Part V

Buffy was on Spike’s heels when he made it to the clearing in front of his crypt. Xander had been left behind. There was no way he could possibly keep pace with the inhuman speed of vampire or Slayer. Buffy came to a halt beside Spike, and he knew without her saying a word that she was horrified by the sight that greeted them.

Dru stood with her arms wrapped around Dawn as Dawn struggled in vain to get away. Dru might be weak, but she was still a vampire.

Dru looked directly at Spike. "This unnatural thing lurked outside my door."

"Ugh!" Dawn grunted as she struggled. "Again, I’m human. You’re a vampire. Who’s the unnatural one here?"

"She sizzles in my arms, Spike. Like lightening in a storm." Dru looked at him in confusion. "It isn’t right."

He approached Dru cautiously. "Then why not let her go, Pet?"

"But I wanted to know what lightening tastes like. You wouldn’t deny me what I want would you? You swore you wouldn’t. You swore on your grave."

"My grave’s been lonely since you’ve been gone," He murmured in soft, lover-like tones. "Let her go and we’ll go inside to be reacquainted."

"Lonely, huh?" Harmony scoffed. "What am I? Chopped liver?"

Spike turned on Harm ferociously. "Very possibly, if you don’t shut your trap."

"Blondie Bear?"

"What?"

"I don’t like the way you’ve been talking to me tonight. I don’t like it one bit, and if you don’t stop talking all mean and grumpy, I’m going to go home."

"And here I thought there might not be a God."

Harmony’s lower lip jutted forward. "You aren’t my boyfriend any more. Not even a little bit. And that means no sex. Not unless you ask very, very nicely."

He caught Harmony’s arm. "Hey, Dru, I’ve got an idea. You give me Dawn there, and I’ll let you eat Harm."

"Don’t want Harm," Dru protested. "Vampires stick in my teeth." Dru cocked her head to the side. "Might kill her though. She hasn’t been a good vampire. Not good at all."

Dru’s dark gaze narrowed, and Harmony began to shake with real fear as she shrank behind Spike.

"Blondie Bear..." Harm cried piteously.

Drusilla’s normally tranquil visage took on an angry cast. "He’s MINE!" She bit out harshly. "I chose him. I made him. He belongs to me. I picked him out extra special, and you can’t have him." Dru turned on Buffy. "Or you either. I see you standing there in the light saying you don’t but you do. Say it’s not so, but you can’t change what’s true, all the little daggers that shoot from your eyes. They cut him and prick him, but he isn’t yours to hurt. He’s mine."

"Got to love a possessive woman," Xander said as he gasped for breath, having finally made it to the clearing after the dash across the graveyard. "What did I miss?"

"Dorcas is trying to kill me," Harmony announced.

"Oh really? Why’s that?"

"Because I stole Blondie Bear from her."

Xander frowned. "Was that before or after she dumped him for a Chaos Demon in Brazil?"

Spike turned and glared at all of them.

Xander lifted his hands plaintively. "Hey, I’m just saying-"

Spike faced Dru. "How about Xander? He’s not a vampire. You could eat him."

"Hey!" Xander protested. "If I’m dead who are you going to beat at pool? Without me you’d lose a hefty chunk of your cash flow."

"Right. Dru, ignore Xander."

But she didn’t. Her eyes became hazy and deep as they often did when she looked into that other, distant world. "You have a good heart."

Xander smiled. "Yeah, I know. I was the heart of the super slayer last year."

"Slayer!" Dru hissed.

"But I can see where you might not like that," Xander rushed to say. "Forget I said it."

"I always do." Dru gazed dreamily at Xander.

"Would you kill me?"

"Pet!" Spike cried. "You don’t mean that."

"Well you won’t do it!" she accused petulantly.

"But I will." Buffy raised her crossbow.

Spike stepped between the two women. "You would have to go through me first, Slayer."

"Don’t think I wouldn’t."

"Don’t think you could."

"They’re posturing again," Xander explained to Harmony, Dawn, and Dru. "They like to do this a couple times a week. Nothing ever comes of it though."

"Shut up, Xander," Buffy and Spike said in unison.

"Okay, but... um... before I do, can I mention just one thing?"

Buffy sighed. "Just one."

"I think Dru’s about to kill Dawn."

Spike spun around crying, "Dru, no!"

Dru gazed at him with tears in her hopeless eyes. "I have to or you won’t keep your promise." A single tear coursed down her cheek. "I’m tired, Spike. And the voices don’t stop any more. I drift for days and don’t know where I am. There’s no reason for this. None at all. Not now."

