The Road to Byzantium 2/2
Jan. 29th, 2009 10:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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gen_storytellerSpike polished the last drop of blood off the knife and stared at her over the top of the blade, chest heaving, golden eyes burning in the darkness. He licked his lips.
In theory, Dawn was staying with the Rosenbergs until Giles could get hold of her dad. In practice, for the last two weeks she'd she crept out of Willow's bedroom and snuck over to Spike's crypt, where she stayed up till three A.M., eating Cheetos and watching Theatre of Blood on Channel 21. Last week there'd been one where the heroes fed a skeletonized vampire some blood. And OK, Dawn couldn't talk because she'd accidentally invited Harmony into her house once, but new levels of stupid, right there. Much to Spike's scorn, the vampire had swelled up like Ballpark franks, back to normal in an instant, and promptly proceeded to wreak mayhem.
In the real world, Dawn knew, it didn't work like that. Vampires gained and lost weight about the same way people did, and for pretty much the same reasons. Putting some meat back on Spike's bones would take a few weeks of feeding right and working out.
So she didn't expect miracles. She didn't expect anything, really. It was just a mouthful of blood. Which was why the way Spike was staring at her was so freaky. Beneath the jutting ridges of his demon brow his eyes were aflame with unnatural elation, blazing like miniature suns. He stretched out a hand and flexed his fingers, marveling at the smooth white skin where angry burns had been only minutes ago.
"Spike, are you OK?"
Spike gave a loopy giggle. "Fine! Better 'n fine! I'm bloody brilliant! What are we waiting for, then? Time's wasting!" He leaped to his feet, practically vibrating with energy, and swaggered out of the thicket. His pale hair glowed in the moonlight; he might as well have had a neon bullseye on his chest.
Dawn had a sudden flash of memory: Angel, freaky-strong after he'd drunk Buffy's blood, lurching down the hospital corridor like he could barely control his super-charged body. But this was different, and Angel had practically drained Buffy dry - Spike had barely had a taste. "What's wrong with him?"
"Apparently Key blood is vampire crack." Anya got to her feet and brushed the dead leaves off her skirt. "I think we should start working on Plan B."
"Daaaaaaagobert! Ally ally oxen free!" Spike yelled, cupping both hands to his mouth. "Oi! Tin Man! Send General Pinhead up here toot sweet, you nickel-plated oaf! I want a heart-to-heart!"
"It's the demon!" Dagobert bellowed. "Byzantium, to me!"
Crap. Spike did sound high. Or drunk. More drunk than he sounded when he actually was drunk. Dawn could hear shouts and the sounds of running feet splashing through the creek as the rest of the troop rallied to Dagobert's call. Shouts of, "Remember, he can't strike you without pain!" and "Crossbows at the ready!" echoed back and forth across the canyon. The metallic snik of crossbows cocking filled the air.
"Fire!"
Spike vanished, moving too fast for the human eye to follow. He reappeared in midst of Dagobert's men. Pale, spidery hands shot out, wrenching the weapons from the hands of the two closest knights before their fingers could tighten on the triggers. Both crossbows spun off into the darkness, to land in the creek with a splash and a clatter, and both men yelped in pain and surprise. Dawn saw Spike stagger and drop to his knees as the chip fired, then pop to his feet again with a manic grin. Three more knights spun and fired wildly as he blurred out of sight again.
Two bolts went wide, while the third caught one of the disarmed knights in the thigh. The wounded man crumpled with a curse and Spike dropped out of bullet time just as Dagobert swung his shotgun around and emptied both barrels point-blank into the vampire's middle. Spike jerked with the impact and toppled backwards, the black leather wings of his duster unfurling around the pale, infernal halo of his hair. He sprawled motionless on the stones, his skinny, jeans-clad legs splayed wide.
Heart pounding wildly, Dawn leaped out of the bushes. "Dawn! No!" Anya hissed, but Dawn was off and running. A healthy vampire could laugh off a bullet, or even a lot of bullets, from most handguns, but high-caliber shotguns could do real damage. And Spike wasn't exactly a healthy vampire right now.
Stones rolled and shifted under her flying feet - what, was every rock and root in the canyon conspiring against her? General Aethelred was storming up the slope from the creek, flanked by a dozen archers and as many knights brandishing swords and spears. Torches bobbed overhead, painting the oncoming horde a lurid red. Trust Spike to be the first vampire in a century to actually be hunted down by a torch-waving mob. Dawn stumbled, skidded, found her balance, stumbled again. A wave of dizziness washed over her. She must have lost more blood than she'd thought, which was weird, because she could feel it circling inside, throb, throb, throb, a cord of fire knotted in her middle. Huh. Well, live and learn. Or go into shock and die.
The world did a slow, lazy revolution and she saw the ground rushing up to meet her. That's really going to hurt.
"Whoops-a-daisy!" Strong hands caught her and swept her effortlessly upright. Spike's arm hooked around her waist, and Dawn sagged gratefully against his side. He held up a leather pouch stamped with the insignia of Byzantium and shook it, sending a brass rain of shotgun shells to the ground. "William the Bloody one, Byzantium nought!" he caroled.
"Spike," Dawn croaked, "what's the plan?" He was still wearing that lunatic grin, and his pupils were enormous black wells in his amber eyes - well, they would be in the dark, wouldn't they? His body radiated an un-vampire-like warmth. "There is a plan, right?"
"'Course I've got a plan." Spike sounded offended. "Got lots of plans. Oodles of plans! Plenty of plans, all of them cracking good plans, too! What demon girl said, yeh? Shush, it's General Wossface, with enough arrows in his quiver to re-enact the martyrdom of St. Sebastian. Oooh, not sporting, not sporting at all!"
Aethelred halted at a safe distance and folded his arms across his chest. "Vampire! This charade is pointless. You cannot hurt us, and you would no more harm the Key than her sister would. Until Brother Selwin can examine her, I'm loath to chance the girl's death - but I will kill both of you rather than let her escape." He waved at the bristling arc of bowmen. "Turn the Key over to me, and we will allow you and the demon woman to leave."
"Aren't we ever so manly? P'raps you've noticed..." Spike tugged the front of his t-shirt up. The cloth was a shredded mess, and the pale, concave belly underneath it was peppered with the tiny black dots of buckshot wounds, but there was no blood. "You can't hurt me, either. Seems our Dawn's blood puts Lydia Pinkham to shame. Could be it'll work on headaches, too. Want to find out?"
Dagobert's jaw clenched, causing his mustache to bristle like a belligerent hedgehog. He took a step forward, and the General laid a restraining hand on his arm. Dawn could see him working out the odds. Unless they hit Spike's heart dead on, the bolts wouldn't stop him any more than the shotgun had. She knew that Spike couldn't keep up the super-speed indefinitely, and the pain from the chip would get worse the more damage Spike tried to inflict, but the knights' briefing might not have been that thorough.
"Thought not," Spike purred. "Now. Let's us have a chat. You'd kill her, yeh, you've stones enough for that. But it'll eat at you. Every night, for the rest of your days, you'll wake, and you'll see her eyes staring back at you out of the dark." His hand cupped her cheek, dry and strangely warm. Dawn thought it trembled a little. "So bloody beautiful..." He blinked and shook himself, lapsing in and out of game face like he couldn't remember which was which. "Wages of being a good man. 'Course," his grin grew sharper, more predatory. "I'm makin' the assumption that you are a good man."
Aethelred said nothing. Dawn hoped that was a good sign. Spike couldn't lie to Buffy to save his life, but put him in a situation like this and he turned into Gielgud. Or at least Matt Damon.
"Things have changed since you and your band of merry men last took the Sunnydale tour." Spike held Dawn's bleeding wrist up for all to see and ran his tongue along the length of her forearm, starting slick and human-soft, ending demon-rough. "Delicious," he drawled, stretching the word out like warm taffy. "You say I won't kill her, and you're right. But you've got the whys of it all wrong. Slayer's rotting in the ground - what's a promise to her, now? You want the Key neutralized. And for me it's all about the blood. Seems to me we can both get what we want, without you losing sleep of nights."
"And how do you propose to... neutralize her?" Aethelred demanded, in a voice as stiff as his spine.
Spike's chuckle was possibly the filthiest thing Dawn had ever heard. "Already done, Prince Valiant. Key's supposed to be pure, yeh?" His hand slipped upwards from her waist. "An' she's anything but, now that I'm in the picture."
"Spike!" Dawn hissed. "You're touching my boob!"
"Blimey, Sherlock, I hadn't noticed!" Spike hissed back. "Try an' look debauched here!"
Dawn dropped her voice to a Penthouse moan. "Oh, Spike!" She tossed her head back in her best impersonation of a romance-novel cover painting. Why should Spike have all the good lines? "My purity is totally sullied! Bite me harder! You make it hurt soooooo good!"
The millisecond of absolute horror that flashed across Spike's face was pretty much worth the admission for the whole night. He recovered fast, though. "There, you've heard it from her lips. Impure as I am. Her power's no use to anyone any longer. 'Cept me."
"So you would suggest, then," Dagobert said with an icy sneer, "That as good men, we hand over a girl scarcely more than a child to a creature as loathsome as you, to be used for your pleasure?"
Spike snorted. "There's consistency for you. You're willing to have murder on your conscience, but you balk at a spot of pandering?"
"Maynard! Aelfric!" the General snapped.
A pair of dark-robed clerics pushed through the line of bowmen and hastened to their leader's side. Maynard folded his hands into his sleeves and bowed deeply. "Your will, my lord?"
"The vampire claims," the General said tersely, "To have made the girl his... doxy." His lip curled with distaste.
"Doxy's such a nasty word," Spike murmured. "I prefer 'box lunch.'"
"Be that as it may," Aethelred said. "The undead are vile creatures. What chance is there his... association with the girl has corrupted her essence?"
The clerics frowned, putting their heads together - Spike could probably hear every word, but to Dawn it was only indecipherable mumbling. Her head was pounding, and the torches were surrounded by pulsing haloes of light. What was wrong with her?
"We have not the means to be certain, my lord," Maynard said at last. "But there is one infallible test we can put her to."
