Sword and Stake Home Gen/Ensemble Page Shippy (M/F) Page Slash (M/M) Page Short Stories Page
To Un-Live and Die in LA Chapter 2 3 4 5 6 7
By spikeNdru, May 31, 2004
Pairing: Spike/Illyria 13,175 Words
NC-17, with a smidge of slash thrown in. You know the drill. If you’re underage, you shouldn’t be reading this.
Post-Power Play
I started writing this immediately following Power Play, and had the story mapped out before Not Fade Away aired, so there are AtS spoilers through Power Play, but it then goes off on its own.
Thanks to denny for hosting this in her LJ, and thanks for all the wonderful feedback that hosting engendered. Your suggestions made this a better story.
Krys Yuy made the icon that I'm using as the link to this story.
Special thanks to makd, Painbow, and denny for the superb beta work. You guys rock!
***********************************************************************
"What, will you thus oppose me, luckless stars . . .
That I may vanish o'er the earth in air,
And leave no memory that e'er I was?
No, I will live . . ."
~Christopher Marlowe
Chapter One
They were all staring at her as if she’d done something unforgivingly bad, and she didn’t understand why. Illyria tilted her head and looked at each one in turn. She sensed that it would be inappropriate to ask, so she looked for clues in the only way left open to her.
She turned to Lorne first, staring at him with unblinking ice blue eyes and read him first. Shock. Regret. Sorrow. Her eyes swept over him and focused on Gunn: Guilt. Anger. Sorrow, but tinged with a breath of triumph. She could not yet make sense of all these human emotions. She would simply observe and process later.
She turned her body slowly and looked deeply at Wesley. Horror. Despair. Guilt. Anger. He looked at her, a brief flash of disgust in his eyes, and then turned away.
She could not read Spike at all. His face was a mask, as if what he was feeling was so powerful, it must be tightly contained. If he allowed the most minute crack in the façade, he would completely crumble. She looked at, and through, each of them again, and then turned to walk away.
“Why?” Wesley’s voice was ragged and as brittle as old parchment.
She turned to face him, and again cocked her head, silently waiting for him to elaborate.
“Why did you do it, Illyria? You knew the plan!” His voice was like shards of broken glass rubbing against each other.
“Yes,” she responded, puzzlement evident in her voice. “Angel was quite clear. He specifically said: ‘This isn’t a keep fighting the good fight kind of deal. Let’s be clear. I’m talking about killing every single member of the Black Thorn. We don’t walk away from that’.”
Her voice was eerily like Angel’s as she quoted his words and waited for them to either accept that she had acted rightly, according to plan, or explain why they appeared to be so upset with her.
A harsh laugh burst from Spike. “Bloody brilliant! She’s right, you know. ‘S not her fault—it’s ours. We should have known . . . I should have known. Spent the last four years hangin’ around with a 1200 year old Vengeance Demon who was as bloody literal-minded as Smurfette, here. Should have remembered how Anya took things and recognized the similarities. Don’t you get it? She followed the plan exactly and now can’t suss out why we’re all upset with her ‘cause she killed Angel.”
Gunn snorted. “Yeah, but she knew he was just pretending. He just went along with ‘em so he could infiltrate the organization. We all understood that!”
Spike shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. He was a card-carryin’, mystically-branded member of the Black Thorn, and he told us we had to kill every . . . single . . . member. Long as there was a link to the Senior Partners, unwilling as that link might be, the Partners still had a foothold here. I think Angel knew that . . .”
“Yes, you would think that, wouldn’t you, Spike.” Wesley fixed steely eyes on Spike, studiously ignoring Illyria. “It’s so much easier to believe that . . . and how convenient for you. Now you no longer have any competition for the ‘Champion’ title, the Shanshu prophecy or . . . Buffy.”
Spike’s left fist shot out, catching Wes on the jaw. Wes went down and Gunn took a half step toward Spike, clenching his fists.
With a look of regret, Spike turned and walked away. He had taken two strides when he heard footsteps following him. He didn’t turn back or pause. He knew whose steps those were. Big Blue would never be an actual member of the Fang Gang, any more than he would.
