He would face her standing at least, not huddled at her feet like someone caught robbing the cookie jar.
“Ever think I didn’t answer because I didn’t want to talk to you, Slayer?” Spike snapped as he lurched upright. He staggered at a fresh onslaught of dizziness, and without thinking, caught at the edge of the tomb to steady himself.
With his burned hand.
The sensation that went thorough him took him somewhere beyond excruciating, and he thought he would literally die from the pain. He pitched forward and would have fallen, except there was an arm suddenly around his waist and he found himself collapsed against Buffy's shoulder.
He hung there a few moments, unable to do anything other than shudder, but eventually the fire in his hand receded slightly, just enough for embarrassment to start creeping in.
Spike had entertained quite a few fantasies that involved similar situations, except then it had been Buffy who was injured while he did the carrying off. They had also featured Buffy saying things like, “Oh, Spike! How could I have been so wrong about you?” Or, “Take me now,” or anything, really, other than, “Stupid vampire,” which was what she was growling in his ear at the moment.
She shifted him off of her body and propped him against the wall. “Stay,” she said firmly.
He locked his knees and braced against the wall of the crypt, trying to regain his equilibrium as he listened to Buffy move around, busying herself with something that rustled. Then, her hand tugged on his uninjured arm to guide him to the edge of the tomb.
“Sit.”
Spike was in no shape to disobey her and sank to the top of the tomb, which was now padded with some sort of fabric.
Buffy pushed at his shoulder. “Down.”
“Sure you don’t want me to fetch a stick? Or maybe play dead? I’m good at that last.”
“Either one would be smarter than what you’re doing right now. And by the way, if you fall over again, I am so not catching you.”
He didn’t think he would fall again, as long as nothing else happened to his hand, but he couldn’t be sure. And lying down did seem like a good idea at the moment, even if it was at Buffy’s suggestion.
Gingerly, Spike lay back and realized that the entire surface of the tomb had been covered by the thick fabric, making it much more comfortable than the bare stone surface would have been.
“What’s all this?” he asked faintly.
“It’s a sleeping bag.” Buffy’s voice was slightly muffled, and Spike opened his eyes and pushed himself up on one elbow to watch her. She was kneeling on the floor, turned away from him as she removed several items from the bundle she had carried. Light from a small, battery-powered lantern abruptly dispelled the darkness of the crypt.
He could see her clearly in the dim light as she turned back to him, her expression a mixture of defiance and embarrassment, and he felt the heat of her blood as it rushed to her face.
“I knew you probably didn’t have a lot of stuff,” Buffy said in voice that was matter-of-fact despite the way she refused to look at him. “And that your hand was in bad shape, so I….” The words died away, and she waved her hand vaguely to complete the statement.
Spike could have said any one of several things, such as ‘your kindness makes the pain bearable,’ or ‘I hope this signifies the beginning of a new friendship between us’. Even a heartfelt ‘thank you’ would have sufficed. And any of those statements would have been true - he was honestly touched at what she had done. However, what came out of his mouth was “You still owe me a television, Slayer. Not some bit of junk either. That was a 19-inch color set you took out in your tantrum.”
Buffy’s eyes suddenly blazed. “I can’t believe I wasted one second worrying about you, Spike,” she hissed. She stalked to the edge of the tomb, clunked the lantern down on the edge, and shoved him back, less gently than before. “Let me see your hand.”
“I’ll be fine,” he said sullenly, wishing she would go away. He didn't like feeling touched, or grateful, or any of the other unfamiliar things he was feeling. “You don’t have to salve your conscience. Not that you shouldn’t want to, going about and thinking I was working with that wanker.”
“My conscience doesn’t need any salving,” she said through her teeth. “I had plenty of reasons to think that you were working with Ethan. I’m only here now because you saved Giles. I want to finish with you, so I can go home and get some sleep, and you can stay out of my way from now on!”
She took his wrist in a firm grip. With bad grace, Spike closed his eyes and let her, afraid to risk further injury by pulling away. He was tense with the anticipation of further pain, but for all her harsh words, she was careful not to jar his hand as she moved it into the spill of light from the lantern.
There was a moment of quiet, and then Buffy said “Jeez, Spike,” in a slightly sick voice.
