FIC: Seraph (13/?)
Apr. 21st, 2009 10:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snick_backupStory begins here. All parts may be found here.
As usual, muchas gracias to my lovely betas,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
hello_spikey and phoenixofborg.
~~~~~
Spike trudged the sewer and tried to figure out where he was running to. L.A. was the obvious destination, with its top-notch demonic medical care. Of course, Angel was there, too -- was that a plus or a minus? Minus, Spike decided, considering the number of pokers Angel had been jabbed with the last time they’d met.
Maybe Mexico, or parts further south, where the weather was always comfortably warm -- and diseases plentiful and varied. Bugger.
North, then, somewhere it actually rained and he could take her out in the daytime now and then.
Or... hell, who was he fooling? He’d never been one for sitting still. It was only inertia and a sort of perverse affection that’d kept him in Sunnydale this long. It hardly mattered where he aimed for now; chances were slim he’d still be there by the time she was born.
At the usual manhole he crawled up the ladder and out, his nose so full of sewer stench that he was already aboveground before he caught Buffy’s scent. There she stood, leaning against his DeSoto with her arms crossed, her lips thin with what he took for impatience. He stiffened, too late: she’d already caught sight of him.
Bloody hell.
“Slayer,” he said, stumbling a step backward, and then his wrists were shackled in hot Slayer hands.
“I need to talk to you, Spike.”
“Bit busy at the moment. Mind if I catch up with you later?” Because maybe it was just regular Slayer business she was on, a demon to identify or some such, and all he needed was fifteen minutes’ head start.
“Willow told me,” she said.
So much for that. “She tell you I’d run?”
“She had an idea. Dawn told me where you stashed the car. Look, I need to talk to you. Just talk.” She grimaced down at his hands. “If I let you go, do you promise not to disappear on me?”
He looked her in the eye and willed every ounce of sincerity he’d ever faked into just one word. “Yeah.”
As soon as her grip loosened, he swept a foot behind her ankles and, fighting the lightning strike in his head as she fell, he dropped his blanket full of books and ran.
It took her less than three seconds to catch up to him. As she gripped his shoulder, he spun and swung one good punch at her chin. The chip blinded him as she hit the ground a second time. He scrambled backwards and nearly smacked into a brick pillar at the edge of the lot. Past it, he sprinted, still dizzy with pain and thrown off his usual stride by the shift in his center of gravity that he hadn’t gotten used to yet.
If he could just get into the woods, he could lose her...
The next moment Buffy tackled him, contriving to flip him around in the process so he landed on his back, almost gently, with her straddling him but not the baby, which meant she was practically sitting on his neck. “You always follow through on your deals,” she said accusingly, one hand cupping her chin.
“Wasn’t a deal,” he wheezed. “Was a promise, extracted under duress.”
She huffed a sigh. “So, what, are we going to have this conversation like this?”
He closed his eyes. “What’s it matter? Jury’s decided. Verdict’s already in.” His brain scrambled for a plan, anything that’d get him and the little one safely away with no worse than the headache throbbing behind his eyeballs. He came up blank. Keep her talking, that was all he could do, that and hope for another opening. “Fine, go ahead. Start apologizing for stealing my little one soon as she’s out.”
When no answer came, he looked up at her. “That’s it, isn’t it? Maybe you could just about stomach letting some faceless tyke get corrupted, but a corrupted Slayer puts the whole soddin’ world at risk, am I right?” He could tell by her stone gaze, her utter lack of surprise that he was. “Saw it all in the Watcher’s face. You’re going to turn her over to someone who’ll treat her like a destiny instead of a little girl. Aren’t you.”
“So tell me why we shouldn’t,” she said evenly.
He opened his mouth to reply, but he’d hit the limit to the number of words he could force out with a Slayer on his chest, and he started choking. Buffy shifted off him and pulled him sitting upright, and then she waited while he got his breath.
Finally, he said, “Vampire here. Doesn’t matter that I’m the one who’s been carrying her around for months. Doesn’t matter I’m the only one who cares what happens to her -- her, not just some abstract good that comes of rescuing her from the labcoats’ clutches, or mine, for that matter. We’re not people to you, neither of us, just pebbles to be sorted into the good and evil jars.”