"What, are you going to see if I weigh the same as a duck?" Dawn muttered.
Maynard shot her a dirty look. "Fetch Orlando here. Where the Key is concerned, a madman may speak a truth the rest of us have too much wit to see."
The General looked from Dawn to Spike and back again, lips pressed to military precision, eyes inscrutable. Dawn clutched Spike's ruined t-shirt, her palms damp with nerves. Maybe she'd overdone it on the artistic touches. Aethelred stroked his goatee, "Very well," he said at last. "Bring us Orlando."
Spike stiffened. "Oi, now, half a mo' - "
"That's a great idea," Dawn interrupted, wedging an elbow into Spike's ribs. "Besides, it's not like we have any choice, is it, Spike?"
He glared at her, and Dawn tried to drill her intent into his brain by return glare - if Spike hadn't possessed a skull of solid ivory, maybe it would have worked better, but the long moment they spent making faces at one another confused the knights enough that no one tried to hurry things up. At last Spike shook himself and snapped, "Fine, then! Bring him on. Bring 'em all on. On Comet and Cupid, Orlando an' Vixen!"
Aethelred nodded. Maynard and Aelfric bowed to the General in unison, and trotted off towards camp. The sound of rocks clacking beneath their boots was quickly lost beneath the susurrus of the river and the moan of the wind in the canyon overhead. Dawn clung to Spike's arm, as much because she was afraid she'd fall down if she didn't as to put on a show, and watched the flame of their torches dwindle to bobbing pinpoints of light over the dark water. For a second the trailing torch bobbled and almost went out as one of the brothers slipped on the treacherous footing. Dawn turned away, Blair-Witch queasy. She could feel Spike jittering and twitching in her grasp, muttering under his breath - if she hadn't been holding on to him he'd be doing his caged-panther pacing thing, up and down, back and forth on the rocks.
It took a small forever for the clerics to return, frog-marching a wild-eyed Orlando between them. "Orlando!" Dawn cried, before anyone else could say anything. "Tell them - I'm not pure anymore, am I? I'm spoiled! I'm no good as the Key!"
The mad knight cringed in his captors' grip, head whipping from Dawn to Spike and back again. "Green girl," he whispered, eyes scrunching closed. Dawn thought she saw tears in the bloody light of the torches. His eyes flew open, wide as the moon overhead. "Green girl gone greener grass is always gone to seed, to sea, to see, bleeding away, going, going, gone." He trailed off with a broken sob, fixing his burning gaze on Spike. "You see, now. You know!"
Spike blinked owlishly. "Couldn't ask for a plainer word than that," he said. "Right! We'll be off, then."
"Silence, demon." Aethelred turned to the monks. "Brothers...?"
Aelfric shrugged and shook his head, his face shadowed beneath the muffling folds of his hooded cassock. He was holding his torch awkwardly, as if he'd hurt his arm in his earlier stumble.
Maynard gave his colleague an irritated look. "Our brother's words are obscure, but - "
"Traitors!" Orlando shrieked. Both clerics jumped back with a start, Aelfric ducking behind the General for protection. "Kinslayers! Fools! Does the Queen of Air and Darkness grieve? Does she sob like a child in the night?"
"Hey!" Dawn protested. "I don't - " Much, anyway.
"All that's green bleeding, bleeding away, when the demon drinks deep, but slit the lamb's throat and her blood will run red enow!" Orlando ranted. He pointed accusingly at Spike. "Here's a fountain of it, aye - will you rush to bathe in ruination, drink deep of corruption? Every hand here, a study in scarlet!"
"Oh, there will be ruination, all right," Spike crooned, bouncing on his toes, fingers flexing at his sides. His teeth were sharp and his eyes fever-bright in the torchlight. "If you come at her through me. Count up your quick, General, 'cos when William the Bloody's done, there'll be songs counting up your dead."
Whether Spike could back up his threats or not was an open question, but Aethelred, at least, seemed to be considering it. "Aelfric, to your station," the General snapped, waving the cowering monk away. "Rest assured I shall speak to your superiors of this shameful behavior later." Chastened, Aelfric ducked his head and slunk off back in the direction of the camp. Aethelred rubbed his forehead tattoo as if it pained him. "Orlando - speak as plainly as you can, for the love of the oaths we both swore. Is the girl yet the Key, or not?"
Orlando stood shivering, arms wrapped tightly around himself. Holding the madness in - or out. "Oaths," he spat, and then, with a meaning look at Dawn, "What's a Key when no lock will fit her? The lady's not for burning." He gave an exaggerated nod, laying one finger aside of his nose.
Aethelred cocked an eyebrow at Maynard, whose cheeks quivered in distress. The cleric gave a nervous little half-bow. "My liege... addled though his wits may be, I see little room for doubt here. The girl is no longer the Key. Or," he corrected himself, "Orlando no longer believes her to be."
A rustle ran through the assembled knights, the creak of leather, the jungle of mail, the hiss of one murmuring to the other. Aethelred heaved a great sigh and leveled an assessing look at Spike. "You are right in one respect, demon. I would fain leave this field with my hands clean of innocent blood. And yet I mislike leaving the child with you scarcely less."
"I've been on the run from your stupid knights for a year," Dawn said, low and furious. "My mother is dead, my sister is dead, and my dad apparently doesn't give a shit. My best friend is a vampire, and I saw what Glory did to your brothers. Every bit of it." She drew herself up, straight as the spinning world allowed. "I'm not a child."
The General's shoulders sagged. "No," he said. "I suppose you are not, at that." He tugged at his beard for a moment, then added, grudgingly, "You and the woman are welcome to share our fire for the night. The demon must remain here."
Spike growled, and Dawn shook her head. "Thanks, but no thanks. We'll just be going. Spike can see in the dark."
"Very well, then." Wearily, he rounded upon the assembled knights, and waved. "Return to camp. We leave for the chapterhouse at dawn."
Dawn caught Orlando's eye. Thank you, she mouthed, and he reached out one longing hand, his fingers closing on darkness as Maynard hustled him away. Her knees buckled, and Spike swept her up in his arms, very Rhett Butler, except she was pretty sure Scartlett O'Hara wouldn't have felt like barfing all over Rhett's waistcoat. ""Hell of a chance you took there, Niblet," he muttered. "Hell of a hell of a hell of a chance."
"Not as big as you think," she slurred. "Like I said. I saw what Glory did. And she didn't use a knife. And if Glory didn't give Orlando that scar..." She gave a loose shrug, encompassing the length and breadth of human perfidy. "Somebody knight-shaped pretty much had to. It wasn't there when I saw him in the hospital." Dawn clutched the lapels of Spike's duster - the tobacco smell, usually weirdly reassuring, was only making her queasier. "Where's Anya?"
Spike's nostrils flared, and he swung around with speed enough to drastically increase the barf forecast. "Going, going, gone - not in the brush anymore. Anya!"
"You don't have to shout," Anya's voice came from the direction of the river. A few seconds later Dawn heard her footsteps on the rocky beach, and there she was, stepping fastidiously from boulder to boulder in the chancy moonlight. A long black robe flapped around her slender body, hood thrown back and sleeves pushed up to her elbows. She stopped, panting a little, and shrugged out of its enveloping folds. "I don't expect we'll be needing that any longer," she said, "and I'm sure Aelfric doesn't want to ride home in his skivvies. Or perhaps he does. One never knows about those monkly types."
"What the fuck," Spike asked with great feeling, "were you up to?"
"Plan B," Anya replied placidly. She held up a short-bladed, triangular knife - the same one that Aethelred had been ready to play Operation with not so long ago. "A sacrifice is exponentially more difficult without the sacrificial knife. I thought it might buy us some time, at least. So I followed Aelfric in the dark, hit him on the head with a rock, stole his robe, and lifted the knife from the General in disguise."
Spike's look of admiration was mostly lost in the dark. "I love a bird with a violent streak." He bounded to the top of the nearest boulder, as if Dawn weighed nothing at all. "Come on, come on, come on, you lot! Westward ho!"
***
The climb up out of the canyon was a dark, nauseating blur. Hours passed as the moon arced high and then slid down again behind the canyon walls. Spike pistoned on, hacking his way through tangled brush and clambering up the broken steps of stone like some kind of robot that had lost its governor and was running full-tilt until it threw a rod. Dawn and Anya staggered along behind him, sometimes hanging on to his belt, sometimes lifted off their feet when Spike grew impatient with their lagging human pace. All the while the vampire kept up a rapid-fire litany of complaints, encouragement, and increasingly wild rambling.
"...never realized, never saw it before, dunno why, 'm very observant - you noticed that, yeh? All fits together but I can't see the bloody pieces - arrgh!" Spike knuckled his eyes. "If I could just see - "
Shut up, shut up, shut up, Dawn thought. But she was too tired and sick to fight with him now. She'd always thought of herself as being in pretty good shape - not a track star, and certainly not the Slayer, but not a total couch potato either. Now every breath burned. Her head pounded and she couldn't feel her feet and any minute now she was going to throw up. But she couldn't collapse, not when they were so close. They were nearly to the place where the access road had been blocked off, the farthest place where someone might find them, if someone came looking.
"'cos it's all there, right there, secret of the bloody universe, all so fucking beautiful, the light, but it twists, you see?" Spike spun around, walking backwards, staring at her with hungry, desperate eyes. "Goes right around the corner and I can't follow - "
Her heel caught on a rock and Dawn collapsed in a flailing heap, crashing to hands and knees in a thicket of live oak. Prickly branches lashed her face and dead leaves and old acorns crunched beneath her knees. Her belly convulsed, muscles seizing up so hard it hurt, and she retched into the gnarled roots. Spike was beside her in an instant, kneeling in the oak litter, dry leaves dusting his shoulders. She clung to him, coughing and spitting to clear the bile from her nose. "Spike," she moaned, "What's wrong with me? What's wrong with you?"
"Nothing wrong." He shivered, like a horse shaking off flies. "Too much right. Slayer's blood's like whiskey. Like supping on the heart of the sun. You, love - you're absinthe. Drives a bloke moon-mad." He gave a sick little laugh. "Used to wonder what Dru saw when she looked at you, pet. Now I know."
