Never Alone by Lilachigh
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Chapter 20 A Time for Tears
Buffy and Spike sat in silence, the dark wrapping around them like a warm cloak. He couldn’t speak - him who usually found it hard to shut up, couldn’t find the words he needed to - what? - apologise? Vampires didn’t say sorry.
At last Buffy sighed, but it wasn’t a sad sound. To Spike’s astonishment it sounded more like a groan of utter contentment.
“It’s weird, isn’t it,” she said at last. “You, me, a dark tunnel, fighting monsters. It all seems so nice and ordinary. What to another girl would be the most terrifying and dreadful day of her life, makes me feel happy.”
“Why’s that, pet?” he managed to say, his head still cradled on his folded arms across his knees.
He felt her shrug in the dark. “Oh, because it‘s you and me and the normal way of our life together, I suppose. I thought I’d lost all that. I’ve been going through the motions of being a happy little Slayer, but it hasn’t been real. When I thought you were - gone - it all became mundane, irrelevant.”
Spike felt his lips twitch unwillingly. “Big word, Slayer.”
Buffy punched him lightly on the shoulder with a blow that would have sent a normal guy sprawling. “I know words! Lots and lots of words! Anyway, how can you know how I usually speak? You don’t remember - ” She stopped abruptly. “Do you remember, Spike?’ she whispered, her voice an agonised gasp in the dark.
“Not everything,” he admitted. “In fact, very little. Just flashes - people, places, things. Can you tell me why I should remember a model from the top of a wedding cake, for god’s sake? And wrapping a stuffed pig in brown paper?”
Buffy smiled. “That was Mr Gordo. You sent him to me, via the demon network, when you thought you were going to die when we fought the First here in Sunnydale. It was getting that parcel that made me realise the link between us had never been broken and that you were alive somewhere. What else do you recall?”
Spike shook his head wearily. She sounded so bloody happy, so enthusiastic. All he wanted to do was sleep for a million years. “Told you, pet, hardly anything. Every time I try, I get this blinding pain in my head, as if something’s trying to stop me remembering.”
Buffy reached out instinctively, her fingers finding the curve of his slender neck where the curls grew tighter. She ran her hand down it and felt him shudder.
“Then don’t try, Spike. You’ve no need to remember for my sake. This is our life now, from today. Yesterday has gone. What use is it to us?”
Spike lifted his head and gazed round at her. His night vision was far better than hers and even in the darkness he could pick out the tender curve of her lips. She was smiling.
“I don’t think we can just forget it, Slayer. It made us what we are. And that’s the whole point. I need to remember because I don’t know what I am any more!”’
Buffy shifted on the hard rocky floor. She wished she could crawl into his lap and let him cradle her against his chest. But he’d made no move towards her since the fight with the octipider. She frowned. He was beginning to worry her.
“I need to....need to say sorry about earlier. I should never have done what I did to you. I treated you as if you were - ” he stopped, words failing him, or at least, words he could use in front of her.
“You treated me exactly the way I wanted,” Buffy said, her patience beginning to crack. “Is this what all this is about, Spike. You’re having a guilt trip because we made love when you didn’t know who I was?“
“We didn’t make love, Slayer, that‘s the whole point,”’ he said, jumping to his feet in one smooth, lithe movement. “We fucked. I fucked you. Hard. I made you scream. But there was no affection on my side. It was just sex. Now - now I can remember loving you and doing that makes me feel sick.”
Buffy got up too and leant against the passage wall. She needed the cold hard stones behind her for support. She’d seen Spike in many different moods over the years, but remorse was not one she’d come across before.
“Well, you certainly still know how to make a girl feel good about herself,” she snapped. “I’m sorry that making love to me makes you feel sick, Spike.”
“That‘s not what I meant. Having sex with someone who - who has some affection for you when you don’t know them at all. That isn’t right. What’s worse is that I know it shouldn’t worry me, but it does. And that isn’t right, either!”
“God, Spike, get a grip! I wanted you - badly. I knew damn well you didn’t remember me and that we should have waited until you did, but sorry, I love you, you idiot. I thought you were dead for months! All I wanted was to feel you inside me again. If that‘s so very wrong, then blame me, but do stop hitting yourself over the head about it. It makes you sound like Angel!”
She bit her lip as she threw the insult at him. It was the very worst thing she could think of to say, but she had to try something to get inside that stupid blond head of his and sort him out.
But there was no response, just, “Who’s Angel? You’ve mentioned him before.”
Buffy sighed. She really didn’t want to go down this road. “Angel was your grandsire. He turned Drusilla, who turned you. The two of you go back a long, long way. You don’t like him, but you were fighting on his side in Los Angeles when you vanished.”
“Is he dead? Is this Drusilla dead?”
Buffy dug her nails hard against the implacable stones. “No, he isn’t,” she said tersely. “Now can we please stop talking about Angel, and talk about us?”
Spike spun round to face her. “But he’s a big part of my past, isn’t he? I need to know, Slayer. I have to find out who I am. Why I am.”
“You‘re the man I love. The man who once loved me more than life itself,” she whispered, feeling the hot tears beginning to gather in her eyes.
