BLOODY CHEESECAKE SURPRISE

Based on Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Angel
by Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy

Disclaimer: Spike and all the others are the property of their proper owners.
Heh, "property of proper." That's funny.

CHAPTER TWO
With A Little Help From My Friends

Spike fell heavily to the floor, his body convulsing with the aftershocks of the intense pain.

"This is highly intriguing," said Wanda's infuriatingly-calm-as-ever voice from somewhere near. "Highly annoying, yes, but intriguing all the same. That was my most thorough scanning spell, one that has never failed me before. I regret to say that there is a bit of pain involved --"

"I noticed that, thanks!" Spike rasped, carefully turning his head to glare at her. Against all logical plausibility, his clothes hurt.

"-- but it will pass," Wanda continued. " Though each second of your pain feels to me like a thousand swords piercing my heart, I am overjoyed to tell you that it won't last for long. What's worse, though, or at least more puzzling, is that the scan revealed nothing out of the ordinary. Apart from your soul, I'm unable to find a single anomaly in you."

"Brilliant," Spike wheezed. "How about another go, then? I think there's still some parts of me where the pain isn't quite as agonizing."

"Oh, please don't think so ill of me that to suggest I wouldn't rather walk through the very flames of Hell itself rather than to see you in any more discomfort than strictly necessary," said Wanda smoothly. "Do at least admit that I have done my utmost to make your stay here a pleasant one."

"Yeah... bloody saint, you are." With tremendous effort, Spike managed to haul himself over to the couch and collapse upon it, silently cursing himself for ever having agreed to cooperate with this lunatic.

True, after almost three days of captivity, he was forced to admit that Wanda did treat him better than the people of the Initiative or the demons of Hell, and that she'd been as good as her word and let him have both furniture, big-screen TV and onion flowers in exchange for his cooperation.

Then again, with the Initiative and the demons of Hell he'd at least not had to endure the infuriating, exaggerated, faker-than-a-three-dollar-bill politeness. It was lucky for Wanda that she was standing in the sun, out of Spike's reach, or he would have lost his temper with her ages ago and attacked violently, repercussions be damned. But, as he wasn't suicidal enough to risk the sun, for the moment he had to make due with imagining several gruesome ends to her.

His favorite at the moment involved burying her up to the neck in sand, smearing jam on her face and leave her to get eaten alive by killer ants.

"It's really most vexing," Wanda continued, blissfully oblivious to her current fate in Spike's imagination. "Every single test I have put you through shows that you should have been a normal, common vampire before your re-ensouling, and yet history repeatedly shows that you were not. For some time, I considered that perhaps it had to do with the vampire who sired you."

"Drusilla?" said Spike, lifting his head as much as he managed.

"Indeed, Drusilla. I was, or rather am, working on a theory that she might have had something to do with your anomaly. A highly unique vampire herself, as I understand it, with a rare form of second sight mixed with, and I do hope you will forgive me if this sounds too crude, notable insanity. And so, I ponder, Drusilla might very well have passed on something of herself, something that would render any vampire she sired as different. You don't happen to know whether she ever sired any vampires apart from you?"

Spike let his head fall back down. "If she did, she never told me about it. No, wait," he suddenly remembered, "there was Darla. Almost forgot about her."

"Darla?" Wanda frowned, as if trying to think of something. "Do correct me if I am wrong, but the only 'Darla' I know of in connection with you is the vampire who sired Angel back in the day. Your, as it were, great-grandsire."

"You know," Spike muttered. "I'm just gonna stop being surprised when you tell me these details from my own life. You clearly know everything there is to know about my past."

"Everything? Hardly that," said Wanda, still completely oblivious to the fact that in Spike's imagination, the killer ants had started on her eyes. "For example, I was unaware that Drusilla had sired a second Darla."

"Not a second Darla, the same one," said Spike. "Look, she got dusted and then some nutters thought it would be a good idea to bring her back to life as a human, all right? And then she got re-vamped by Dru." He paused. "And now that I'm actually telling the story to someone else, I'm suddenly getting a whole new appreciation for how bloody insane it all sounds. Anyway, I wasn't even involved in that mess. Never even met Darla after she came back."

