A Raising in the Sun

by Barb Cummings

 

Genre: Drama

Rating: PG-13

Disclaimer: All belongs to Joss and Mutant Enemy, and naught to me.

Summary: Post "The Gift", spoilers for everything under the sun; Pairing: None, 'cause of that inconvenient Buffy being dead thing, but it’s S/B in spirit



Chapter 7

The Bronze wasn't too crowded on a Tuesday night.  Standing on her toes in the doorway and craning her neck, Anya was able to survey almost the whole club.  Neither Willow's red nor Spike's white-blond head stood out in the scattering of people milling about on the dance floor or congregating around the tables.  She was about to say as much to Xander, but he'd caught sight of other familiar faces, and was already wending his way through the dancers to their table.  "Hey!" Xander yelled over the noise of the other patrons.  "Doug!  Lenny!"

Doug and Lenny, along with a few other guys from Xander’s crew at the construction company, were seated around one of the little circular tables, which was littered with the remains of an appetizer platter.  The two of them looked up from their beers and waved back.  "Hey," Doug greeted them as Xander wove his way through the crowd to his table, Anya following along in his wake.  "What's up?  Want a beer?  We got a pitcher. You're not usually here this late on a work night."  He gestured towards a vacant seat.  “Take Joe’s chair, he’s trying to pick up some college chick at the bar.”

"Thanks, bud, but we can't stay long, we're on a manhunt." Xander slid Joe’s chair over for Anya and grabbed another for himself from a nearby table.  "You know my friend Willow?  The redhead?  Has she been in here tonight?"

Doug frowned and exchanged looks with the others.  "Haven't seen her, man.  She's the cute little d--"  Lenny tossed a warning shot of peanuts at him and he cut himself off before swallowing any more foot.  "No.  Hasn't been in."

Xander gave him the eye.  "I believe the current in term is 'woman-loving woman', oh politically correct poster boy.  How about a blonde Brit about so tall, black leather coat, really annoying?"

Lenny scratched his stubbly chin and leaned back in his seat.  "You mean Spike?  That pool-playing friend of yours?"

The description of Spike as a friend of his seemed to throw Xander for a loop.  Anya couldn’t remember having seen him look quite that disgruntled in a while.  "He's no damn friend of mine," he snapped.  "Have you seen him or not?"

"Shit, Harris, bite a guy's head off, why don't you?"  Lenny grumbled.  "No, I haven't seen him.  And I’ve been keeping an eye out.  He bummed a cigarette off me last week and then ripped off the whole pack when I wasn’t looking."

Xander sighed and shoved the hair off his forehead.  "Sorry, Lenny, I'm on edge.”

“It's important we find them,” Anya said.  “Family emergency.”  That was vague enough to cover anything, especially if you never made it clear which family the emergency was in.  She pulled a pen and notepad out of her purse and wrote down a number.  “If you see either of them, give us a beep, please.  Here’s my pager number."

Lenny shrugged.  "Sure.  Smack him one for me when you find him."

“We’ll do that.”  Anya gave Lenny and Doug what she hoped was a sincerely grateful smile.  Faking sincerity was difficult, but, she thought, worth the trouble, especially since she was counting on Xander’s work friends to provide the bulk of really good gifts at their upcoming wedding.  It wasn’t as if Dawn or Tara or Willow had any income to speak of, and Giles was the world’s worst shopper, and if Spike showed up for anything more than the free food and alcohol she would be mightily surprised.  “Thank you both.” 

She got up and took Xander’s arm, tugging him towards the doors.  He slouched out to the parking lot behind her, hands shoved angrily into his pockets.  He didn't say anything until they got into the car and the doors slammed.  He sat gripping the wheel for a moment, then burst out, "Since when am I the Pulseless Wonder's keeper?  If Lenny's gullible enough to leave anything in reach of that goddamn deadbeat vampire he deserves to get burned!"

