FIC: Seraph (12/?)
Apr. 14th, 2009 04:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snick_backupStory begins here. All parts may be found here.
Many thanks to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
phoenixofborg and hello_spikey for making this chappie much, much better than it was.
~~~~~
He was cleaning out cobwebs when they came, Willow and Giles, their twin furrowed brows harbingers of something ill. He closed the door behind them and grunted in response to their mumbled hellos. Willow clutched a three-ring binder in front of her like a shield.
“It seems,” Giles began, and then paused to remove his glasses. Bloody hell, he was already polishing the lenses and he hadn’t even said anything yet. “It seems we’ve made -- that is, Willow has made -- a discovery.”
She shot Giles a fidgety glance. “Yeah. Um, you know the program I wrote to search for files on the Initiative’s mainframe?”
“Yeah?”
“It turned out, it worked way better than I thought it did. It picked up all these files that weren’t coming out of anywhere in the main directory -- I don’t think they were even accessible to anyone except the wiggiest of the bigwigs.”
“And your little bits-and-bytes truffle hunter sniffed them out. Which means they have something to do with me and--” He clamped his hands onto the sarcophagus lid. “And the little one.”
“Right! Because, remember how we couldn’t figure out why they’d do medical testing on vampires? And you know how weird it was that all the babies were girls?”
He didn’t know where she was going, but he knew he didn’t like it. “Yeah...” Vampires and girls... No. No.
“We think they were trying to make Slayers.” Her shoulders drew tight and ready to flinch as she waited for him to process that, but he’d already been halfway there.
“Those sick bastards.”
There it was, the flinch, and the wide Willow-eyes. “There was a lot of stuff they didn’t know, like that there’s only one Slayer -- except, you know, Faith. But they had this idea that they could make them -- raise an army, I guess.”
“And they expected to do this how, exactly?” There was the low and deadly again.
“Some time ago,” Giles said, “several members of the Council of Watchers theorized that Slayer potential might be triggered in an ordinary girl if she were exposed to vampires at a very young age. Experimental results were disappointing, but it was argued that they were performed when the girls were too old. Willow--” He nodded to her, “-- has found correspondence from one of these renegade Watchers, apparently telling someone in the Initiative just enough to get the experiments done that he wanted.”
“Hence me with a sprog,” Spike said. “Doesn’t get any younger than that -- or any closer, either. I take it they didn’t much care about me being male?”
Willow shrugged. “It looks like by the time they’d figured out the science to deal with the ‘dead’ part, the ‘male’ part didn’t really matter. A couple of the other vampires were guys, too.”
Spike took a deep, steadying breath. “So, the Initiative wankers were a bunch of sodding idiots, not news, and now I’m up the duff, also not news.”
“Yeah, except...” Willow trailed off.
“Except what?” He was fairly sure he didn’t want to know.
“Except they might have been right,” she said.
“What.”
“Statistical studies suggest that there may be a, a sort of proximity effect,” Giles said. “It may even help explain which Potential is activated -- so far as we are aware, at the time of her calling Buffy was nearer to the Hellmouth than any other Potential of eligible age. She may have been called because of the impending danger with the Master.”
Spike huffed a sigh out of his crumbling disbelief. He’d known it made no sense for the labcoats to gift him with a daughter, even by accident, but he’d thought when he’d escaped with her they’d slipped whatever plan the mad scientists had calculated.
“It wouldn’t be so bad if she were a Slayer, would it?” Willow, placating, always playing peacekeeper. “You wouldn’t really mind if she slayed other vampires, would you? I mean, you’re kind of friends with Buffy now, sort of.”
“You--” He tried to piece this together in his mind, trace the logic of it, but his brain was stumbling off in so many directions at once. “You think I’m upset because she might be a white hat?”
“Um, yeah?”
“She’s a baby!” he exploded. “Not a vamp duster. She’s not even born yet!” And there were his hands out in plain sight, cupped around his little girl. “You want to hand her her death sentence before her life’s fairly started!”
Feet shuffling now, and the eyeing thereof. “Buffy’s been all right so far--”
“Are you blind? You’ve been playing sidekick how long now? Buffy’s already died once, or so I hear. She teamed up with my own evil self for the sole purpose of offing her boyfriend. How many times has she saved the world, and what’d it cost her?” He turned to Giles. “You’re a bloody Watcher, you know what slaying does to them. Refines ‘em so they’re bright and hard as steel, and then just keeps burning, until they’re pitted and brittle and finally they shatter. You know.”
