Chapter Text
Could We Wander?
by Femail Of The Species
Cafedemonde@yahoo.com
The worse thing that could have happened was that he could just not be there.
She stepped down the darkened staircase carefully, not in such a rush this time. The high school basement would never rate as a favorite place to visit in her book. But knowing what she knew now, which was more than she knew then, the first time she saw him, she could not leave him here... to rot.
He had helped them all, saved them all. And didn't he deserve a second chance like the rest of them? She turned down a dusty corridor, pipes lining the wall to the right as she recalled her conversation with her friend.
~~~
"He tried to rape her, Willow." He said this like he was explaining that the sky was blue to a toddler. It angered her, but anger was a luxury she could not afford with these people anymore.
"I know... I get it, but why?"
"Huh?"
"I mean, they were lovers," She held up her hand - small, pale, strong - to stave off his comments. "No matter what she led us to believe, she feels something for him. Has for a long time. Why would he just go crazy and try to rape her? He loves her."
"Now see that's where you're twisted, Wills. He is a demon and we trusted him for too long. I don't care if he dies in that basement."
~~~
She stopped at the spot where she found him before, spouting craziness about passes and buttons. She felt him, close and cowering.
"Spike?"
Nothing. A rat skittered across a broken lab table. It was not a frog so everything was fine.
"Spike." She allowed it to be more of a command. The quiet shifting behind her had her swinging around quickly to see the vampire standing there, expending a great deal of energy not looking at her.
"Oh, Spike." It was soft and full of all the compassion she had left. She thought she had used it up on herself, but something about this lost creature, once the most powerful and frightening thing she had ever imagined, had her delving deep into hidden reserves.
"W-Willow..."
"Yep, it's me...I, uh, came to take you back."
He shook his head violently, backing away and tripping over a box. "No...no one comes for me...I hurt them all for HIM and still everyone leaves. No one comes for me but me."
"Spike, I'm not hurt."
"I hurt you?" His blue eyes looked like dark pools of water as they glistened with tears.
"No."
He sat down on the dirty floor, thinking, and she joined him. After a moment he looked up from his hands, which were minus the black nail polish, and spoke. "I would have."
"You would have what?" She frowned, the cryptic nature of this conversation wearing at her nerves.
"Hurt you. I would have drained you and made you like me. Kept you forever."
It was flattering in a psychotic stalker sort of way. "And would you still...now I mean?"
He laughed, maniacal but pleased as well, and it gave his voice a nasally tone. "Now? Now I can't hurt a fly."
She decided not to be offended by his amusement since it made his eyes dance with something other than sadness and insanity.
"Spike...look at me." When he did she continued. "We have to get out of here. It's a bad place and bad things will happen. I don't want you here when it does. I don't want you hurt."
"Maybe I'm the bad thing."
It was her turn to laugh. "Nah...you missed the Wicked Willow show last May. Good thing too cuz I might have fried you. Then I'd really never forgive myself." She smiled at him when he grinned a little, understanding what lay beneath her words. "Come on...Let's go."
She stood slowly, her stomach still sore from being demon snacks the day before. He glanced up at her. "Where will I go? You know what I did. I can't be around them."
"I get that. I'm kinda tired of the looks I've been getting too. Casa Summers is not the haven it once was....We can go to my house. My parents are out of the country, I think." The people she had called her friends talked about her behind her back and exchanged wary glances when they thought she could not see. They kept her close so that they could watch her, not because they wanted her company. She was too tainted for that now.
He stood up quickly, rubbing dirty hands on his dirtier pants "Are you real, Willow?"
It was an odd question if you did not understand that he was, for some reason, going insane.
"I'm very real...too real in fact. I'm hoping you can help me with that."
He nodded although he had no idea what she meant and took the proffered hand - small, pale, strong - as they walked out in easy silence.
*********
She tossed the pager onto the bed. Xander had been paging her all evening. Funny that Buffy had not tried once. The fact that she should call her friends and let them know she was safe and had not gone evil was overshadowed by the knowledge that they would never agree with what she was doing. She wondered when her life became someone else's to approve of and control. She was sure that she had that plaque stating that she was the boss of them and not the other way around.