Drusilla had never looked at her, not really, never begged Angelus to make her a pretty present of a glowing green girl-doll. All those memories were fake. But Spike never seemed to care about that. "It was only a few drops," she whimpered. "Why doesn't it wear off?"
Anya leaned against the nearest tree, cradling her bad arm in her good hand. She looked as dead-tired as Dawn felt. "I told you," she said, in her oh-what-fools-these-mortals-be voice. "The power of the Key's manipulated by rituals of blood magic. What you did back there when you fed him your blood was half-assed, but it was a ritual - channeling intent through action. You had intent, and you acted."
"I don't have intent anymore! Make it stop!" Dawn wailed, probably forfeiting her not-a-child cred for the next year or so.
Spike gnawed on a thumbnail, looking as if he might proceed on to the finger-bone beneath, given half a chance. "Lovely theory, bloody gorgeous, simply smashing, but it's bollocks. Doesn't get like this every time she gets a paper cut, does she? Got to be something else."
"How should I know?" said Anya, irritable. She brushed a strand of sweaty hair from her eyes, and dropped to her haunches. "There are all kinds of factors involved, and it's not as if she came with a manual. Maybe there's no magic involved at all, and she's just dehydrated and going into heat prostration."
"She is right here," said Dawn, curling into a sullen, queasy ball.
"Let's look at this logically." Anya pursed her lips. "Spike, you said you could see her - what do you see?"
Spike ducked his head, growling in frustration. "That's the bloody problem! I can't - it doesn't - 's all twisted up inside my head! Can't stop thinking about it, can't make anything of it!"
"Try," Anya said unsympathetically.
It was totally stupid to feel sorry for herself now. And yet, somehow, she managed it. "Is it - is it that bad?" Dawn asked. "Seeing what I really am?"
"Oh, love," Spike's eyes softened, his face melting into lines of adoration. "You're beautiful. But it's too much. I can't - " He clutched his singed hair, face twisted in a grimace of something beyond pain. "There's no room! You don't fit!" His eyes squeezed shut, and he rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet. Somewhere overhead, a bird shrilled an early greeting to the coming sunrise. After a moment he said, "'s green. Not really, but if it was a color and you could name it, it'd be green. Got a pattern to it, if only you could make it out, but you can't - it's never still, is it? And it's... hooked into everything. 'S hooked into me." One hand clutched at his chest. "Or I'm hooked into it. It - "
"I can feel my blood moving around inside of me. And something's pulling on it," Dawn interrupted, hating the whiny note in her voice. "Do something!"
"Who do you think I am, Willow?" Anya asked indignantly. "I'm not going to try to break a spell when I don't even know what it's doing. I might turn you both into newts. Or blow things up."
"But you have to do something!" Dawn shrieked. "You're the only one of us that knows anything about magic! Please, Anya, it's almost sunrise!"
"Oh, all right! I'll try. But if both of you end up living out your short, moist lives in an aquarium next to Amy the Rat, don't say I didn't warn you." Anya wrapped her arms around her knees, sharp brows knit in a pensive frown. "OK. Here's a thought. The Key attunes to whatever dimension it's in. It couldn't open portals between them, otherwise. And how did vampires came into being? The last of the Old Ones, the pure demons, infected a human corpse with its essence as it was being forced out of this dimension!" She gave a triumphant nod. "Setting up a connection between something attuned to this dimension and something that was frozen in the process of being pushed out of it probably wasn't the best of ideas."
"Tangled," muttered Spike, still rocking. "Between us. Knots and tangles, snarls and snags, all around the mulberry bush. All buggered up's what it amounts to."
Dawn tried to concentrate on what Anya was saying, but the words didn't seem to mean anything. She felt like fainting. Maybe. She'd never actually fainted before, so how would she know what it felt like? If it meant the whole world going grey and rushing away at the speed of... of a rushing grey thing, she was totally on it.
"Dawn!" a voice shouted. Something slapped her across the face, hard, and someone not-her yelled in pain. Pale bony fingers, broken knuckles, bitten nails mottled with flecks of black polish. Hand. Spike's hand. Spike's face, skull-white in the lightening darkness, eyes blazing golden moons, lips - not bloodstained, because there'd been so very little blood, and he'd licked up every drop - parted over the ivory razors of his fangs. "Dawn," he said, soft and pleading. You wouldn't think a mouth like that could form words so tender. "Come back to me."
"Don't leave me," she whispered thickly, not even sure what she meant by that. "They all leave me. Stay. Please."
"It's getting worse!" Spike snarled. He whipped his knife out, so quickly it seemed to appear in his hand like magic, and pressed it to his chest through the rags of his t-shirt. Dark blood beaded around the blade as the tip bit into pale flesh. "Connection, is there - I'll cut it out, is what I'll do. Blood for blood."
"Yes, because the way to fix a botched-up piece of blood magic is more botched-up blood magic," Anya said tartly, snatching the knife away. "Look, I may be talking out my ass here, but I'm all you've got, so listen before going all Sweeney Todd on us. You're using the wrong knife." She produced the athame she'd stolen from the General. "And I'm pretty sure that you doing it would be a bad idea."
Without warning she plunged the athame into Spike's chest, right at the point he'd been clutching, gouging out a divot of flesh the size of Dawn's palm. Bone gleamed white in the failing moonlight, then drowned in upwelling blood. Spike gasped, staring down at his chest.
It was Dawn who screamed.
"It moved," Spike whispered. He looked at Dawn, then back down at his bleeding chest. His hand slid down to his belly. "It moved. Hooks and needles, claws dug in deep - hold still, and we'll gut you yet, mate!" Anya yipped as he retrieved the knife, vamp-fast, and drove it into his belly.
"Wait!" Anya grabbed his wrist. Spike froze, staring at her, blood-trickles raking black clawmarks across his stomach. "Spike's right. There's something more going on here. Dawn," she said, very quietly, "you have to let go."
What was she taking about? "I can't!" Dawn sobbed, clutching her own chest, trying to hold in the vast empty ache within. She wasn't human at all, just an empty shell, stretched tighter and tighter around nothing at all. "I'll never see him again!"
Spike dropped the knife and cradled her close. Gross cold vampire blood seeped into her shirt. He was so terribly strong, so terribly thin, nothing more than bone and piano-wire muscle. She'd fix that. Make him drink his pig's blood, even when he bitched about the taste. And they'd watch Theatre of Blood and play cheater's poker and stay up way too late and maybe someday he'd look at her and she wouldn't see her sister's ghost in his eyes, and then --
But only if he stayed. Only if he stayed.
"You'll see me to the end of your days, love." Spike buried his face in her hair. "Promised your sister, didn't I?"
She wrenched away. "Buffy's dead!"
"And I promise you, too!" he snarled, giving her a shake.
"Think of that old saying," said Anya. "'If you love something, let it go, and if it doesn't come back - '"
"Forget about it?" Dawn finished bitterly.
Spike rolled his eyes. Behind him, she could see the lightening of the eastern sky, and the branches black against the dawn. "No, hunt the ungrateful bastard down an' kill him."
Maybe this was how Buffy had felt, on the tower. With a deep breath, Dawn Summers let go.
This time, it was Spike who screamed, clawing at his belly like his guts were falling out. Anya snatched up the knife again, and with her splinted hand made a clumsy grab at nothingness, as if grasping some invisible lifeline. The knife slashed downwards, and the night bled emeralds, coruscating brilliance that outshone the rising sun. Dawn cried out as the blade sheared through a connection subtler than flesh and bone. The terrible million-fishhook tugging at the core of her was shredding, fraying, dissolving, taking parts of her with it. Fragments of memory, of self, whipping away like leaves in a whirlwind. Dawn reached out, desperate to catch them, but it was too late. The last strand of... something snapped, and she was falling, falling, falling into the light.
***
It was warm, and the sun was high. Dawn lay still, breathing in the scent of damp earth and oak mast, and wondering exactly why sunshine should be such a horrifying concept. Until she rolled over and saw Spike's pale hand curled like a dead spider in the dry leaves, fingertips half an inch from the bright shaft of light. He looked terrible; there was a big icky half-healed wound in his chest, and the leaves beneath him were sticky with dried blood.
She shot upright, banged her head against something hard and knotty, and doubled over again with a yelp. Swearing and clutching her head, she grabbed Spike's wrist and tugged his arm farther into the shade. Spike snored. Some gallant protector he was. Dawn rubbed her eyes and looked around. She was crouched in a musty-smelling hollow at the foot of a fallen tree. An earth-clotted tangle of roots arched overhead, mostly screening them from the sun, and the ground beneath her was lumpy with dead leaves and rotting acorns. Spike was crammed into a crevice at the very rear of the hollow, and Anya was curled up at the entrance.
How had they gotten here? She hurt all over, and her whole body was covered with bruises and cuts she couldn't remember getting, and plenty that she did. They'd been driving to Fresno, and there'd been... she frowned. A hitchhiker? Yeah. And then the knights had showed up, and then... memory frayed into a confusing kaleidoscope of fragments: bouncing along on horseback under a bright hot sun, the red flicker of torchlight, the gleam of fangs. None of it made any sense. Maybe she'd hit her head. She'd check for bruises, except, well, she'd just hit her head.
There was a canteen at Anya's side, still holding a few swallows gurgling in the bottom when she shook it. Dawn gulped the water greedily and then bit her lip in retroactive guilt; maybe she should have saved some for Anya. Maybe they were still close enough to the stream that she could get more water.
Spike moaned a little, twitching in his sleep. His eyes drifted open, and he blinked muzzily and grimaced. "Oh, my sodding head..."
"Spike!" Dawn dropped the canteen and flung her arms around him. "You're OK!"
"Be better if you stop strangling me," Spike growled, but he made no move to disentangle her. "Bloody hell, what time is it? Jenkins, wake up!"
"Five more minutes," Anya mumbled, waving her unsplinted hand feebly.