Buffy had to force back nausea as she examined the extent of Spike’s injury. The skin at the edge of the burn was blackened and peeling. White blisters stood out in sharp contrast to the red, angry flesh. She was amazed he’d made back to the crypt without passing out. Chronic irritant or not, there was no way she could leave him like this.
Buffy sat on the edge of the tomb next to Spike and carefully rested his hand in her lap. The fact that he didn’t make any snide remark was a strong indication of how much pain he was in.
Feeling as if she were offering aspirin to someone who had just been hit by a bus, she began to coat the wound with the antiseptic burn spray she had bought.
Spike went rigid, “Shit!” he snarled, eyes flaring yellow and his other hand bunching into a fist.
“Easy,” Buffy said gently. “This should help in a minute.” She put a slightly teasing note into her voice. “Besides, if you try to fight, I’ll just kick your ass even more than usual.”
“Not…on…your…best…day…Slayer,” Spike managed in return, but he relaxed a little, and his eyes faded back to blue before they closed again.
Buffy thought of trying the aloe vera ointment she had bought, but there wasn't a way to get it into the wound without incapacitating him from the pain again. Unable to think of anything else to do for him, she sat quietly, trying not to look at the mutilated hand in her lap.
Spike stirred restlessly. “Talk or something, would you? Takes my mind off.”
“Not much to talk about. I’ve been hunting Ethan and what I thought was you for the past month,” Buffy shrugged. “That’s it.” Curious, she added, “Where were you, anyway?”
Even through the pain-clenched features, she thought Spike looked uncomfortable. “I was around.”
“Not,” she snorted. “I took this town apart. No rock unturned, no sewer unvisited. My hair may never be the same. I saw every icky thing Sunnydale has to offer. We have a serious roach problem. But I didn’t see you, and that means you weren’t here. You weren’t holed up with Ethan, so where were you?”
Spike was quiet for so long, that Buffy thought he’d fainted again, but he finally said reluctantly, “I was in New Orleans.”
“New Orleans? Jazz and little doughnut things and topless parade women New Orleans?”
“Wrong time of the year for topless parade women, but, yeah, that New Orleans. Lots of vampires there. If you ever kill off all the Sunnydale undead and need to keep busy, you can head South.”
She looked away into the darkness of the crypt. “You left the night you got the chip out?”
“The next day.”
“And you’ve been there all this time?”
“Yeah.”
Buffy fell silent. A question clogged the back of her throat, a question she needed to ask, but she was afraid. The asking of that question, the fact that she had to ask it, would change so many things. And what would his answer be?
“Look at me.”
Reluctantly, she turned her head to meet blue eyes regarding her steadily.
“Say it, Slayer.”
“You already know what I need to say,” she said quietly.
“Yeah, I do, but you need to say it anyway.”
“All right.” Buffy made her voice calm and uninflected. “Have you Hunted since you got the chip out?”
“Twice,” Spike said flatly.
She reached frantically for her power, letting the coolness of the Slayer wrap around the sharp pain in her heart. What had she expected? Spike was a vampire. Even if he left her and her friends alone, he would see nothing wrong with continuing to kill those who meant nothing to him.
“Once,” Spike continued, his eyes yellowing again in response to the presence of the Slayer, “Was the night I was freed. I pulled two blokes off some girl. They’d ripped her shirt open and were tearing her knickers off when I got there. I threw one to Harmony, took the other for myself. The girl ran home to Mum.”
“I heard about that,” Buffy said thinly. “She said two monsters came out of the bushes and ate the men who were attacking her.”
“There you are then. The second time, I was in New Orleans, and a bunch of football types objected to my hairstyle and nail polish. They jumped me in an alley, five to one, with two baseball bats and a switchblade.”
She frowned, troubled. It sounded all right on the surface, but the fundamental nature of the Slayer rebelled at the thought of vampires killing humans, no matter how repulsive the humans in question might be.
Spike’s voice hardened. “I’m going to defend myself, Buffy. I went too long with that sodding chip making me unable to raise a hand to stop a human’s blow. Now, maybe that’s only fair because I didn’t exactly give humans a fair fight for a lot of years. Too bloody bad. I’m not going to be a target anymore. Not even to please you.”
“I don’t want you to stop Hunting to please me,” she said quietly. “I don’t want you to do anything just to please me. I’m not going to stop Slaying either.”
“I know.” Unexpectedly, Spike tugged at a lock of her hair with his good hand. “I can tell you this, though, and it’s not to please you. I won’t attack just to feed. I get along well enough on the butcher’s bilge.”
