snick_backup | FIC: Seraph (4/?)

Some dialogue in this chapter borrowed from "New Moon Rising."

Story begins here. All parts may be found here.

~~~~~~

So it had been a week, and he hadn’t gotten around yet to calling the next name on his list of medical references. No reason. He was short of cash, but that could always be fixed by hanging around downtown and fanging out at passers-by. He just hadn’t gotten to it yet. The last time he’d tried, his mark had turned out to be the demon girl, and the ensuing haunted house hijinks--not to mention the aftereffects of the one beer he’d talked himself into--had put him out of sorts.

He was musing on this in between afternoon naps when his door swung open and something on the dinosaur end of dainty stumped in. Spike held his breath; it was too late to duck into the sarcophagus, and anyway he didn’t want to. He hadn’t had his bit of violence since turning tail on the vamp fanatics, hardly a satisfactory ending, and he was itching to pummel something. So he waited. When a swath of dry skin rustled just above his head, he shot a hand and gripped--an arm, pebbly-textured and thick. Yeah. This one, he could fight.

“From the sound of those massive mud flaps I’d peg you for a demon,” he said, eyes closed. “Which means you’re in for a world of... pain,” he finished, staring up at a bloke that was big and solid and ugly as bugger all, a patchwork of demon parts all joined by huge shiny staples. Not what Spike would have called fashionable, not that most demons seemed to have any sense of fashion at all as far as he could tell.

“Spike,” said the thing. “I want you to come with me.”

“Do you?” Spike slid to his feet. “Let’s go then.” He feinted a step and then hauled off a punch to the gut that’d send the guy sprawling. Only it... didn’t. The brute was still standing there, peering at Spike with that disinterested curiosity that must have been calculated to intimidate. “Ow.”

“Come. You’re going to help me with my problem.”

This, he thought, was who the Slayer and her Slayerettes had been jittering about for weeks. He wasn’t so sure he wasn’t a bit jittery himself. Besides, the stink of so many demons concentrated in one skin was souring his stomach. “Why is that, exactly?”

“Because I’m going to help you with yours.”

Which was just intriguing enough that Spike followed him to a dank hole-in-the-ground of a headquarters and listened to a spiel outlining mayhem on an impressive scale, even if the approach struck him as a bit clinical. Far be it from him to object to another demon’s taste in violence. Take an army of humans and a vague alliance of demons, smash them together, and make a new army out of the pieces: it wasn’t exactly an apocalypse--and he’d have known one if he saw it--but it was at least a middling-sized Armageddon. He started to think that, for the first time since he’d been zapped, something was looking up.

“And you want me,” he said.

“You have connections to the Slayer. You can draw her into the battle.”

And wasn’t it always about the Slayer? The guy said he’d heard about Spike’s other Slayers--the dead ones--and he made noises like he was impressed with Spike’s impotence-fueled vendetta against the local demon horde, but it really all came down to the fact that Spike had been stupid enough to get himself caught and then pathetic enough to ask for help from the Slayer, of all people.

“Not that all that doesn’t sound amusing, but you said something about helping me with my problem, too, yeah? The chip?”

“I will remove the chip.”

Spike blinked. “Just like that. I make sure the Slayer’s down in the melee, you take out the chip.”

“Just like that,” said the thing, but the informality sounded stiff, almost threatening, in his deep oratorical delivery.

It was everything he wanted: the whole world laid at his feet again and some general butchery to welcome him back into it.

“And the other, too, yeah?” Spike asked, gesturing down at himself.

“You will be wholly restored,” the guy said--intoned, was more like. “The chip that confines you will be removed, demolished. The unnatural growth in your stomach--unnatural even for you, a vampire, who glories in perverting the processes of nature--will be excised and destroyed.” He paused, cocking his head at a rigid angle that turned the pose into a caricature. “I think I would like to dissect it.”

It will be the first human life you’ve ended in quite some time.