Sighing, she flopped onto the bed, her body bouncing as she lay flat out. Spike was still sleeping. Getting him away from the school basement, hence away from the mouth of Hell, and nearly force feeding him five pints of blood seemed to be having a positive effect on the not-so-blonde vampire. Last time she checked he was back to his normal, bluish pale, instead of a sickly greenish pale.
It was obvious that he had not been eating properly. She pondered the lack of rats in the basement. Angel ate rats. Buffy had told her that after he got the soul he ate rats and other little creatures to...
She sat upright as if shot.
"No..." Not another moping, brooding, soul-strapped vampire! She scooted to the bed's edge and jumped to her feet landing solidly and breaking into a run. He was in the living room on the sofa. She glared at him, trying to see it, see if it was really there, but she could not tell. She knew a spell, but did not dare. He was sleeping peacefully, maybe for the first time in a long time, but her urgent need to know took over and she shook him, gently but firmly.
"Spike!"
Yellowed eyes and elongated canines appeared and then melted away swiftly once he recognized her. "What's wrong?" He groaned, sitting up to shake away the fog.
"Nothing...I mean...did you...do you... A SOUL, Spike?" It came out like a whine, punctuated by the stomping of her foot.
"What? No!" He lied and even he knew it was pitiful.
"Why?"
"I..." He wondered if he could trust her with the truth. Would she make him leave? Tell them so they would stake him?
"Spike, I killed a man. Ripped the skin from his body, set him on fire and happily watched him die. You can tell me anything."
"Right..." He swallowed and she caught herself staring at his Adam's Apple. "I left to get the chip removed. But I was a bit vague and the my-former-self that the demon restored was a little further back in time than I intended."
"So the chip is still there and it gave you a soul. That's gotta suck."
"Ohhh, more than you can know, Red."
"Hey... you called me Red, not Willow, so you must be feeling better."
"Maybe...hard to tell. I get crazy for a while and then I can think clear for a while."
"Well..."
A knock at the door cut off her words. "Shit..." She debated pretending to not be home, but the light was on and both Xander and Buffy knew where the spare key was hidden. "Do you want them to know you're here?"
He shook his head and headed up the stairs.
"Wills, answer the door...I know you're in there." He banged again and looked surprised when his fist missed the wood as she yanked the door open.
"Hey Xan."
"What are you doing here? I've been paging you." He stepped past the threshold and into the living room.
"Oh...I left it upstairs, and I've been down here...sleeping."
Xander glanced at the blanket and pillow on the sofa and nodded. "Why here?"
"Just wanted to be alone." She replied, scanning the room for traces of the vampire.
"You should go to Buffy's."
"I'm fine. I think I'll be staying here for a while. I'll stop by tomorrow night. I need to get some stuff anyway."
"Are you sure you're okay?"
"Mmm hmm." She smiled sweetly and gave him a brief hug. "Of course, now shooo, get home before the baddies get ya."
"Call me if you need me?"
"Yes."
"And you'll come to Buffy's tomorrow evening?"
"Yes, Xander."
"And you'll answer the phone?"
"Yes! Now go!" She pushed him, laughingly, out of her home and closed the door tightly, leaning her forehead against it.
"Smothering..."
She glanced up to find Spike gazing at her curiously. "Yes...he just worries."
"A bit like a mother hen, then?"
"Ha...something like that." He sauntered down the stairs, seeming more like his old snarky self, which was oddly pleasing. "You hungry?"
"Got something other than human?"
"No. And you need the good stuff right now. You can get back on pigs after I fatten you up a little." She opened the refrigerator and took out two Red Cross packets.
"Oi, I can't get fat. Vampire." He began preparing the blood for the microwave.
"Angel is. Or at least that's what I heard." She said, popping a grape in her mouth. While he had slept she did a little shopping.
"Huh...he even manages to change an unchangeable vampire body. Bloody amazing poof."
"Can I ask you something?"
"Don't promise to answer, but feel free."
"Okay...if you had gotten your wish and the chip was gone, what were going to do?" It had been on her mind since he said it.
