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Author's Chapter Notes:
Thank you all for remembering this fic. I hope you enjoy this chapter...
Chapter Fourteen

Bloody buggering hell.

Spike stared, his jaw slack as he soaked in a Slayer on the brink of awareness. He was positive he looked like an awestruck idiot, a wet behind the ears teenager getting hard at the thought of the first girl he’d fallen for. And the way his heart swelled at the words, at the tone she’d used to relay them, he felt like it was the very first time. Something solid settled over him, his cock thick and warm inside her body, and he recognised the truth of what he had in this to the infatuation that was his past with Cecily and Drusilla. The difference was so startling that he couldn’t get over it—how more sincere it made him feel, and how much his body tingled.

The vampire slayer was falling for a previously deluded wanker with visions of his own importance.

It made Spike shudder to think what possibilities she saw in him now to believe in him enough to feel things for him. Heavy things. Things with great emotional impact, and hopefully lasting effects. It was no matter, though. It may have been a night that shifted reality, but it was a night that he’d found and made love, and he wasn’t letting anything spoil it. He couldn’t lose it now, so with a whispered plea, Buffy stirred and helped him move back to the basement.

She stayed with him for a while, waiting till he slept with a smile on his face before sneaking away. His subconscious followed her to her bedroom, and he rested knowing she was safe from harm. She didn’t need him to protect her within her own home—now that Angelus was banished from her soul.

The house was silent as the hours ticked away and darkness faded from the sky. A rattle of keys at the door heralded a new arrival, but the visitors persisted in slumber. Joyce Summers let herself into her home just as the morning sun broke out and chased down her shadow. She firmly clicked the door shut, exhaustion making her body lax and her eyelids droop. Dropping her overnight bag, she kicked off her shoes and wandered into her house, stopping short at the sleepover that was apparently taking place in her living room—and, why was the school librarian curled up and snoring alongside a bunch of kids?

The rumbling from the only other adult’s throat was irritating, but it was comforting in its service of breaking the silence. There was always something a little daunting in returning to an empty house. The sunny morning outside was making her tired, so before she slept Joyce decided to take her suitcase straight to the machine downstairs and then crawl up the stairs to bed. Buffy won’t mind, she thought with a smile. Besides, her clothes definitely needed a going over. Some stains were going to require real elbow grease to shift them.

As much as she felt drawn toward the sleepover guests, Joyce felt the very strong pull of sleep. She’d never felt so tired before and was far from the top of her game to entertain so many people at once. With a secret smile on her lips, Joyce walked by the bodies and crept through the kitchen.

Preoccupied with the thought of her much anticipated homecoming with her daughter, Joyce didn’t concentrate on the stairs going down into the basement until she stumbled on the very last one, scrabbling for the hand rail. Looking up in relief, she released a shocked gasp as an extremely pale face topped with white hair loomed right in front of her face.

“Oh God, don’t kill me,” she pleaded, taking a desperate step back away from the imposing figure dressed head to toe in black.

Spike tilted his head, a sad smile on his lips. “Bit late for that aren’t I, Joyce?”

She’d been told it would be impossible to trick them all. Still, she’d had so much fun thinking of possible ways it could be done, and then returning to the house exactly the way she’d left it. She’d wondered how long it would take Buffy to figure it out, and then contemplated exactly which expression Buffy would finally adopt. But of course, Spike had to be seen to first, and now through a woman’s eyes, she could really see the potential in seeing to this vamp.

A feral snarl tore from her throat as she launched herself off the bottom step, hands finding and gripping Spike around the throat and staring hatefully into matching yellow eyes. “Is that any way to say hello to your sister?” she asked around gleaming fangs and snapped at the bare skin of his throat. “I must have smacked the manners right out of that head of yours on Parent Teacher night.”

The kick that sent him flying to the opposite wall wasn’t lucky so much as Spike had no idea of how to handle his girl’s newly demonic mum. The shovel that was suddenly in her hands made him consider using a bit more force behind his attack, however, and he made a move to tackle her at the ankles. Her stockinged feet lost a lot of impact as she tried to kick him in the throat, Spike rolling just as her big toe made contact with his Adam’s apple. He coughed compulsively before quickly springing to his feet, circling now but never taking his eyes off the spade. He didn’t think Buffy would appreciate him slapping her mum around—newly vamped or not—but neither did he think she’d want to take him out with a suspiciously spade-flattened face.

“What’s this all about, Joyce?” He knew she would have been sent by Angelus to exact his small-minded revenge. It just threw him for a loop that the vengeance had already been enacted.