“But what would you do with a baby?” Buffy’s expression was sincere puzzlement, tinged with suspicion for his presumably nefarious intent. “What do you want her for?”
“I don’t want her for anything. She’s not a birthday prezzie, Slayer, and not a pawn in some game of mystical chess, either.”
Buffy rocked back and planted her hands behind her in the grass. “What is she, then?”
“She’s the only person on this whole rotten planet I’m worth anything to,” he blurted. “Even if I am just living space.” He looked off down the street, avoiding the Slayer’s face and the pity that had to be there; he’d pity the bloke that delivered a line like that, if he didn’t just eat him for being a pathetic wanker. “It’s us against the universe, and I’m not giving her up.”
“If she did turn out to be a Slayer, what would you do?”
“She won’t,” he said, as firmly as though the truth depended on the strength of his conviction. “But if she did, I’d teach her every trick I know. She’d know more about vamps than any Slayer that ever lived, and so long as I was solid she’d never fight alone.”
“You wouldn’t have to do that,” Buffy said, staring down at the hem of her shirt. “She wouldn’t have to fight anything. I don’t. I choose to fight the baddies and save the world and all the rest of it.” She looked up and peered intently at him. “Why would she care about any of that, if you raised her?”
He hadn’t even considered that -- he’d had so little time to think at all. “Told you, I like the world. D’like it to carry on a bit longer yet.”
It wasn’t much of an answer, but she didn’t press it. Instead, “What if you got the chip out? Would you turn her?”
“Bloody hell, Slayer! I don’t want her dead. I want her.”
“But if you turned her you’d have a sidekick, Big Bad and Little Bad.” She said this casually, as though the conclusion was obvious, easy.
And it was obvious, it was easy, but not the way he thought it should have been. “I don’t want her stuck in the shadows with me. I want her to be a bloody seraph, golden and shining.” And curse William for needing to get his word in at the worst possible moment.
But Buffy didn’t seem to notice the slip into romanticism. “Why?” she said, her brow furrowed with bafflement. “What would you want with a, a seraph? I don’t get it.”
He opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again. With each attempt her eyebrows rose a fraction higher. “She’s alive,” he said finally.
Pause. “And?”
“And I’m dead!” She looked at him blankly. “Look, there’s an order to things: living and dead, light and dark, good and evil, call it what you like. There’s the part of the world that’s running as it should and the part that’s gumming up the works. I’m on the broken side of things, and I like it. S’fun. But she’s not broken yet, at least not like I am, and I want her to stay that way. Whole. Falling off the wall’s easy enough, but getting put back together again...well, from where I’m standing it’s bloody well not going to happen, is it?”
“Your unexpected philosophical depths just got depthier,” she said, but her tone was sober. “So why not just give her to the non-broken people?”
“Because they won’t love her like I do!” He braced for the denial, but it didn’t come. Deflated, he added softly, “I can’t give her up.” Again he waited, for accusation this time, a finger pointing to say that here was proof that he wasn’t fit, that he didn’t deserve her. “If it was a question of her death or my dust, it’d be dust every time. But I’m not turning her over to some wanker just because he thinks he’s got better idea of her ‘welfare’ than I do. You’ll have to stake me first.”
“Okay,” Buffy said.
He wasn’t sure what he was being told. It must have showed.
“She’s yours. I’ll tell the others to lay off the baby-stealing talk.”
He thought it must be a trick, but the Slayer wasn’t much better a liar than him. “You mean it. You won’t interfere.”
“No interference of the Buffy. Or of the Giles, which is really what you’re worried about, right?”
“You’re serious.”
“Yuh huh.” There was a full eye roll implicit in that tone. “But look, if it turns out that she is one of these Potential Slayers, then we’ll need to discuss, okay? Because you know how I feel about the Watcher’s Council--” She frowned. “Or maybe you don’t. Anyway, they and me are totally unmixy, and there’s no way I’m letting them get their hands on her.
“But still, if she is, then we’ll need to make with some planning.”
If she was -- well, he wasn’t thinking about that. She wasn’t; the question was irrelevent. But if she was...
“All right,” he said finally. “But no stealing.”