"You really want to know?" She nodded. "The truth?" He asked again.
"Yeah, I do."
" Fine then...I had it all planned out. Plenty of thinking time on the boat to Africa."
"Africa?!" She gasped, her green eyes lighting up in wonder.
"Yeah, but you're interrupting my little story, which I thought you wanted to hear."
"Sorry, go on." She grinned when he grinned first.
"So I planned it out like this. I was going to come back and make like nothing was different. Let her think I was still her bitch boy." Willow flinched at the venom in his tone, but he paid her no mind. "And then, when the time was right, I would take what was mine."
"Oh Spike, you don't mean that. If a girl says no..."
"Oh, bullocks Red, I was out of my mind that night. Won't be repeating it. Ever. No, I was going to take you and turn you like I was meant to do when I found you in the dorm. And then together we could kill the slayer... or just leave. I do think the world needs her. Not just any slayer, but her. Although we could have drained Xander.
"Are you joking?"
He smirked at her. "Maybe...yes...but really no, I'm dead serious." His voice dropped an octave and it seemed to make the walls tremble a little.
"Why?"
"I wanted you all along. I thought I'd get the chip out ages ago and sneak off with you. Never happened, though." He pouted.
"Sometimes I wonder what my life would have been like if you had done it."
"Marvelous, bloody marvelous."
"What would Angel have done to you?"
"What he always does to me...nothing." He lit a cigarette and scowled. She must have purchased these for him. It tasted funny after not smoking for so long, but he continued, touched that she did this for him.
She was frowning, trying to wrap her mind around his last statement.
"What? You think that Angelus managed to fail at killing me time after time because I was so fucking good." She nodded. "I am flattered, but no. He would never kill me or Dru. He'd beat us, burn us, bleed us, but never kill."
"I don't understand."
"We are his. His family. Not those fools in Hell-A... they are nothing but pets, human minions, to him. He cares for them because he has decided that they are his, but we are blood of his blood."
"So all those times..."
"Oh I was really trying to kill the wanker, but always knew I couldn't. Just like no matter how much people try you can't kill God. That's what he is, you know... Came close once, though, then that bitch dropped a soddin' organ on my back. Sire was very brassed off about that for a while." Spike laughed and to Willow it was a good sound.
"So now that you know, what will you do?"
She got up and walked over to where he sat sipping blood from a large coffee mug.
"This is the best conversation I've had since I went to England."
"I do understand the concept of changing the subject, luv."
"No...I'm not...changing it I mean...I just wonder...would you always talk to me?"
He was nonplussed, head tilted.
"Forever...If we had forever, would it be like this. You telling me things, us getting along."
He smiled. "It would be better -cause we'd shag." His eyes raked over her body. "A lot."
After all she had done, he thought she was over the blushing, but there it was, red as her hair and spreading.
"They don't trust me anymore."
"I know...they won't trust me either."
"We can go away...I can get the chip out."
His eyes widened comically. "Say again."
"I can remove it. A spell. I kinda took in a little dark magick when I went bad."
She was sheepishly cute, but nevermind that. "You can get it out?"
"Uh, yeah..."
"And then you'll leave with me, knowing what I'll do?"
"But your soul won't let you, right?"
"Sod the soul...If you will let me, I want you for mine."
"Spike I don't get this...you loved Buffy just a few months ago."
"I was insane a few months ago. And a few hours ago as well, but that's not the point. The point is I wanted you first. And I'm a still vampire. A soul can't change that. I just won't turn you against your will."
"You won't?"
"No." He was pouting and it was so cute to her, she wondered how Buffy had ever resisted him.
"But you'll keep trying to convince me, right?"
"Oh yeah, never stop that." He pushed a lock of hair back from her face, tracing her widow's peak with a finger.
"And we can travel the world?"
"Yeah..."
"Live anywhere?"
"Yeah...But we have to see Angel first."
"Angel? Why?" She sucked her bottom lip into her mouth. It was what she did when she worried.
"So he don't come after us, is why. So he can see for himself that you are with me because you want to be."
"And then?"
"Then we wander."
*********
end