Spike slammed the door of his crypt so hard the walls vibrated. For a long, glorious moment, a porcelain unicorn on the sill teetered precariously, before falling and smashing into needle-fine shards on the floor.

Well, that was something. He stamped through the fragments of Harmony's ornament, grinding them in to dust, and curled his lip. "Bitch," he muttered, succinctly. There had bloody well better be several bottles of something cheap and violently alcoholic under the bed, or he was going to have to break a lot more -

He froze. A strange sensation crawled up over the back of his skull, like the feeling of being on the verge of remembering something important. He stared into the blackness, and spoke in a low growl. "Who's there?" 

His eyes widened, and she emerged from the cloak of gloom: huge black pupils, small mouth in a solemn smile, pale hands raised in a spellbinding gesture all ready to draw him in. "Look who's come to make everything right again," Drusilla breathed.

Spike's mouth fell open. "Dru? You –"

"Nice digs." Another voice, honey and grit. "But really, a crypt ... trying a bit hard, William?" Darla  breezed out from the shadows behind Drusilla, smiling to herself. "Close your mouth, darling, it makes you look gormless." She held up a line-drawing of Buffy, taken from Spike's downstairs shrine. "Did you draw this yourself? It reminds me of someone else's style..."

Catching himself gaping, Spike switched promptly to his most indignant scowl. "What are you doing here? Dru – love –" His former girlfriend had moved around behind him and twined her slender, bare arms around his upper body, caressing wantonly. Despite his better instincts, Spike squirmed free and caught her thin wrist. He stared at Darla, challenging. "Thought Soul Boy dusted you years ago."

"Times change." Darla shrugged and smiled sweetly.

"Yeah," shuddered Dru, her mouth turning down at the corners. "Want to change them back." She turned, twisting her own wrist in his grip and smiling slowly at the pain, before pressing her cool mouth against his. Wide-eyed in surprise, Spike saw Darla watching ironically over Dru's shoulder. He put his hands on Dru's arms and pushed her gently back, breaking the kiss.

"Did you miss me?" asked Dru, teasingly.

"God, yes," Spike muttered, voice low and sincere. Darla's derisive snort brought him back to himself. "I mean – no. Getting on just fine without you. Got my own life now. Put that down." Darla had picked up another of Harmony's regrettable unicorns, and was examining it with that arch look she did better than anyone else Spike knew. Given the number of condescending women he'd known in his time, that was quite an accolade.

"Well, it sure looks like you've been keeping busy," Darla commented, complying in her own good time. "What about ... slayers? Are they still getting under your skin? Added any more to your tally?" She returned to staring at the drawing.

Spike watched her levelly for a moment. "Peaches know you're around?" he asked at last, letting Dru encircle his waist again.

There was no mistaking the cloud that passed over Darla's defiant features. Spike looked closer – it was hard to be sure, in the guttering candlelight of the crypt, but something seemed to be wrong with her face. Her apricot skin was grazed with the slightest film of roughness, as though it had almost healed from something. Must have been nasty. Back when they'd all run together, back when the four of them had made a habit of risking unlife and limb just for kicks, the sheer force of her will had made Darla faster to heal than most.

"We're getting daddy back," whispered Dru in his ear.

Spike turned his head. Was Dru's skin damaged too? "Getting him back for what?"

"No, silly." Dru tapped the tip of his nose. "Getting him back like he used to be. Like we all used to be. Happy families again."

In spite of himself, Spike felt something inside him clenching – some tiny vestige that used to be hope, wrapped around with a decades-old shell of self-reliance that didn't want any part of this. Damn it. He had many things more pressing than this to bellyache over. If there was any whisky left, he had other reasons to cry into it on the road to oblivion. He looked hard in to Darla's eyes: if there was going to be sense anywhere in this, it'd be there. But she'd seen him coming, and had screens already up between the lenses and her thoughts. They looked at each other for a long moment, while Dru walked her fingers up Spike's arm. He cleared his throat.

"There was a happy bit?" he said, unsteadily, opting for the most familiar route out of this potential pain. "I must've blinked."

"Oh come on, William. Italy was fun," opined Darla. "Russia wasn't so bad either. You weren't tied up and gagged all the time. As a matter of fact, I don't remember hearing you complain when you were."

"Well, kind of the thing with a gag, isn't it?" spat Spike.

Dru giggled, but Spike wasn't sure she was laughing with them. "Come back with us, Spike," she said, in the voice she used for dark incantations and nursery rhymes. "I know you miss it." She held up her hand and plucked gracefully at the air before him, as though pulling secrets out of it. "You're all small and sad. All the pieces went awry, but we can put them straight again. Don't you miss your family? Don't you want to paint the world black again, like old times?"

Just the proximity of the two vampires he'd known for a century filled the air with a tingling, crackling haze of dark possibility. It set his teeth aching, his skin humming with inarticulate memories of sensation and desire. And, in turn, it made the piece of hardware buried in his cortex fizz with electric warning.

"Can't be done, Dru," he said, quietly. "That's past now. Can't go back."

Dru looked at him blackly, and he sighed. Dru lived in a different time. It wasn't that she was stuck in the past – though it often looked that way – more that time didn't pass for Dru the way it did for others. It wasn't a stream flowing steadily, but an ebbing, shifting sea in which she was adrift. There was no need to go forwards, no harm in going backwards, for her. She saw the future and communed with the ghosts of the past. And he was bloody well better off out of it, Spike told himself firmly. He drew himself up, put on his best look of determination. "Like I said, I've got a good thing going on here," he told her. "And," he added, setting his jaw, "I'm seeing someone else. Real, er, special girl -"

"Shh! Naughty," interrupted Dru, grabbing Spike's clenched fist, sucking the energy out of him with the deadness of her grip. "No need to make up stories. Already know why you're not coming. Poor boy. Tin soldiers put funny little knick-knacks in your brain." She jerked her head mechanically to one side. "Can't hunt. Can't hurt. Can't kill. You've got a chip."

Spike rolled his eyes. "Great. Vampire bush telegraph." He turned a venomous glare on Darla. "I can still hurt demons, you know." She raised one eyebrow, and didn't even try to stop smirking. "But you're right," he said, turning back to Dru. "'m no use to you now. Scourging's off the cards when you can't so much as cast a withering look without getting brain-fried." He tapped at his own forehead. "Sweet of you to come and remind me, might've slipped my mind."

Dru stroked an extended finger down his cheek, making him shudder and shut his eyes despite himself. She leaned close. "I don't believe in science," she stage-whispered. "All those bits and molecules no one's ever seen – oh!" She opened her eyes wide as a shot of blue electricity snaked across her unbelieving face, then dropped unconscious to the floor.

Darla stepped over Dru's slumped body, weighing a taser speculatively in her hands. "She was right, it came in handy," she observed, smiling brightly at Spike. "Listen. Dru might not believe in science, but you always were more of an empiricist." She fingered the trigger of the taser threateningly, setting off Spike's chest-constricting memories of nasty young men in camo gear, and big white holding pens. "I've been recruiting demons for weeks. If you want to negotiate, you can negotiate with this. But you're a bright boy. So you already know you're coming with me."

Sometimes it was just good to be told what to do. "Always knew you wanted me," he said, the part of his brain located furthest from his survival instinct winning out. It was a part that often had control of his mouth. The indulgent smile Darla offered him left him in doubt he'd pay for the comment later, but for now she simply held out a graceful hand to him. He took it, pausing only to heft Drusilla's motionless form over his shoulder.

"I can use you," Darla told him, simply.