her shoulder, circling the couch to take the seat beside her. It’s closer than he’s been in days, but she can’t bring herself to let that affect her. “A vamp got her. Or, the way the vamp tells it, she came to him and asked to be killed. So she’s gone,” she concludes tonelessly.
His arm is around her instantly, pulling her into him, where she can convey her hopelessness and fear and pain with nothing more than the limpness of her position. And Spike, her wonderful, knowing Spike, puts aside the passive-aggressive anger he’s directed her way all week and holds her close until she’s lulled to sleep by his unnecessary breathing.
She doesn’t deserve comfort, and she doesn’t deserve his unconditional friendship. Not when so many are suffering because of her. But she’s incapable of pushing him away anymore, and even self-reproach can’t extricate her from his arms this time.
[Reviews - 21]
-
Table of Contents [Report This]
Chapter or Story |
Chapter or Story | 
Chapter or Story
Has been viewed 1700 times
- Text Size +
-
Table of Contents [Report This]
Chapter or Story |
Chapter or Story | Chapter or Story - Text Size +