"In five minutes those medieval plonkers may be - " Spike trailed off, scowling and running a hand over his jaw. Dawn could see that he didn't have much more than a day's growth of whiskers, so they couldn't have been out for too long. "Bugger," he said. He poked gingerly at the wound in his chest, where the muscle was just starting to knit back across the bone beneath a parchment-thin sheath of raw pink new skin. "No. They're gone, yeh? We sent them packing, didn't we? Epic battle, pulled the wool over their eyes somehow?"
"I... I think so," Dawn said. She scrunched her eyes shut, trying to remember. "There was a knife..." She whirled around on her knees, searching through the leaf-litter. "Wasn't there?"
"This?" Anya held up the athame - the hilt was mostly intact, but the blade was only a twisted, blackened stub of metal. "Ow!" She dropped it, sucking her fingers. "It's hot." She frowned, examining her palm. "There was a spell. Something to do with... doors?"
Spike levered himself to a sitting position, moving as if every muscle ached, which it probably did. "Bloody magic. Never goes well." He squinted up through the roots at the bright sky overhead, and inched a little farther back into the hollow. "If those wankers back in Sunnydale had listened to me and let us drive at night..."
Anya snorted. "Right. We'd have slipped past undetected, because a platinum blond vampire driving a '59 DeSoto at midnight could never possibly be mistaken for a platinum blond vampire driving a '59 DeSoto at noon."
Dawn was pretty sure they'd had this exact argument before, in reverse. "Never mind that." She rubbed her temples. "Okay. We can work this out. The knights had us, and Spike came to rescue us, and... and...I can't remember what happened after that. Or only bits and pieces."
They patched the night together again, eventually. Most of it, anyway. Spike remembered climbing down the canyon walls in the dark, clinging like a limpet to the rock while the yellow flare of campfires blinked like vampire eyes along the river below. Anya remembered stealing the knife. Dawn remembered her gamble with Orlando, and the General turning away, ordering his men to follow. But the farther into the night they got, the more holes there were, until at last all the little holes ran together into one great big bottomless pit of what the heck? Exactly why the knife looked like it had been through Mount Doom, and exactly how Spike had gotten those barely-healing scars, or how she'd acquired the cut on her wrist (and that bothered Dawn more than anything else, because she didn't do that kind of thing to herself anymore)... nada. It was like the knife had carved away whole chunks of the night along with chunks of Spike's flesh.
"Obviously I did something exceptionally clever to convince them you weren't the Key," Anya concluded at last. "Probably it interfered with the spell that wrote you into everyone's memory. I'd really rather that I remembered it. If only for my resume."
"Oi! How d'you know it wasn't me?" Spike demanded. "I've done spells, you know!"
"How do we know it was any of us?" Dawn said, tossing a desultory acorn at Spike. "Maybe the Knights did it."
Spike initiated a retaliatory strike. "Well, whoever did it cocked it up royally. We're lucky the Bit didn't disappear up her own existence." He looked disconcerted for a moment. "Strike that bit about it being me who did it, then."
Anya ducked beneath the acorn crossfire and crawled out into the open, shaking a few oak leaves out of her shoes. "The important thing is, I really want to be someplace with soap and running water." She stretched and looked around. "Ooh, look, we're not completely lost! I can see the gate across the access road from here!"
Spike shrugged out of his duster and began peeling off the remains of his t-shirt. "Wouldn't be so cheerful about it if I were you. It's miles back to the highway, and hours till sunset yet. An' when we get there, we've four flat tires and only one spare. Even odds the blood in the cooler'll have gone off, and I'm famished."
"Well, don't look at me," Anya said. "Catch a squirrel or something."
"Like I'd bite a couple of scrawny bints like you lot in the first place - " Spike froze, eyes blazing yellow. "Hold on. I hear an engine."
All Dawn could hear was Spike's stomach rumbling, but then she realized the noise was getting too loud for that, and coming from the road. A cloud of pale dust rose above the treetops, drawing slowly nearer. Dawn gulped. Had the Knights decided to come back, with reinforcements? Anya gave a shriek of delight, crammed her shoes back on, and dashed off towards the trailhead, arms waving. A tow truck bounced into view between the trees, Xander at the wheel, Giles hanging out the passenger side window. The DeSoto, much the worse for wear, was balanced precariously atop the truck bed.
Xander brought the truck to a lumbering halt and hopped out to jerk the chains tighter around the DeSoto's rear tires. "Watch the paint job, you bloody Philistine!" Spike bellowed, crawling half-way out of the hollow and jerking back as sunlight clipped the tip of his nose. "That car's a classic!"
"You can stroll over and give me a hand any time, fang-face!" Xander yelled back, adjusting the winch.
And just like that, they were on their way home.
***
There wasn't enough room for everyone in the cab of the truck, so Dawn volunteered to sit in the DeSoto with Spike. Smoking through his duster and two layers of blanket, the vampire leaped into the front seat, slammed the door behind him, and laid into the horn. Through the car's filthy windshield and the equally filthy rear window of the tow truck, Dawn saw Xander flip him off and throw the truck into gear.
It was kind of neat, riding this high, though the truck's suspension left a lot to be desired. Spike was looking kind of green, though - either he wasn't as recovered as he wanted everyone to think, or vampires were extra-susceptible to motion sickness. It wasn't until they jounced off the access road and onto the highway again that he relaxed his grip on the steering wheel, sat back with a sigh, and emerged from his blankets. "Dunno how as I'm going to nick a whole set of new tires for the old girl," he muttered, half to himself. "Not as if you can tuck 'em into your coat pocket and stroll out of the dealership."
Dawn took a swig at the mostly unmelted Slurpee she'd guilted Giles out of. Outside the windows, telephone poles whizzed past, like yesterday's drive unspooling in reverse. It didn't feel, somehow, as if they were headed back to the same place they'd left. She gave Spike a sideways glance. He was slouched in the opposite corner, one hand draped protectively over the useless steering wheel, one booted foot propped on the dashboard. He was swimming in a shirt borrowed from Xander, his scruffy platinum curls backlit by the filtered sunlight.
"I guess a vamp needs his wheels," she said carefully, "To... go places." Spike didn't catch the hint. Dawn wasn't even sure she was dropping one. "I could... help you," she continued. "I mean, I could, like, distract the garage guys or something while you do the actual evil stealing of tires part."
Spike blinked and turned a look of surprise and gratitude upon her. "Much appreciated, Snack-size. But..." There was less regret in his voice than you might have expected. "Your sis wouldn't like it."
"Buffy's dead." Whoa. Deja vu.
"Doesn't matter," Spike said, as if that ended the argument, forever and ever amen.
And she could have left it at that, and she wasn't sure why she didn't, except that it seemed like a cowardly thing to do, and she was tired of being afraid. "Yeah, it kinda does," she said. "Look, you promised to take care of me and all... but the Knights are gone now. And the details of why may be fuzzy, but I'm pretty sure they aren't coming back. Giles is going to track down my Dad any day now, and...and I know you've got stuff to do. Bad evil vampire stuff." Dawn took a deep breath, and did the second bravest thing she'd ever done in her life. That she remembered doing, anyway. "So if you need to... to go places, I just wanted you to know... I understand. And I'll be OK."
She devoted the next eternity or so to excavating precise little holes in her cup of pink slush with the straw, which had this little spoon thing on the end for just such emergencies. What would you call it, a stroon or a spaw? Witness the marvels of modern Slurpee technology.
"Niblet," Spike said at last, and then, "Dawn."
Her belly made a swoopy dip that couldn't entirely be accounted for by the crappy suspension. Could you still have a crush on a guy you'd peeled drunk and filthy off the floor of his crypt, smacked to consciousness, and dragged out of same? A guy who regarded the necks of most people he met with the same fond regard with which he surveyed an extra-rare cheeseburger? A guy who was still madly in love with your dead sister? Maybe she'd think about that some time when she wasn't possibly concussed. He was wearing an expression she was sure she'd seen before, she just wasn't sure where. Kind of a smile, but kind of sad, too. "Your sis... I know she didn't want me in her life, there at the end. She just needed me for a bit, is all. Just like you. No, hush. You know why I fell for her? Wasn't her pretty face, nor her pretty... other parts, though I can't say I didn't fancy those too. It was her heart. Same heart as you've got - valiant, is what she was. What you are." He reached across the seat, fingertips barely brushing the fall of her hair. "Someday, love, you'll hand me my walking papers, 'stead of giving me leave to fetch them myself. And on that day, I'll go. But not one day before."
Dawn sat very still. Then, very deliberately, she slouched down and propped her left foot on the dash, sneaker briefly bumping toes with beat-up Docs. "Well, it's a good thing you're immortal," she said. "Because that day? You'll be waiting a looooong time for it."
And he could have said something lame about how she was too young to know what she wanted about stuff like that, but he didn't. Spike just laced his hands behind his head and grinned, the first real, genuine grin she could remember seeing from him since Buffy'd died. Or maybe ever. "That so? Then get me my slippers, Liza."
There was only one answer to that. "Get 'em yourself," Dawn replied. And the road unwound before them, taking them home to someplace new.
END
Note: This request this story was written to is as follows:
Characters/Pairings you want the story to focus in: Dawn, Spike
Characters/Pairings you want in the story too: Anya! Even if only because D&S are speaking about her.
Things you want: post-Gift but *before* Buffy comes back. Spike takes Dawn out of town for several days - to distract her, to protect her from a demon (a parallel ‘OMWF'?), on a whim... whichever reason works best. I really want the story to focus on D&S, and the firmer their friendship is, the better. Banter is love, lol!
Things you don't want: No LA, and as few B/S as possible, please.
Extras: hitchhiking back home (either they do it, or they pick someone up at some point in the journey). I would love for Spike to tell Dawn *his* version of Lover's Lane (S3), and maybe Dawn can add her own ‘memories' around those events?
In theory, Dawn was staying with the Rosenbergs until Giles could get hold of her dad. In practice, for the last two weeks she'd she crept out of Willow's bedroom and snuck over to Spike's crypt, where she stayed up till three A.M., eating Cheetos and watching Theatre of Blood on Channel 21. Last week there'd been one where the heroes fed a skeletonized vampire some blood. And OK, Dawn couldn't talk because she'd accidentally invited Harmony into her house once, but new levels of stupid, right there. Much to Spike's scorn, the vampire had swelled up like Ballpark franks, back to normal in an instant, and promptly proceeded to wreak mayhem.