“No stealing,” she agreed. “And, Spike? Your baby does not need her dad to get dusty for being stupid and evil. I won’t stake you unless I have to, and -- here’s proof there’s an apocalypse coming any minute -- I don’t want to have to.” Softly, “So please, don’t make me.”
He’d already used up what little prevaricative skill he had for the night. He looked straight into that steady, serious gaze, and he said, “Right.”
“Okay.” Her posture loosened and she leaned back on her arms, braced against the grass. The combative glint in her eye faded.
“Okay.” He felt like he’d just wrestled a Fyarl -- and won, it seemed. Which pretty much never happened, not in a fair bout. “What are you playing at, Slayer?”
She glanced at him, eyes questioning.
“You’re saying me and my superior powers of argumentation just convinced you to let me keep her? Not bloody likely. Since when did you give a rat’s arse what I said about anything? Since when did you listen to me at all?”
“Well...” She shrugged. “It’s not like there’s a handy how-to guide for this -- The Slayer’s Guide to Pregnant Vampires. And she is sort of yours. I mean, if she were just a baby and not a Slayer or whatever, it’s not like anyone else would want her. Poor kid.” Her mouth twisted in a sympathetic grimace. “Anyway, I’m not trying to kill something or prevent certain doom, so I don’t think it’s really a slaying-type mess. It’s a...some other kind of mess.”
A pause, while he processed this. “That the speech you’re giving the Scoobies at large?”
A shift of the shoulders. “More or less.”
“And you expect, say, Giles to find it convincing?”
“I’m the Slayer, right? So call this a unilateral Slayer decision.” For a bare moment he saw it in her eyes, the burden and the glory both. “They’ll be okay with it eventually.”
And he believed her. He doubted Giles would yield so easily, but still, he believed her.
Within, his little girl squirmed, maybe in response to the release in tension. He rubbed that spot low under his belly that she seemed to respond to. “S’all right, love, we’ve got the Slayer looking after us now.” Then he caught Buffy’s wide-eyed stare, and he slumped. “Bugger.”
“You talk to your stomach.”
“I talk to her.” He looked off into the distant dark, waiting for peals of girly, un-Slayerlike giggles. When they didn’t come, he glanced back to see her lips quirking into a grin.
Before he could react, she leaned over and mock-whispered to his middle, “Don’t tell him, but your dad’s kind of a dork.”
“Hey!”
“But it’s okay, you’re one of us.” She laid a hand on his stomach, palm flat and fingers pointed up. “We’ll save you from the dorkiness.”
In the last weeks of bemusement she’d watched Dawn pat at him and feel for tiny kicks, but Buffy had never touched him, and now the shiver of having the Slayer that close to something that mattered that much swamped all other thought.
Then he realized why the gesture felt so familiar. “Bloody hell,” he breathed.
She snatched her hand away, looked up. “What?”
Well, wasn’t this confessional time? Might as well tell it all. “Dream I had. You talked to her, put your hand like that. Said she was one of you lot.”
Recollection dawned. “I remember that. Wait -- you were in that dream? You were?”
“It was my dream!”
“So you said at the time,” she said, tone amused. Then she snapped her fingers. “That was the First Slayer dream! And you, with the spell--”
“First Slayer dream?”
“You know, the joining spell, to beat Adam? The First Slayer came that night and tried to kill us all in our dreams. Did she slay you?”
Well, that explained a bit. “Didn’t pay me any attention. Probably because, as you pointed out, I didn’t belong there. I wasn’t one of you, after all.” He was surprised at the depth of his bitterness at that memory.
It wasn’t like he’d ever wanted inside the bumbling circle of evil-squashers that’d named themselves after a kids’ show on the telly. Except maybe in a single moment of weakness, after spending most of the last year outside every circle known to man or vamp.
“But you hate us, right?”
He opened his mouth to say of course he did, he loathed every one of them that’d been fouling up his plans since day one. Instead, “Don’t really have the energy anymore,” he said, hand fallen to his belly again. “Got other concerns now.”
“Oh.” At his look, “I guess we don’t hate you anymore, either. I mean, there’s the trying to kill us and all, but...”
“But?”
She shrugged. “Like you said, other concerns. And heck, you haven’t tried in, what, at least six months?”