“Then why can’t I remember?” he roared, his fist hitting the wall beside her head. “If I really loved you, how could I have treated you like I did? That wasn’t loving, Buffy. That was just fucking!”
Buffy felt her temper rising. She’d forgotten in all the anguish of loosing him just how irritating he could be when he chose. How he could effortlessly make her want to smack him. It gave her a jolt. Was this what happened when someone you loved went out of your life? You only remembered the good things and not the bad?
“Spike,” she tried to keep her voice calm and steady, but failed. “You’re getting things out of proportion. Look, come upstairs and have a shower. You’re still covered in that icky thing’s blood. Get a wash and we’ll go find a bar and have a drink. I don’t suppose you remember the Bronze where we used to drink. There must be somewhere half decent been built in the New Sunnydale. Clem will know.”
The Bronze. Spike shut his eyes and tried to think. And for a second or two he was there. He was stalking his prey, coat flapping at his heels, moving through the crowd, scenting her, then seeing her through the cigarette smoke and the flashing disco lights - dancing, arms raised, blonde hair escaping to surround a small, pretty face. Her body tight and hot and calling to him.
Then as swiftly as it had come, the memory was sucked away by a great wave of pain and he winced and clutched at his forehead.
“It’s no good, Slayer. I have to find out why I can’t remember,” he said at last when he could make his voice work once more. “You said I was fighting in Los Angeles. Well, that’s where I’ll have to go then.”
Buffy felt her blood ice over and the hairs on the back of her neck stood up. “Spike, that’s ridiculous. All you’re going to find in Los Angeles is a load of pain and misery.
And what about the Hellmouth here? It’s opening again. These Shades and monsters prove that. I’ve got to find a way of shutting it again. I need your help, Spike. I...I don’t think I can do it on my own.”
Spike winced at the uncertainty in her voice but he knew without even trying that she was wrong. If anyone could cope with the Hellmouth it was this woman. She certainly didn‘t need his help.
“I’ll be back,” he said quietly. “Once I find out what happened to me, why I’ve become the person I am.”
“Oh great,” Buffy said sarcastically, not believing he was going to walk out on her. “I’ll just tell the Shades and various other assorted monsters to sit and wait for you then, shall I?”
“You don’t have to start closing the Hellmouth straight away, do you?” Spike said, beginning to get annoyed at her attitude. Bloody hell, perhaps this was why he didn’t fully remember her. She could be a right royal pain when she chose.
Buffy stared in the direction of his voice, wishing he could see the expression on her face. She reckoned it would tell him more than a thousand words.
“Listen, Spike. The Hellmouth is my job. Always has been and by the looks of it, always will be. There is no way I can just walk away and leave it to flourish.”
“I need to go to L.A.” Spike said stubbornly.
“Then go!” Buffy turned on her heel. “I’ve really had it with all the soul searching and introspection. Go to L.A., find Angel, discover what happened to you. Perhaps you’ll come back, perhaps you won’t. To be honest, I don’t care any more. I’ve got a job to do and I’m going to do it.”
She didn’t wait for his reply, but walked rapidly away, back down the passage towards the shopping mall. She was trying hard not to cry. Now wasn’t the time. There would be time for tears later.
So he was leaving her. Nothing new there then! she thought bitterly. It was what every man in her life did at some time. And at the end of the day, the truth was simple. She wasn’t enough for him. She wasn’t good enough for William the Bloody.
That was a cracking joke. One day soon she’d sit down and have a really good laugh about it. Yes, discovering where he came from, who he was, what he’d become, was obviously far more important than loving her.
She pushed aside the little voice in her mind that asked her why she couldn’t have gone with him to L.A. Why she was so scared of him discovering the truth behind his injuries. Because if she was honest, she was terrified. Once he knew who he truly was, then perhaps he wouldn’t want her after all.
Buffy reached Spike’s room and sank down on the bed to catch her breath. She curled up and buried her face in the pillow - just for a moment. She could smell a lingering trace of the vampire on the incongruous pillow slip. A child’s pattern of yellow teddy bears and green kittens - obviously all Elsa, Clem’s wife, had spare.
The tears came at last, slow and hot, trickling down the side of her face to pool on the pillow. She was too tired to sob. She just lay there and let the pain of rejection flood out of her.
At last she sat up and swung her feet onto the floor, pushing her emotions away, putting another layer of bricks ontop of the wall she was busy building in her head to keep Spike and everyone else at bay.
When would she ever learn? she wondered wearily. You gave your heart to someone and they walked all over it. Well, it wasn’t going to happen to her again.
The octipider’s body had gone. Clem and Elsa had tidied it away. But Elsa‘s axe was still lying on the floor. Buffy picked it up and tucked it into her waistband.
“I don’t need anyone!” she told herself fiercely. “I’m the Slayer and this is my job. I don’t need Spike! I’ll never need Spike again!”
to be continued
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Author's Chapter Notes:
The more you write about them, the more complex they become. And one characteristic that comes through all the time is how stubborn they are. Both of them! This episode did not go the way I had intended. They changed it. Damn them. Now I’ve go to replot the whole story!