Title: Black Goddess, White Flowers
by: Bree
feedback: Lovely. Petdrusilla@aol.com
archive: Stakes & Snakes, Creative Juices, Pure Evil, anywhere else please ask.
pairing: Spike/Dru
disclaimer: I don't own any of the characters, except for Morpheus the demon.
summary: Dru strikes a bargain with a powerful demon to disable Spike's chip. Early season 6.
rating: PG pretty tame
It seemed an eternity had passed since she had truly been alone. It was an eternity filled with sweet adorations, swollen opaque midnights, celestial fires, torment, and all the passions of the dead and cold. Yet an eternity nonetheless. She had begun to measure time by the belly of her lovely and constant moon that hung over that sticky, faraway beach. The moon had gained and lost his belly ten times since she last saw her Spike.
The feel of the clumpy wet sand on her naked flesh made her giggle, and she squirmed around in it until she could imagine it was millions of tiny maggots devouring her. The thirteen candles she had lit remained flickering, encircling her, untouched by the calm ocean. She sat up, reached for the birdcage, and took the quivering dove into her hands.
“Will you flap your pretty little wings, dear heart?” she murmured to it. “I want to see you fly, fly, fly.”
She freed one hand and clasped the pearl hilt of the dagger, tracing it down the bird’s back. “Hear me, thou sleeper of the great oblivion!” she cried.
She let the dove go, and it fluttered swiftly away. The dagger, however, she plunged into her palm, and she smiled with childlike fascination as her blood spilled onto the sand. On her knees now, she raised her arms to the heavens. “Hear me, thou minion of dreams and desires! I summon thee!”
The candles exploded like tiny firecrackers, one by one. She laughed wildly and clapped her bloody hands. The entire beach was illuminated by its own preternatural light.
“I hear you, Dru,” said a deep voice.
She smiled, sprang to her feet like a cat. “Morpheus,” she cooed before she even turned around.
“The very same, Love.”
She saw him now, standing quite tall and broad-shouldered, dressed in a velvety wine-colored suit from days past. He must have been sleeping a very long time.
“Time to wake up, silly demon. The cats are in the barn now. They’re lying down with the sheep dogs. Everything’s topsy-turvy.”
Morpheus raised his eyebrows, barely discernable in the dark blue craters of his face. His arms outstretched, he gathered little Dru to him, pale cheek, frozen breasts, sunken stomach all pressed to the velvet. She let out a tiny, melancholy wail.
“S’all right, Dru. I’ve seen it all in my dreams, everything that has come to pass. I know why you summoned me.”
“She dreams, too,” said Dru, lifting her face to meet his gold eyes. “The Slayer. Baby’s still sleeping in the sweet ground where they left her. Everything else is just a dream.”
“And you think you can wake her up, too, eh?”
Another wail, louder now, and she broke free of his embrace. “They used to bring me lilies,” she lamented. “Lilies and daisies, and pretty roses for my bed. I remember them all around me. Then she came. And they put lilies on her grave, My Angel. My Spike. She took them both.”
“Oh Dru, don’t you have some mucus demon or something to distract you? I’ve never known you to be wanting for admirers.” He rattled a patronizing chuckle.
“Don’t like their fun,” she frowned. “Their games are all sloppy. Not like my Spike. My Spike is a gentleman.”
“So you want me to get him back for you?” Morpheus asked.
“Oh yes! Ugly knick-knacks in his brain make him weak. I know you can fix him all better.”
Morpheus snickered. “And you, my darling? What are you willing to offer me in return?”
Drusilla cast her eyes away. “You might go digging through my brain, might find treasure. Make my dreams all dark again.”
“You mean . . . your second sight? You are willing to give up your visions? For Spike?” Morpheus breathed incredulously.
Dru nodded.
“You poor, mad, silly wretch. You do love him, after all. Really, Dru, I hardly think he’s worthy of you.”