He’d had enough of the slights, the distrust, the veiled looks from the Scoobies. Buggered if he’d go through it again with Angel’s crew. He’d do alright on his own. Better than alright. Their loss . . . but they really couldn’t afford any more losses. Cordelia . . . Fred . . . Angel. He’d have stayed if they’d shown any desire for him to do so. He was just so bloody tired of fighting for acceptance . . . for respect. He just couldn’t do it anymore. Four years was enough. Anybody wantin’ Spike to fight at their side was gonna have to ask. Though he supposed he should call Andrew and let the Slayerettes know. They might want to send someone to Hell-A. Faith, probably. She had an in with the Fang Gang, and Wes and Gunn would work with her.
Noticing a seedy-looking bar up ahead, flickering neon beer signs in the dirty window, Spike decided he could use a drink. He ran his hands through his soaking wet hair, slicking it back. The rain had been coming down hard enough to wash away the blood. He couldn’t smell it anymore, and if he was still bleeding, he’d know it.
He turned into the dive and glanced around, the water dripping from his coat forming a puddle on the uneven floor boards. He dug his hand into his coat pocket and came up with enough money to get drunk on. He ordered a bottle of cheap whiskey and moved to the table farthest from the bar.
Taking off his leather duster, he shook it hard twice, then shrugged back into it. It was waterlogged and weighed a ton. It’d never dry out properly. Didn’t matter. He had nine more just like it, courtesy of the CEO of the Rome branch of W&H. And not one of those coats meant a damn thing.
None of them carried the scars from his fall off the tower when he’d failed to save Dawn, or the scuffs from the house he and Buffy had literally brought down around their ears. None had ever felt the soft touch of Buffy’s hand on his arm, or the not-so-soft touch of her fists and feet.
None of them was Nikki’s coat, purified by the scrubbing bubbles of the amulet; sanctified in a way, as if the ultimate victory in the Hellmouth was Nikki’s, too. As if a part of her had been there, still fightin’ the good fight with her sister Slayers.
His musings came to a halt as he realized Illyria was standing beside his table, and had apparently been there for some time. She just stood there silently, head cocked, as if he were a bloody bug under a microscope.
He raised an eyebrow, acknowledging her presence, and stretched out his leg, shoving the chair across from him away from the table. He gestured to the chair.
“Take a load off.”
Before the words were out of his mouth, he became aware of an old song by The Band running through his mind. Take a load off, Annie. Take a load for free. Take a load off, Annie. Then . . . then . . . then . . . you put the load right on me.
Illyria sat, and he poured her a drink, handing her the glass, and drinking straight from the bottle himself.
“They will never forgive me for what they perceive as my error in judgment.”
“No, luv, don’t reckon they will.”
“Do they not understand the logic? A battle is only fought to be won. If he had decided I was a threat, he would have ended the existence of this body. He tried to do so already before Wesley drained my powers.”
“Logic comes from the head, pet. Emotions—grief, love, hate—that comes from the heart. When people are grieving, lookin’ at things logically’s not high on their priorities list.”
“Grief! I am sick of grief. Grief is ash and vinegar. It is an exercise in futility. Grief will not change things. It will not bring back my Kingdom, or the Burkle persona, or the vampire.”
“No. Won’t do that. Not meant to. Grief is the way humans mourn their passing. ‘S reflective, not pro-active, pet.”
“Do you grieve?”
Spike took a long swallow of the whiskey before answering. “Sometimes I think my whole life is nothin’ but grief. ‘M not the brooding type—don’t wallow in regret and guilt, but the grief . . . the mourning? Yeah. ‘S with me all the time.”
Illyria tilted her head and looked into his eyes. Hers were pale, ice-blue, clinical, cold. His had darkened to midnight blue, overflowing with feelings she couldn’t recognize or name.
“You and Angel were rivals. His presence diminished your existence. You are now free of that. Why do you mourn?”
Spike made a low sound that caused goosebumps to rise on the shell Illyria was wearing. It sounded like the howl of a wolf in torment, but muted, quiet, as if the wolf were far away and only the lingering echo of sound reached her ears.