Anya buckled her seatbelt.  "Lenny doesn’t know Spike’s a vampire,” she pointed out.  “This is one of those things where you're mad at Spike because you don't want to be mad at what you're really mad at, isn't it?"  That was as close as she wanted to come to direct criticism of Willow; that never went over well with Xander.

"No," Xander replied irritably, glancing over his shoulder and throwing the car into reverse.  "It's not.  I'm well and truly mad at Spike on his own merits.  I'm just also mad at me for being sap enough to slack off on hating him.”

“You can’t help it.  Men run in packs.  It’s a hunter-gatherer thing.”

“Can we lay off the hyena metaphors?”  He pulled out into traffic.  “I guess we’ll hit the Fish Tank next.  Dammit, this is hopeless!  They could be anywhere!"

"Not anywhere.  We know they aren't in the places we've already looked," Anya said, stroking his arm.  "Should we check back in with Tara and Giles?"  The other two had remained in Giles' apartment to try working a location spell, but Anya had little expectation of them succeeding.  If Willow were up to something wrong, she was more than capable of screening herself and her activities from the sort of magics Tara and Giles could muster.

Xander tossed the hair out of his eyes.  He was incredibly sexy when he got that resolute, determined look.  "Nah.  Not till we've checked out every place we can think of.  We've been to the library, and the Magic Box, and Spike's crypt, and Will's parents' house... when we find them I swear I'm gonna pound Spike's face in."

“If he’s at the Fish Tank someone may have done it for you.”  In contrast to the trendy brew pubs which sprang up like mushrooms over by the UC Sunnydale campus, downtown Sunnydale had exactly three night spots worth checking–the Bronze, the Fish Tank, and Willie’s, in descending order of seediness and demon-haunted atmosphere.  The latter two were long shots; Anya couldn’t imagine Willow going to either of them, and these days Spike only went to Willie’s when he wanted to beat someone up, and to the Fish Tank when he wanted to get beaten up.  Anya considered.  "But that's safer than trying to pound Willow's face in," she said at last.

Xander faced her suspiciously.  "What's that supposed to mean?"

"Exactly what I said.   If you have to release your anger and assert your dominance in a display of physical violence, hitting Spike is a better idea than hitting Willow.  Willow could damage you severely and Spike can't.  Or we could have rough sex later.  Or both.  I don't mind."

He regarded her for a long bemused moment.  "I see your ‘I don’t mind’ and raise you an ‘Ew.’  If you’re trying to turn me off the idea of pounding faces, you’re succeeding.  Doesn't this piss you off even a little?"

"Only because it makes you angry."

Xander didn't take that one any further, and remained quiet for the rest of the drive over to the Fish Tank, only the occasional furrowing of his brow providing evidence of his thoughts.  Anya looked out the window and watched him out of the corner of her eye.  The fact that Willow and Spike were probably doing a dangerous spell didn't bother her in itself.  She didn't trust Spike around her money, but otherwise she was as indifferent to him as he was to her.  Willow she put up with for Xander's sake, but that was all.  If the two of them blew themselves up, Anya didn't think she'd be very sad about it.

But Willow was Xander's best friend, and Spike was, despite Xander's oft-professed loathing of vampires, his only current male acquaintance who both shared a few of his interests--though usually only to the point that they could argue about who was right for hours--and who was in on Xander's secret life as Assistant Slayer, First Class.  Either of them getting blown up would upset Xander a great deal.  And she didn’t want another funeral.  There had been too many of them lately.  So if Willow and Spike were doing something that hurt Xander, they had to be stopped.

The Fish Tank and Willie’s both proved to be busts; no one had seen Spike at either place for days, and as Anya suspected, no one at either place had ever seen Willow.  They’d been cruising Sunnydale’s remarkable selection of graveyards ever since.  Xander kept checking his watch; it was almost three.  He couldn’t stay out much longer; he had to work tomorrow, and running heavy machinery on four hours’ sleep was something Anya tried to avoid encouraging him to do.  He’d be living on No-Doz for the next day as it was.

Her pager buzzed as they took another futile turn down Main, and Xander pulled over to a corner pay phone.  She slipped coins into the slot and punched in Giles’ number.  “Hello?  Giles?”