And Giles, damn him, was looking at Spike with something like sympathy, layered over a sharper, deeper pain that Spike didn’t want to contemplate. “Yes,” he said softly. “I know.”
Willow’s voice broke the moment. “But we don’t know anything for sure, right, Giles?”
He cleared his throat. “Yes, well, the statistical results were not conclusive -- certainly the correlation was nothing like a hundred percent. Even if the theory were sound -- which we don’t know -- we’d no reason to think that this...practice--” His gaze flicked down Spike for an instant. “--would always yield the desired results.”
“How would we know if it did?” Spike said. “Some sort of test? Some mojo?”
“There is a diagnostic spell to check for Slayer potential,” he said, “but it won’t work until she’s born, and even then, it isn’t recommended to perform any magic on or near an infant for several months after birth.”
“Like your ‘is it a demon’ spell?” Spike suggested sarcastically. “Or Red’s big joining of the mystical foursome?”
Willow made a squeak that sounded like a precursor to further apologies, but Giles interrupted. “Had you informed us of your condition, the latter issue wouldn’t have arisen.” He looked pointedly at Spike, and then continued, “However, even if she were a Potential, the Council estimates there are several thousand worldwide at any given time. Her chances of being called would be miniscule.”
“Yeah, except who knows what kind of ‘proximity effect’ having a vampire for a dad will have on her.”
Giles eyed him sharply with renewed, not altogether neutral interest. “Surely you don’t intend to keep the child,” he said.
“I -- what? You’re daft. What would I do with a little one?” Spike asked, scrambling.
“An excellent question,” Giles said softly.
Willow glanced back and forth between them, lips parted with some unvoiced thought.
“Well, what if I did want to keep her? Which I don’t. Lot of mess, babies.”
“What if you did?” Giles repeated, eyebrows high in disbelief. “Spike, let us for the moment pretend that you are not a soulless murderer of innocents.” He took off his glasses and thrust them in Spike’s face. “You are still irresponsible, impulsive, self-centered, and violent. You are amused by others’ pain. You do not work and have no steady income. You are unmoved by any sense of compassion or empathy. You are a thief, an extortionist, a braggart, and a drunk.
“You are, in point of fact, utterly incapable of physically, mentally, or emotionally providing for a child.” He shut his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. “I would not leave a dog in your care, much less a future Slayer.”
“But shouldn’t he get to say what happens to her?” Willow asked, her eyes shining huge with...worry? “He is kind of the one who’s pregnant.”
Looking startled, Giles said, “You can’t possibly think he could take adequate care of her, even if he wanted to.”
“Well, no. I mean, maybe? I mean...” She glanced at Spike, but he was fairly sure there were no answers to her dilemma stamped on his forehead.
“It isn’t as though we’ve no alternatives. There are protocols in place for orphaned Potentials. The Council--”
“You want to give her to those wankers? They’re the ones that did this to her!”
“Not the Council proper,” Giles said. “This was orchestrated by a renegade who has long since been turned out of the ranks.”
“Like yourself?” Spike said.
Giles’ gaze narrowed, but he only said, “Regardless of her provenance, if she were a Potential, the best possible place for her would be in the Council’s care.”
“And if I didn’t want to give her up?” Shut up, Spike, shut up.
Giles’ snort sounded almost amused. “How much trouble do you suppose a vampire with a severe human-violence handicap could give them?”
Spike met Giles stare for stare and waited for something between them to shatter. Finally, he shrugged with careful indifference. “I guess it’s something to think about. Big decision, figuring out what to do with a baby.”
“Yes,” Giles said, voice deceptively soft. “How very odd that the decision should be yours.”
“Funny old world, innit?” Spike said. Pinned under that gaze, he had trouble finding the breath to speak. “Anyway, nothing to be done at the moment, is there? Just wait and see if she’s one of these maybe-Slayers?”
“So it would seem.”
“Right, then,” Spike said, willing his shoulders to relax and his hands loosen. “In the meantime, I don’t suppose you’d give a hand with the cleaning.” He flicked a thumb towards the back of the crypt. “Haven’t gotten around to much fixing yet on the fixer-upper.”