Spike searched in vain for something to say, some words to pierce her melancholy. He drew a blank but had to say something. "What’s so different today than yesterday or the day that came before that? The burns will go away, Pet."

She shook her head. "Some scars heal, others don’t."

"These scars will. They’re almost healed now. You’ll be good as new, Pet. Everything will be just like it was before."

"No, it won’t," Dru insisted. "I told you. The shadow!"

"Angel?" Spike took a cautious step toward Dru. "You don’t have to worry about Angel here." Then glancing at Buffy he amended, "But if you do, we don’t have to stay here. I can take you to see the world again."

"Seen the world. Seen too much of it. Don’t want it any more. There’s no point in it."

"Because of what Angel did to you?" Spike asked in disbelief as three lifetimes of resentment of the older vampire bubbled to the surface. "If it’s revenge you want, I’ll be glad to exact it." And suddenly Spike became very aware of the crossbow trained at his back. Until now, Buffy’s threats had been idle. Over the years, Buffy had more than ample opportunity to kill him, just as he’d had more than one shot at killing her. Yet here they both stood, unharmed. But if he threatened Angel? Yeah, Buffy would stake him over that.

Dru gave Spike a sad, sweet smile. "You can’t get my revenge. Not after all these years."

All these years? Spike shook his head thinking he hadn’t heard her correctly. "This isn’t about what happened in LA?"

"Angel wasn’t in the city of angels. I told you. There was only icy fog where he used to be. He did not care." Again her eyes filled with tears. "He saw all the pretty lawyers about to die and did not care!"

Buffy gasped. "No. That can’t be true."

Dru turned her dreamily bewildered eyes toward the Slayer. It was probably the first time these two such starkly different creatures shared the same expression - shock, horror and confusion.

Dru’s head tilted to the side as she talked quietly, intimately to Buffy. "It isn’t Angel is it? Angel would not walk away. But he did. Why did he? He stood at the top of the stairs. Grandmummy said they would die, all the pretty men and women in suits full of wine and money. Angel would not walk away. He would never walk away, but HE did. Vile creature. HE said he did not care. Angel would have cared." Dru turned back to Spike asking in a lost voice. "He did not care! How can there be revenge on such a creature? How?"

Now Buffy sounded almost as lost Dru. "Angelus?"

"No!" Drusilla cried. "Not Angelus. I know Angelus well." Her hands slipped around Dawn, moving upward in a slow path until she covered the young girl’s ears. "He came to me long ago."

Spike saw the tell tale signs, the swaying tempo of Dru’s body, and the vague look in her eyes, that said that Dru was lost to them. She was somewhere in the far distant past or in the not too distant future. She chanted: "Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been two days since my last confession... "

"More like two days and a century and a half," Buffy said under her breath. Spike didn’t think the Slayer meant to be heard, but he heard her all the same.

Dru’s voice became choked and tearful, and her words were full of fear. "I’ve been seeing again, Father. Didn’t try to, I swear! But yesterday the men were going to work in the mine and I had a terrible fright, my stomach tied all in knots and I saw a horrible crash, men screaming in the dark... my mum said to keep my peace, it didn’t mean nothing..."

"Love," Spike said soothingly as he stealthily drew near. "This was all very long ago, before even I was born. Don’t go dredging up past uglies. Don’t torture yourself so."

But Drusilla was lost somewhere in her dark, horrible past. Tears filled her eyes. "My mum says I’m cursed. My seeing things is an affront to God. That only He is supposed to see anything before it happens. But I don’t mean to, Father, I swear. I try to be pure in His sight, and I do my penance. I don’t want to be an evil thing."

"Talk about a family dysfunction junction," Xander whispered into the dark. "Makes my mom sound like mother of the year."

Dru didn’t seem to hear. She heard another voice, a darker one... an evil one. "Please, do not call me a devil. I’m not a spawn of Satan! I’m not! I want to be good! I want to be pure!"

Xander frowned. "I’m confused, was it her mother or the priest calling her that?"

Spike gave the younger man a dark look before growling: "Neither."

"Help me!" Drusilla cried. "Oh please. Help me! He comes for me. Oh God! Dear God. PLEASE!"

Xander shook his head. "I still don’t get it. Who’s she talking about? Who told her these things? Who scared the bejesus out of her?"

Spike’s gaze as it settled on Xander was pitiless, and exasperated. "Who do you think? Angel."

