Forward to Time Past by Unbridled Brunette

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Chapter 56

All that evening, Spike lay in a sprawl atop the hard slab of the sarcophagus, his blue eyes fixed on the clouds of dust motes drifting near the stone supports of the cobwebbed ceiling. He was naked, his hair disheveled and his neck bruised, his lips stained the same faint red as the sunset sky outside. He hadn’t set his feet on the floor since Buffy had left almost nine hours before; he hadn’t eaten. He hadn’t even moved. He’d done nothing but lie on his back, gazing upward. Though unsmiling, his swollen mouth held a vague suggestion of happiness, the bottom lip drooping, unneeded breath rasping over it with lifelike regularity. The long fingers of his left hand tangled in silky material of the underwear she’d left behind, but he didn’t feel that any more than he actually saw the cracked ceiling on which his eyes were trained. He wasn’t really there, wasn’t really alone, and the passage of time meant nothing because it was still last night and she was with him.

Even now, he could taste her blood in his mouth, sweeter than anything else in the world because it had been willingly given. There had been no temptation to take more than she offered. In fact, he had felt something akin to reluctance at taking anything at all, because she was his and what he felt for her was—and had always been—separate from that.

Still, she’d insisted, holding up her wrist for him to lick, pressing the ball of her thumb into his mouth and rubbing the wound gently across his tongue. He could hear her heartbeat quicken as he began to respond, and suddenly the scent of her arousal hung heavy on the air.

I just want you to be mine, she had said.

He was hers. Didn’t she know that yet? He had always been hers, had always been calling out for her, spilling tears and come onto his lonely bedclothes for want of her. Back then, she had been nameless, formless, nothing more than an indistinct bright blur in the otherwise monochrome landscape of his existence. Even so long ago as that, he had belonged to her.

Clumsily, he tried to tell her that, but before he could find the right words to explain she had drawn away. Her thumb had stopped bleeding and she pulled it gently from his slack mouth, pausing for just a nanosecond to caress his bottom lip. He hated even that slightest of retreats, but it didn’t last. The next moment, her hands had slipped beneath the worn fabric of his blue Oxford, lifting it a little so that she could knead the tight muscles of his shoulders. Her mouth quivered a little as she asked him, “What on earth are you wearing?”

The amusement in her eyes made him uncertain. Did she like the change or not? Was she teasing him or testing him? His brow furrowed as he struggled to find a response that wouldn’t get him into trouble.

“Thought you might like it,” he said finally. The words were hushed, purposefully indistinct in case they turned out to be the wrong ones and would later need to be retracted. Buffy raised her eyebrows, smiled in a way that left him almost physically ill with the force of his adoration. Her fingers insinuated themselves further between the button-down and his t-shirt, sliding the sleeves of the former down his shoulders and arms, pushing a little more firmly when they threatened to catch on his wrists. When it was off, she tossed it over the back of a chair.

“Silly vampire. You really haven’t changed much in the last hundred years, have you?” Her mouth was against his ear, brushing back and forth against the lobe.

Spike felt a rush of mingled pleasure and shame. He wanted her to know that he was the same man as before, but he didn’t want her to think he was the same person. He’d been so stupid back then, so weak, nothing but a foil for bastards like Archer. As lovely as his time with her in London had been, part of him cringed at the thought that she had seen him thus: an inconsequential fool who had no idea how to please a woman. He didn’t want her to see him as that fool now.

“Have you?” she asked again, making him realize that he had never answered her the first time. Slowly, he shook his head.

“I have, love. Hundred years and more—things happened—I did things—and I changed. I’m not—”

Her lips grazed his jaw, trailing words so low even he could hardly hear them. “Yes, you are. You’ve changed in all kinds of ways; you’ve been bad. I know that. But, in here—” she placed a hand over his unbeating heart “—you’re exactly the same. You tried to tell me; I just wasn’t ready to listen until now.”

He swallowed. “Yeah. What does that—” he began, but she preempted the question.

“You don’t have to dress like a reject from Dawson’s Creek to have me; you don’t have to hide what you’re eating. You can take the good out of who you’ve become…you can be yourself. You are the same inside. It’s just that before…before you were…innocent.”

He shifted, uneasy and embarrassed to remember just how innocent he had been, but her voice dropped low, took on a soothing, sleepy quality that made his bones feel like jelly. She nuzzled the base of his throat and her next words hardly seemed to be her own.

“No wonder you went mad,” she whispered, mouthing her way up the line of his throat until she found the sweet spot. “You were so trapped back then. Did you love me because I set you free? Because I touched you and let you out of the agony of being a gentleman?”