"So you would be unable to tell me whether she was different in some way afterwards," said Wanda.

"Fraid so. And no point trying to find her. Last I heard, she was dust. Again."

"How very unfortunate, and how very tragic for you," said Wanda with exaggerated sympathy. "My deepest and most sincere condolences for your loss."

Spike grit his teeth. Sod the killer ants and sod the long, drawn-out suffering, just give him five uninterrupted minutes with the bitch and an ice pick. Five minutes. "Yeah, thank you," he said.

"But she was the only other vampire to be sired by Drusilla, as far as you know?"

"Far as I know."

"In many ways, that is a pity. Had there been others, I might have had the opportunity to study them as well, and see whether they displayed any abnormal traits similar to yours."

"Well. Wouldn't that have been an absolute scream," said Spike dryly. "Dozens of wannabe Spikes falling over themselves, fighting over who gets to shag the Slayer and sacrifice themselves in order to save the world."

Wanda didn't appear to have heard him. "But if that is the case," she mused, "why am I unable to find the anomaly within you?! There should by all accounts be something there, something detectable!"

"Not my fault if Dru never bothered to leave a calling card." Spike sat up on the couch, noting to his relief that the lingering pain was almost gone by this time; only a slight headache remaining. "We done for now? Passions is on."

Wanda sighed. "I suppose so. I'm going to have to research more revealing spells anyway. Rest assured, my friend, we will find out your secret."

"I can hardly wait," said Spike, reaching for the remote.

"I do appreciate your cooperation," said Wanda as she turned to walk out, "Were it only that the other one was as easy to deal with as you."

"Yeah, yeah. Wait -- other one?" Spike put the remote down and turned to look at Wanda, but she had already exited the room.

Great. Brilliant. Spike stifled a groan and ran his hand down his face. The bint was doing this on purpose, he just knew it, letting these things slip ever so casually in order to taunt him.

So, there was another one, a fellow prisoner that he hadn't known about. Could it be another vampire with a soul, perhaps? Not likely. Even if Wanda's claims were true, and he and Angel weren't as wholly unique as he'd once thought, ensouled vampires were still so rare that the odds that a third one would be around here and now were pretty slim.

For a brief moment, Spike wondered if the other prisoner might be Angel, but he discarded that idea almost before he'd finished the thought. No, the faint bond between him and old Captain Forehead might not be the best example of the strong connection between vampires of the same bloodline, but is was still strong enough that Spike was certain that if Angel had been here, he would have known.

Someone else, then. Was it someone he knew, or a complete stranger? Male or female? Human, demon, or something else entirely? Impossible to say for sure.

Oh well. If Wanda was busy with whoever this "other one" was, that did also mean that there were times she wasn't watching him -- which suited him just fine.

Spike was not known for his patience. In fact, most who knew him would probably have laughed their heads off if the words "Spike" and "patience" were even mentioned in the same sentence. But, contrary to popular belief, he could (at least when it was absolutely necessary and he had no other options) force himself to wait, and plan, and work with silent perseverance towards one goal.

He turned on the television just in time to see the opening credits for his favorite soap opera roll across the screen, and sat down to watch. Or at least, that was what he appeared to be doing.

Making sure to place a distant, half-there expression on his face (an expression his former roommate Xander Harris had once once pointed out to him, and later referred to as his "Spike in a TV-induced coma" look -- usually adding some stupid joke about how Spike was unliving proof that TV killed your brain cells), he pretended to let the on-screen actions absorb him, while tuning both them and everything else out in favor of a single line of thought:

George. It's me. Answer me.
George. It's me. Answer me.
George. It's me. Answer me.

It's been said, many times over and by many different people, that there is nothing humans excel at better than making themselves stupider than they really are. That they'll happily ignore blatant truths even when these truths are stating them right in the face, convincing themselves that what they see and hear isn't really what they see and hear, because that would mean that everything they thought they knew was wrong.

While this is an extremely simplified half-truth at best -- the human mind is a lot more complex than most think and works on several different levels -- it does go a long way to explain why, even in places where supernatural beings and events are plentiful, the main population will still stubbornly insist that there's no such thing as monsters or magic, and that everything has a natural explanation.