His voice on the other end of the line sounded tired, but he’d obviously gotten some news.  “Yes.  I just received a call from the police.  Apparently Spike and Willow showed up at Mr. Summers’ apartment shortly after midnight...” 

A few minutes later she nodded.  “All right.  We’ll meet you there.”   She hung up the phone and dashed back to the car.  “Go to Hank Summers’ place,” she directed.  “Spike and Willow were there, and took Dawn someplace a couple of hours ago.  Giles wants to see if he remembers anything they said about where they were going.”



For Dawn, getting into the DeSoto with its blacked-out windows was like stepping into another world, a tiny private universe smelling of old upholstery and stale cigarette smoke and spilled whiskey and the not-unpleasant earthy scent of vampire.  She’d done it dozens of times over the course of the summer, before her Dad had showed up.  She’d stayed with Willow’s family while Social Services tried to contact her father, in Willow’s old room, which had a convenient private door leading out onto their back porch.  Dawn had invited Spike in, but he’d seldom taken advantage of the fact unless he needed patching up after a fight.  Instead, once or twice a week, he’d appear out of nowhere and tap on the panes of the window, and she’d slip outside and into the big black gas-guzzling dinosaur.  And they’d go places. 

Spike adamantly refused to take her patrolling with him, but otherwise he was perfectly willing to take her anywhere--scavenging at the dump, or on one of his shoplifting excursions, or back to his crypt to watch bad late night movies on his snowy old television and make rude comments about them, or even once or twice to Willie’s, where he let her have a sip of his blood-and-bourbon just to see what it was like (really gross).  Now and again they’d run into demon trouble, because it was Sunnydale, after all, and she’d get a forcible reminder of just how savagely efficient a fighter he could be when the chip wasn’t interfering.  He was, in short, a horrible influence and Dawn loved every moment of it.

She hadn’t realized how much she’d missed it after her father had arrived and taken her in.  Of course, school had started now, and that would have meant a curtailing their midnight jaunts anyway.  But now, tearing out of the parking lot, it was almost like old times again.  Dawn sat in the back seat and listened to Willow and Spike arguing over putting the Ani DiFranco she’d brought or the Butthole Surfers in the portable CD player (Willow claimed to draw the line at bands named after body parts one couldn’t show in public) and reaching a devil's compromise on John Cougar Mellencamp.  In a few moments they were roaring down the interstate at one in the morning, the headlights of oncoming cars growing, blazing into their eyes, dying away, Spike singing I fight authority, authority always wins at the top of his undead lungs as the passing headlights turned his pale hair into a burnished silver halo.  Dawn laid her head down on the windowsill.  This moment was perfect.  She never wanted it to end.

But the future kept rolling towards her an inexorable one second per second, and all too soon the highway gave way to surface streets and the DeSoto was lurching to a halt in the shadow of the old warehouse.  Spike and Willow got out and stood there in the rank grass beside the car, staring up at the rotting hulk of the building.  Dawn got out of the back seat and stood a little behind them, watching the tension build in the way they held themselves.  She herself was beyond nervous, in some kind of state of lucid shock which allowed her to think and act and not deal with the fact that they were about to bring her sister back from the dead.

Spike was the first to move; he went round back and opened up the trunk, and he and Willow started pulling things out.  Big things, a couple of hibachis, it looked like, and a bag of charcoal and some lighter fluid.  "What happens if it... goes wrong?" Dawn said, picking up the charcoal.  Fire King.  Dad used Fire King charcoal for cookouts, back when she was a kid.  Maybe Buffy would like that being what they used to bring her back...  Her voice sounded harsh, older in her own ears.  "If she comes back and she's..."  She didn't want to say Like Mom with Willow there.  Spike hadn't actually seen the results of the spell he'd helped her get the ingredients for... nor had she.  Hearing them had been more than enough.

Willow looked lost.  Spike looked a million years old.  "Then I kill my third Slayer," he said.