Dru’s insane reverie continued unabated. "It’s dark? How did it become so dark? And there is blood, so much blood. Papa went first, then my mum. One by one he took them all. Mother. Father. Sisters three. He pushed me to the side. ‘Watch’, he told me. Oh God, my family. They scream. They scream before they die. They scream as they do. They’re scream now. When will they stop screaming? Stop screaming!" she commanded in rising hysteria. "I tell you to stop screaming!"

Pain welled inside Spike. Pain for his tortured, demented Dru. "Please, Pet, come to the present. The past will only hurt you." Or destroy you, he thought. Destroy all that was left of you when Angelus was done.

Dru shook her head in bewilderment. "Why didn’t he kill me? He could have killed me." Dru’s piercing gaze pinned Buffy. "He did not kill me. Why? Why make me watch then leave me in a pool of blood so dark... it was almost black... so I added my own. A kitchen knife across my throat. Whack. Whack. Kindest cut was my own."

Buffy shuddered as Dru looked into unseen faces and cried: "No, Sisters. I cannot be saved. I do not want to be. Can’t you see? They all died. Died for no cause but me. Kill me and mayhap you’ll be spared."

Dru sank onto the ground pulling Dawn down with her.

Dawn’s face twisted in terror as she began to struggle. She should struggle, Spike thought. Dru was out of control and unless this nightmare was brought to a swift end, Drusilla might kill the Nibblet in a fit of madness.

Dru began to rock, almost as if she meant to comfort not only herself but the horrified Dawn. "Sisters of Mercy, don’t you see?" Dru wailed. "He had none. Not pity, or kindness either. There is no grace or peace. Not heaven, just hell. Hell for the likes of me. Sisters, please!"

Silence overtook the graveyard. Spike, Xander, Buffy and Harmony did not move or make a sound. They stood transfixed by the horror of Dru’s agonized screams. "Black and white and red! Against the wall and on the floor. All around me, falling one by one ‘till there are no more... and no me either."

"He comes again!" Dru sobbed. "He will not be denied. Sisters pay for mercy with life and blood. They lie like dust beneath his feet. Crunch beneath his toes making blood like wine."

Dru laughed hysterically, a sobbing laugh full of defiance and misery. "I would not see. I won. I was no longer there. I fly in stars and hide in clouds. I was not there when he brought grandmother to see. I was not there when his cravat fell to the floor, followed by shirt and trousers too. I was not there as he fell over me, taking soul and virtue. I was not there!"

Buffy looked sick.

Dru looked destroyed.

"Kill me! For pity’s sake, kill me!" Dru screamed.

"But he would not let me go. He would not let me die." Her face transformed to vampire and insistence entered her crying tone. "Hurt me then. Make me suffer for surviving when all I loved did not. Pain and punishment are all that make life worthwhile."

Dru didn’t sound like herself, Spike thought. There was too much logic in what she said, though it was tortured logic at best.

"Angelus hurt me. Called me evil and vile." Dru smiled her sad, ghastly smile. "I lived to be punished and Angelus did it best."

Without conscious volition, Spike found his gaze drifting toward the Slayer. There was a green cast to Buffy’s face as shock and disgust colored her eyes. Her expression was similar, but in some ways worse, than the one Spike had seen on her face when he had exposed Riley Finn’s betrayal.

Spike realized that he was doing it again, showing Buffy things she would rather not see, things that perhaps she should never have known. He tore away a veil of trust and hope and showed her the ugly truths that lay beneath. He wished he could be someone else, someone who didn’t find himself shoving truths in her face saying, "See! This is what happens around you when you do not look! These are the things you do not know." He could lie to within an inch of his unlife, so why did he keep bringing the truth to this one girl? Why could he not stop himself? Why did he do these things when it only brought pain to her eyes and disgust to her face when she looked at him? What was it he so badly wanted Buffy to see?

"If you could only see me," a voice spoke to Spike from the past. William’s voice... his OWN voice so long denied.

Bollocks. What was he doin’ moonin’ over the Slayer when Dru was cryin’ out in pain and the Slayer stood with a stake ready to impale his heart? In the past the choice had been simple. Bloody hell, there had been no choice at all. Kill the Slayer, drag Dru into his arms and off they would go to make a merry hell elsewhere. But those days were dead or dying. Choices came harder now. At some point the lines between right and wrong, love and desire had blurred to the point that Spike no longer knew where one ended and the other began. He couldn’t decide where on the spectrum he stood except that he stood between these two women that he loved but who did not love him.

Dru was sobbing now. "Daddy went away. Angelus was gone." She looked up imploringly. "How could I live without Daddy to hurt me?"