“You know what it’s about. You’re a brute, seducing my daughter like that.” Only she grinned, betraying the implied concern around a malicious snarl and nudging at memories long buried and yet with the power to topple his commonsense. “I bet she was tasty, too. Was she tasty, Spike? Was my not-so-pure little Buffy worth all the pain you’re going to feel?”

He saw red—mother or no mother—and pinned her with a back-breaking crunch to the stairs. “You do NOT talk about Buffy that way.” His word was final, absolute and his expression deadly—yet she laughed in his face and with more power than expected from a newbie fledge, she bucked him off and sent him careening back into the far wall.

Spike staggered to his feet to watch Buffy’s mother dust off her hands as she stood contemplating him, her demon-side blatant in the perusal.

“I can see what she sees in you, and I have to admit, she’s showing far more taste than I ever anticipated. I can just imagine what it must feel like to have that long thick cock sliding into—”

“Oi! Watch your mouth, you filthy hag. She’s too good for the likes of you.” Spike blinked at the tinkling laughter, feeling the older woman’s amusement striking a chord of familiarity that made him want to cringe.

“Oh, that is too cute. Angelus warned me you were a sap. Pity I can’t let you leave this basement. Can’t have you warning the others now, can I?” The mature-looking vampire nearly sparkled in her excitement, taking to evil like a duck to water.

“I see the old man turned you and trained you to feel too confident. Master vamp here, luv. You haven’t got a chance of winning against me. ‘Specially not now Buffy’s welfare is in my hands.”

Her cold cynical laugh stopped him dead in his tracks and for the first time he doubted his own prowess. Remembered that even master’s have to crawl their way back from being crippled and it was only last night he felt good on his legs again. He watched in realised horror when her eyes went glassy and she began to sway. He barely had two seconds to think ‘oh, fuck’ before he was sucked into his sire’s favourite game and he knew he was screwed.

His body was frozen and his mind slipped into a vision of his once favourite things—depravities that should have made his blood curdle and rebel in his veins. But he was helpless against the control, knowing full well how strong Dru’s penchant for the dramatic was with her little parlour tricks.

“Ahhh, now it’s sinking in. You missed the vital clue…brother!” And she bestowed a kiss by his ear as she took out a stake from her slacks and raised it in a clear path for his heart. “Anything you want me to tell Buffy before I rip my darling girl’s throat out?”

He was gone, seeing stars and pixies and blood from floor to ceiling, but his senses didn’t lie. There was still hope.

“Why don’t you tell me why Spike would tell you anything?” And Buffy’s hand shot out and gripped her mother’s wrist, squeezing hard until a bone snapped and the stake slipped to the floor. “And Mom, it’s so not nice to threaten my boyfriend—not when he could become your son-in-law and you’ll be stuck with him for eternity. Oh, already there. Guess you didn’t think of that one, huh?”

Buffy tipped her head to the side, looked at the unrepentant expression on her mother’s face and slammed her elbow in her face. Spike cringed as he broke from the thrall and shunted the offensive spade and stake across the floor before lunging for Joyce’s arms and held them burning behind her back. In what appeared to be a blur, Buffy won the round and hauled the woman who gave her life to the cot Spike had been sleeping on and roughly shackled her arms to the wall, ignoring each scream as her mother spat and insulted her the entire way.

One huge step back and Buffy slumped against a suddenly present Spike, allowing his strength to hold her on her feet while she looked upon the demonised remains of her mom.

“I cannot tell you how sorry I am,” she whispered, the emotion breaking free now that no one else in the house was in danger.

“Oh don’t be sorry, sweetie. This is the greatest feeling in the world. No cares, no responsibilities. And the food! Oh god, such ambrosia. Why, my employees themselves tasted like fine wine. I believe I’m completely drunk from them alone. And really, Angelus is a superiorly attractive demon when he’s bathing in the blood of the innocent.”

Buffy fell back, barely holding onto her stomach contents as she envisioned her mother’s completely clueless workmates and studied the vile expression on her face as she related the horrific tale of their casual slaughter.

“Though that’s a singularly misleading argument now, isn’t it? Humans as innocents? I’m astounded how that one is used to differentiate between good and evil,” Joyce mocked.

Buffy stood tall, emotions locked down and hidden for a time in the future when she had the luxury of giving in. Right now, Sunnydale needed her, and the adversary just lost the familiarity of connection as the Slayer surged to the fore. An entity that her mother had no knowledge of about her.

“We need to get on that plan for the soul thingy. Let’s go tell Giles.” She turned her back on a snarling monster—her mother long gone—and together they sought out an answer.

One that would ease the devastation of a heart too young to survive it.





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