She looked at him sharply, trying to determine if he were lying. Spike was not known for being trustworthy, but something about the way he met her eyes made her think he might be telling the truth.
After enduring her scrutiny for a few moments, he sighed and said, “I’d cross my heart, but it would hurt like hell.”
Buffy’s mouth twitched. “You’ve done enough with the crosses tonight.” More soberly she asked, “Why the big change? What happened to humans being Happy Meals with legs?”
“Hung out with you lot too long, didn’t I? You’ve corrupted me.”
Spike’s tone was light, but Buffy sensed that he was telling the literal truth. Being around her and the others had changed him. It was sort of flattering, but also scary to think she could have that much influence.
To cover her discomfort, she asked, “If you were living the good life in New Orleans, how’d you end up back here in that famous nick of time?”
It was Spike’s turn to have his eyes skitter away. At last, he muttered something. She thought she understood what he said, but she had to be wrong because what she thought he said didn't make any sense.
"Excuse me?"
Spike sighed. “I said I had a vision.”
“A vision? You?”
“Yes, a vision, me,” he snorted. “What, I can’t have visions? Just because you’re the Slayer, you think you’ve got the market cornered on visions….”
“Ok, Ok,” Buffy interrupted what sounded like the start of a long rant. “Calm down. You’re Vision Guy. A vision of what, exactly?”
“Another Slayer,” Spike said after an even longer pause. “Little bit of a thing named Mattie. Bad hair, big knife.”
Buffy’s jaw dropped. “You saw Mathilda Sawyer? The spirit-killer?”
“Don’t know about all those names. She just said Mattie. But yeah, her. She told me about what was going on here and a bit about the prophecy.”
“So you came back,” Buffy finished softly.
“Yeah. Couldn’t have some wanker going about stealing my rep.”
They were getting back into dangerous territory, Buffy thought. Despite his excuse for returning, Spike’s eyes had done that softening thing again, and she knew that he had come back because of her. And he knew that she knew. And…whatever.
I should stop staring at him and just leave, she thought. Her insides felt like they were turning to mush, and it was making the Slayer part of her very nervous. It was actually making the Buffy part of her nervous too. A helpful, voluntarily-non-human-eating Spike wasn’t something she felt capable of dealing with.
But there was one thing she had to tell him. She owed him that. “I’m glad,” Buffy said through a tight throat, “That it wasn’t you working with Ethan.”
“I’m glad I got here in time,” his voice sounded a little strangled too.
The moment stretched between them like a high-tension wire, then was shattered by Spike frowning in sudden surprise. “I didn’t even notice….That’s good stuff you used on my hand, Slayer. Doesn’t hurt anymore.”
“Oh. Good.” She looked down at his hand, which she’d absently held in her lap the entire time they’d been talking, and found herself looking at pale, unmarked flesh.
Unbelieving, she brushed her fingers lightly over his palm. Spike jumped, then sat up at the lack of pain to stare at his uninjured hand.
Buffy's nervousness made an abrupt transition to panic. She dropped Spike’s hand as if she’d discovered that she was holding a large, poisonous snake, and sprang off the tomb.
“Wow,” she babbled. “That did work pretty well, didn’t it? I’ll have to write the company. Tomorrow. I’ll do it tomorrow, after I leave here. Which I’m doing right now, not tomorrow.”
She turned to flee, but Spike moved with a vampire’s swiftness to catch her arm and spin her back to face him.
“The Slayer shall take the hand of her Adversary,” he whispered, his eyes searching her face. Buffy shivered. “It's true, you know. You feel something for me too, or you couldn’t have done this.”
“I, you, we,” she sputtered, her brain seeming to have lodged firmly in first gear, or possibly in reverse. Automatically, she reached for her center, but the Slayer had apparently given up on the entire situation and gone off to have a drink. Buffy wished she could join her.
Very gently, Spike brushed her hair back with his free hand. Buffy drew in a long, shuddering breath, leaning into the touch without thinking. It was a gesture she used with Dawn, but the feelings this particular touch caused were far from sisterly.
She was moving forward even as his fingers slid around the back of her skull.
His mouth had always looked hard, either tight with anger or curled in a sneer, but his lips were soft against hers. If she had ever thought about it, Buffy would have imagined Spike's embrace would be rough as well, but his hands were gentle, softly caressing her hair and face. She could feel him holding back, controlling his power.