Willow closed her eyes and nodded. "And I make sure she won't be in any condition to bring back ever again."

Dawn's skin twitched all over, like a horse plagued with flies.  “You couldn’t--”

The vampire sighed.  “Dawn, love, if I couldn’t I wouldn’t need to.  Think about it.” Spike picked up the hibachis and the two of them started off for the factory.  It took a moment to penetrate.  If Spike were able to kill Buffy, it would mean she weren't quite human.  Dawn felt sick for a moment.  She hugged the charcoal as if it were a lifeline and ran to catch up.

The factory and adjoining warehouse were deserted, though evidence of the Van Guys’ stay remained in the shape of a radio and a cooler full of melted ice and beer bottles in one of the sheds.  Broken glass and scraps of metal crunched softly under Dawn's sneakers, louder under the soles of Spike's Doc Martens, as they circumnavigated the building.  Willow looked questioningly up at the route Spike and Xander had taken inside; Spike shook his head.  "We’re not dodging anyone, we can get in down here."  The doors on the ground floor were locked, but there were plenty of broken windows, and knocking the last few scraps of glass out of one took only a few moments.  Spike went in first and lifted the other two through after him.

Once on her feet again, Dawn looked around.  The interior of the warehouse was still much as Spike and Xander had described it several nights ago.  She pulled a palm-sized flashlight out of her fanny pack and clicked it on, shining it around the cavernous space.  Five sketchily painted symbols in red were still visible in the clear area in the middle of the floor, though drifts of greyish brown vampire dust partially obscured several of them.  The chains which had held the captives lay in several tangled piles nearby, just as they'd fallen from the disintegrated vampires' limbs.  Spike bent over and picked one set up, scrutinizing them with a tight-lipped, unreadable expression before tossing them aside.  They hit the concrete with a loud clank.

Willow had set her duffle down on one of the sagging old tables and was pulling things out--a small brass censer on a chain, some packets of incense, a silver-handled knife, several quartz crystals, a small bowl... she was all business now, nerves subdued to the necessity of getting everything just right.  "Dawn, take the censer and light some of this in it."  She handed Dawn a couple of small charcoal briquets and a packet of incense.  "Don't put the incense on yet, I just want to get the coals going.  Spike, where's your lighter?"

The vampire handed it over silently.  It wasn't one of the throwaway plastic Bics Dawn was used to seeing; it was big and heavy and made out of some silvery metal... probably silver, duh.  After a moment of fumbling with the unfamiliar striker, Dawn flicked it on and held the little flame to the charcoal until a red glowing rim of ember spread around the edge.  She handed it back and Spike went over to the half-melted mess of candles on the table on the other side of the room and began lighting them one by one.  The growing light did little to dispel the room's overall gloom.

Willow took out a sheet of paper on which several complicated symbols were sketched.  She studied it for several minutes, comparing them to the ones on the floor.  Coming to a decision at last, she walked over to one of the half-completed symbols on the floor.  "We'll use this one."  She began scraping at one of the other symbols with the toe of her shoe, and grimaced when this made no impression on the paint.  "We'll have to get rid of these.  They'll mess it up.  Is there any more paint lying around?"

After several minutes of searching they discovered the paint bucket, and Dawn set to work painting over the symbols that Willow pointed out as unnecessary.  Willow got out a large piece of crumbly, reddish chalky stuff and began marking off a large circle around the remaining symbol, pausing to draw complicated little sigils every few feet.  “Spike, set one of those hibachis up to the north and one to the south of the circle."

It took at least half an hour to set up the ritual circle, and when everything was ready, Willow got to her feet and wiped her hands on her jeans nervously.  She pulled a thick sheaf of printouts out of the duffle and began passing them out.  "The original ritual was written to be performed by way more people than we've got.  I've made a lot of changes."  Willow passed each of the other two a sheet of paper.  "Here's your parts.  Uh... Dawnie, give Spike the one in the large type.  This one’s yours.  It’s a long ritual, at least three hours, and once we start we can’t stop.  Also, Vespasian and his people will be arriving in the morning, and us still being here when they get here would be bad.  So be ready to suck it up if you get tired."