She growled softly, but it was not in her ability to defend herself with words. “Help a sad child, Morpheus? Help a sad princess?”
She dropped to her knees before him, and he gripped her head in one massive blue hand as if it were nothing more than a piece of fruit. “I accept your offer.”
His hand glowed, and Drusilla screamed in agony. The demon moaned in delight as he absorbed more and more of the power of her mind. Then at last she collapsed, limp and unconscious in the sand.
“I’m sorry about this, Love,” he said to her. “But it has to be done.”
He lifted her willowy naked form and carried her away from the beach, deep into the thick, wet trees. The North Star was calling him towards her. To the north was the Hellmouth, the Slayer, and Dru’s beloved. Behind him, on the brink of the ocean, thirteen candles had gone out.
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At sunset, Giles was preparing to close the Magic Box for the night. Anya was inside dealing with the last couple of customers and packing away some of the fragile and rare merchandise that they never left out in the open--satyr horns, Egyptian scorpions, and the like. He was taking out the trash.
He awkwardly dumped the bags into the metal garbage cans in the alley out back, when something stirred from behind a stack of old crates. Peering into the shadows, he nearly tripped over a small lump covered in old packing sheets and newspaper. “Dear Lord,” he muttered, twisting the unconscious girl around to see her face. The chill in his blood made him cry out as he beheld Drusilla.
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“Okay,” said Buffy, storming into the Magic Box, stake in hand, with Spike barely a step behind her. “What’s so urgent?”
It was Spike who first noticed. “Bloody hell!” he cried out, and Buffy whirled around, following his gaze.
Giles had tied Dru to a chair in the center of the store, and from the state of the vampire girl, it seemed like an overreaction. She was awake now, covered in dirt and blinking her eyes at them in confusion. Tracks in the grime on her face made it look as if she’d been crying. Her hair was in disarray, and the strangest thing of all was that she was not wearing a pretty dress of lace, organza, or satin. She was dressed in jeans and a ratty old purple sweater, as if she was a normal young woman. A living young woman.
“Dru?” Spike asked carefully.
She knew her name at least, and she looked back at him. “Y . . . y-yes?”
“She seems to have lost her memory,” Giles explained, and they saw he had already begun to gather books for research.
“Amnesia?” Buffy wondered.
“No, she knows who she is, where she comes from, most of the details of her mortal life. But everything after that . . . What I mean to say is, she doesn’t know what she is. And she doesn’t know any of us.”
“Please let me go,” Dru pleaded faintly. “If you let me go, I promise I’ll run straight home and never look back.”
Xander and Anya emerged from downstairs. “Nice to know she’s still nutty as ever,” Xander remarked.
“So what do we do with her?” Buffy asked no one in particular.
“Um, here’s a thought,” Xander said. “How about you stake her?”
Spike, who had been staring, transfixed, into his former paramour’s altered face, now growled angrily. “You so much as touch a hair on that poppet’s head, and I’ll put your insides on the outside, Harris!”
“Uuuuuh, Spike?” Buffy said skeptically. “Either whatever Dru has is contagious, or I distinctly remember you offering to take her out yourself the last time she was here.”
His face softened, guiltily. “All right, so I did. But look at her. Some bleeding fiend has been diddling around with her mind, and now she’s all helpless. She’s no threat to anybody like this!”
Giles cleared his throat. “I’m afraid I must agree. I think it would be more beneficial to us to try and discover just how Drusilla’s memory was erased, and more importantly, why.”
“You can’t kill her now,” said Anya decidedly. “That would be murder. Murder is wrong. Right?”
“She’s a vampire,” Xander muttered.
Dru whimpered like a wounded animal. “Where’s mummy? Why can’t I go home?”
“She’s dead, Baby,” Spike answered. “She’s been dead for quite some time now. You remember a tall broody chap named Angelus? Dark, inane, very sharp fangs? Guess not.”
He knelt beside her chair and started to untie her.
“What are you going to do?” Buffy asked, a bit defensively.