Vampires attack your high school? Obviously they weren't vampires at all, just gang members on PCP.
A demon shows up at the supermarket to go on a killing spree? Just a homicidal terrorist with a bad skin condition.
Giant, colorful fish flying over the city? Must be a balloon of some kind.

So Betta George didn't feel any particular need to stay hidden as he flew over the roofs and buildings. Even though the popular myth that people seldom look up and won't notice what's directly above their heads isn't really true, George knew that the people who did look up would, nine times out of ten, decide that there couldn't actually be a flying fish there and that he had to be some kind of special effect or marketing stunt.

Betta George, among friends known as just "George," was a splenden beast, a very rare creature that looked uncannily like a huge, flying betta splenden. For the most part, splenden beasts were peaceable creatures who kept to themselves and didn't bother anyone, which would have made them easy prey to demons and creatures of darkness if it hadn't been for their uncanny telepathic and psychic powers. Splenden beasts, it was said, could read any mind like an open book -- and that included otherwise unreadable minds like those of vampires.

There was some debate, among the few people who actually cared enough about the subject to debate, just how great these splenden beasts' powers were. Even the splenden beasts themselves weren't completely sure, and George had fairly recently (thanks to a persistent vampire who hadn't wanted to take no for an answer) had to push himself to his very limit and beyond and been surprised at just how much power was hidden in that fishy head of his.

He had also discovered that he was pretty adept at locating and picking up stray thoughts from people he knew.

Which was why he wasn't too surprised when, as he swooped over a particularly high rooftop, in a flash, he knew that somewhere, someone he knew was thinking his name. And not only thinking the name, thinking it over and over with a sharp intensity that for a moment caused the thoughts to raise above the dull chatter of other people's stray thoughts, like a shouting voice in a sea of whispers.

Either somebody out there were having some pretty intense fantasies about him, or they were trying to get his attention. He really hoped it was the latter.

George stopped, hovering over the building as he concentrated, seeking out the one mind among the others that was thinking about, or to, him. A human would have been hopelessly lost in a cacophony of thoughts, hopes and inane inner dialogues, but the mind was a splenden beast's true element, and communication between minds mere child's play.

Even so, it took nearly five minutes of intense searching before George found the right mind. It was faint now, but stubbornly repeating the same words over and over again:

George. It's me. Answer me.
George. It's me. Answer me.
George. It's me. Answer me.

::Spike?:: said George, sending his own thoughts back in reply.

George. It's me. Answer -- wait, is that you?! You finally heard me?

::Sorry, I didn't know you were trying to contact me,:: George replied. ::What's up?::

Got a bit of a situation here, mate, came Spike's thoughts. While most people sound very different in their thoughts than they do when talking out loud, Spike's flippant (and affected) London accent was just as pronounced in his mind as in his actual voice. Might need a bit of help.

Author's Notes: Sorry for the long wait on this chapter, but I've been busy with a lot of other creative (non-fanfiction-related) work. Rest assured, though, that I haven't given up on fanfiction or on Spike, and that I am continuing this story, however slowly it may go.

In my notes for the previous chapter, I hinted that Betta George would make an appearance in this story, and here he is. People who haven't read the comics might find him misplaced in a place like the Buffyverse, but George is actually a canon character, appearing as he does in the canonical Angel: After the Fall. I like George, and it makes sense that Spike would try to reach out to him, so I decided to give him a role in the story.

You might have noticed that I've removed Faith from the "featured characters" section. The reason for this is that the story has gone through an unexpected change, and all of a sudden I wasn't so certain where, or even if, Faith fit into this anymore. I tried to write some scenes with her for this story, but they always felt forced and unnatural, as if I was trying to shoehorn her into a scene she didn't belong in. The result? A badly-written Faith. And I think our rogue Slayer deserves better than that -- I'd rather save her for an occasion where she can actually shine than force her into a story where she'll only end up looking bad.

There'll be more Buffy-centric characters in the next chapter, though, so stay tuned!