Dawn studied her lines in the candlelight, then glanced over at Willow.  "When do I have to get... get cut?"

Willow held up the silver knife and tested the blade on her thumb.  "To start with... right now."  She picked up the shallow bowl.  "I need enough to complete the symbol."

For a moment, standing there, Willow's familiar features were replaced by Doc's.  Dawn felt lightheaded for a moment, and she took one lurching step back, grabbing the edge of the nearest table.  "I--"

"Dawn..."  Spike said quietly.  "It's not too late to stop this."

Spike almost never used her real name.  Stupid vampire could hear how fast her heart was beating.  Dawn swallowed.  "No," she got out, thrusting her arm out towards Willow.  She could still see the long, thin white scar from where she'd inexpertly sliced her own wrist last winter.  "Do it." 



"We have prepared a holy place in the darkness, and we have anointed it with oil..." 

Dawn tipped the small vial and let three precise drops of almond oil fall on the center of the symbol, and walked back to her station on the easternmost edge of the circle.  Her palms ached under the neat gauze bandage; Willow had had to make several cuts to get enough blood to complete the complex swirling pattern.  Her legs were tired, too.  It felt as if they'd been doing this for hours.  They had been doing it for hours.  There'd been the invocation of the Powers, there'd been the consecration of every item involved in the ritual, there'd been the careful placing of the quartz crystals at the nodes where the sigils were drawn around the edge of the circle...

Willow paced its circumference slowly while swinging the censer.  The smell of incense was heavy in the air.  Spike was standing at the westernmost point of the circle, holding the Orb of Thessula cupped in one hand.  The braziers smoked sullenly to either side.  Willow's chant continued.  "We have been granted the blood of the living, and we have summoned the living dead..."

Shaking smoking censer, Willow left the edge of the circle and began spiraling in counterclockwise towards the center.  Her voice was hoarse, but steady.  "As it was written, they shall prepare the way and the very Gates of Death shall open..."

Dawn felt it through the soles of her feet, a deep subterranean rumble which swelled and intensified with every heartbeat.  The original line had been 'the gates of Hell'.  Willow had changed it, but that line had still troubled her.  Angel had fallen through the Hellmouth.  He'd never said what it had been like there, but he'd been crazy for weeks after coming back.

There was no chance that Buffy was really in there.  She wasn’t sure where Buffy was, or if she was anywhere at all, but she knew it couldn’t be there.  Their family had never been religious, and she wasn't even sure which church, if any, either of her parents had ever belonged to.  Still, the whole picture that she'd pieced together from things Buffy and Angel had dropped about Whistler and the Oracles and the Powers That Be didn't sound like the stuff you always heard about what God and Heaven were like.  The Oracles had sounded like total snots, for one thing, and the Powers That Be sure didn't care about the falling of a sparrow.  They were only interested in the big picture, the balance between good and evil, and tough beans to anyone that got squashed in adjusting the balance.

"...that which is above shall rejoice; for that which was below shall arise.   And the world shall know the Slayer; and the Slayer shall know the world.”  Willow was now standing directly in front of Spike.  "One is without breath..."

"Yet I live," Spike responded tersely.  He sounded funny, and Dawn realized that his accent had changed slightly, lost the working-class inflection.

"One is without time..."

"Yet I live."

"One is without soul..."

"Yet I live."

"One is without sun..."

"Yet I live."

"One is dead..."

"Yet I live."

Spike and Dawn both advanced to the center of the circle, meeting Willow there at the end of her spiral path.  Spike held the Orb out over the symbol.  "Animam meam dono pro beneficio amicae carae, et ille sacrificum est."