In the real world, Dawn knew, it didn't work like that. Vampires gained and lost weight about the same way people did, and for pretty much the same reasons. Putting some meat back on Spike's bones would take a few weeks of feeding right and working out.
So she didn't expect miracles. She didn't expect anything, really. It was just a mouthful of blood. Which was why the way Spike was staring at her was so freaky. Beneath the jutting ridges of his demon brow his eyes were aflame with unnatural elation, blazing like miniature suns. He stretched out a hand and flexed his fingers, marveling at the smooth white skin where angry burns had been only minutes ago.
"Spike, are you OK?"
Spike gave a loopy giggle. "Fine! Better 'n fine! I'm bloody brilliant! What are we waiting for, then? Time's wasting!" He leaped to his feet, practically vibrating with energy, and swaggered out of the thicket. His pale hair glowed in the moonlight; he might as well have had a neon bullseye on his chest.
Dawn had a sudden flash of memory: Angel, freaky-strong after he'd drunk Buffy's blood, lurching down the hospital corridor like he could barely control his super-charged body. But this was different, and Angel had practically drained Buffy dry - Spike had barely had a taste. "What's wrong with him?"
"Apparently Key blood is vampire crack." Anya got to her feet and brushed the dead leaves off her skirt. "I think we should start working on Plan B."
"Daaaaaaagobert! Ally ally oxen free!" Spike yelled, cupping both hands to his mouth. "Oi! Tin Man! Send General Pinhead up here toot sweet, you nickel-plated oaf! I want a heart-to-heart!"
"It's the demon!" Dagobert bellowed. "Byzantium, to me!"
Crap. Spike did sound high. Or drunk. More drunk than he sounded when he actually was drunk. Dawn could hear shouts and the sounds of running feet splashing through the creek as the rest of the troop rallied to Dagobert's call. Shouts of, "Remember, he can't strike you without pain!" and "Crossbows at the ready!" echoed back and forth across the canyon. The metallic snik of crossbows cocking filled the air.
"Fire!"
Spike vanished, moving too fast for the human eye to follow. He reappeared in midst of Dagobert's men. Pale, spidery hands shot out, wrenching the weapons from the hands of the two closest knights before their fingers could tighten on the triggers. Both crossbows spun off into the darkness, to land in the creek with a splash and a clatter, and both men yelped in pain and surprise. Dawn saw Spike stagger and drop to his knees as the chip fired, then pop to his feet again with a manic grin. Three more knights spun and fired wildly as he blurred out of sight again.
Two bolts went wide, while the third caught one of the disarmed knights in the thigh. The wounded man crumpled with a curse and Spike dropped out of bullet time just as Dagobert swung his shotgun around and emptied both barrels point-blank into the vampire's middle. Spike jerked with the impact and toppled backwards, the black leather wings of his duster unfurling around the pale, infernal halo of his hair. He sprawled motionless on the stones, his skinny, jeans-clad legs splayed wide.
Heart pounding wildly, Dawn leaped out of the bushes. "Dawn! No!" Anya hissed, but Dawn was off and running. A healthy vampire could laugh off a bullet, or even a lot of bullets, from most handguns, but high-caliber shotguns could do real damage. And Spike wasn't exactly a healthy vampire right now.
Stones rolled and shifted under her flying feet - what, was every rock and root in the canyon conspiring against her? General Aethelred was storming up the slope from the creek, flanked by a dozen archers and as many knights brandishing swords and spears. Torches bobbed overhead, painting the oncoming horde a lurid red. Trust Spike to be the first vampire in a century to actually be hunted down by a torch-waving mob. Dawn stumbled, skidded, found her balance, stumbled again. A wave of dizziness washed over her. She must have lost more blood than she'd thought, which was weird, because she could feel it circling inside, throb, throb, throb, a cord of fire knotted in her middle. Huh. Well, live and learn. Or go into shock and die.
The world did a slow, lazy revolution and she saw the ground rushing up to meet her. That's really going to hurt.
"Whoops-a-daisy!" Strong hands caught her and swept her effortlessly upright. Spike's arm hooked around her waist, and Dawn sagged gratefully against his side. He held up a leather pouch stamped with the insignia of Byzantium and shook it, sending a brass rain of shotgun shells to the ground. "William the Bloody one, Byzantium nought!" he caroled.
"Spike," Dawn croaked, "what's the plan?" He was still wearing that lunatic grin, and his pupils were enormous black wells in his amber eyes - well, they would be in the dark, wouldn't they? His body radiated an un-vampire-like warmth. "There is a plan, right?"
"'Course I've got a plan." Spike sounded offended. "Got lots of plans. Oodles of plans! Plenty of plans, all of them cracking good plans, too! What demon girl said, yeh? Shush, it's General Wossface, with enough arrows in his quiver to re-enact the martyrdom of St. Sebastian. Oooh, not sporting, not sporting at all!"
Aethelred halted at a safe distance and folded his arms across his chest. "Vampire! This charade is pointless. You cannot hurt us, and you would no more harm the Key than her sister would. Until Brother Selwin can examine her, I'm loath to chance the girl's death - but I will kill both of you rather than let her escape." He waved at the bristling arc of bowmen. "Turn the Key over to me, and we will allow you and the demon woman to leave."
"Aren't we ever so manly? P'raps you've noticed..." Spike tugged the front of his t-shirt up. The cloth was a shredded mess, and the pale, concave belly underneath it was peppered with the tiny black dots of buckshot wounds, but there was no blood. "You can't hurt me, either. Seems our Dawn's blood puts Lydia Pinkham to shame. Could be it'll work on headaches, too. Want to find out?"
Dagobert's jaw clenched, causing his mustache to bristle like a belligerent hedgehog. He took a step forward, and the General laid a restraining hand on his arm. Dawn could see him working out the odds. Unless they hit Spike's heart dead on, the bolts wouldn't stop him any more than the shotgun had. She knew that Spike couldn't keep up the super-speed indefinitely, and the pain from the chip would get worse the more damage Spike tried to inflict, but the knights' briefing might not have been that thorough.
"Thought not," Spike purred. "Now. Let's us have a chat. You'd kill her, yeh, you've stones enough for that. But it'll eat at you. Every night, for the rest of your days, you'll wake, and you'll see her eyes staring back at you out of the dark." His hand cupped her cheek, dry and strangely warm. Dawn thought it trembled a little. "So bloody beautiful..." He blinked and shook himself, lapsing in and out of game face like he couldn't remember which was which. "Wages of being a good man. 'Course," his grin grew sharper, more predatory. "I'm makin' the assumption that you are a good man."
Aethelred said nothing. Dawn hoped that was a good sign. Spike couldn't lie to Buffy to save his life, but put him in a situation like this and he turned into Gielgud. Or at least Matt Damon.
"Things have changed since you and your band of merry men last took the Sunnydale tour." Spike held Dawn's bleeding wrist up for all to see and ran his tongue along the length of her forearm, starting slick and human-soft, ending demon-rough. "Delicious," he drawled, stretching the word out like warm taffy. "You say I won't kill her, and you're right. But you've got the whys of it all wrong. Slayer's rotting in the ground - what's a promise to her, now? You want the Key neutralized. And for me it's all about the blood. Seems to me we can both get what we want, without you losing sleep of nights."
"And how do you propose to... neutralize her?" Aethelred demanded, in a voice as stiff as his spine.
Spike's chuckle was possibly the filthiest thing Dawn had ever heard. "Already done, Prince Valiant. Key's supposed to be pure, yeh?" His hand slipped upwards from her waist. "An' she's anything but, now that I'm in the picture."
"Spike!" Dawn hissed. "You're touching my boob!"
"Blimey, Sherlock, I hadn't noticed!" Spike hissed back. "Try an' look debauched here!"
Dawn dropped her voice to a Penthouse moan. "Oh, Spike!" She tossed her head back in her best impersonation of a romance-novel cover painting. Why should Spike have all the good lines? "My purity is totally sullied! Bite me harder! You make it hurt soooooo good!"
The millisecond of absolute horror that flashed across Spike's face was pretty much worth the admission for the whole night. He recovered fast, though. "There, you've heard it from her lips. Impure as I am. Her power's no use to anyone any longer. 'Cept me."
"So you would suggest, then," Dagobert said with an icy sneer, "That as good men, we hand over a girl scarcely more than a child to a creature as loathsome as you, to be used for your pleasure?"
Spike snorted. "There's consistency for you. You're willing to have murder on your conscience, but you balk at a spot of pandering?"
"Maynard! Aelfric!" the General snapped.
A pair of dark-robed clerics pushed through the line of bowmen and hastened to their leader's side. Maynard folded his hands into his sleeves and bowed deeply. "Your will, my lord?"
"The vampire claims," the General said tersely, "To have made the girl his... doxy." His lip curled with distaste.
"Doxy's such a nasty word," Spike murmured. "I prefer 'box lunch.'"
"Be that as it may," Aethelred said. "The undead are vile creatures. What chance is there his... association with the girl has corrupted her essence?"
The clerics frowned, putting their heads together - Spike could probably hear every word, but to Dawn it was only indecipherable mumbling. Her head was pounding, and the torches were surrounded by pulsing haloes of light. What was wrong with her?
"We have not the means to be certain, my lord," Maynard said at last. "But there is one infallible test we can put her to."
"What, are you going to see if I weigh the same as a duck?" Dawn muttered.
Maynard shot her a dirty look. "Fetch Orlando here. Where the Key is concerned, a madman may speak a truth the rest of us have too much wit to see."
The General looked from Dawn to Spike and back again, lips pressed to military precision, eyes inscrutable. Dawn clutched Spike's ruined t-shirt, her palms damp with nerves. Maybe she'd overdone it on the artistic touches. Aethelred stroked his goatee, "Very well," he said at last. "Bring us Orlando."