“Rivals. Yeah. That we were. And much more. My relationship with Angel’s complicated, luv. He was my Yoda, my teacher, my world. I loved him. I hated him. I wanted to be just like him . . . I wanted to be as unlike him as possible. I lived my life in his shadow. Everything I did . . . everything I had . . . he had done and had first. He was the sun, blazin’ in the sky and I was the moon—a pale shadow. I spent a hundred years tryin’ to be better’n him . . . different from him. I wanted him to notice me—to ‘see’ me in my own right. As a person . . . as ‘Spike’, not just ‘Angelus-light’. I wanted him to approve of me, to respect me, to love me. An’ these last few months, we were headin’ in that direction. I began to hope.
“Y’know, the most dangerous emotion in the world isn’t love or hate—it’s hope. Me an’ Angel, we were workin’ things out. We were startin’ to talk, to communicate, to understand each other. We’d both bollixed up all the most important relationships in our lives, but Angel and Darla had managed to work things out. They’d come to a kind of closure. He remembers her with fondness, now, with respect. If they could do that, there was hope for us—for him and me. Hope for . . . absolution.”
His voice was a mere breath of a whisper. “And now that hope is . . . gone.”
Illyria reached out and covered his hand with hers. Spike’s startled eyes locked on hers.
“What are you feelin’ right now, pet? Right this instant?”
“I do not feel human emotions. They are a weakness.”
“Balls! What do you feel?”
“Nothing! I do not feel . . .”
“What. Do. You. Feel?”
Illyria went perfectly still and her eyes went blank as she searched her psyche for the answer. She tried to identify this strange feeling that was so utterly foreign to her. She struggled to put a name to it.
“Compassion.” Illyria spoke haltingly. “I feel . . . compassion.”
“That you do, luv. An’ it looks like there’s hope for you yet.”
**********
Andrew turned off the cordless phone and carefully replaced it in its cradle. He was in a quandary. He had never told Buffy that Spike was alive—well, undeader than when she had last seen him—and was working with Angel. Partly because Spike had asked him not to, and partly to have a secret about Spike that the other Scoobies didn’t have. It was like he had a piece of Spike all to himself that the others couldn’t touch. And he had also harbored the hope that Spike would occasionally contact him.
He had fantasized about clandestine phone calls, leading to face-to-face meetings, in which he and Spike would fill each other in on the details of their lives, and swap news about mutual friends; in the process, developing a deep and meaningful relationship.
Spike would eventually come to value Andrew as the one person in the world who totally understood him.
He could hear their conversations in his head, replaying them over and over, culminating with his regretful statement: “I’ve enjoyed our little tête-à-têtes, Spike, more than I can say, but time is fleeting and now, alas, I must return to my duties as Watcher and guardian of the Forces of Good.”
Spike would answer: “No! You cannot go! Don’t leave me, Andrew. You are the only one in this whole, sorry world I can talk to. I’ve been able to reveal my deepest feelings to you. No one has ever understood me as you have, and I can’t lose that. I need you in my life, Andrew. I don’t think I could bear to go on without your presence and unflagging support. It is as necessary to my continued existence as air or water. Say you will stay . . . my life has no meaning without you in it, Andrew!”
Okay, ixnay on the “air and water” bit—not a good metaphor cause, hey! Vampire, so not something Spike would say, probably. “It is as necessary to my continued existence as hot, pulsating blood!” Much better.
The microwave “dinged”, startling Andrew out of his pleasant reverie. He still hadn’t figured out how he was going to tell Buffy. He supposed he could always go with the classic “Good News/Bad News”. That should do it.
*Hello, Buffy? I’ve got Good News and Bad News.*
*What’s the Bad News?*
*Angel’s dead.*
*What’s the Good News?*
*Spike’s alive.*
Um. Maybe he’d better call Giles instead.
*********************************************************************************
Sword and Stake Home Gen/Ensemble Page Shippy (M/F) Page Slash (M/M) Page Short Stories Page