FIC: Seraph (3/?)
Feb. 6th, 2009 12:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snick_backupStory begins here. All parts may be found here.
~~~~~~
Dawn showed up at the crypt just before sunset. On the drive in she did exactly what he needed her to do: chatter about everything and nothing, filling up the silences during which he might have been tempted to think.
Then she was asking about plans, about unlife post-chip, and Spike spun a few fantasies for her benefit: another crack at stealing the Gem of Amara from Angel, a lazy life in the sun on one of those Caribbean islands that got lots of cruise ship tourists. “It’d be a bloody service to society, eating some of them. The crooked lawyers and the fat cat CEO’s.” She giggled at that, and he tried to think when the last time was that someone thought he was funny.
They got to the office a few minutes early. The lobby was empty; even the receptionist station was vacant. Dawn made a move towards the chairs and Spike held a hand out. “Wait.” He sniffed. “Demon blood.”
She gave him an are-you-stupid look. “It’s a doctor’s office.”
“Wait.” As he said it, shadows closed in from all sides. When the light hit the dark forms, they were in vamp face.
“Well, well,” Spike said, calculating. “A bit of a pre-surgery brawl to get the tension out?” At least fifteen crowded around him and Dawn, and more pressed in behind those.
“You are the abomination,” spat the vamp at the front, a particularly ridgy character in a cloak.
“Yeah, heard that before.” Dawn was edging up behind him. Can’t get distracted, can’t laugh about a mini-Scooby looking to him for protection. Which, now that he thought about it, was more humiliating than it was funny.
“You dare stand and pretend you bring the Miracle Child. You are a mockery to our grand and profane prophecy. You, you--” It waggled a shiny blade at him.
“At a loss for words, are you?”
“Kill him--and cut the child out first!”
“Bugger.” Spike’s face shifted as he launched himself at the robed vamp and got in one good kick and a nice knuckle-bruiser to the sod’s jaw before he had arms wrapping around him from all sides, steadying him for a bit of do-it-themselves surgery via the shiny blade with the fancy scrollwork. He threw them off and let fly a flurry of punches. His demony doctor was probably dead and there’d no fixing his problem tonight, and he let the rage of these two facts fuel his fists, digging him deeper into the mass of ridged faces that seemed, in the tiny arena of the waiting room, to be unending.
“Spike!”
He turned to see two vamps piling on Dawn, fangs out. She was already bleeding from a gash on her arm and a shallow puncture at her neck.
She looked delicious.
She swung an awkward punch. The recipient grabbed the still-bleeding arm and bit again, and she screamed, “Spike!”
“Bloody hell.” He shoved the vamps at his back against the crowd behind them and plunged forward, pushing the next vamp to the red-speckled carpet and grabbing Dawn’s hand. “Had a nice chat, got to run now.”
The vamps streamed after them, screaming oaths in a few ritual languages he knew and at least one that he didn’t, but somehow he managed to keep himself and Dawn ahead of them. At the car he threw her in from the driver’s side, ducked in, slammed the door shut on some vamp’s fingers, and squealed tires revving out of the parking lot.
He jerked down onto a side street at first opportunity, then through an alley. Finally he got them onto the highway towards Sunnydale, bumping the speed limit but not pushing past it, since it wasn’t like he could eat the guy handing out tickets anymore.
A few moments after he’d stopped mumbling under his breath, Dawn said, “I’m bleeding,” her voice a full octave higher than usual.
“You don’t say,” Spike said.
She glared at him. “You can’t eat me. You promised. And you still have the chip.”
“Right.” He punched the dash, and she jumped. “Doesn’t mean I don’t want to. And I’m hungry.” As usual, and not improved by the pre-surgery starvation. “Help if you bandaged yourself up a bit.”
“I don’t--”
He swerved off onto the curb, stopped the car, and twisted to rummage through the bottles and cassette tapes behind his seat until he found a couple of t-shirts. He tore them into strips and shoved them at her, and then he pushed out of the car, slammed the door, and kicked the fender. Then he kicked it a few more times for good measure.
“Spike?”
Startled, he snarled at her. She flinched, but she stood her ground. “I can’t get this one on my arm.”
“Bloody stupid bint,” he mumbled, but he took the cloth strip, and then his attention got caught on the luscious salt-copper-iron-blood smell wafting from the wound.
Dawn pulled away. “Never mind, I’ll tie it myself. Pervert.”