She put her hand to his agony, ever-present, and he drew a sharp breath. And it was agony. It was endless. His desire for her was nothing like those fierce, fast couplings with Drusilla, the harried and often violent drive to achieve what was nothing more than a spasm of physical release. With Buffy, there was release but no relief. She was seawater to a thirsty man; she was opium to an addict, always leaving him wanting. Sex with her had little to do with the ultimate climax and everything to do with the road that led them there. It was the joining that mattered to him, her body locking with his, wrapped around him so tightly that for the moment, at least, he didn’t have to worry about her slipping away. He would have felt the same sort of satisfaction had she let him crawl into her head, her heart. If he could have, he would have nestled into the soft bed of her temporal lobe or been held by the pulsing muscles of her right atrium. He would have become so deeply embedded that she couldn’t ignore him or run away; he would have been part of her.

He felt the top button of his trousers pop free from its moorings and, drawn out of the reverie, he looked down. The fingers of her right hand had inched down into the loosened waistband, and her left hand cupped the nape of his neck. She kissed him on the edge of his chin, murmuring in a voice that was partly playful and mostly not: “I’m kind of surprised at you. I didn’t think you could still hold back.”

He couldn’t hold back much longer. She was chiseling away at his self-control and the restraint was like torture. Her fingers rested on his pelvis an inch above the aching, needy flesh, but she wouldn’t make the final descent. She kept kissing him, gnawing at that special spot on his neck, the first place her lips had ever touched him, and he couldn’t bear it. With an apologetic moan, he lost control and shoved her backwards, pressing her down onto the solid stone lid of the sarcophagus.

My love, my sweetheart, my treasure. Mine. Mine. Mine.

A dizzying rush of possessiveness—all the names he’d once uttered with such ease and couldn’t even imagine calling her now, although in his heart he still felt it. He was obsessed with her and that couldn’t possibly be good, but she was his and he had always been hers…and he just couldn’t stop himself. He fumbled at her clothes with hands that were too eager for gentleness, scattering shirt-buttons across the stone, tearing the edge of a zipper from its seam. She didn’t complain, only encouraged him by tugging his t-shirt up over his head, using her feet to push his trousers over his hipbones.

Finally, she was exposed and all his, and he kissed his way along her breastbone and her stomach…all the way down to the place that had been his undoing.

As Spike lay daydreaming in the pleasant silence of the retreating evening, Buffy was suffering the very unpleasant silence of disapproval as she stood in front of her friends in the Magic Box. For a long time after she made her declaration, none of them had spoken and she, perceiving the disbelieving stares at her back and the curt expression of paternal disappointment before her, wondered if perhaps she should just walk out. She retreated two steps and half-turned toward the door, but his deep voice stopped her.

“So, this is it,” he said slowly, his eyes narrowing behind the glasses he then removed to clean with a ferociousness directed at her. “You choose Spike—a vampire, an unrepentant killer—over your calling and your own wellbeing.”

“Yes,” she said simply. “I do.”

One of Giles’ hands dropped to the edge of the display case, grasping it with so much force Buffy wondered if the glass would crack. It didn’t.

“The things he has done to you, Buffy,” he began in a careful voice that trembled on the brink of rage. “Think of the things he has done to all of us, but to you in particular. The Order of Turaka—the Gem of Amara—even Adam—what would have happened if any of those schemes went according to his plans? Do you think you would be standing here with us now, debating the validity of his feelings?”

She flinched a little, knowing what he said was true. However, she knew things that Giles didn’t; she knew that Spike would have never gotten that far, would never have done a single despicable act, if she had been standing in the cemetery the night he had risen. Moreover, she understood the anger that drove him, the confusion of seeing the face of someone he believed to be dead on someone he thought he wanted to kill. Whatever had gone through his mind in the original timeline, in this one, he’d been heartsick and uncertain, which might have accounted for the fact that none of his schemes ever did go according to plan. She also knew there was no point in trying to explain any of this to Giles.

“I’m not going to argue with you,” she told him plainly. “He is a vampire, and he is unrepentant, and he is a killer. How is that so different from Angel except for the soul? Which, I’ve got to tell you, doesn’t seem to mean a whole lot these days. Definitely not as much as I was told it did. And maybe I’m the only moral compass Spike’s got, but he does have me and he wouldn’t do anything to disappoint me. I trust him with that.”

“You trust him,” Giles echoed with a sneer. Buffy’s face flushed with anger.

“I do. Giles, you told me that a vampire is just a demon that fills the empty shell of a corpse. You told me that the soul was the essence of the person and without it, that person ceased to exist at all, replaced by a thing with the same face and mannerisms and memories—but still just a thing. That was a lie!”