Spike stiffened. "Oi, now, half a mo' - "
"That's a great idea," Dawn interrupted, wedging an elbow into Spike's ribs. "Besides, it's not like we have any choice, is it, Spike?"
He glared at her, and Dawn tried to drill her intent into his brain by return glare - if Spike hadn't possessed a skull of solid ivory, maybe it would have worked better, but the long moment they spent making faces at one another confused the knights enough that no one tried to hurry things up. At last Spike shook himself and snapped, "Fine, then! Bring him on. Bring 'em all on. On Comet and Cupid, Orlando an' Vixen!"
Aethelred nodded. Maynard and Aelfric bowed to the General in unison, and trotted off towards camp. The sound of rocks clacking beneath their boots was quickly lost beneath the susurrus of the river and the moan of the wind in the canyon overhead. Dawn clung to Spike's arm, as much because she was afraid she'd fall down if she didn't as to put on a show, and watched the flame of their torches dwindle to bobbing pinpoints of light over the dark water. For a second the trailing torch bobbled and almost went out as one of the brothers slipped on the treacherous footing. Dawn turned away, Blair-Witch queasy. She could feel Spike jittering and twitching in her grasp, muttering under his breath - if she hadn't been holding on to him he'd be doing his caged-panther pacing thing, up and down, back and forth on the rocks.
It took a small forever for the clerics to return, frog-marching a wild-eyed Orlando between them. "Orlando!" Dawn cried, before anyone else could say anything. "Tell them - I'm not pure anymore, am I? I'm spoiled! I'm no good as the Key!"
The mad knight cringed in his captors' grip, head whipping from Dawn to Spike and back again. "Green girl," he whispered, eyes scrunching closed. Dawn thought she saw tears in the bloody light of the torches. His eyes flew open, wide as the moon overhead. "Green girl gone greener grass is always gone to seed, to sea, to see, bleeding away, going, going, gone." He trailed off with a broken sob, fixing his burning gaze on Spike. "You see, now. You know!"
Spike blinked owlishly. "Couldn't ask for a plainer word than that," he said. "Right! We'll be off, then."
"Silence, demon." Aethelred turned to the monks. "Brothers...?"
Aelfric shrugged and shook his head, his face shadowed beneath the muffling folds of his hooded cassock. He was holding his torch awkwardly, as if he'd hurt his arm in his earlier stumble.
Maynard gave his colleague an irritated look. "Our brother's words are obscure, but - "
"Traitors!" Orlando shrieked. Both clerics jumped back with a start, Aelfric ducking behind the General for protection. "Kinslayers! Fools! Does the Queen of Air and Darkness grieve? Does she sob like a child in the night?"
"Hey!" Dawn protested. "I don't - " Much, anyway.
"All that's green bleeding, bleeding away, when the demon drinks deep, but slit the lamb's throat and her blood will run red enow!" Orlando ranted. He pointed accusingly at Spike. "Here's a fountain of it, aye - will you rush to bathe in ruination, drink deep of corruption? Every hand here, a study in scarlet!"
"Oh, there will be ruination, all right," Spike crooned, bouncing on his toes, fingers flexing at his sides. His teeth were sharp and his eyes fever-bright in the torchlight. "If you come at her through me. Count up your quick, General, 'cos when William the Bloody's done, there'll be songs counting up your dead."
Whether Spike could back up his threats or not was an open question, but Aethelred, at least, seemed to be considering it. "Aelfric, to your station," the General snapped, waving the cowering monk away. "Rest assured I shall speak to your superiors of this shameful behavior later." Chastened, Aelfric ducked his head and slunk off back in the direction of the camp. Aethelred rubbed his forehead tattoo as if it pained him. "Orlando - speak as plainly as you can, for the love of the oaths we both swore. Is the girl yet the Key, or not?"
Orlando stood shivering, arms wrapped tightly around himself. Holding the madness in - or out. "Oaths," he spat, and then, with a meaning look at Dawn, "What's a Key when no lock will fit her? The lady's not for burning." He gave an exaggerated nod, laying one finger aside of his nose.
Aethelred cocked an eyebrow at Maynard, whose cheeks quivered in distress. The cleric gave a nervous little half-bow. "My liege... addled though his wits may be, I see little room for doubt here. The girl is no longer the Key. Or," he corrected himself, "Orlando no longer believes her to be."
A rustle ran through the assembled knights, the creak of leather, the jungle of mail, the hiss of one murmuring to the other. Aethelred heaved a great sigh and leveled an assessing look at Spike. "You are right in one respect, demon. I would fain leave this field with my hands clean of innocent blood. And yet I mislike leaving the child with you scarcely less."
"I've been on the run from your stupid knights for a year," Dawn said, low and furious. "My mother is dead, my sister is dead, and my dad apparently doesn't give a shit. My best friend is a vampire, and I saw what Glory did to your brothers. Every bit of it." She drew herself up, straight as the spinning world allowed. "I'm not a child."
The General's shoulders sagged. "No," he said. "I suppose you are not, at that." He tugged at his beard for a moment, then added, grudgingly, "You and the woman are welcome to share our fire for the night. The demon must remain here."
Spike growled, and Dawn shook her head. "Thanks, but no thanks. We'll just be going. Spike can see in the dark."
"Very well, then." Wearily, he rounded upon the assembled knights, and waved. "Return to camp. We leave for the chapterhouse at dawn."
Dawn caught Orlando's eye. Thank you, she mouthed, and he reached out one longing hand, his fingers closing on darkness as Maynard hustled him away. Her knees buckled, and Spike swept her up in his arms, very Rhett Butler, except she was pretty sure Scartlett O'Hara wouldn't have felt like barfing all over Rhett's waistcoat. ""Hell of a chance you took there, Niblet," he muttered. "Hell of a hell of a hell of a chance."
"Not as big as you think," she slurred. "Like I said. I saw what Glory did. And she didn't use a knife. And if Glory didn't give Orlando that scar..." She gave a loose shrug, encompassing the length and breadth of human perfidy. "Somebody knight-shaped pretty much had to. It wasn't there when I saw him in the hospital." Dawn clutched the lapels of Spike's duster - the tobacco smell, usually weirdly reassuring, was only making her queasier. "Where's Anya?"
Spike's nostrils flared, and he swung around with speed enough to drastically increase the barf forecast. "Going, going, gone - not in the brush anymore. Anya!"
"You don't have to shout," Anya's voice came from the direction of the river. A few seconds later Dawn heard her footsteps on the rocky beach, and there she was, stepping fastidiously from boulder to boulder in the chancy moonlight. A long black robe flapped around her slender body, hood thrown back and sleeves pushed up to her elbows. She stopped, panting a little, and shrugged out of its enveloping folds. "I don't expect we'll be needing that any longer," she said, "and I'm sure Aelfric doesn't want to ride home in his skivvies. Or perhaps he does. One never knows about those monkly types."
"What the fuck," Spike asked with great feeling, "were you up to?"
"Plan B," Anya replied placidly. She held up a short-bladed, triangular knife - the same one that Aethelred had been ready to play Operation with not so long ago. "A sacrifice is exponentially more difficult without the sacrificial knife. I thought it might buy us some time, at least. So I followed Aelfric in the dark, hit him on the head with a rock, stole his robe, and lifted the knife from the General in disguise."
Spike's look of admiration was mostly lost in the dark. "I love a bird with a violent streak." He bounded to the top of the nearest boulder, as if Dawn weighed nothing at all. "Come on, come on, come on, you lot! Westward ho!"
***
The climb up out of the canyon was a dark, nauseating blur. Hours passed as the moon arced high and then slid down again behind the canyon walls. Spike pistoned on, hacking his way through tangled brush and clambering up the broken steps of stone like some kind of robot that had lost its governor and was running full-tilt until it threw a rod. Dawn and Anya staggered along behind him, sometimes hanging on to his belt, sometimes lifted off their feet when Spike grew impatient with their lagging human pace. All the while the vampire kept up a rapid-fire litany of complaints, encouragement, and increasingly wild rambling.
"...never realized, never saw it before, dunno why, 'm very observant - you noticed that, yeh? All fits together but I can't see the bloody pieces - arrgh!" Spike knuckled his eyes. "If I could just see - "
Shut up, shut up, shut up, Dawn thought. But she was too tired and sick to fight with him now. She'd always thought of herself as being in pretty good shape - not a track star, and certainly not the Slayer, but not a total couch potato either. Now every breath burned. Her head pounded and she couldn't feel her feet and any minute now she was going to throw up. But she couldn't collapse, not when they were so close. They were nearly to the place where the access road had been blocked off, the farthest place where someone might find them, if someone came looking.
"'cos it's all there, right there, secret of the bloody universe, all so fucking beautiful, the light, but it twists, you see?" Spike spun around, walking backwards, staring at her with hungry, desperate eyes. "Goes right around the corner and I can't follow - "
Her heel caught on a rock and Dawn collapsed in a flailing heap, crashing to hands and knees in a thicket of live oak. Prickly branches lashed her face and dead leaves and old acorns crunched beneath her knees. Her belly convulsed, muscles seizing up so hard it hurt, and she retched into the gnarled roots. Spike was beside her in an instant, kneeling in the oak litter, dry leaves dusting his shoulders. She clung to him, coughing and spitting to clear the bile from her nose. "Spike," she moaned, "What's wrong with me? What's wrong with you?"
"Nothing wrong." He shivered, like a horse shaking off flies. "Too much right. Slayer's blood's like whiskey. Like supping on the heart of the sun. You, love - you're absinthe. Drives a bloke moon-mad." He gave a sick little laugh. "Used to wonder what Dru saw when she looked at you, pet. Now I know."
Drusilla had never looked at her, not really, never begged Angelus to make her a pretty present of a glowing green girl-doll. All those memories were fake. But Spike never seemed to care about that. "It was only a few drops," she whimpered. "Why doesn't it wear off?"
Anya leaned against the nearest tree, cradling her bad arm in her good hand. She looked as dead-tired as Dawn felt. "I told you," she said, in her oh-what-fools-these-mortals-be voice. "The power of the Key's manipulated by rituals of blood magic. What you did back there when you fed him your blood was half-assed, but it was a ritual - channeling intent through action. You had intent, and you acted."
