Disclaimer: I own Nothing except Nora and Aubrey
January 6th 2005. She sat at the table with her head in her hands, staring at a glass filled with clear fluid that Spike took as her usual gin & tonic w/ lime. Concerned, but not wanting to seem it, he came up quietly. “Somehow I don’t get the feeling your family holiday was too relaxing, what? Did Grandpa have too much nog and call grandma a bitch?”
She raised her head, streaked face where some tears would fall without any pretense or sobs. “People drink too much around the holidays. My grandmother never drank, not since it killed my uncle Robert slowly. Now she’s gone.”
He frowned. Great. ‘Look what you’ve talked youself into, you git. Now she’ll go into some distraught crazy talk’. He’d been here before. He told Buffy that he had saved her every night since her death, but he’d never be able to make her know what it was like. “I’m sorry.” he had little else to say. That same timelessness crept between them, as it had whenever they chatted over a drink, but this one was stifiling, not as though he had to breathe. Nora, for the first time, felt frightened, but warning in her heart was drowned by her helplessness.
“They live in your heart, the dead. You never forget them, and its nice to rewrite history and only remember the good times. So tell me something about her, your best memory”, he almost wished he had a confidante, but its lonely at the top of the food chain, and knew he would have pushed them away.
“She’s not dead. She’s inside her body, ready to move on from this world and she cant because they wont take her off life support. I inherited her gift for intuition and healing, and found her spirit; I was able to say goodbye, but the rest of the family won’t understand. She knows its her time. I wish she could find peace”, and finally broke down.
Spike got up without thinking and took her in his arms, nothing to do but hold her. Her body was so hot, warming his room-temperature flesh quickly. The first few moments, the energy between their bodies was immense, her head found its place in the curve of his neck, time felt like it had stopped, somewhere a glass broke behind the bar and as months before, time went back into full swing. “C’mon luv, lets get you out of here, I’ll walk you home” Spike put a few dollars down for her drink and while she was turned, he threw back what had apparently been her gin and tonic. It was only water.
“You’ve lost loved ones recently, or rather, they’ve lost you”. Spike had his eyebrows bunched together at her, she looked down at the pavement, “there’ve been rumors: love for a Slayer, a champion was needed to save the world, you burned up with Sunnydale and are somehow back here, but you haven’t gone to find her yet”
He stared at the sidewalk, answering without lifting his eyes. “She’s got a life to live. I cant go off and find her without having my own place in the soddin world. The Great Poof’s sittin up in his high throne in that hellhouse and sugarcoating what’s happened to him, he’s lost his head. I wont end up like that. He stays away because of his bleedin soul, I stay away because I want her to find herself aside from the Slayer….soddin Wolfram and Hart.”
So they talked of the unfairness of love in all its forms, and when the passed a corner shop that was still playing christmas music, she shivered and slipped her hand in Spike’s pocket where his hands were deeply buried and wrapped her had in his like a small child, not entwining their fingers, but rather like young children in line at school.
At a streetlight, he asked her suddenly, because it had only come to him just then, “whats a girl like you doing working for Wolfram&Hell, having drinks with a vampire and hoppin round the city with him?”
She sighed and looked at him hard. “I was slipped a drug at a college party and bitten by a vampire who I had known before his turning. I couldn’t move, but remember him pulling away and screaming after biting me. My best friends were either killed or turned. I lost a lot of blood from the wound and was found the next morning. Ive been searching for what made me different ever since”. She said it quickly, as though it were a speech she wasn’t prepared to give, but knew all of her lines.
After she said it, he was able to put his finger on what partially made her so attractive. Her blood sang to him while it was coursing through her veins. He glanced at her neck, noticing the scar, wondering if he too, would be repelled by it. Her body was womanlier than the Slayer’s; deeper curves and she walked with less of a strut. He wondered about all those emotions he had stirred up, frustration written all over her face. “That why youre working for Wolfram & Hart? Trying to get inside info?” he’d try and see if he could get a bit more out of her. “I needed a job, I could do office work, it wasn’t until later did I realize what I got myself into. Then your pal Angel became the Cheese and I was happy to see some of the creeps go. I’m not so stupid as to let out what happened to me, those people would have cut me open for testing if I had uttered a word about it.”
Spike realized she wasn’t ready to play ball, she knew he was edging at something and she could be just as cunning to avoid it.
They walked for a good 2 and a half hours simply chatting, moving off the subjects that were too close to home and on to neutral ones. Nora spoke of her family and grandmother, love of the outdoors and the music she grew up on. She’d played guitar since childhood and still played some clubs occasionally. Yes, she owned a Ramone’s vinyl, yes she could hold her own with a bit of very basic hand to hand sparring, and yes, to Spike’s dismay she was a vegetarian.
“This is my building,” she sighed. “Nice place,” Spike replied, and he was being honest, not too expensive, but more upscale than he expected. A friendly and safe place, needless to say, he felt uncomfortable even going inside.
She lived on the third floor, at the far end from the elevator. She slid her hand from his as she took out her keys. “I’d invite you in, but I’ve sorted laundry all over the sitting area,” she said it with a half smile but he didn’t know whether to believe her or not, but it didn’t matter anyway, he had had a nice chat, but that was about enough human interaction as was his dose for awhile. He’d be good for the next few weeks, maybe a month.
Looking back on it, that was the point where he could have turned around and left, nothing would have happened and he’d still be in the same mindset and dead body. If he knew than what he knew now…..
A shriek came from down the hall, and a crashing if glass. Nora printed to the door and banged on it screaming for a Mrs. Andrews. Spike pulled her away to break down the door. There was a demon crouching over her, letting her bleed into some sort of urn from stab in her chest and slices on the inside of her upper arm. Spike had the demon on the ground before it could stand, and snapped its neck, letting it fall to the floor. Nora screamed for him to kneel on the other side of the elderly woman. “She’s dead luv “, he began, but she grabbed his hand and put it on the sliced arm. The warm blood washed over his fingers, perpetuating the warmth Nora had radiated in his pocket. The temptation was rising in him to drink, but she looked him hard in the eyes with a tear streaked face and said quietly, but forcefully, “you need to be with me for this, no matter what. You need to want this. Just concentrate.”
With that she lowered her head and whispered to herself so lightly, even Spikes vamp-hearing could barely pick it up. She had laid one hand over the woman’s chest, the other gripping Spikes hand. Every iota of this felt wrong, like he should run out of here. He was “supposed to fight the baddies, not cure old ladies, what did she expect of him anyway?”, but the heat in his hand was burning his and he realized what power this girl may have, how hard she was trying. What for? This old timer? He thought of who she might be, and the more he wondered about this body, the heat in his hand became white hot, but paralyzed, he couldn’t have let go if he tried. Maybe a grandmother, a widow of an English chap like myself. Maybe her grandchild is one of the new slayers… It seemed like hours that they were there, unmoving. He didn’t know what he was supposed to concentrate on. He was seeing stars; as though that crazy slayer has burned off his hand instead of sawed it off.
He felt a twitch under his bloodstained hand, and opened his eyes, though he didn’t remember closing them. Nora let go and searing pain shot through his arm, she took no notice and began Rescue breathing on the woman, shouting for him to call 911. “Goddamnit woman! What did you do to my bloody arm?!” the groped for the phone anyway, handing it to her, he didn’t know the address anyway. She talked on the phone to the paramedics briefly and continued to breathe into the lady’s mouth and nose, checking for a pulse…she looked up at him with a meaningful stare. She had no words; this was too much in one night. He picked up the dead demon, nodded his head at her and left through the stairs. The paramedics arrived very shortly after, and Nora blacked out.
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