“Twenty-eight weeks,” he said softly.
next part
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As usual, muchas gracias to my lovely betas,
hello_spikey and phoenixofborg.~~~~~
Spike trudged the sewer and tried to figure out where he was running to. L.A. was the obvious destination, with its top-notch demonic medical care. Of course, Angel was there, too -- was that a plus or a minus? Minus, Spike decided, considering the number of pokers Angel had been jabbed with the last time they’d met.
Maybe Mexico, or parts further south, where the weather was always comfortably warm -- and diseases plentiful and varied. Bugger.
North, then, somewhere it actually rained and he could take her out in the daytime now and then.
Or... hell, who was he fooling? He’d never been one for sitting still. It was only inertia and a sort of perverse affection that’d kept him in Sunnydale this long. It hardly mattered where he aimed for now; chances were slim he’d still be there by the time she was born.
At the usual manhole he crawled up the ladder and out, his nose so full of sewer stench that he was already aboveground before he caught Buffy’s scent. There she stood, leaning against his DeSoto with her arms crossed, her lips thin with what he took for impatience. He stiffened, too late: she’d already caught sight of him.
Bloody hell.
“Slayer,” he said, stumbling a step backward, and then his wrists were shackled in hot Slayer hands.
“I need to talk to you, Spike.”
“Bit busy at the moment. Mind if I catch up with you later?” Because maybe it was just regular Slayer business she was on, a demon to identify or some such, and all he needed was fifteen minutes’ head start.
“Willow told me,” she said.
So much for that. “She tell you I’d run?”
“She had an idea. Dawn told me where you stashed the car. Look, I need to talk to you. Just talk.” She grimaced down at his hands. “If I let you go, do you promise not to disappear on me?”
He looked her in the eye and willed every ounce of sincerity he’d ever faked into just one word. “Yeah.”
As soon as her grip loosened, he swept a foot behind her ankles and, fighting the lightning strike in his head as she fell, he dropped his blanket full of books and ran.
It took her less than three seconds to catch up to him. As she gripped his shoulder, he spun and swung one good punch at her chin. The chip blinded him as she hit the ground a second time. He scrambled backwards and nearly smacked into a brick pillar at the edge of the lot. Past it, he sprinted, still dizzy with pain and thrown off his usual stride by the shift in his center of gravity that he hadn’t gotten used to yet.
If he could just get into the woods, he could lose her...
The next moment Buffy tackled him, contriving to flip him around in the process so he landed on his back, almost gently, with her straddling him but not the baby, which meant she was practically sitting on his neck. “You always follow through on your deals,” she said accusingly, one hand cupping her chin.
“Wasn’t a deal,” he wheezed. “Was a promise, extracted under duress.”
She huffed a sigh. “So, what, are we going to have this conversation like this?”
He closed his eyes. “What’s it matter? Jury’s decided. Verdict’s already in.” His brain scrambled for a plan, anything that’d get him and the little one safely away with no worse than the headache throbbing behind his eyeballs. He came up blank. Keep her talking, that was all he could do, that and hope for another opening. “Fine, go ahead. Start apologizing for stealing my little one soon as she’s out.”
When no answer came, he looked up at her. “That’s it, isn’t it? Maybe you could just about stomach letting some faceless tyke get corrupted, but a corrupted Slayer puts the whole soddin’ world at risk, am I right?” He could tell by her stone gaze, her utter lack of surprise that he was. “Saw it all in the Watcher’s face. You’re going to turn her over to someone who’ll treat her like a destiny instead of a little girl. Aren’t you.”
“So tell me why we shouldn’t,” she said evenly.
He opened his mouth to reply, but he’d hit the limit to the number of words he could force out with a Slayer on his chest, and he started choking. Buffy shifted off him and pulled him sitting upright, and then she waited while he got his breath.
Finally, he said, “Vampire here. Doesn’t matter that I’m the one who’s been carrying her around for months. Doesn’t matter I’m the only one who cares what happens to her -- her, not just some abstract good that comes of rescuing her from the labcoats’ clutches, or mine, for that matter. We’re not people to you, neither of us, just pebbles to be sorted into the good and evil jars.”