“I could maybe come by later this week,” Willow said. “I bet Tara would, too -- she’s been asking about you.”
“Yeah?” For a bare moment he looked forward to that, a cleaning party with the witches, before he remembered that he hadn’t really meant the offer. He cocked his head to a mocking angle. “What about you, Rupert?”
“Thank you, no.” Giles finally returned his glasses to his nose and glanced about the gloom with distaste. “I’ve a few more sources to review on how Slayers are chosen.”
“Right.” Spike snagged his broom from the corner it’d been leaning in. “Well, then.” He looked at them pointedly until they said their farewells and then he shut the door firmly behind them. He allowed himself thirty seconds slouched against the sarcophagus, eyes shut and breath shuddering, while he considered this new disaster and all the small catastrophes to come in its wake. He saw again the firm, cold purpose in Giles’ eyes and heard it in his voice.
Rising, Spike stuffed what little cash he had on hand and his one remaining pouch of blood into his duster pockets and wrapped Dawn’s books in the blanket he’d been sleeping under. Then he scuttled down the ladder and sacrificed a few seconds more glancing at the crib he’d salvaged a couple of nights ago, a bit battered in places but nothing some pliers and duct tape couldn’t straighten out. But it wasn’t worth dragging halfway across town, not when he was in a hurry. Neither was the tiny blanket, rat-nibbled, which he’d put in the crib more to keep it from looking so barren than for any other reason; nor the stuffed elephant he’d plucked from a dumpster for the same purpose.
There was, in fact, nothing he wanted to take, nothing of value at all except the knives, bought for two silky white Abyssinians the week before. He fingered them a moment. Friendship, plain and simple, wasn’t generally a vampire concept; maybe if it had been, he might have found someone before this who didn’t seem to notice, or at least to care, that he was a vampire. But Dawn didn’t, or she hadn’t until a few days ago, and that was...
Well. No use in thinking how that had been. It didn’t matter now. He set the knives back down with the wistful hope that she’d find them and know he’d left them for her.
He shouldered his makeshift bookbag and angled around the corner to his personal sewer exit, and then he took off in the direction of a certain abandoned shed. It wasn’t a straight shot, but the sun would be set by the time he reached the DeSoto.
Finally, he was leaving Sunnydale for the last time.
next part
Many thanks to
phoenixofborg and hello_spikey for making this chappie much, much better than it was.~~~~~
He was cleaning out cobwebs when they came, Willow and Giles, their twin furrowed brows harbingers of something ill. He closed the door behind them and grunted in response to their mumbled hellos. Willow clutched a three-ring binder in front of her like a shield.
“It seems,” Giles began, and then paused to remove his glasses. Bloody hell, he was already polishing the lenses and he hadn’t even said anything yet. “It seems we’ve made -- that is, Willow has made -- a discovery.”
She shot Giles a fidgety glance. “Yeah. Um, you know the program I wrote to search for files on the Initiative’s mainframe?”
“Yeah?”
“It turned out, it worked way better than I thought it did. It picked up all these files that weren’t coming out of anywhere in the main directory -- I don’t think they were even accessible to anyone except the wiggiest of the bigwigs.”
“And your little bits-and-bytes truffle hunter sniffed them out. Which means they have something to do with me and--” He clamped his hands onto the sarcophagus lid. “And the little one.”
“Right! Because, remember how we couldn’t figure out why they’d do medical testing on vampires? And you know how weird it was that all the babies were girls?”
He didn’t know where she was going, but he knew he didn’t like it. “Yeah...” Vampires and girls... No. No.
“We think they were trying to make Slayers.” Her shoulders drew tight and ready to flinch as she waited for him to process that, but he’d already been halfway there.
“Those sick bastards.”
There it was, the flinch, and the wide Willow-eyes. “There was a lot of stuff they didn’t know, like that there’s only one Slayer -- except, you know, Faith. But they had this idea that they could make them -- raise an army, I guess.”
“And they expected to do this how, exactly?” There was the low and deadly again.
“Some time ago,” Giles said, “several members of the Council of Watchers theorized that Slayer potential might be triggered in an ordinary girl if she were exposed to vampires at a very young age. Experimental results were disappointing, but it was argued that they were performed when the girls were too old. Willow--” He nodded to her, “-- has found correspondence from one of these renegade Watchers, apparently telling someone in the Initiative just enough to get the experiments done that he wanted.”
