Rated: PG-13
Summary: Spike leaves after "Dead Things," wanting nothing more than to get Buffy out of his head. Wesley's still an independent contractor after the events of "Loyalty." And the Slayer's still living in the land of denial.
Disclaimer: I don't own any of the characters featured
below except for Nika. She's all mine. And I'm not making any money off
of her either, so please don't sue.
Part I: Reasons
"I'm not a perfect person/There are many things I wish I didn't do/but I continue learning/ I never meant to do those things to you/and so I have to say before I go/that I just want you to know/I've found a reason for me/to change who I used to be/A reason to start over new/ and the reason is you/I'm sorry that I hurt you/It's something I must live with everyday/ and all the pain I put you through/I wish that I could take it all away/and be the one who catches all your tears...I've found a reason for me/to change who I used to be/a reason to start over new/and the reason is you/I've found a reason to show/a side of me you didn't know/A reason for all that I do/and the reason is you." ~Hoobastank, "The Reason"
Chapter 1: August 2002
Nika took the urn the funeral home attendant handed her, holding it tightly to her breast. They had held the memorial service the day before, her husband's brothers in arms coming in droves to offer their condolences. She knew that none of them quite understood why Danny had asked to be cremated. She'd explained that it was traditional in his family. The explanation had seemed to suffice.
It was odd, she thought, that the urn was so small, only a little bigger than a football. Danny had been a big man, broad chested and well muscled. He had made her feel safe as no one ever had before.
She closed her eyes against the tears that threatened and headed out to her car. Today, there was no one. Her friends had been kind, but awkward. His friends and their wives had seemed not to know what to say. They had liked him, but they had never been close. She and Daniel had been a world unto themselves, and now half her world was gone.
Nika drove home in a daze, not quite seeing the road or the signs, managing it on autopilot, the urn on the passenger seat next to her. She pulled up in front of the house they had bought not a year previously, took the urn inside with her. She sat on the bed in a daze.
There seemed to be no reason to move, to speak, to do anything at all. No reason to go on.
Daniel had made her swear to him, so long ago now, that if anything ever happened to him, she would go on living. "It's a dangerous profession," he warned. "If something happens, you have to live. Promise me you'll go on living."
Nika had laughed lightly, as only a girl of nineteen could. She had believed the both of them immortal, invincible, never mind that her life had been marked by death. She had believed Danny to be immortal at least, this strong man of hers that had such a gentle touch. There had been loss before, yes, but she had not understood what this kind of loss would bring to her soul.
She could not kill herself, not and keep her promise, but she could put herself in a position to not live much longer. As a policeman's wife, as the wife of one who was not-quite-human, she knew of the dark places in the city, places you could go if you had a death wish.
Nika rose and washed her face, dressed, made sure she looked an appealing morsel, despite the marks of grief that could not be washed away. Pressing her lips to her fingertips and her fingers to the urn, she whispered. "I'm sorry, but I will be with you soon, my love."
~~~~~
There was a place that the more unsavory sort went, a place that most humans avoided if they wanted to stay alive. The people at the bottom, those were the ones who had the easiest time believing that there were things that went bump in the night. Too many of them had seen friends and loved ones swallowed by the darkness to not believe.
Now, Nika was planning on diving into the darkness headfirst.
She ordered a drink and sat down in a secluded corner. Getting eaten needed to be done carefully, she thought, as she had no desire to be turned. She wanted to find someone who might be persuaded by the novelty of a willing human meal to do things her way.
After an hour or so, Nika spotted the one she wanted. He was a lean, blonde man, the platinum blonde of a bottle rather than nature. More average height than tall, he was as far removed from her Daniel as it was possible to be, which suited her just fine. Nika had no desire for her last sight to be of a demon that reminded her of Danny.
What decided her was the way he drank, grimly, and with purpose, as though he were trying to wash something away with a river of whiskey. That, and the way he limped as he made his way to the bar when the wait-demon wouldn't serve him. His right leg was obviously not working very well, and as he moved, Nika could tell he had a similar problem with his right arm. She hadn't known of anything that could cause such an injury in a vampire, but apparently something had.
And he was a vampire. The paleness of his skin, the blue of his veins, the lack of a pulse jumping in the hollow of his throat—Daniel had taught her what to look for long ago. Had taught her that, and had told her that she was to cremate his body, no matter the cause of death. "I'll not have you looking on at me as a demon. It's the way my family has always done it, to ensure our passage on to the next life. It's not a tradition I would leave behind."
Nika had left instructions for her own funeral, that she was to be cremated as well. Even if the creature tried to turn her, it would not work. She hoped. She hoped that the possibility of a meal for an injured vampire, unable to hunt, would be enough to convince him to simply drain her and leave the body.