"I don't have intent anymore! Make it stop!" Dawn wailed, probably forfeiting her not-a-child cred for the next year or so.
Spike gnawed on a thumbnail, looking as if he might proceed on to the finger-bone beneath, given half a chance. "Lovely theory, bloody gorgeous, simply smashing, but it's bollocks. Doesn't get like this every time she gets a paper cut, does she? Got to be something else."
"How should I know?" said Anya, irritable. She brushed a strand of sweaty hair from her eyes, and dropped to her haunches. "There are all kinds of factors involved, and it's not as if she came with a manual. Maybe there's no magic involved at all, and she's just dehydrated and going into heat prostration."
"She is right here," said Dawn, curling into a sullen, queasy ball.
"Let's look at this logically." Anya pursed her lips. "Spike, you said you could see her - what do you see?"
Spike ducked his head, growling in frustration. "That's the bloody problem! I can't - it doesn't - 's all twisted up inside my head! Can't stop thinking about it, can't make anything of it!"
"Try," Anya said unsympathetically.
It was totally stupid to feel sorry for herself now. And yet, somehow, she managed it. "Is it - is it that bad?" Dawn asked. "Seeing what I really am?"
"Oh, love," Spike's eyes softened, his face melting into lines of adoration. "You're beautiful. But it's too much. I can't - " He clutched his singed hair, face twisted in a grimace of something beyond pain. "There's no room! You don't fit!" His eyes squeezed shut, and he rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet. Somewhere overhead, a bird shrilled an early greeting to the coming sunrise. After a moment he said, "'s green. Not really, but if it was a color and you could name it, it'd be green. Got a pattern to it, if only you could make it out, but you can't - it's never still, is it? And it's... hooked into everything. 'S hooked into me." One hand clutched at his chest. "Or I'm hooked into it. It - "
"I can feel my blood moving around inside of me. And something's pulling on it," Dawn interrupted, hating the whiny note in her voice. "Do something!"
"Who do you think I am, Willow?" Anya asked indignantly. "I'm not going to try to break a spell when I don't even know what it's doing. I might turn you both into newts. Or blow things up."
"But you have to do something!" Dawn shrieked. "You're the only one of us that knows anything about magic! Please, Anya, it's almost sunrise!"
"Oh, all right! I'll try. But if both of you end up living out your short, moist lives in an aquarium next to Amy the Rat, don't say I didn't warn you." Anya wrapped her arms around her knees, sharp brows knit in a pensive frown. "OK. Here's a thought. The Key attunes to whatever dimension it's in. It couldn't open portals between them, otherwise. And how did vampires came into being? The last of the Old Ones, the pure demons, infected a human corpse with its essence as it was being forced out of this dimension!" She gave a triumphant nod. "Setting up a connection between something attuned to this dimension and something that was frozen in the process of being pushed out of it probably wasn't the best of ideas."
"Tangled," muttered Spike, still rocking. "Between us. Knots and tangles, snarls and snags, all around the mulberry bush. All buggered up's what it amounts to."
Dawn tried to concentrate on what Anya was saying, but the words didn't seem to mean anything. She felt like fainting. Maybe. She'd never actually fainted before, so how would she know what it felt like? If it meant the whole world going grey and rushing away at the speed of... of a rushing grey thing, she was totally on it.
"Dawn!" a voice shouted. Something slapped her across the face, hard, and someone not-her yelled in pain. Pale bony fingers, broken knuckles, bitten nails mottled with flecks of black polish. Hand. Spike's hand. Spike's face, skull-white in the lightening darkness, eyes blazing golden moons, lips - not bloodstained, because there'd been so very little blood, and he'd licked up every drop - parted over the ivory razors of his fangs. "Dawn," he said, soft and pleading. You wouldn't think a mouth like that could form words so tender. "Come back to me."
"Don't leave me," she whispered thickly, not even sure what she meant by that. "They all leave me. Stay. Please."
"It's getting worse!" Spike snarled. He whipped his knife out, so quickly it seemed to appear in his hand like magic, and pressed it to his chest through the rags of his t-shirt. Dark blood beaded around the blade as the tip bit into pale flesh. "Connection, is there - I'll cut it out, is what I'll do. Blood for blood."
"Yes, because the way to fix a botched-up piece of blood magic is more botched-up blood magic," Anya said tartly, snatching the knife away. "Look, I may be talking out my ass here, but I'm all you've got, so listen before going all Sweeney Todd on us. You're using the wrong knife." She produced the athame she'd stolen from the General. "And I'm pretty sure that you doing it would be a bad idea."
Without warning she plunged the athame into Spike's chest, right at the point he'd been clutching, gouging out a divot of flesh the size of Dawn's palm. Bone gleamed white in the failing moonlight, then drowned in upwelling blood. Spike gasped, staring down at his chest.
It was Dawn who screamed.
"It moved," Spike whispered. He looked at Dawn, then back down at his bleeding chest. His hand slid down to his belly. "It moved. Hooks and needles, claws dug in deep - hold still, and we'll gut you yet, mate!" Anya yipped as he retrieved the knife, vamp-fast, and drove it into his belly.
"Wait!" Anya grabbed his wrist. Spike froze, staring at her, blood-trickles raking black clawmarks across his stomach. "Spike's right. There's something more going on here. Dawn," she said, very quietly, "you have to let go."
What was she taking about? "I can't!" Dawn sobbed, clutching her own chest, trying to hold in the vast empty ache within. She wasn't human at all, just an empty shell, stretched tighter and tighter around nothing at all. "I'll never see him again!"
Spike dropped the knife and cradled her close. Gross cold vampire blood seeped into her shirt. He was so terribly strong, so terribly thin, nothing more than bone and piano-wire muscle. She'd fix that. Make him drink his pig's blood, even when he bitched about the taste. And they'd watch Theatre of Blood and play cheater's poker and stay up way too late and maybe someday he'd look at her and she wouldn't see her sister's ghost in his eyes, and then --
But only if he stayed. Only if he stayed.
"You'll see me to the end of your days, love." Spike buried his face in her hair. "Promised your sister, didn't I?"
She wrenched away. "Buffy's dead!"
"And I promise you, too!" he snarled, giving her a shake.
"Think of that old saying," said Anya. "'If you love something, let it go, and if it doesn't come back - '"
"Forget about it?" Dawn finished bitterly.
Spike rolled his eyes. Behind him, she could see the lightening of the eastern sky, and the branches black against the dawn. "No, hunt the ungrateful bastard down an' kill him."
Maybe this was how Buffy had felt, on the tower. With a deep breath, Dawn Summers let go.
This time, it was Spike who screamed, clawing at his belly like his guts were falling out. Anya snatched up the knife again, and with her splinted hand made a clumsy grab at nothingness, as if grasping some invisible lifeline. The knife slashed downwards, and the night bled emeralds, coruscating brilliance that outshone the rising sun. Dawn cried out as the blade sheared through a connection subtler than flesh and bone. The terrible million-fishhook tugging at the core of her was shredding, fraying, dissolving, taking parts of her with it. Fragments of memory, of self, whipping away like leaves in a whirlwind. Dawn reached out, desperate to catch them, but it was too late. The last strand of... something snapped, and she was falling, falling, falling into the light.
***
It was warm, and the sun was high. Dawn lay still, breathing in the scent of damp earth and oak mast, and wondering exactly why sunshine should be such a horrifying concept. Until she rolled over and saw Spike's pale hand curled like a dead spider in the dry leaves, fingertips half an inch from the bright shaft of light. He looked terrible; there was a big icky half-healed wound in his chest, and the leaves beneath him were sticky with dried blood.
She shot upright, banged her head against something hard and knotty, and doubled over again with a yelp. Swearing and clutching her head, she grabbed Spike's wrist and tugged his arm farther into the shade. Spike snored. Some gallant protector he was. Dawn rubbed her eyes and looked around. She was crouched in a musty-smelling hollow at the foot of a fallen tree. An earth-clotted tangle of roots arched overhead, mostly screening them from the sun, and the ground beneath her was lumpy with dead leaves and rotting acorns. Spike was crammed into a crevice at the very rear of the hollow, and Anya was curled up at the entrance.
How had they gotten here? She hurt all over, and her whole body was covered with bruises and cuts she couldn't remember getting, and plenty that she did. They'd been driving to Fresno, and there'd been... she frowned. A hitchhiker? Yeah. And then the knights had showed up, and then... memory frayed into a confusing kaleidoscope of fragments: bouncing along on horseback under a bright hot sun, the red flicker of torchlight, the gleam of fangs. None of it made any sense. Maybe she'd hit her head. She'd check for bruises, except, well, she'd just hit her head.
There was a canteen at Anya's side, still holding a few swallows gurgling in the bottom when she shook it. Dawn gulped the water greedily and then bit her lip in retroactive guilt; maybe she should have saved some for Anya. Maybe they were still close enough to the stream that she could get more water.
Spike moaned a little, twitching in his sleep. His eyes drifted open, and he blinked muzzily and grimaced. "Oh, my sodding head..."
"Spike!" Dawn dropped the canteen and flung her arms around him. "You're OK!"
"Be better if you stop strangling me," Spike growled, but he made no move to disentangle her. "Bloody hell, what time is it? Jenkins, wake up!"
"Five more minutes," Anya mumbled, waving her unsplinted hand feebly.
"In five minutes those medieval plonkers may be - " Spike trailed off, scowling and running a hand over his jaw. Dawn could see that he didn't have much more than a day's growth of whiskers, so they couldn't have been out for too long. "Bugger," he said. He poked gingerly at the wound in his chest, where the muscle was just starting to knit back across the bone beneath a parchment-thin sheath of raw pink new skin. "No. They're gone, yeh? We sent them packing, didn't we? Epic battle, pulled the wool over their eyes somehow?"
"I... I think so," Dawn said. She scrunched her eyes shut, trying to remember. "There was a knife..." She whirled around on her knees, searching through the leaf-litter. "Wasn't there?"