Dawn pulled off the bandage from her palm, and Willow extended the silver knife, its blade stained rust with the earlier bloodletting.  She couldn't restrain a whimper when the blade bit into her palm again, lengthening and deepening the cut.  "Sanguinem meum dono pro beneficio amicae sororis, et ille sacrificum est."  She reached out and took Spike’s hand, covering the glowing Orb with her bloody palm, and squeezed, hard.  Rivulets of crimson dripped between their clenched fingers and spattered downwards upon the symbol like rain upon parched ground.  Willow threw her arms up and her head back, bloody knife rending the air, her eyes as dark as the sky outside.  Her voice rang out,

"Et ille qui est mortuus vivet
Dum vita et mors non duas res
Sed una est...in tenebris lux!
Buffy Anne Summers, Surge! Surge! Surge!"

Dawn felt the Orb shatter in their dual grasp, fragmenting into a rain of impossibly fine shards, each lurid with her blood, each glowing with its own internal light.  The blood met the cloud of crystalline motes and the shaking of the earth intensified again.  The ground buckled beneath them.  Dawn staggered.  Out of nowhere a howling wind sprang up, sucking the remains of the Orb and the blood droplets into a raging whirlwind.  All three of them drew back involuntarily, barely able to keep their feet against the pitching and yawing of the ground.  The dust of the Orb and the blood swirled together, red and silver, in a whirlwind around the symbol, rising, falling, wheeling about some invisible centerpoint, plunging into nothingness at its heart.

For a long moment nothing happened.  Dawn stood there trembling.  Had it worked?  Had they messed something up?

And then she heard Spike scream.



A maelstrom of blood and moonlight revolved overhead, centered on a pearl of incandescent light.  An uncanny wind whipped their hair, and aftershocks jolted through the old building.  Willow was still caught up in the rhythm of the spell when the vampire's scream broke her concentration.  She tore her eyes away from the swirling nexus of magical energy in time to see Spike let go Dawn's hand and collapse to the blood-splattered concrete, his face drawn in a rictus of agony.  Dawn grabbed for him as he fell, but he was too heavy for her and she could only break his fall a little.  She clutched her hand to her chest and stared from him to her bleeding palm, then turned on Willow.  "What's happening to him?"

Willow fought down panic.  Events were slipping away from her.  "I don't know!"  That wasn't quite true--it was pretty obviously a repeat of whatever had gone wrong back in the crypt, but worse.  This was a completely different spell.  It didn't make sense.  Her eyes were drawn back to the vortex; the brilliant sphere in its heart was the size of a baseball now.  The spell was working--or was it?  Her research on the original spell had led her to believe that the Raising would be almost instantaneous, not drawn out in slow motion like this.  She'd made so many changes, and it wasn't as if she could have tested them... "It shouldn't be doing this!"

Dawn dropped to her knees by the vampire's side, her bloody hand hovering fearfully over his shoulder.  Spike was lying in the middle of the (now somewhat smeared) symbol, with his knees drawn up to his chest and arms wrapped tightly around them, curled into a tight, shivering ball.  "Spike.  Spike!  Can you hear me?"

He twitched a little at the sound of her voice, but his only answer was a strangled snarl.  Dawn looked up at Willow.  "We've got to stop, it's hurting him!"

White-faced, Willow stooped and picked up the scattered pages of the spell that Dawn and Spike had dropped, and began riffling through them.  Her greatest successes in magic had always been driven by emotion, not reason, but there was no place for impulse here.  She had to think.  What had she missed?  "There has to be some connection," she muttered, thinking out loud.  "Both spells went wrong in the same way..."

Dawn laid her hand tentatively on Spike's shoulder and his shivering abated slightly.  "Both spells?" she asked, but Willow ignored the question.

"OK, the obvious--both spells involve Spike's soul.  But one was to summon it, and one was to dismiss it.  Opposite effects, right?  And neither one should have affected him at all, since the soul... wasn't...really... his... Oh, no."  Willow scrabbled through the pages of the spell again, checking, double-checking, her heart sinking.

"Soul?" Dawn interrupted, her voice rising to a shriek.  "What soul?  What are you talking about?  Was that what that glowy thing was?  You said all we needed was some of my blood!"