He growled and snatched her arm back. “Hold still.” He wrapped the gash tight and rigged a kind of knot. “Got some lovely hemoglobin in you.”
“Gee, what a charmer you are.”
Spike spun and kicked the fender again.
“Spike?” Her voice wavered. “Are you okay?”
“Bloody hell! I’ve still got this thing stuck in me, my doctor’s gone sodding missing, and I just pulled out of a brilliant brawl so I could stand here smelling the Slayer’s kid sis and not be able to eat her while she asks me stupid questions. What do you bloody think?”
She crossed her arms--gently--and didn’t say anything. Finally, he kicked the fender one last time and got back in the car, and when she was in the other side they pulled back onto the road again.
After a few moments of silence, Dawn said, “They were waiting for you.”
“Yeah.” He couldn’t quite figure that, unless the Kurelli had told them, though he hadn’t been aware of vampicidal religious fanaticism as one of the standard Kurelli traits. Maybe that vamp receptionist had clued them in.
“Why would they care if you got the chip out? Were they, like, worried about the competition?”
“Was never about the chip.”
“Then... what? I don’t get it.”
He’d had enough talking around the subject and he couldn’t bring himself to actually say it. He grabbed her hand and laid it against his stomach, and hoped the chit curled up in there would move so she could feel it and he wouldn’t have to explain.
Dawn snatched her hand back and scooted up against the passenger door. Catching her look, he snorted. “Oh, now you’re scared of the vamp. I’m exactly as terrifying as any horny bloke with a yen for the underaged. Brilliant.”
When she didn’t move, he sighed. “The military blokes? Wankers who shoved this chip up my brain?”
“Yeah,” she said, voice flat.
“They knocked me up.”
A pause. The brow furrowed. Finally, tentatively, “I know you’re English and stuff, but here that means--”
“Yeah.”
“Oh.” Another pause. “Really? Really?”
“Yeah.”
“Ew.”
“Not disagreeing with you.”
She unwedged herself from the door, and for a while she was mercifully silent. Eventually, the hand came sneaking back and flattened on his stomach, but apparently his parasite wasn’t in the mood for action tonight. Or maybe it’d already gotten enough.
“So there’s a baby in there.”
“There bloody well is not! S’just a blob. S’nothing. And I’m going to get it out!”
“Oh.” Her voice was very small.
Spike glared at her. “What now?”
She shrugged, and huddled in on herself. “It’s just, you know, babies. They’re kind of cute, and cuddly--”
“And tender.”
“And it’s not like you matter to anyone else. I mean, your girlfriends keep dumping you and Buffy’s friends all hate you because you’re a vampire and she says all the demons hate you because you beat up on them and now the vampires want to kill you because you’re pregnant--”
He snarled.
“But you like killing things, right?” Her voice hardened. “You’re probably excited.”
“What is it with you people? Women go around getting rid of babies all the time, and it’s a hell of lot more natural with them than it is with me!”
“It’s sad then, too.”
“Well, cry me a bloody river.”
She fell into a reproachful silence. Well, good. Daft bint needed some of those shimmery illusions stripped away, or the world would just eat her alive. Like it ate that silly ponce William.
Some time later, Dawn whispered, “I’m really cold.”
“Turn the heater on.”
When she didn’t, he glanced over to see her slump slowly against the door. A dark line trickled down her arm from beneath the makeshift bandage, and he realized that the smell of blood, which he’d been carefully ignoring, had gotten stronger.
“C’mon, love, we’re almost there. Wake up. There’s a good Niblet.” But she just fell sideways at his touch. Bloody hell. They were just rumbling into the suburbs outside Sunnydale proper; nowhere to stop, really.
He floored the gas. A few minutes later he hauled Dawn out of the car and carried her, head lolling, up to the Summers door. He gave the lock a sharp kick, pulled the door open, and laid Dawn on the couch.
Joyce stumbled down the darkened stairs. “What--Spike? Oh my God, Dawn. What have you done to her? You bastard!”
“Got herself scraped up a bit, needs some bandages and probably some fluids, too.”
Joyce flipped on the lights, took the time for one dust-at-twenty paces glare, and strode off towards the kitchen. Meanwhile, Spike grabbed the blanket draping the back of the sofa and covered Dawn with it.
“Spike?” Dawn’s eyes slitted open. “My head’s all woozy.”