“But what would you do with a baby?” Buffy’s expression was sincere puzzlement, tinged with suspicion for his presumably nefarious intent. “What do you want her for?”
“I don’t want her for anything. She’s not a birthday prezzie, Slayer, and not a pawn in some game of mystical chess, either.”
Buffy rocked back and planted her hands behind her in the grass. “What is she, then?”
“She’s the only person on this whole rotten planet I’m worth anything to,” he blurted. “Even if I am just living space.” He looked off down the street, avoiding the Slayer’s face and the pity that had to be there; he’d pity the bloke that delivered a line like that, if he didn’t just eat him for being a pathetic wanker. “It’s us against the universe, and I’m not giving her up.”
“If she did turn out to be a Slayer, what would you do?”
“She won’t,” he said, as firmly as though the truth depended on the strength of his conviction. “But if she did, I’d teach her every trick I know. She’d know more about vamps than any Slayer that ever lived, and so long as I was solid she’d never fight alone.”
“You wouldn’t have to do that,” Buffy said, staring down at the hem of her shirt. “She wouldn’t have to fight anything. I don’t. I choose to fight the baddies and save the world and all the rest of it.” She looked up and peered intently at him. “Why would she care about any of that, if you raised her?”
He hadn’t even considered that -- he’d had so little time to think at all. “Told you, I like the world. D’like it to carry on a bit longer yet.”
It wasn’t much of an answer, but she didn’t press it. Instead, “What if you got the chip out? Would you turn her?”
“Bloody hell, Slayer! I don’t want her dead. I want her.”
“But if you turned her you’d have a sidekick, Big Bad and Little Bad.” She said this casually, as though the conclusion was obvious, easy.
And it was obvious, it was easy, but not the way he thought it should have been. “I don’t want her stuck in the shadows with me. I want her to be a bloody seraph, golden and shining.” And curse William for needing to get his word in at the worst possible moment.
But Buffy didn’t seem to notice the slip into romanticism. “Why?” she said, her brow furrowed with bafflement. “What would you want with a, a seraph? I don’t get it.”
He opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again. With each attempt her eyebrows rose a fraction higher. “She’s alive,” he said finally.
Pause. “And?”
“And I’m dead!” She looked at him blankly. “Look, there’s an order to things: living and dead, light and dark, good and evil, call it what you like. There’s the part of the world that’s running as it should and the part that’s gumming up the works. I’m on the broken side of things, and I like it. S’fun. But she’s not broken yet, at least not like I am, and I want her to stay that way. Whole. Falling off the wall’s easy enough, but getting put back together again...well, from where I’m standing it’s bloody well not going to happen, is it?”
“Your unexpected philosophical depths just got depthier,” she said, but her tone was sober. “So why not just give her to the non-broken people?”
“Because they won’t love her like I do!” He braced for the denial, but it didn’t come. Deflated, he added softly, “I can’t give her up.” Again he waited, for accusation this time, a finger pointing to say that here was proof that he wasn’t fit, that he didn’t deserve her. “If it was a question of her death or my dust, it’d be dust every time. But I’m not turning her over to some wanker just because he thinks he’s got better idea of her ‘welfare’ than I do. You’ll have to stake me first.”
“Okay,” Buffy said.
He wasn’t sure what he was being told. It must have showed.
“She’s yours. I’ll tell the others to lay off the baby-stealing talk.”
He thought it must be a trick, but the Slayer wasn’t much better a liar than him. “You mean it. You won’t interfere.”
“No interference of the Buffy. Or of the Giles, which is really what you’re worried about, right?”
“You’re serious.”
“Yuh huh.” There was a full eye roll implicit in that tone. “But look, if it turns out that she is one of these Potential Slayers, then we’ll need to discuss, okay? Because you know how I feel about the Watcher’s Council--” She frowned. “Or maybe you don’t. Anyway, they and me are totally unmixy, and there’s no way I’m letting them get their hands on her.
“But still, if she is, then we’ll need to make with some planning.”
If she was -- well, he wasn’t thinking about that. She wasn’t; the question was irrelevent. But if she was...
“All right,” he said finally. “But no stealing.”