Cautiously, Buffy moved closer and stroked Spike’s shoulders, the kiss deepening as his hands slid down her back to gather her to him. This felt…incredible…but also extremely strange. They’d spent the last three years as mortal enemies. Hell, she’d tried her best to kill him earlier that evening. Now his tongue was in her mouth. And she was enjoying it. Definitely strange.
When he felt her tense, Spike released her and sat back on the tomb his eyes flickering amber and blue. Buffy stood still trying to get her breathing to even out instead of hitching around in her chest.
She also tried rather desperately to think of something to say, but most of her brain was still not cooperating, and the only part that was functioning was making a very lewd suggestion that involved the sleeping bag.
“Goodnight, Spike,” she managed.
He nodded, looking slightly freaked out himself. “Goodnight, Slayer.”
Even having denizens of Hell for clients didn’t make staff meetings any more interesting. However, Lindsey forced himself to pay strict attention to every word spoken. Since this was the end of a quarter, Mr. Jones, one of the Senior Partners, was conducting the meeting, and it wouldn’t do to miss anything. Lilah would like nothing better than to show him up and move to sole head of their division.
He didn’t really care one way or the other. He hadn’t cared about much of anything since Darla left. Before she left, he’d only cared about her. Now, there was nothing.
But thinking about projections and deadlines beat thinking about that nothing, so that was what he did.
“To continue,” said Jones, “We must turn our attention to the Acquisitions department. Recently, there have been rumors regarding the Stone of…aaarrggghhh.”
Jones’ face began to turn purple, and the skin on either side of his throat pressed in, showing the indentations of invisible fingers.
There were gasps and muffled shrieks as almost everyone sent their chairs rolling rapidly back from the table. Lindsey alone remained in his place and reached for the silent alarm button.
“No,” Jones wheezed. “This isn't an outside attack. It’s one of the Board Members.”
Lindsey pulled his hand back slowly. Jones’ face was no more discolored than it had been a second ago. He wasn’t being killed, at least not yet, just held in a very uncomfortable position.
“You have failed.” The icy voice filled the room.
“How, Lord?” Jones gasped.
“The Slayer did not destroy the Adversary. She has taken his hand. An alliance has formed.”
Lindsey’s ears pricked up. Faith was still in jail with limited possibilities to form alliances with anyone. That left only Buffy, the Slayer Angel loved. Involuntarily, he glanced down at his recently replaced artificial hand.
“We'll fix it.” he asked calmly. Every human eye in the room fixed on him, and he felt the weight of another's Attention. "Just tell us what you want us to do."
“Kill the Adversary. Do not fail again.”
“No, Lord,” Jones was flung back into his chair. Even though they never saw him, the departure of the Board Member was palpable. The atmosphere lightened. The sun shown again in the windows.
“Meeting adjourned,” Jones said as calmly as he could. He pointed at Lindsey. “You stay.”
The others departed, with Lilah casting him a dark look. Lindsey smiled back at her. You've got to take your opportunities where you find them, he thought. Next time, do something contstructive instead of screaming like a girl.
When the room was empty, Jones stood, waving Lindsey back into his chair. He went over to a small cabinet and withdrew a bottle of Scotch and two glasses. He poured and passed one to Lindsey.
“That was quite an interesting encounter."
"Yes, Sir." Lindsey waited until Jones drank, then took a sip. The smoky taste was bitter on his tongue.
"Still, you displayed a cool head,” Jones said.
“Thank you, Sir.”
“I’m going to have to handle this…situation…myself." Jones sighed. "I admit, I made a mistake. Some things it doesn’t do to delegate. I’ll be taking a trip downstate. Interested? I could use an extra cool head.” He smiled. “Could mean a promotion. Bring you to favorable attention of the higher-ups.”
It could be argued that the higher-ups’ attention, favorable or otherwise, was something to be avoided. Lindsey had lost his ambition to get ahead in Wolfram and Hart these days, so his interest in the attention was minimal at best. However, there were other things he wanted, and this assignment looked like a possible way to get them.
None of those thoughts were detectable in his voice. “Anything I can do to help, Sir,” he said blandly.
“Good. I have to wind a few things up here. We’ll leave in the morning.”
End Part 11.