Joyce pushed past him and knelt at Dawn’s side. As she stripped the now-sodden t-shirt from Dawn’s arm she said sharply, “These look like teeth marks.”
“Got jumped by some vamps,” Spike said.
“Friends of yours?” Her voice was ice.
“No, we both got jumped.”
“What was she even doing with you?”
“Um. Well.”
“It was my idea, Mom.”
Joyce pressed the disinfectant into the wound, and Dawn yelped. “What was your idea?” Her voice had taken on a deadly momma-bear tone.
“Mom, nothing like that. Geez. Spike had an... errand, and I said I’d go with him.”
“Dawn, what were you thinking, just running off like that?” She turned on Spike. “I cannot believe you let this happen to her. I’d like to--oh, I could stake you myself!”
“Mom, no, you can’t! He’s--” Dawn caught Spike’s sharp look. “It wasn’t his fault,” she finished. “He saved me.”
“Oh, no? If he hadn’t taken you to wherever you went, he wouldn’t have had to save you.”
“He didn’t have to,” Dawn said.
Joyce threw her hands up. “Wonderful. My daughter is running around who knows where in the middle of the night with a man who puts her in mortal danger and then has to think about whether or not he’s going to save her life.”
But Dawn wasn’t listening to her. Dawn was looking at him, her big blue eyes pensive, unafraid. “He didn’t have to save me,” she repeated, whisper-soft. From her expression this was an important thought, a revelation, and he chose not to consider what it might signify.
She wasn’t so bad, he found himself thinking later, after he’d gotten to his crypt without further mishap and two bags of blood had improved his mood. It occurred to him that he ought to be appalled, admitting to affection for one of the warmbloods, but he dismissed the thought. It wasn’t as though he’d ever followed those kinds of rules before. That vampirism had conventions and mores when it could have had anarchy was, in his opinion, its great absurdity. That stint under the Anointed One had been enough vamp social agenda to last him a human lifetime or two. No one would ever catch him following some ‘profane prophecy’ about a vamp-borne sprog, even if it did lead to a lovely brawl.
A brawl that had kept him from getting rid of his stowaway. “Won yourself a reprieve, did you?” he said, and then growled when he realized who he was talking to.
Soon. This would all be over soon.
next part
~~~~~~
Dawn showed up at the crypt just before sunset. On the drive in she did exactly what he needed her to do: chatter about everything and nothing, filling up the silences during which he might have been tempted to think.
Then she was asking about plans, about unlife post-chip, and Spike spun a few fantasies for her benefit: another crack at stealing the Gem of Amara from Angel, a lazy life in the sun on one of those Caribbean islands that got lots of cruise ship tourists. “It’d be a bloody service to society, eating some of them. The crooked lawyers and the fat cat CEO’s.” She giggled at that, and he tried to think when the last time was that someone thought he was funny.
They got to the office a few minutes early. The lobby was empty; even the receptionist station was vacant. Dawn made a move towards the chairs and Spike held a hand out. “Wait.” He sniffed. “Demon blood.”
She gave him an are-you-stupid look. “It’s a doctor’s office.”
“Wait.” As he said it, shadows closed in from all sides. When the light hit the dark forms, they were in vamp face.
“Well, well,” Spike said, calculating. “A bit of a pre-surgery brawl to get the tension out?” At least fifteen crowded around him and Dawn, and more pressed in behind those.
“You are the abomination,” spat the vamp at the front, a particularly ridgy character in a cloak.
“Yeah, heard that before.” Dawn was edging up behind him. Can’t get distracted, can’t laugh about a mini-Scooby looking to him for protection. Which, now that he thought about it, was more humiliating than it was funny.
“You dare stand and pretend you bring the Miracle Child. You are a mockery to our grand and profane prophecy. You, you--” It waggled a shiny blade at him.
“At a loss for words, are you?”
“Kill him--and cut the child out first!”
“Bugger.” Spike’s face shifted as he launched himself at the robed vamp and got in one good kick and a nice knuckle-bruiser to the sod’s jaw before he had arms wrapping around him from all sides, steadying him for a bit of do-it-themselves surgery via the shiny blade with the fancy scrollwork. He threw them off and let fly a flurry of punches. His demony doctor was probably dead and there’d no fixing his problem tonight, and he let the rage of these two facts fuel his fists, digging him deeper into the mass of ridged faces that seemed, in the tiny arena of the waiting room, to be unending.