“No stealing,” she agreed. “And, Spike? Your baby does not need her dad to get dusty for being stupid and evil. I won’t stake you unless I have to, and -- here’s proof there’s an apocalypse coming any minute -- I don’t want to have to.” Softly, “So please, don’t make me.”
He’d already used up what little prevaricative skill he had for the night. He looked straight into that steady, serious gaze, and he said, “Right.”
“Okay.” Her posture loosened and she leaned back on her arms, braced against the grass. The combative glint in her eye faded.
“Okay.” He felt like he’d just wrestled a Fyarl -- and won, it seemed. Which pretty much never happened, not in a fair bout. “What are you playing at, Slayer?”
She glanced at him, eyes questioning.
“You’re saying me and my superior powers of argumentation just convinced you to let me keep her? Not bloody likely. Since when did you give a rat’s arse what I said about anything? Since when did you listen to me at all?”
“Well...” She shrugged. “It’s not like there’s a handy how-to guide for this -- The Slayer’s Guide to Pregnant Vampires. And she is sort of yours. I mean, if she were just a baby and not a Slayer or whatever, it’s not like anyone else would want her. Poor kid.” Her mouth twisted in a sympathetic grimace. “Anyway, I’m not trying to kill something or prevent certain doom, so I don’t think it’s really a slaying-type mess. It’s a...some other kind of mess.”
A pause, while he processed this. “That the speech you’re giving the Scoobies at large?”
A shift of the shoulders. “More or less.”
“And you expect, say, Giles to find it convincing?”
“I’m the Slayer, right? So call this a unilateral Slayer decision.” For a bare moment he saw it in her eyes, the burden and the glory both. “They’ll be okay with it eventually.”
And he believed her. He doubted Giles would yield so easily, but still, he believed her.
Within, his little girl squirmed, maybe in response to the release in tension. He rubbed that spot low under his belly that she seemed to respond to. “S’all right, love, we’ve got the Slayer looking after us now.” Then he caught Buffy’s wide-eyed stare, and he slumped. “Bugger.”
“You talk to your stomach.”
“I talk to her.” He looked off into the distant dark, waiting for peals of girly, un-Slayerlike giggles. When they didn’t come, he glanced back to see her lips quirking into a grin.
Before he could react, she leaned over and mock-whispered to his middle, “Don’t tell him, but your dad’s kind of a dork.”
“Hey!”
“But it’s okay, you’re one of us.” She laid a hand on his stomach, palm flat and fingers pointed up. “We’ll save you from the dorkiness.”
In the last weeks of bemusement she’d watched Dawn pat at him and feel for tiny kicks, but Buffy had never touched him, and now the shiver of having the Slayer that close to something that mattered that much swamped all other thought.
Then he realized why the gesture felt so familiar. “Bloody hell,” he breathed.
She snatched her hand away, looked up. “What?”
Well, wasn’t this confessional time? Might as well tell it all. “Dream I had. You talked to her, put your hand like that. Said she was one of you lot.”
Recollection dawned. “I remember that. Wait -- you were in that dream? You were?”
“It was my dream!”
“So you said at the time,” she said, tone amused. Then she snapped her fingers. “That was the First Slayer dream! And you, with the spell--”
“First Slayer dream?”
“You know, the joining spell, to beat Adam? The First Slayer came that night and tried to kill us all in our dreams. Did she slay you?”
Well, that explained a bit. “Didn’t pay me any attention. Probably because, as you pointed out, I didn’t belong there. I wasn’t one of you, after all.” He was surprised at the depth of his bitterness at that memory.
It wasn’t like he’d ever wanted inside the bumbling circle of evil-squashers that’d named themselves after a kids’ show on the telly. Except maybe in a single moment of weakness, after spending most of the last year outside every circle known to man or vamp.
“But you hate us, right?”
He opened his mouth to say of course he did, he loathed every one of them that’d been fouling up his plans since day one. Instead, “Don’t really have the energy anymore,” he said, hand fallen to his belly again. “Got other concerns now.”
“Oh.” At his look, “I guess we don’t hate you anymore, either. I mean, there’s the trying to kill us and all, but...”
“But?”
She shrugged. “Like you said, other concerns. And heck, you haven’t tried in, what, at least six months?”
“Twenty-eight weeks,” he said softly.
next part
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