"Um.  That was all we needed from you."  Willow rested the pages on her knees, staring at the printouts, two voices ringing in her ears--Spike, asking Is there any law says it has to be your soul?   Her old high school computer science teacher, Jenny Calendar, saying Remember, always define your variables.  "I know what the problem is."  She pointed to the final lines of the spell.  "It just says 'I give my soul.'  And it's, like, with vampires, we always say 'soulless' but really, the demon takes the place of the human soul.  With the summoning spell, I'll bet it latched onto the demon first because it was closer, but I'd defined the variables better so it stopped when it found the right one and slurped it up into the Orb.  But this spell, it's all about substitutions--your blood is Buffy's blood, so Buffy's death is your death.  So Spike's soul is, well, his old one, but also--"

"The demon."

"Yeah.  That's pretty much it."  Willow avoided Dawn's eyes and wondered if she looked as miserable as she felt.  "The spell's pulling Spike's demon out of his body."

Dawn's eyes went wide with horror.  "That will kill him!"

"Well... uh... yeah.  Since the demon's the only thing keeping him from being a corpse, if it gets pulled out all the way he's probably going to go all dusty on us."

"Then make it stop!" Dawn yelled, balling both hands into fists.

"No."

The word was no more than a hoarse growl.  Spike had uncoiled himself, and was now pushing himself up off the pavement, holding himself rigid against the shudders which still wracked his body.  "No.  If it's working, you bloody well keep it working!"  He lifted his head, slowly and painfully, and Willow's stomach crawled a bit as the planes of his face finished shifting and settling.  The candlelight glittered in his golden eyes and threw the ridged brow and permanent snarl of his vampire countenance into horrific relief.  Willow wasn't even sure he realized he'd slipped into game face, though it made sense; that would give the demon a surer hold on the flesh it inhabited.  Dawn didn't seem to notice either; she just kept holding on to his shoulder.  Spike grabbed her arm and leaned into her shoulder for support, baring his fangs in a grimace of pain.  After a moment he drew breath enough to continue, "You get her back.  That's what we came for, to get her back or to make damned sure no one else can.  You keep--aaahh!"  He doubled over again.

The incandescent sphere was swelling overhead now, a miniature sun.  Willow hesitated.  "Look, if we can get her through I think it'll stop.   It did get the one soul, after all, so that should satisfy the conditions of the spell.  But I don't know how long it'll take!  It should've happened much faster than this, and if it goes on too long--"

Spike snarled up at her, "You think I didn't mean it when I said I'd give my soul for her?  Either of 'em!  Finish the bloody spell already!"

Dawn whimpered deep down in her throat.   Willow closed her eyes, lifted her arms, and began the chant once more.



There was a moment Spike had witnessed hundreds of times.  Sometimes it went flashing by in an eyeblink, sometimes it stretched itself out long enough for the shocked victim to look down, to realize that the moment had come and that it was too late to avoid it.  It was the moment when one of a few select kinds of physical damage--fire, a wooden stake penetrating the heart, the removal of the head from the body--irreparably severed the connection between human body and demon soul.  When the moment was over, a vampire dissolved into ash.

None of those things had happened to him, but he was caught in that moment nonetheless, infinitely prolonged.  The agonizing, undefinable pull he'd felt during Willow's earlier spell was magnified a hundredfold.  He was being torn ever so slowly in two, and somehow he had to hold on to himself.

Concentrate.  On the hard concrete floor.  On the gritty layer of dust under his hand, on the smell of Dawn’s congealing blood.  Here.  Now.

He needed the demon.  He'd known that from the first night, in the moment in which his first human prey ceased to be 'the woman' and became simply food.  He remembered staring down at the ragged crimson mess he'd made of her neck in his eagerness, expecting to feel guilt and horror and anguish, and instead feeling... pleased.  And still hungry.  In the flush of his new power he’d challenged Angelus for his own kill, and the older vampire had clouted him in the head hard enough to send him spinning across the alley and smash into the wall opposite.  He should have been terrified.  He should have backed down and begged pardon, crawled away and nursed his humiliation helplessly, in private, as he had all his life.  Instead he surged to his feet with a roar and launched himself at Angelus' back--and his grand-sire turned around, smashed him methodically into jelly and left him lying there until Drusilla came flitting by just before sunrise and carried him back to the lair.  Angelus, satisfied he'd learned his lesson, ignored him--and never really understood why, the whole time, the newly-risen William had been laughing.

