Italy was as he remembered it, even as it had been while he was there with Angel searching for Buffy. The streets were filled with tourists late at night, loud music coming from the clubs. Pretty girls with dark tan skin, dark everything. He remembered some Italian. Pieces of it from all the time he had spent there, enough of it to engage in conversation but not enough to carry one all on his own. He stared at the piece of paper in his hand. It seemed like scribbled gibberish, words put together to form something he couldn’t understand. There was an address of a street, a street he wasn’t sure he would find and if he could, he wondered if she would be there, in danger and of course not waiting for a knight and shining armor to swoop in and save her.
He knew that if he did have a heart it would be beating out of his chest at that point. He couldn’t remember being so scared, so frightened. It wasn’t just the fact that she was in danger and he was scared for her. He knew she could handle her own but sometimes she was too proud to ask for help and so the danger would remain in silence. The danger he could always pick up on before anyone else because he knew her. He knew the side of her no one else had had a chance to see. He could feel the suspense of it all building up inside of him. He hadn’t known what to do for months. If he should see her, tell her what had happened and then hope for the best. He had been a coward and had stayed in LA moping around in his dark room afraid of what the future held. It was seeing her at all that frightened him the most.
There was a loud crash on the ground next to him. Glass broke and pieces of it shattered against his leg. He looked up, cranking his head back to stare up at a woman hanging out of a three story building, screaming at the top of her lungs in Italian at the man that stood near him. He screamed back at her, kicking the broken pieces of glass. Spike shook his head shaking the shattered chunks off his pants. “Good job mate” he commented but the man didn’t regard the comment, except with a slight nod and held his panicked angry expression while Spike walked away. He shifted his body around as he moved through the crowded sidewalk, digging into his pocket for his pack of cigarettes. It didn’t take long to light one up and pretend to breathe one in, blowing out circles of smoke that floated up into the sky. He knew his nervousness didn’t show. He walked so slowly; he could barely feel his own movements. From another’s eye he was sure he looked cool, calm and collected. It was a lie.
He stopped again for a moment. His eyes ran over the paper once more, ready to ask someone, anyone who might know what the letters and numbers meant, where the exact address was and how fast he could get there. But he caught a whiff of a scent he knew and his eyes darted behind him. It was a scent he didn’t know well but still a scent of someone he remembered. He managed to shut out all the noises around him and quickly survey the crowd, looking for the owner of the aroma. It took a few moments for his eyes to find the culprit but there she was. Her hair was longer, maybe even darker but her swagger was the same. Her clothes even looked the same, black tank top and jeans. “Faith” he said underneath his breath. She didn’t see him. She was engaged in a conversation with a girl who he assumed was another slayer; a slayer in training maybe. He moved backwards, pressing his body against the brick building behind him. He threw his cigarette to the ground, letting the crowd stomp the smoke out as they passed.
Spike watched her silently, thinking of what to say, or how to approach her without getting punched or even staked. He closed his eyes for a moment contemplating whether or not to approach her at all. He ran the palm of his hand over his face before opening his eyes to a shocking surprise. In the brief time he had closed his eyes, she had caught view of him out of the corner of her eye. “You look like someone” was all she said. Her eyes flickered over him, up and down with a bewildered expression that mixed with worry. He coughed slightly while pressing his hand into a fist. He looked over Faith’s shoulder at the girl she had been talking to. Her expression was sour and her skin was so white he thought for a moment she might herself be a vampire but the thought quickly faded as he turned his attention back to Faith. “It’s me,” he stated in a sullen tone. She stared at him without flinching. “I thought so.” She moved away from him, giving him room to move around.
“What do you mean?” he fumbled again with the pack of cigarettes in his pocket, frightened to look back up at her because tears were forming in his eyes. The past few months and even year passing through his mind like a brutal rampage. Questions began to fill up inside his head never taking a breather. He felt overwhelmed with emotions he had been fighting away for so long. Suddenly everything he had been hiding from was about to hit him not so delicately in the face. He could feel it as much as he could feel anything. He knew there would be more to come, more to feel.
He finally placed the cigarette to his lips and watched Faith as she lit it for him. He mumbled a somewhat silent thanks and rested his eyes on anything but her. She was watching his every move, the hem of his clothing, the way he leaned against the wall and for a moment she wanted to tell him to leave but she wasn’t sure why. She wasn’t sure if it was because she felt a certain protection over Buffy’s emotional well being now or if she knew her relationship with Buffy, whatever it may be might digress completely if she saw Spike was alive and kicking. She contemplated her response, although there was nothing that could change the reality of what was in front of her.
“Andrew told me when I was in London”. She bit her lip and for a moment he was sure he saw a sliver of blood trickle from her lip to the tip of her tongue. He crinkled his eyebrow with a question rising in the air as he blew triangles above Faith’s hair. “She doesn’t know,” she replied, looking into his eyes, through to his beating soul. He nodded his head, looking down at the rocky sidewalk. There didn’t seem to be any more questions to ask. Some people knew and some others didn’t and the one person he felt should care had no idea at all. Maybe it would make what he had to do easier. He wasn’t sure. Spike could feel his soul warming inside of him at the thought of their reunion and yet he felt the desire to throw up. Though he knew he couldn’t. He sighed, pulling out a bit of burnt tobacco from his top lip.
“What are you doing here?” Faith’s question was interrupted by another crash down the street. The same woman screaming out the window at the same angry dishelmed man. Faith and Spike both looked at each other and laughed. “That shit goes on every night with those two” and she laughed some more, settling into a smile. He shook his head. It was as if for a few moments he had forgotten the reason why he was there and why he needed someone’s help. The girl that had been with Faith had disappeared. “Where did she go?” Spike signaled with his cigarette. Faith’s body turned around evenly as her eyes surveyed the street. She shrugged her shoulders. “Girls are always running off around here. Probably got scared of you. Never met a soul-ed one before.” She winked.
“Buffy’s in trouble”. The tone quickly changed and at the exact moment the moon hid behind the clouds causing people to moan at the audacity of it to erase any of their light. Faith ran her coarse hands through her dark hair, tilted her head back and quickly grabbed the cigarette out of Spike’s mouth and took a drag. She didn’t bother handing it back to him. He hadn’t expected her to. His fingers were already pressing against a new one. She moved her body closer and took the butt of his old cigarette, pressed it against his new one as he sucked on the butt, the light flickering. Spike watched her as she contemplated what he had said. Faith smelled like olives and vanilla. The combination didn’t seem strange to him mostly because nothing was strange in his world. She went through a number of reactions in their silence. Her eyebrows creased up several times then fell back. Her eyes barely left the one, roaming, dark cloud in the sky. “She said she’d be okay”, her voice was soft and honest. It was in its purest form and it was then he realized that something had been leading up to this all along. Something no one had bothered to talk about or even contact him about.
Spike moved closer to her, flicking the ashes of his cigarette to the ground below them. Faith closed her eyes, moving her head back down. “The Immortal”. It left her lips like a thousand pieces of crystal falling to the floor. The noise was deadly. Her eyes opened and watched his expression.