"This?" Anya held up the athame - the hilt was mostly intact, but the blade was only a twisted, blackened stub of metal. "Ow!" She dropped it, sucking her fingers. "It's hot." She frowned, examining her palm. "There was a spell. Something to do with... doors?"
Spike levered himself to a sitting position, moving as if every muscle ached, which it probably did. "Bloody magic. Never goes well." He squinted up through the roots at the bright sky overhead, and inched a little farther back into the hollow. "If those wankers back in Sunnydale had listened to me and let us drive at night..."
Anya snorted. "Right. We'd have slipped past undetected, because a platinum blond vampire driving a '59 DeSoto at midnight could never possibly be mistaken for a platinum blond vampire driving a '59 DeSoto at noon."
Dawn was pretty sure they'd had this exact argument before, in reverse. "Never mind that." She rubbed her temples. "Okay. We can work this out. The knights had us, and Spike came to rescue us, and... and...I can't remember what happened after that. Or only bits and pieces."
They patched the night together again, eventually. Most of it, anyway. Spike remembered climbing down the canyon walls in the dark, clinging like a limpet to the rock while the yellow flare of campfires blinked like vampire eyes along the river below. Anya remembered stealing the knife. Dawn remembered her gamble with Orlando, and the General turning away, ordering his men to follow. But the farther into the night they got, the more holes there were, until at last all the little holes ran together into one great big bottomless pit of what the heck? Exactly why the knife looked like it had been through Mount Doom, and exactly how Spike had gotten those barely-healing scars, or how she'd acquired the cut on her wrist (and that bothered Dawn more than anything else, because she didn't do that kind of thing to herself anymore)... nada. It was like the knife had carved away whole chunks of the night along with chunks of Spike's flesh.
"Obviously I did something exceptionally clever to convince them you weren't the Key," Anya concluded at last. "Probably it interfered with the spell that wrote you into everyone's memory. I'd really rather that I remembered it. If only for my resume."
"Oi! How d'you know it wasn't me?" Spike demanded. "I've done spells, you know!"
"How do we know it was any of us?" Dawn said, tossing a desultory acorn at Spike. "Maybe the Knights did it."
Spike initiated a retaliatory strike. "Well, whoever did it cocked it up royally. We're lucky the Bit didn't disappear up her own existence." He looked disconcerted for a moment. "Strike that bit about it being me who did it, then."
Anya ducked beneath the acorn crossfire and crawled out into the open, shaking a few oak leaves out of her shoes. "The important thing is, I really want to be someplace with soap and running water." She stretched and looked around. "Ooh, look, we're not completely lost! I can see the gate across the access road from here!"
Spike shrugged out of his duster and began peeling off the remains of his t-shirt. "Wouldn't be so cheerful about it if I were you. It's miles back to the highway, and hours till sunset yet. An' when we get there, we've four flat tires and only one spare. Even odds the blood in the cooler'll have gone off, and I'm famished."
"Well, don't look at me," Anya said. "Catch a squirrel or something."
"Like I'd bite a couple of scrawny bints like you lot in the first place - " Spike froze, eyes blazing yellow. "Hold on. I hear an engine."
All Dawn could hear was Spike's stomach rumbling, but then she realized the noise was getting too loud for that, and coming from the road. A cloud of pale dust rose above the treetops, drawing slowly nearer. Dawn gulped. Had the Knights decided to come back, with reinforcements? Anya gave a shriek of delight, crammed her shoes back on, and dashed off towards the trailhead, arms waving. A tow truck bounced into view between the trees, Xander at the wheel, Giles hanging out the passenger side window. The DeSoto, much the worse for wear, was balanced precariously atop the truck bed.
Xander brought the truck to a lumbering halt and hopped out to jerk the chains tighter around the DeSoto's rear tires. "Watch the paint job, you bloody Philistine!" Spike bellowed, crawling half-way out of the hollow and jerking back as sunlight clipped the tip of his nose. "That car's a classic!"
"You can stroll over and give me a hand any time, fang-face!" Xander yelled back, adjusting the winch.
And just like that, they were on their way home.
***
There wasn't enough room for everyone in the cab of the truck, so Dawn volunteered to sit in the DeSoto with Spike. Smoking through his duster and two layers of blanket, the vampire leaped into the front seat, slammed the door behind him, and laid into the horn. Through the car's filthy windshield and the equally filthy rear window of the tow truck, Dawn saw Xander flip him off and throw the truck into gear.
It was kind of neat, riding this high, though the truck's suspension left a lot to be desired. Spike was looking kind of green, though - either he wasn't as recovered as he wanted everyone to think, or vampires were extra-susceptible to motion sickness. It wasn't until they jounced off the access road and onto the highway again that he relaxed his grip on the steering wheel, sat back with a sigh, and emerged from his blankets. "Dunno how as I'm going to nick a whole set of new tires for the old girl," he muttered, half to himself. "Not as if you can tuck 'em into your coat pocket and stroll out of the dealership."
Dawn took a swig at the mostly unmelted Slurpee she'd guilted Giles out of. Outside the windows, telephone poles whizzed past, like yesterday's drive unspooling in reverse. It didn't feel, somehow, as if they were headed back to the same place they'd left. She gave Spike a sideways glance. He was slouched in the opposite corner, one hand draped protectively over the useless steering wheel, one booted foot propped on the dashboard. He was swimming in a shirt borrowed from Xander, his scruffy platinum curls backlit by the filtered sunlight.
"I guess a vamp needs his wheels," she said carefully, "To... go places." Spike didn't catch the hint. Dawn wasn't even sure she was dropping one. "I could... help you," she continued. "I mean, I could, like, distract the garage guys or something while you do the actual evil stealing of tires part."
Spike blinked and turned a look of surprise and gratitude upon her. "Much appreciated, Snack-size. But..." There was less regret in his voice than you might have expected. "Your sis wouldn't like it."
"Buffy's dead." Whoa. Deja vu.
"Doesn't matter," Spike said, as if that ended the argument, forever and ever amen.
And she could have left it at that, and she wasn't sure why she didn't, except that it seemed like a cowardly thing to do, and she was tired of being afraid. "Yeah, it kinda does," she said. "Look, you promised to take care of me and all... but the Knights are gone now. And the details of why may be fuzzy, but I'm pretty sure they aren't coming back. Giles is going to track down my Dad any day now, and...and I know you've got stuff to do. Bad evil vampire stuff." Dawn took a deep breath, and did the second bravest thing she'd ever done in her life. That she remembered doing, anyway. "So if you need to... to go places, I just wanted you to know... I understand. And I'll be OK."
She devoted the next eternity or so to excavating precise little holes in her cup of pink slush with the straw, which had this little spoon thing on the end for just such emergencies. What would you call it, a stroon or a spaw? Witness the marvels of modern Slurpee technology.
"Niblet," Spike said at last, and then, "Dawn."
Her belly made a swoopy dip that couldn't entirely be accounted for by the crappy suspension. Could you still have a crush on a guy you'd peeled drunk and filthy off the floor of his crypt, smacked to consciousness, and dragged out of same? A guy who regarded the necks of most people he met with the same fond regard with which he surveyed an extra-rare cheeseburger? A guy who was still madly in love with your dead sister? Maybe she'd think about that some time when she wasn't possibly concussed. He was wearing an expression she was sure she'd seen before, she just wasn't sure where. Kind of a smile, but kind of sad, too. "Your sis... I know she didn't want me in her life, there at the end. She just needed me for a bit, is all. Just like you. No, hush. You know why I fell for her? Wasn't her pretty face, nor her pretty... other parts, though I can't say I didn't fancy those too. It was her heart. Same heart as you've got - valiant, is what she was. What you are." He reached across the seat, fingertips barely brushing the fall of her hair. "Someday, love, you'll hand me my walking papers, 'stead of giving me leave to fetch them myself. And on that day, I'll go. But not one day before."
Dawn sat very still. Then, very deliberately, she slouched down and propped her left foot on the dash, sneaker briefly bumping toes with beat-up Docs. "Well, it's a good thing you're immortal," she said. "Because that day? You'll be waiting a looooong time for it."
And he could have said something lame about how she was too young to know what she wanted about stuff like that, but he didn't. Spike just laced his hands behind his head and grinned, the first real, genuine grin she could remember seeing from him since Buffy'd died. Or maybe ever. "That so? Then get me my slippers, Liza."
There was only one answer to that. "Get 'em yourself," Dawn replied. And the road unwound before them, taking them home to someplace new.
END
Note: This request this story was written to is as follows:
Characters/Pairings you want the story to focus in: Dawn, Spike
Characters/Pairings you want in the story too: Anya! Even if only because D&S are speaking about her.
Things you want: post-Gift but *before* Buffy comes back. Spike takes Dawn out of town for several days - to distract her, to protect her from a demon (a parallel ‘OMWF'?), on a whim... whichever reason works best. I really want the story to focus on D&S, and the firmer their friendship is, the better. Banter is love, lol!
Things you don't want: No LA, and as few B/S as possible, please.
Extras: hitchhiking back home (either they do it, or they pick someone up at some point in the journey). I would love for Spike to tell Dawn *his* version of Lover's Lane (S3), and maybe Dawn can add her own ‘memories' around those events?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-01-30 08:46 pm (UTC)"Blimey, Sherlock, I hadn't noticed!" Spike hissed back. "Try an' look debauched here!"
Dawn dropped her voice to a Penthouse moan. "Oh, Spike!" She tossed her head back in her best impersonation of a romance-novel cover painting. Why should Spike have all the good lines? "My purity is totally sullied! Bite me harder! You make it hurt soooooo good!" Everything was going swimmingly with the debauched key set free to be the teenage girl she never really was, and then you turned the story ampage to 11. The vivid, emotionally wrenching image of the spell overtaking Spike and Dawn was brilliant and frightening. Anya was a comical voice of reason anchoring the chaos spinning between the affected two.
Their amnesia in the aftermath of the spell allowed Spike and Dawn to believably pledge their fealty in the DeSoto. If they'd remembered the spell, there would have been awkwardness and distance. Dawn took Anya's advice to let Spike go, and he's not going anywhere. Lovely stuff.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-31 06:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-05 02:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-08 12:48 am (UTC)