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Buffy rejoined them after a short while and they spent the day getting to know each other. They traded demons tales, life tales and more than a few embarrassing stories. It was like three friends getting together and having a good time but the threat of Living Death, overshadowed the entire event. It was impossible to have a great time when a demon was out there waiting to kill you but Buffy still had to admit that it had been fun. She barely spent time with her own friends anymore and it was nice to remember what it was like to not only live in the world but be a part of it as well.

When Gunn left, a few hours before nightfall Buffy hoped that they all could do it again real soon when things were back to normal…well her version of normal anyway. She couldn’t wait to introduce Spike and Gunn to Willow and Oz. Spike had told a story about him and Gunn at a Dingoes concert only to have the great music spoiled by an impromtu demon attack and she resisted telling them that she knew the band. That would be a surprise she sprung on them another day, she thought with a smile.

While she gathered up the cartons of takeout she realized that she was no longer surprised at how she instantly wrote Spike into her future. She wasn’t willing to buy the star-crossed lovers throughout time angle but she was willing to believe that love made it own rules along the way. Love had somehow become a very frequent guest in her life and vocabulary, after years of blighted or meaningless affairs and that just proved that things happen at the time you least expect them. What was weird is how perfect it seemed to fit. She had always expected love to pinch given her lifestyle and her past relationships but with Spike it just felt right. She turned to share that thought with Spike and the words caught in her throat.

She was looking at Spike and everything looked the same but his eyes were a virulent green. Her mind recalled the last time she had seen those toxic eyes staring back at her from a face twisted in pain, only this time she was the one suffering. “What do you want?”

“Is that anyway to treat an old lover?” Living Death asked her with Spike’s voice.

“Your not either of them, you’re just the thing wearing their skin.”

“True enough but their memories are mine. Tell me Buffy, what would you do to save your new lover?”

“I’ve seen this act, remember? I don’t know how you did it this time but just like before Spike isn’t going to come back.” Buffy said putting her hands behind her back so he couldn’t see them shaking. She had to be strong while she faced his killer and when he was dead…then she would fall apart and mourn for what she had lost just at the moment she thought she had everything.

“I am death personified and this body is of the dead. I simply filled him with life…my life force to be exact. But unlike Riley Finn, this can be a temporary joining. I can leave this shell at anytime and return to my host body and your vampire will have no memory of this encounter.” He stepped forward to her in a long rolling gait that was so different from Spike’s that she felt the first tears prick her eyes. “What would you give for me to spare him?”

“What do you want?”

“You.” When she stepped away, he shook his head arrogantly. “Can’t you lesser beings ever think beyond matters of the flesh. You constantly feast on each other like parasites and call it love. You and those like you will never become more than that, if you continued to degrade yourselves in such an unbecoming manner. While I have ascended past such false acts of human perversion to a power the likes of which you have never known nor could comprehend.”

He sounded so unlike Spike that her mind instinctively clicked into gear. “So if it’s not sex you’re after what could I possibly offer something like you?”

“Power.” He ran his hand down in front off her body, never touching anything but the air around her. “I feel the raw untamed magicks inside you. They are held back from their true purpose by your humanity and I wish to harness them for my own. In your form, my power will be unmatched in this dimension and I alone will rule this world.”

Unable to help herself, her eyes trailed over to the portrait hanging on the wall. It only proved to her what she was fighting for and it wasn‘t some unknown destiny. What was worth fighting for was right here in front of her. She turned her eyes back to where Living death stood. “So you want to get in touch with your feminine side by taking me over. But that doesn’t explain why you’re here making deals instead of taking what you want by force. All that power you claim to have and you’re afraid to fight one woman chock full of human perversion. Score one for us parasites, huh.”

He backhanded her, knocking her several steps back. She could feel a small amount of blood drip down to her tongue from where she had bit the inside of her cheek and that just pissed her off and steeled her resolve. Emotion pain was something she never understood but dealing with physical pain was as natural as breathing for her. “Impressive but I’m not exactly trembling in fear.”

“You are afraid, just not for yourself.” Living Death told her coldly. “You’re afraid of what happens to him and that makes you weak in a way losing the other did not. Like your father, the once noble Har’tuh before you, you have allowed the living, the mortals of this world to bind you with your feelings. To assume a new living host after my first reincarnation, they must willingly surrender to death. Or else I would have taken you the moment I escaped my sarcophagus. So what I am proposing is a trade, his life for yours.”

“And if I say thanks but no thanks and save the world instead?”

“Then you save all but the one person that matters to you. I can keep this body indefinably since he is already dead and I will if you dare to refuse my most generous offer. Who will you chose, yourself and the faceless others of this realm or the one who touched your cold heart? Chose wrong and I will bring death to everyone you know but it will always be the one I let live that will haunt you. Sooner or later the idea of him, locked away until the end of time in a prison of his own flesh will drive you to escape into death. You will spill your own blood or allow yourself to lose in battle and either way at that moment of surrender I will still win.”

“I’ve never been the type to surrender.” She bluffed desperately, sounding as if she was telling the truth. Not even the slightest flicker of deception showed itself on her face or in her eyes.

Smiling evilly, like the devil collecting his due he let his eyes fade back to blue and spoke in a voice sure to convince her in a way that his own could not. “As you can see, I can assume him utterly. I see the pain in your eyes just as I saw you yield in his arms through his memories. Much like Samantha Finn you will succumb to your lovers pleas and in time you will forget that I am not him. I whispered in her ear, in his voice begging her to come to me and free me from my unnatural tomb. At first she resisted and then I told her that you had locked him away from her to keep him for yourself. I told her every intimate detail of your liaisons and soon enough she hastened to take her place at her husbands side to prove her steadfast devotion. She splashed her blood over the ground above me and before her life slipped away she found peace in a final embrace.” He touched her face the way he knew Spike would have caressed her. A light touch of his palm over her check and a soft stoke of his thumbs across her lips.

When she pulled away with misery flooding her eyes, he knew he had already won but he wanted to seal the deal entirely. “I offer you the same chance now. Until this day becomes the next I will allow you to spend the passing hours with him. But at the dawn, when the worlds of the darkness and the light merge for a single moment I expect you to offer me your life willingly so that we may become one as well. The choice is yours luv…will you fight the inevitable or will you surrender so that he may live another day?”

She had already made her choice before she learned the truth behind Samantha’s death. But hearing Spike’s voice and knowing that it wasn’t him was enough to prove that it was the right one. She would not make him pay for her past and she loved him to much to walk away when she had the power to save him. The day of her death had always been on the distant horizon and by agreeing to this deal she had a chance to make her last day, better than all the ones before. She would have to break Spike’s heart to protect him and that would be harder to bear than taking her own life but they both had to be done. She would die at dawn but she would do everything in her power to ensure that he was free come the sunrise. He would live on and through him, like he had said she would never truly die. “Where do we meet?”





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