Shaking off her thoughts and draining the glass, summoning up the last dregs of courage, Nika made her way over to the vampire's table. She sat down in front of him boldly, without asking permission or waiting for an invitation.
His response was surly, as she might have expected from the look of him. He looked like a tough the cops would instinctively hassle. "Drinkin' alone tonight, ducks."
"I have a proposition for you," Nika replied, not knowing where her own boldness was coming from. Perhaps it was simply desperation to be done. Some way of making sure she died, without having to commit the deed herself. Perhaps it was because she wanted to go out the way her husband had. Her parents had. Her sister had. It was the last way she might be close to them.
"Not interested."
She pretended not to hear him. "I'm offering you a meal."
He laughed. "You don't know what you're offering."
"Drink from me."
That got his attention. His head shot up, and he regarded her with the most piercing blue eyes she'd ever seen. "What?"
Nika leaned in closer, lowering her voice so that she wouldn't be heard across the din. "I want you to drink from me. Kill me. Not turn me."
"Novel way to commit suicide," he commented, interest creeping into his voice, even though his face was bland.
Her gray eyes became steel. "Not your business."
"No," he agreed. He looked at her for a long moment, and seemed to come to a decision within himself, completely separate from her request and desire. "Where? Out back?"
Nika thought of dying in an alley, and shook her head. Maybe it was vain or stupid. Maybe she just didn't want to risk anyone stopping them. Maybe because it had always been her secret desire to die an old woman, happy and content, in her own bed. One out of three didn't seem too bad at the moment. "My house. I have a place. It's not far."
"You'll have to invite me in, an' all," he reminded her, and she shrugged.
"It won't matter." It did matter, some small voice inside her insisted. All of it mattered. She had promised Danny, promised to live and promised never to invite a vampire inside the house. Tonight, she was going to break both of those promises.
~~~~~
Spike hadn't known quite what to do when the woman came to him and asked him to kill her. It had been two months since he'd gotten the chip out, and he could have been hunting his meals for at least the last couple weeks. Instead, he'd told himself that he needed time, needed to make sure he could chase a human down.
He promised himself that he would go back to being the Big Bad just as soon as he had healed.
It had taken him a few weeks to find a doctor that would remove the chip. Funny, but he had been so focused on Sunnydale and the Initiative, and then so intent upon the Slayer, Spike had never even considered going out of town to find help. L.A. offered quite a bit more in the way of demon doctors, and it hadn't taken too long to find someone that would help. Even better, the man had been so fascinated by the modification chip, he'd taken that as half his payment.
So Spike had paid up front and woken to find the doctor gone and half his limbs not working.
He'd managed to lurch out of the makeshift operating room and hole up in a little flop house he'd found. To his credit, the doctor had warned him of the possible side effects of such an operation, and Spike had stocked up on fresh blood beforehand. Good thing too, because it was two weeks before he could even manage to leave the room again.
Spike knew his leg was getting better. It was a rather slow process, and the arm came back first, but the limp wasn't quite as bad now. At least, that's what he told himself.
He could do denial as well as the next person. (A place called Sunnydale and a certain blonde Slayer came to mind.) He'd deluded himself about Buffy's feelings for a long time. He might have continued, except for that night in the alley. It wasn't even her words, or the bruises that she left. All of that had been done before, said before, though not in quite the same language. No, it had been her back as she walked away. Left him for the sun, knowing he might not be able to make it back to his crypt. That was what had convinced him to leave. One of them was going to kill the other.
So he deluded himself into thinking that he could be the Big Bad again, that he would heal and hunt again, that nothing had changed. Spike didn't question his reluctance to play up his injury to get women fawning over him. He knew how to milk such things, and chose not to. Instead, he waited until he could run and jump with the best of them, ignoring the nagging voice in the back of his brain that said he might never be able to again.
That was why he said yes when the woman came to him with her request. Her boldness intrigued him, and her death wish peaked his curiosity, but mostly Spike realized that if he refused to kill her, he would have to admit that something fundamental had changed within him. Refusing a human's willing offer would be like a starving man refusing a five-course meal.
There would be no more denial after that.
Therefore, he agreed to go with her to her house, finishing his drink with one swig and following her out to her car. She drove a sensible old four-door sedan, of indiscriminate make and model. Spike found himself staring at her as she drove them back to her house, trying to decipher what kind of woman it was who would offer herself up to a vampire. Requests for turning weren't so unusual, but she had been very emphatic about the staying dead part.
She was perhaps in her mid- to late twenties, and her brown hair was pulled back in a sensible braid. A wide mouth formed a slash across her face, and a straight nose did nothing for her features. The only thing that might have been pretty were her eyes, which were large, gray, and framed with thick dark lashes. Even so, she was not pretty or beautiful, though some might call her handsome. There was a strength in her face, in her eyes, that might draw people to her. But the strength she had was gone, broken by something or someone, and Spike finally broke the silence.