Abruptly Dru’s tears stopped and her face lit with madly fierce glee. She began to laugh, a loud, unfettered, wild laugh that sent chills down Spike’s spine as Dawn looked up at him with abject terror in her young eyes. Spike frowned. Dawn should be terrified. Dru was beyond reason or sanity. She was disintegrating before their eyes.

"Angel!" Dru cackled. "Oh he suffers so. What wonderful vengeance. What beautiful pain. I am a thorn in his side, a memory he cannot forget. I’m the face of horrors HE created. I am the evil he made but cannot bring himself to stop. Isn’t it wonderful? Isn’t it grand? Oh how he turns away. The shame of it tears him down. I am the blood of my mother, and father and sisters three crying for vengeance from beyond the grave. I am the specter bathed in the blood of the Sisters of Mercy who found none in him. What a perfect picture. What a fitting end."

Dru tilted her head to the side, Dawn’s fragile skull still clasped in her unnaturally strong hands.

"Only it was not the end," Dru said in confusion. "He sat in the dark, in the city of angels, but Angel was not there, not Angelus neither. He was dark and cold and did not care. I look in his eyes. Nothing is there. Not pain or grief or guilt. Not punishment or admonition. Nothing. There’s nothing left for me to do."

Her gaze drifted toward Spike. "Nothing but you."

Spike could hear Buffy’s quickly indrawn breath.

Dru looked up at the stars. "Sisters of Mercy said God protects. God has mercy. He has pity on our souls." She frowned. "Pity on our souls but nothing else?"

With sudden, unprecedented clarity Dru looked directly at Spike, really looked at him. Maybe for the first time, maybe for the only time in all their years together Dru seemed to see him without a cobweb of dreams and nightmares. "We lost our souls for no crime," she cried to him. "We did no wrong save to have hearts we could not defend. He broke me, and I stole you. Your heart gleamed in darkness. It was bright and true. I wanted it for my own to replace all that I had lost."

Crystalline tears coursed down Dru’s pale, gaunt cheeks. "You were gentle - kind and good. You offered love even where it was not wanted. But I wanted. I wanted so badly. I needed too."

Dru’s eyes drifted closed, shielding her torment from prying eyes though her tears still gave testament to more grief than any creature should bear.

Dru said with quiet, terrifying sanity. "I stole you with promises that were not true. I took you from light to this hell. I cursed you because you alone had heart enough to love me."

Spike ached to touch her, to comfort Dru. To brush away her tears and place a tender kiss on her brow. Dru’s lashes lifted and, by the look in her eyes, Spike was aware that she knew exactly what he was feeling. She knew every word he would say before he could even think to say it. She knew. His past, his present, and his future... She knew.

"I’m sorry," Dru cried. "If I knew mercy I would give it to you. If I could find saving grace, it would be yours. Even now, in darkness, your heart has some light. I hear the echo of its beating. A hundred and score years gone and still it lives. It mocks me, making my curse complete. The only one to love me, I cursed to a death without love or mercy. Alone and in the dark, forever shunned by the light you sought." With shoulders slumped, no longer defiant and proud, or even remotely mad, Dru looked to Buffy. "I fled thinking one more rich in hope could lead the way to grace. But there is no mercy. There is no reprieve. A curse once given cannot be wished away. God turns a blind eye when old, dark hearts shatter like glass."

Dru gazed sorrowfully at Spike, tears once again brimming in her eyes then spilling over. "God has pity on our souls," she told him. "But nothing else."

And he saw the moment. He knew the decision was made. Dru released her last lingering tie to sanity and gave way to the voices, the pain and the madness within as she brutally pushed against the fragile bones of Dawn’s skull.

"No!" Spike could not allow this to happen. He could not allow this nightmare to be. He lunged forward and yelled in blistering pain as something pierced his back, tearing through his skin and muscle and bone.

Buffy had staked him!

"Slayer!" he roared, looking in disbelief at the viciously sharp wooden stake protruding from his chest just below his collarbone. She had missed his heart by inches.

"I SAID crossbows could be slippy," Harmony crowed.

Spike’s gaze locked with Buffy’s. He knew just where he stood - between Buffy and Dru. He hadn’t been the target. She had meant to kill Dru.

Fury lit inside him. It could not be contained. A word ripped through him, tearing at his vocal chords as it willed itself to life. "No!"

In pain and fury and encroaching despair, Spike pulled the stake THROUGH his shoulder, unaware that his agony transformed his face into that of a demon. "I warned you, Slayer. I will NEVER allow you to hurt my Dru."