“Gonna take care of her,” he said. “I’m all she has.”
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He couldn’t explain to himself the sickly rush of emotion that overtook him, but he had felt it before, and it was oddly comforting and familiar. Thoughts of the Slayer had plagued his mind for so long that they became quite the norm, but all of that changed when he saw Dru broken. One minute Buffy had stood beside him, her heat so strong he could feel it like fireglow, all gold and shiny and completely unattainable for him, kind of like the sunlight. Then Dru, his black goddess, his onyx jewel, his partner, was suddenly in front of him, a mere crumbly, weepy, distant shadow of herself. The choice was not so clear this time, and it wasn’t bloody fair. Not fair at all.
“What’s your name?” she asked pleasantly, like a little girl. The thought of home and mother seemed to have drifted away.
“I’m Spike, Pet,” he said. “You really can’t recall me even slightly?”
She shook her head slowly. “Where are we?”
“My crypt. You like it?”
From the canopy bed where she lay, propped up on pillows, she surveyed the sparse, antique atmosphere of his home. “Very much.”
He threw open one of the old trunks and began to dig through it, scattering items of clothing left and right, most of them procured from victims, souvenirs of his glory days. “I know they’re in here somewhere. Ah yes . . . “
Spike lifted the deliciously thin white material from its confines and held it before him. The empire waist, the transparent overlay . . . He pressed it to his face and smelled it. “I have a couple of your dresses that you left behind when you . . . Well, it’s a bit of a tale, but the point is I kept them, and you should wear them. Feel more like yourself, right, Love?”
The dresses seemed to make her happy, and after she put the white one on, she spun around the room gleefully.
“I’m going to bring you things, Dru,” he promised. “Ribbons and laces, trinkets and baubles, so you can do your hair all pretty and make yourself up. Then I’m going to tell you everything you forgot. But first I think we need a spot of dinner.”
She leaned in and kissed his cheek, a gesture that made him shiver. “You’re a princess, you know that? A princess.”
As he turned to leave, she called after him. “Spike?”
“Yes, Baby?”
“Why are there no mirrors down here?”
His eyes widened. “My God.” Then he sighed. “I’ll explain it you later. I promise.”
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“Morpheus,” said Giles. “I think he may be our prime suspect.”
“Never heard of him, “ Buffy said, sipping her coffee and staring apathetically at the pile of unopened books in front of her. She was no good at research, and she was still sort of disturbed by the way Spike had so quickly reassumed the role of Drusilla’s guardian. It wasn’t that she felt for him what he claimed to feel for her, but he had been such a valuable confidant since she got back, and she had really begun to enjoy his company, though it pained her to admit it. The idea of being replaced in his affections was a small blow to her pride.
“The demon Morpheus,” Giles continued. “He calls himself after the Greek god of dreams. He’s very powerful. He has the ability to enter people’s minds, or their dreams, and rearrange them at will, add to them memories and thoughts that were never there, and also take certain things away.”
“Like memories and thoughts,” Xander supplied sarcastically.
Anya snorted. “Morpheus is sleeping. He went into some sort of hibernation a long time ago. Nobody’s heard from him in about a century.”
Giles thrust the open book under her nose. “Apparently there is some sort of ritual one can perform to summon him.”
Buffy frowned. “So Dru summoned this guy up expecting to have a nice chat and he turned on her?”
Giles nodded. “But why? Whose mind did she want him to rearrange?”
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“Morpheus,” Spike said. “Might have figured you’d be behind this, you old sod.”
The demon gave him a jagged grin. “Nice to see you again, Spike.”
He was seated on an intricate silver throne in the middle of the woods, flanked by several vamps and lesser demons, all of them regarding him suspiciously. “I see it’s not hard for a geezer like yourself to recruit a few lackeys round these parts, even if you have been gone for a hundred years.”
“You’d be surprised how many still remember and revere me, Spike. I’m a bit of a legend, really. Dru certainly thought so.”