Here.  Now.  Willow’s voice rising and falling, certain as the tide.  Taste of his own blood where he’d bitten the inside of his cheek falling.

That was the real gift the demon had given him: not immortality, nor strength, nor supernatural keenness of sense, but rage.  Pure, killing rage that swept fear aside and lent sinew to every other passion he owned.  It wasn't true that he had never feared anything again after that night--he'd feared plenty.  But the fear didn't matter any longer.  He was transformed.  The demon fit into the hollow place within him where the guilt and horror and anguish should have been--good riddance to them--as if he'd been born to it.  So seamless was the meld that it was easy to make himself believe that the demon was all he was, and look back with scathing contempt, when he cared to look back at all, upon the mediocre life and times of William the Bloody Awful Poet.  He needed the demon to be Spike.

Light swelling overhead, so bright it hurt even through eyelids shut tight.  Here.  Now.  Not enough.  The world was fading out around him like a photograph left too long in the sun.

He was slipping out of his own grasp, catching desperately at fraying scraps of memory--Standing on the Slayer's front lawn, ducking his head to hide the grin of embarrassment.  “I want to help save the world.”  Sitting in the Slayer's kitchen, pouring out his heartbreak about Dru's desertion to Joyce Summers over hot cocoa--and miraculously finding purchase.

Steeling himself to crawl to his mortal enemies rather than let himself starve to death after the chip had gone in.  Finding excuses to hang around Sunnydale and run into said mortal enemies.  The horrible realization that his obsession with killing the Slayer had mutated into something very different.  Storming up to her doorstep, shotgun in hand, determined to end the whole farce.  Ending up trying to comfort her instead.

The spell didn't pull at that part of him.  Had his humanity been only a fading collection of century-old memories, the demon might have been ripped out entire by now, clawing uselessly at a mooring of sand.  But the line between William and Spike had always been dangerously fuzzy.  He held onto every scrap of weak, aberrant, human behavior he could muster, held on for dear unlife.  There wasn't any stake in his heart and there wasn't any fire charring his flesh and his head was still on his shoulders and buggered if he was just going to let go.

Watching 'Passions' with Joyce in the crypt.  Helping Dawn steal Giles' journal.  Playing pool with Xander.  Telling Dawn stories about his past while she listened with horrified relish.  Siding with Buffy against Dru after his disastrous attempt at revealing his feelings.  The queer hitch in his throat when he finally heard, third-hand, of Joyce's death.  Helping Dawn with the ill-fated attempt to resurrect her.  Hanging in chains from Glory's penthouse ceiling.  The wash of shame when he realized that Buffy knew about the robot.  Hiding Dawn in the sewers.  Stealing the van.  Grabbing the sword.  Finally reinvited into Buffy's house, looking up at her as she ascended the staircase.  “I know I'm a monster.”

The world sharpened around him again, sound and scent and vision coming back into focus.  He needed the demon to be Spike.  He was beginning to realize how much he needed William to be Spike, too.  Dru, bless her mad murderous heart, had been right about one thing. You were born to slash, and bash, and oh! bleed like beautiful poetry...

He'd stood up to a bloody goddess once.  She'd creamed him, of course, just as Angelus had, but he'd taken everything Glory could dish out and then some, and still scraped up the stones to force his beaten, bloody self to stand up when those elevator doors opened, prepared to do it all over again.  Had he been all William, he would have been blubbing everything he knew after three minutes of Glory's idea of fun and games.  Had he been all demon, he wouldn't have been in those chains in the first place.  The one couldn't, the other wouldn't, fight some fights.

Spike wasn't one or the other.  He was both at once, and right now it was inconceivable that Spike do anything but fight.

Continue to Part 8

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