But Buffy didn’t waver. She didn’t bend. "Then I’ll kill you, Spike. I won’t let her murder my sister."

Spike looked for any hesitation or doubt in Buffy’s gaze. There was none. She spoke only the truth. Buffy would not, could not allow her sister to be killed, and part of Spike knew that he could not ask it of her, just as he could not allow her to hurt Dru.

This was hell then. Spike had spent a hundred years avoiding it, but here he stood, trapped between two women he loved.

Two more diametrically opposed creatures could not be imagined - ethereal Dru, full of dreams and nightmares, childlike after a hundred and sixty years of living, and the strong and vibrant Buffy, so burdened by responsibility that he feared she would grow old before her time... if she were allowed to grow old at all.

Spike hurt for them both, grieved for them too, for all either would appreciate it. Both beauties were sirens luring him to his terrible fate. One love mired in madness and death no matter how he tried to save her and another who would not accept his heart if he offered it up on a silver platter.

Neither woman was his, or would be his, or COULD be his.

Spike was alone, as he had been all along, as he would always be. He was cursed after all. And Spike realized now, some things would ALWAYS be beyond his reach. Some things were never meant to be, though his heart tried in vain to will itself back to life, to pursue lost dreams of love. Only there were things that could not be had for the asking.

And as he looked at Dru holding an innocent girl’s life in her hands, Spike knew that some things could never be denied.

Dru nodded. The time had come. Spike couldn’t explain it. How had a choice been made when he was so unwilling to make it? If he had found it impossible to choose whom to love, how could he have chosen whom to kill?

Dru sighed. It was neither happy nor sad, just deep and perhaps... Spike could be wrong but it was like the last sigh of life he had heard on so many victims’ lips. The last breath given when one knew there would be no more. It was surrender, or peace.

A slight Mona-Lisa-like smile drifted across Dru’s pale but beautiful face. Dru looked human again, and her scars were almost completely gone - not that Spike had ever really noticed them anyway. She was beautiful, as beautiful as she must have been as a young, innocent girl, before nightmares and demons had come to claim her.

"The end," Dru said in a soft voice and closed her eyes... and began tightening her fingers around Dawn’s skull.

Dawn began to scream in terror and in pain. The child’s cries pierced the night causing birds in the trees above them to flutter and take flight in a whoosh of air and chaos.

Buffy raised her crossbow, but hesitated. Spike still stood between her and her target, between her and her sister’s life.

Dawn’s screams rose in pitch becoming high and thin and heartbreaking. "Oh God!" she cried.

And Dru bent close to Dawn’s ears whispering just loudly enough for only Dawn and Spike to hear. "God doesn’t want you, unnatural thing." And Dru’s hands tightened and began to twist Dawn’s head. She was going to break the child’s neck.

Dawn’s wail split the air.

"Dru, no!" Spike dove forward, impaling Dru with the stake covered in his own blood.

For an instant, a fraction of a second, Dru’s gaze met Spike’s, and she smiled. Then, she disintegrated in his hands.

"Dru no!" he cried. "No!" Dust fell through his fingertips. "No, no, no. Please come back. You must come back. Dru!" He sounded like a wounded animal as he buried his face in his hands, hands covered in the dust of the woman who had seduced his heart and soul. The woman he had followed to the ends of the earth, to death and beyond. The woman he was not sure he could live without. "Dru..."

Buffy took a hesitant step forward, but Spike lifted his hand as if to ward her off. "Slayer," he growled. "Leave me be. Leave US be." He fell to his knees. His head was bowed as he moaned: "Just leave."

Dawn lay on the ground looking up at Spike with huge innocent eyes. He offered the child his hand, and drew her to her feet. When Dawn would have spoken, Spike shook his head. "Just go, Nibblet."

Dawn didn’t move for a long moment, she just dropped her hand on his shoulder. He could have wept over that small, simple gesture if he was not already silently weeping from heartrending grief. Spike gave Dawn a nod of acknowledgment so that she could throw herself into her older sister’s arms, sobbing out her pain and fears as Spike could not allow himself to do.

Buffy held Dawn, her hand gently at the back of sister’s head, the other around Dawn’s trembling shoulders but her gaze remained on Spike. He knew it. He felt it. And he returned the look - whatever it was. It could have been empathy, or loathing. Resentment, or the silent communication of two creatures who knew what it was like to kill what you loved best in all the world. Whatever it was, it was there and then it was over.

Picking up her crossbow and mercifully grabbing Harmony across the mouth, Buffy, her friend and her sister disappeared into the night leaving Spike alone, terribly alone, in his own unremitting darkness.