Spike bared his fangs. “Whatever you did to her, I suggest you undo it right quick, you get me?”
“Or what? You’ll send the Slayer after me? Relax, my friend, I only gave her what she asked for.”
“And what was that?”
“You.”
Spike made an incoherent noise.
“Oh yes, she wanted you, restored to your former strength, freed from the prison those fellows made of your brain, your instincts. Don’t look at me like that, old boy, you’re well again! The bloody thing in your head is disabled. Hunt as you will.”
Spike imagined his beloved Dru calling up that demon. She bleeding well knew better, she did. He was not to be trusted. But she did it for him. All of it . . . for him.
“And in exchange for that favor you took her memories?”
“The little ducky loves you, you know. It was quite an unexpected revelation for me. She offered me her visions, all her clairvoyant power. But I knew that it wasn’t enough just to disable your chip. She still might not have wrestled you away from that ridiculous hold the Slayer had on you. So I wiped clean her slate. Thought that might be dramatic enough of a step.”
“You bastard,” Spike seethed. “Dru and me, we won’t be fodder for your little experiments, you fix her now!”
Morpheus laughed. “That’s what she said. Fix him. Fix him, Morpheus. And I did. You can ask nothing more of me than that. You know you can‘t overpower me, Spike, so why don‘t you just go find her something to eat?”
“He’s right, Spike,” said a voice from behind him.
Spike looked back and saw the Slayer standing there, looking poised and stern, her face unreadable.
Morpheus waved his lackeys away. “I need to have a word alone with the young lady,” he said.
Buffy glared at Spike, who also retreated into the night.
“White flag, Slayer,” he said when they were alone. “I don’t want to fight.”
“You don’t want to fight me?” Buffy repeated, shocked. “You are a demon, right? Cause if not, you should look into some plastic surgery.”
Morpheus inclined his head to her, the thick horns pointing at her like daggers. “There will be another time for us. I am only here to teach two old friends a lesson.” He paused, studied her. “You’re jealous of Drusilla.”
“Me? No! Those two were made for each other. They’re nasty, they’re arrogant, and they’re completely insane. They’re soulmates.”
“But they have no souls.”
Buffy snickered and looked at the ground.
“I know people, Slayer. I know the very fabric of their essence. One day you will learn that about me. But not tonight.”
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The next night, Buffy was surprised to find Spike sitting on her porch, like he had many nights before Drusilla returned.
“So how did she take it? The whole ‘I’m a bloodsucking monster’ thing?”
“Well Dru’s mind isn’t one to function normally,” Spike said.
“There’s the understatement of the decade.”
“What I mean is, she fell back on instinct. She knew what to do.”
Buffy got a chill at the thought. “I don’t want to know.”
Spike chuckled. “I came upon a bloke mugging some old lady in an alley. Figured I’d start small, now that I’m cured and all. Don’t want to get you too pissed at me.”
“You ate the mugger right? Not the old lady?”
He didn’t answer, he just smiled. His teeth glistened like knives.
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“I’m back, love!” he shouted as he descended into the crypt. Her singing drifted towards him from the bedroom, where he found her sitting on the bed, brushing her lovely dark hair.
“You stay away too long.”
“I know, Pet,” he said, and kissed her full on the mouth, which she liked. “I’ll be better, I swear.”
“I miss you when you’re away,” she said. Then faintly, she added, “I miss Miss Edith.”
Spike pulled back from her. “Are you starting to remember things?”
“Pieces. Frozen pictures. All scrambled up, though.”
“That’s wonderful, Dru! You’ll be back to your old self in no time at all, just like I am. Thanks to you.”
Finally she noticed what he was holding in one hand. “Are those lilies, my Spike?”
“For you, Princess.”
She gasped in delight. “I love lilies.”
He gave her the bouquet, and she rose to her feet, scattering them one by one onto the bed, like an offering at the altar of her desires.
The End