There was more maundering after that, something about a struggling flame and savagery and truths clung to, but Spike’s attention kept slipping. He’d almost gotten used to the fluttering heartbeat, the knot of fire warming him--would he miss that, he wondered?--but anytime he held himself still, he noticed anew. As though it knew it had his attention, the thing kicked, feebly.

The demon-thing was on about plans now, things Spike ought to have been listening to, all the stars to be nudged into alignment so that Patches got his interesting casualties and Spike got his existence back. Something about the witch’s dogboy and an unlikely rescue, although Spike couldn’t keep track of what the purpose of said rescue was--something to do with Soldier Boy the First.

He pulled himself together long enough to mutter generic assent and get told the directions to the Initiative’s back door, and then he pasted on his most amiable grin and scrambled down the caves’ single sewer entrance.

Whatever in the mighty misbegotten’s words had kicked Spike’s thoughts into freefall, it wasn’t the kind of thing that could be teased out with a little hard thinking--not that there were many things with him that could. He needed motion. He needed to hit things until it came to him, whatever it was.

He followed his feet to the sewer line beneath the clock tower where a clot of Klong beasts had collected, feeding off the residual mystical energy from that silence-making spell months before. Spike wrenched an iron bar from the sewer wall, slipped into his fangs, and plunged toward the middle of the slimy, grunting mass of Klong.

He could feel it creeping up on him, like a stealth epiphany.

He hacked at a tentacle swinging towards him, and got a faceful of steaming, rank Klong blood. Then he was kicking another tentacle away before it could trap him. He pushed towards the center of the flailing mass and stabbed the bar straight into the flat of the beastie’s oh-so-tender forehead. It slumped.

It wasn’t Patchwork Demon’s words, ‘unnatural’ and ‘perverting the processes of nature’ and what not, because he’d had all the same thoughts himself, or most of them, anyway.

Another Klong oozed towards him, and he shoved aside the pincered arm to kick it in the nose once, twice, and then straight into the head: dead Klong.

It wasn’t Dru, peering at him with fierce knowing gaze and telling him what Miss Edith saw in his future, ‘beads of time black as soot, round as eyes sliding down the thread, plop, plop, plop.’ Golden fishes again, and long wintry months with wheels instead of waltzes, and a mouse running pit-pat round his belly. ‘The melons shall dance and the turnips shall sing opera,’ she’d said, and then she’d given him that look that was half lust and half something older and darker and deeper than any sex they ever had.

It wasn’t that, because he hadn’t even thought of it in years, that one mad dazzling conversation out of thousands.

The two remaining Klongs were agitated now, both heaving towards him at once. One caught slimy hold of his arm, suckers sticking to the duster leather. He beat it back with a roar.

And it wasn’t Dawn, her arms crossed and her blue eyes (all babies were born with blue eyes) shining out from under eyebrows pinched in reproach. It just wasn’t.

Suddenly a tentacle struck him in the face and he was spitting bitter Klong ooze. He wrenched out of the grip and sunk his makeshift dagger into the unprotected forehead. Then he struck at the other beastie, pouring all the itching uncertainty into his punches until the thing’s skull caved in.

The first human life you’ve ended in quite some time.

Felt as though there ought to be some satisfaction in that, some sense of triumph over the human-shaped constructions of hypotheses and scalpels who’d stripped him of all but swagger.

There wasn’t.

He slouched against the seeping sewer wall and started feeling for his cigarettes before remembering, just in time, the high flammability of Klong blood.

He wanted a Moment, an epiphany backed by a measured stack of hesitations and half-inclinations and reasoning that he could trace and explain to himself. He looked, after, and thought he might have found it in all those things he thought it wasn’t: Dru’s mouse and Dawn’s blue eyes and, yes, the heat welling up in him that he hadn’t known since he’d first felt fangs slide into his throat. Maybe.

Or maybe it was simply that he could feel the life trembling in him. William had been a man of abstracts; he’d delighted in a line of logic or a pretty phrasing, and maybe he’d gotten his argument in somewhere along the way. But Spike lived/fought/loved by fangs and cock and both hands, and it was Spike who relaxed against the tiny flutter within and said, “Looks like you’ll be staying for a while yet, little one.”

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