“Hence me with a sprog,” Spike said. “Doesn’t get any younger than that -- or any closer, either. I take it they didn’t much care about me being male?”
Willow shrugged. “It looks like by the time they’d figured out the science to deal with the ‘dead’ part, the ‘male’ part didn’t really matter. A couple of the other vampires were guys, too.”
Spike took a deep, steadying breath. “So, the Initiative wankers were a bunch of sodding idiots, not news, and now I’m up the duff, also not news.”
“Yeah, except...” Willow trailed off.
“Except what?” He was fairly sure he didn’t want to know.
“Except they might have been right,” she said.
“What.”
“Statistical studies suggest that there may be a, a sort of proximity effect,” Giles said. “It may even help explain which Potential is activated -- so far as we are aware, at the time of her calling Buffy was nearer to the Hellmouth than any other Potential of eligible age. She may have been called because of the impending danger with the Master.”
Spike huffed a sigh out of his crumbling disbelief. He’d known it made no sense for the labcoats to gift him with a daughter, even by accident, but he’d thought when he’d escaped with her they’d slipped whatever plan the mad scientists had calculated.
“It wouldn’t be so bad if she were a Slayer, would it?” Willow, placating, always playing peacekeeper. “You wouldn’t really mind if she slayed other vampires, would you? I mean, you’re kind of friends with Buffy now, sort of.”
“You--” He tried to piece this together in his mind, trace the logic of it, but his brain was stumbling off in so many directions at once. “You think I’m upset because she might be a white hat?”
“Um, yeah?”
“She’s a baby!” he exploded. “Not a vamp duster. She’s not even born yet!” And there were his hands out in plain sight, cupped around his little girl. “You want to hand her her death sentence before her life’s fairly started!”
Feet shuffling now, and the eyeing thereof. “Buffy’s been all right so far--”
“Are you blind? You’ve been playing sidekick how long now? Buffy’s already died once, or so I hear. She teamed up with my own evil self for the sole purpose of offing her boyfriend. How many times has she saved the world, and what’d it cost her?” He turned to Giles. “You’re a bloody Watcher, you know what slaying does to them. Refines ‘em so they’re bright and hard as steel, and then just keeps burning, until they’re pitted and brittle and finally they shatter. You know.”
And Giles, damn him, was looking at Spike with something like sympathy, layered over a sharper, deeper pain that Spike didn’t want to contemplate. “Yes,” he said softly. “I know.”
Willow’s voice broke the moment. “But we don’t know anything for sure, right, Giles?”
He cleared his throat. “Yes, well, the statistical results were not conclusive -- certainly the correlation was nothing like a hundred percent. Even if the theory were sound -- which we don’t know -- we’d no reason to think that this...practice--” His gaze flicked down Spike for an instant. “--would always yield the desired results.”
“How would we know if it did?” Spike said. “Some sort of test? Some mojo?”
“There is a diagnostic spell to check for Slayer potential,” he said, “but it won’t work until she’s born, and even then, it isn’t recommended to perform any magic on or near an infant for several months after birth.”
“Like your ‘is it a demon’ spell?” Spike suggested sarcastically. “Or Red’s big joining of the mystical foursome?”
Willow made a squeak that sounded like a precursor to further apologies, but Giles interrupted. “Had you informed us of your condition, the latter issue wouldn’t have arisen.” He looked pointedly at Spike, and then continued, “However, even if she were a Potential, the Council estimates there are several thousand worldwide at any given time. Her chances of being called would be miniscule.”
“Yeah, except who knows what kind of ‘proximity effect’ having a vampire for a dad will have on her.”
Giles eyed him sharply with renewed, not altogether neutral interest. “Surely you don’t intend to keep the child,” he said.
“I -- what? You’re daft. What would I do with a little one?” Spike asked, scrambling.
“An excellent question,” Giles said softly.
Willow glanced back and forth between them, lips parted with some unvoiced thought.
“Well, what if I did want to keep her? Which I don’t. Lot of mess, babies.”
“What if you did?” Giles repeated, eyebrows high in disbelief. “Spike, let us for the moment pretend that you are not a soulless murderer of innocents.” He took off his glasses and thrust them in Spike’s face. “You are still irresponsible, impulsive, self-centered, and violent. You are amused by others’ pain. You do not work and have no steady income. You are unmoved by any sense of compassion or empathy. You are a thief, an extortionist, a braggart, and a drunk.