“Spike!”
He turned to see two vamps piling on Dawn, fangs out. She was already bleeding from a gash on her arm and a shallow puncture at her neck.
She looked delicious.
She swung an awkward punch. The recipient grabbed the still-bleeding arm and bit again, and she screamed, “Spike!”
“Bloody hell.” He shoved the vamps at his back against the crowd behind them and plunged forward, pushing the next vamp to the red-speckled carpet and grabbing Dawn’s hand. “Had a nice chat, got to run now.”
The vamps streamed after them, screaming oaths in a few ritual languages he knew and at least one that he didn’t, but somehow he managed to keep himself and Dawn ahead of them. At the car he threw her in from the driver’s side, ducked in, slammed the door shut on some vamp’s fingers, and squealed tires revving out of the parking lot.
He jerked down onto a side street at first opportunity, then through an alley. Finally he got them onto the highway towards Sunnydale, bumping the speed limit but not pushing past it, since it wasn’t like he could eat the guy handing out tickets anymore.
A few moments after he’d stopped mumbling under his breath, Dawn said, “I’m bleeding,” her voice a full octave higher than usual.
“You don’t say,” Spike said.
She glared at him. “You can’t eat me. You promised. And you still have the chip.”
“Right.” He punched the dash, and she jumped. “Doesn’t mean I don’t want to. And I’m hungry.” As usual, and not improved by the pre-surgery starvation. “Help if you bandaged yourself up a bit.”
“I don’t--”
He swerved off onto the curb, stopped the car, and twisted to rummage through the bottles and cassette tapes behind his seat until he found a couple of t-shirts. He tore them into strips and shoved them at her, and then he pushed out of the car, slammed the door, and kicked the fender. Then he kicked it a few more times for good measure.
“Spike?”
Startled, he snarled at her. She flinched, but she stood her ground. “I can’t get this one on my arm.”
“Bloody stupid bint,” he mumbled, but he took the cloth strip, and then his attention got caught on the luscious salt-copper-iron-blood smell wafting from the wound.
Dawn pulled away. “Never mind, I’ll tie it myself. Pervert.”
He growled and snatched her arm back. “Hold still.” He wrapped the gash tight and rigged a kind of knot. “Got some lovely hemoglobin in you.”
“Gee, what a charmer you are.”
Spike spun and kicked the fender again.
“Spike?” Her voice wavered. “Are you okay?”
“Bloody hell! I’ve still got this thing stuck in me, my doctor’s gone sodding missing, and I just pulled out of a brilliant brawl so I could stand here smelling the Slayer’s kid sis and not be able to eat her while she asks me stupid questions. What do you bloody think?”
She crossed her arms--gently--and didn’t say anything. Finally, he kicked the fender one last time and got back in the car, and when she was in the other side they pulled back onto the road again.
After a few moments of silence, Dawn said, “They were waiting for you.”
“Yeah.” He couldn’t quite figure that, unless the Kurelli had told them, though he hadn’t been aware of vampicidal religious fanaticism as one of the standard Kurelli traits. Maybe that vamp receptionist had clued them in.
“Why would they care if you got the chip out? Were they, like, worried about the competition?”
“Was never about the chip.”
“Then... what? I don’t get it.”
He’d had enough talking around the subject and he couldn’t bring himself to actually say it. He grabbed her hand and laid it against his stomach, and hoped the chit curled up in there would move so she could feel it and he wouldn’t have to explain.
Dawn snatched her hand back and scooted up against the passenger door. Catching her look, he snorted. “Oh, now you’re scared of the vamp. I’m exactly as terrifying as any horny bloke with a yen for the underaged. Brilliant.”
When she didn’t move, he sighed. “The military blokes? Wankers who shoved this chip up my brain?”
“Yeah,” she said, voice flat.
“They knocked me up.”
A pause. The brow furrowed. Finally, tentatively, “I know you’re English and stuff, but here that means--”
“Yeah.”
“Oh.” Another pause. “Really? Really?”
“Yeah.”
“Ew.”
“Not disagreeing with you.”
She unwedged herself from the door, and for a while she was mercifully silent. Eventually, the hand came sneaking back and flattened on his stomach, but apparently his parasite wasn’t in the mood for action tonight. Or maybe it’d already gotten enough.
“So there’s a baby in there.”