“Bloody right, it was a lie!” Giles retorted, his voice loud enough so the group at the reading table flinched. “What was I supposed to tell you, Buffy? Would it have made it easier for you to know that the murderers that came out of those coffins were your schoolmates? That Angel did do all those heinous acts in the distant—and decidedly not so distant—past. Would you really have wanted to know?”

Buffy started to answer, but his voice overrode her own.

“You want the truth, Buffy? Here it is: the man you consorted with in London became a bloodthirsty killer. He tortured his former acquaintances; he murdered the young women who reminded him of you, and he killed two slayers. You’ve seen the cruelty he’s capable of, the lengths he will go to in order to satisfy his own base desires. Yet, you claim that you trust him?”

“What about her?” Buffy jabbed her finger in the direction of Anya, and she heard the collective gasp of surprise from the group at the table and the watcher at the counter. Anya, however, seemed unruffled even when Buffy’s eyes found hers.

“How many people have you killed?” Buffy demanded. “How many lives have you ruined and people have you tormented? You didn’t have to do anything you did—you had free will and you knew right from wrong. You enjoyed the things you did—you still enjoy the memory of them—and you’re somehow considered better than Spike?”

“Buffy, this isn’t about Anya.” Although Xander jumped to his girlfriend’s defense, his expression and tone seemed uncertain. For the first time, Buffy thought she saw something akin to understanding in his eyes.

“She’s over a thousand years old!” she persisted, focusing her gaze on him now, as well as Anya. “Spike isn’t even a hundred and fifty. You do the math and tell me whose tally of victims runs higher, and then you tell me why Anya is allowed to sit at that table with everyone else while Spike is considered so disgusting people are paying me to stay away from him!”

Xander’s mouth was hanging open and even Anya appeared thoughtful, but neither of them had any reply for her. Buffy wanted to say more, but a sudden and overwhelming sense of weariness came over her, and the limbs that had previously shaken with nervousness, then anger, now trembled with fatigue. She felt almost dizzy with her triumph—and it was a triumph just to be able to confront them this way—but the stress of the past two weeks had finally caught up with her. She’d slept fitfully, eaten very little, and been under constant emotional strain, and now, staring out into the bewildered faces of her friends, she marveled at her own exhaustion.

She would go home, she decided. She would not stay here and talk in circles with her friends or argue with Giles. She would have dinner, she would sleep for a few hours, and then she would go see Spike. Without another word to any of them, she turned on her heel and walked out the door.

When her form was no longer visible through the glass, the remaining five looked at each other.

“Well,” Anya said finally, using the chipper voice that almost always preceded a divulgence of something terrible. “She has a point. I have killed a lot of people.”

Spike had only just rolled out bed—or, at least, onto his feet—when his employer showed up. Although his modesty had taken a permanent holiday at roughly the same time as his soul, Spike felt relieved that he had at least some clothes on. He didn’t trust the guy yet and, being as how he was a human, that made Spike pretty well helpless if he decided to try anything. Nakedness just emphasized that vulnerability and though he might not be wearing anything but a pair of threadbare black jeans, it was better than wearing nothing at all.

“Yeah?” he said briefly to the man who, as of yet, had said nothing. He searched his pockets for cigarettes but discovered two things: his pockets didn’t contain cigarettes and he had forgotten to fasten the button on his jeans. The latter he ignored as a matter of little importance, but the former annoyed him. He began searching the tables and furniture for the misplaced carton, all the while keeping one ear cocked to the man at the door.

“I trust you’re prepared to go to work?” the man asked.

“Sure. Why not?” Spike said indifferently. There was a crumpled pack of Marlboros in between the sofa cushions and he pounced on it, pulling out the desired cigarette with his teeth. The stranger offered him a light.

“You know what to do?” he asked, pocketing the lighter as Spike took his first much-needed hit of nicotine.

“Guess so. You did explain it all before. I’ve even got a good place in mind to get things going.”

“Take me there,” the man said shortly. Spike raised his eyebrows, the cigarette dangling from his lips as he began to assemble the rest of his outfit.

“We on a schedule?” he asked.

“In a manner of speaking. Tempus neminem manet, you know.”

“Nunc dimittis servum tuum,” Spike answered with a shrug. The man turned from the doorway then, and Spike quickly followed his retreating figure across the darkened cemetery. The top button of his jeans was still undone and he’d forgotten to lace his boots, but neither of those things diminished Spike’s confidence or his mood. He moved in his customary swagger, blowing smoke rings at grave monuments as he passed them.

Not even once did it occur to him that he might not be doing the right thing.

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