“You are, in point of fact, utterly incapable of physically, mentally, or emotionally providing for a child.” He shut his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. “I would not leave a dog in your care, much less a future Slayer.”
“But shouldn’t he get to say what happens to her?” Willow asked, her eyes shining huge with...worry? “He is kind of the one who’s pregnant.”
Looking startled, Giles said, “You can’t possibly think he could take adequate care of her, even if he wanted to.”
“Well, no. I mean, maybe? I mean...” She glanced at Spike, but he was fairly sure there were no answers to her dilemma stamped on his forehead.
“It isn’t as though we’ve no alternatives. There are protocols in place for orphaned Potentials. The Council--”
“You want to give her to those wankers? They’re the ones that did this to her!”
“Not the Council proper,” Giles said. “This was orchestrated by a renegade who has long since been turned out of the ranks.”
“Like yourself?” Spike said.
Giles’ gaze narrowed, but he only said, “Regardless of her provenance, if she were a Potential, the best possible place for her would be in the Council’s care.”
“And if I didn’t want to give her up?” Shut up, Spike, shut up.
Giles’ snort sounded almost amused. “How much trouble do you suppose a vampire with a severe human-violence handicap could give them?”
Spike met Giles stare for stare and waited for something between them to shatter. Finally, he shrugged with careful indifference. “I guess it’s something to think about. Big decision, figuring out what to do with a baby.”
“Yes,” Giles said, voice deceptively soft. “How very odd that the decision should be yours.”
“Funny old world, innit?” Spike said. Pinned under that gaze, he had trouble finding the breath to speak. “Anyway, nothing to be done at the moment, is there? Just wait and see if she’s one of these maybe-Slayers?”
“So it would seem.”
“Right, then,” Spike said, willing his shoulders to relax and his hands loosen. “In the meantime, I don’t suppose you’d give a hand with the cleaning.” He flicked a thumb towards the back of the crypt. “Haven’t gotten around to much fixing yet on the fixer-upper.”
“I could maybe come by later this week,” Willow said. “I bet Tara would, too -- she’s been asking about you.”
“Yeah?” For a bare moment he looked forward to that, a cleaning party with the witches, before he remembered that he hadn’t really meant the offer. He cocked his head to a mocking angle. “What about you, Rupert?”
“Thank you, no.” Giles finally returned his glasses to his nose and glanced about the gloom with distaste. “I’ve a few more sources to review on how Slayers are chosen.”
“Right.” Spike snagged his broom from the corner it’d been leaning in. “Well, then.” He looked at them pointedly until they said their farewells and then he shut the door firmly behind them. He allowed himself thirty seconds slouched against the sarcophagus, eyes shut and breath shuddering, while he considered this new disaster and all the small catastrophes to come in its wake. He saw again the firm, cold purpose in Giles’ eyes and heard it in his voice.
Rising, Spike stuffed what little cash he had on hand and his one remaining pouch of blood into his duster pockets and wrapped Dawn’s books in the blanket he’d been sleeping under. Then he scuttled down the ladder and sacrificed a few seconds more glancing at the crib he’d salvaged a couple of nights ago, a bit battered in places but nothing some pliers and duct tape couldn’t straighten out. But it wasn’t worth dragging halfway across town, not when he was in a hurry. Neither was the tiny blanket, rat-nibbled, which he’d put in the crib more to keep it from looking so barren than for any other reason; nor the stuffed elephant he’d plucked from a dumpster for the same purpose.
There was, in fact, nothing he wanted to take, nothing of value at all except the knives, bought for two silky white Abyssinians the week before. He fingered them a moment. Friendship, plain and simple, wasn’t generally a vampire concept; maybe if it had been, he might have found someone before this who didn’t seem to notice, or at least to care, that he was a vampire. But Dawn didn’t, or she hadn’t until a few days ago, and that was...
Well. No use in thinking how that had been. It didn’t matter now. He set the knives back down with the wistful hope that she’d find them and know he’d left them for her.
He shouldered his makeshift bookbag and angled around the corner to his personal sewer exit, and then he took off in the direction of a certain abandoned shed. It wasn’t a straight shot, but the sun would be set by the time he reached the DeSoto.
Finally, he was leaving Sunnydale for the last time.
next part