“There bloody well is not! S’just a blob. S’nothing. And I’m going to get it out!”
“Oh.” Her voice was very small.
Spike glared at her. “What now?”
She shrugged, and huddled in on herself. “It’s just, you know, babies. They’re kind of cute, and cuddly--”
“And tender.”
“And it’s not like you matter to anyone else. I mean, your girlfriends keep dumping you and Buffy’s friends all hate you because you’re a vampire and she says all the demons hate you because you beat up on them and now the vampires want to kill you because you’re pregnant--”
He snarled.
“But you like killing things, right?” Her voice hardened. “You’re probably excited.”
“What is it with you people? Women go around getting rid of babies all the time, and it’s a hell of lot more natural with them than it is with me!”
“It’s sad then, too.”
“Well, cry me a bloody river.”
She fell into a reproachful silence. Well, good. Daft bint needed some of those shimmery illusions stripped away, or the world would just eat her alive. Like it ate that silly ponce William.
Some time later, Dawn whispered, “I’m really cold.”
“Turn the heater on.”
When she didn’t, he glanced over to see her slump slowly against the door. A dark line trickled down her arm from beneath the makeshift bandage, and he realized that the smell of blood, which he’d been carefully ignoring, had gotten stronger.
“C’mon, love, we’re almost there. Wake up. There’s a good Niblet.” But she just fell sideways at his touch. Bloody hell. They were just rumbling into the suburbs outside Sunnydale proper; nowhere to stop, really.
He floored the gas. A few minutes later he hauled Dawn out of the car and carried her, head lolling, up to the Summers door. He gave the lock a sharp kick, pulled the door open, and laid Dawn on the couch.
Joyce stumbled down the darkened stairs. “What--Spike? Oh my God, Dawn. What have you done to her? You bastard!”
“Got herself scraped up a bit, needs some bandages and probably some fluids, too.”
Joyce flipped on the lights, took the time for one dust-at-twenty paces glare, and strode off towards the kitchen. Meanwhile, Spike grabbed the blanket draping the back of the sofa and covered Dawn with it.
“Spike?” Dawn’s eyes slitted open. “My head’s all woozy.”
Joyce pushed past him and knelt at Dawn’s side. As she stripped the now-sodden t-shirt from Dawn’s arm she said sharply, “These look like teeth marks.”
“Got jumped by some vamps,” Spike said.
“Friends of yours?” Her voice was ice.
“No, we both got jumped.”
“What was she even doing with you?”
“Um. Well.”
“It was my idea, Mom.”
Joyce pressed the disinfectant into the wound, and Dawn yelped. “What was your idea?” Her voice had taken on a deadly momma-bear tone.
“Mom, nothing like that. Geez. Spike had an... errand, and I said I’d go with him.”
“Dawn, what were you thinking, just running off like that?” She turned on Spike. “I cannot believe you let this happen to her. I’d like to--oh, I could stake you myself!”
“Mom, no, you can’t! He’s--” Dawn caught Spike’s sharp look. “It wasn’t his fault,” she finished. “He saved me.”
“Oh, no? If he hadn’t taken you to wherever you went, he wouldn’t have had to save you.”
“He didn’t have to,” Dawn said.
Joyce threw her hands up. “Wonderful. My daughter is running around who knows where in the middle of the night with a man who puts her in mortal danger and then has to think about whether or not he’s going to save her life.”
But Dawn wasn’t listening to her. Dawn was looking at him, her big blue eyes pensive, unafraid. “He didn’t have to save me,” she repeated, whisper-soft. From her expression this was an important thought, a revelation, and he chose not to consider what it might signify.
She wasn’t so bad, he found himself thinking later, after he’d gotten to his crypt without further mishap and two bags of blood had improved his mood. It occurred to him that he ought to be appalled, admitting to affection for one of the warmbloods, but he dismissed the thought. It wasn’t as though he’d ever followed those kinds of rules before. That vampirism had conventions and mores when it could have had anarchy was, in his opinion, its great absurdity. That stint under the Anointed One had been enough vamp social agenda to last him a human lifetime or two. No one would ever catch him following some ‘profane prophecy’ about a vamp-borne sprog, even if it did lead to a lovely brawl.
A brawl that had kept him from getting rid of his stowaway. “Won yourself a reprieve, did you?” he said, and then growled when he realized who he was talking to.
Soon. This would all be over soon.
next part