"Why d'you want to go out this way?"
She glanced over at him but didn't answer right away. "Why did you say yes?" she finally replied, a question for a question.
Thankfully, it wasn't a question Spike had to think too hard about. "I'm a vampire, luv. We eat people. 's the way of things."
The silence that greeted his reply just about convinced him that he wasn't going to get an answer. He would kill her without ever knowing what led to her seeking him out. "I don't want to be here anymore."
It was a good enough response, and one Spike could understand. There were plenty of days when he wasn't sure he wanted to be here anymore either. Not that he was ready to meet the sunrise yet, but he had no lust for unlife, not as he once did. "I get that."
After a more comfortable silence, the woman said, "I'm Nika."
"Spike."
"What happened to you?"
Spike debated on what to tell her, whether it mattered. If he was going to kill her anyway, he didn't suppose it mattered at all, so he said, "I had somethin' wrong with my brain, an' when I went in to get it fixed, this is what happened. 's better now," he added, as an afterthought.
"There are exercises you can do to help," Nika offered cautiously.
He stared at her with renewed interest. "You a doctor, then?"
"A midwife. I've done some work with people who've—had accidents," she finished, and then fell silent.
The words seemed heavy to both of them, as though speaking were a hardship. Though, if they had known one another, they would have known that words should have fallen easily, like leaves in the fall. The rhythm of their conversation was one of uneasy ebb and flow, so that silence felt better.
Nika finally pulled up in front of a small house that had the looks of being lovingly cared for in spite of its size. Except for that, for the tidy yard and neatly painted trim and shutters, there was nothing to recommend it. He followed her out of the car, to the porch, and she unlocked the door, pausing just inside.
She looked back at him, and for an instant Spike was certain that she was going to change her mind. That she would leave him on the outside and shut the door in his face. She did neither of these things.
"Come in, Spike."
They were echoes of another woman's words, in what seemed like a lifetime ago. Sometimes, at night, Spike would wonder if it might not have been better if Buffy had been left in her coffin. A dead Buffy had been a burden, like an albatross around his neck, weighing him down with guilt, but he'd had a family of sorts. A live Buffy had cut him off from everything he'd begun to value. He shoved the thought aside with a feeling close to remorse.
Spike stepped across the threshold, looking around. He spotted a picture on the wall of a tall, black-haired man in a police uniform, standing next to a young Nika. "He's gone." It was a statement of fact, and there was no condemnation in his tone. It hadn't been so long ago that only a promise to a dead woman had kept him alive, in a manner of speaking. Spike might have killed himself otherwise. "How long?"
"A week." There was a pause. "They say someone cut his throat, but I saw the wound when I identified the body." The morgue attendant had not argued with her request. She gathered they saw varying strange reactions to grief. "It wasn't a knife."
Spike understood what she wasn't saying, and turned to look at her. "I'm sorry."
Nika had no idea why this vampire's words would mean so much more than any other's, including the other officers and their wives and husbands who had come to the memorial service. Perhaps they had rung false because their loved ones were still standing there beside them, because part of their being sorry was also relief that it wasn't their spouse who was gone. The vampire's expressive eyes and face told her he knew grief intimately, even though it should have been impossible. "Thank you."
Spike suddenly wanted to get down to business. Much longer in this woman's company and he wouldn't be able to kill her. He would bite and think of another he'd so recently seen lifeless. "Where do you want to do this?" he asked for the second time that night.
"In the bedroom," she finally said. "You can leave me there—after."
"After," he agreed, following her as she headed that way.
The two of them sat down on the edge of her bed, the springs of the old mattress squeaking under their combined weight. Nika had to choke back tears, thinking that it had squeaked every night since she and Danny had married, and it never would again. It would have been ten years soon.
"I haven't done this in a while," Spike confessed suddenly into the silence of the room. "That thing with my brain? Was a chip, didn't let me hurt people. You'll be my first in a long time."
Neither missed the double entendre, though they didn't say anything. It seemed too solemn an occasion for dirty jokes. "Can you now?"
"Oh, yeah. Got it removed. That's what happened to m'leg." Spike had checked as soon as possible after the surgery. He was inclined to believe it had happened, due to the extent of the damage, but he'd finally gone out and deliberately stepped on someone's toes as he passed them in the street. He'd told himself it was the only thing he could really do.
"Oh. Will it hurt much?" she asked, and there was a thread of fear in her voice that hadn't revealed itself until then.
Spike couldn't lie to her; he didn't have the heart. "Some. I'll be as gentle as I can."
Nika hesitated, and then brushed back her braid, exposing a bare neck, her creamy skin an open invitation. "Remember, no turning."
"Right." Still Spike hesitated, unsure of himself, of what he wanted, until he could wait no longer. It was now or never, and so it had to be now.
For the first time in years, Spike bit into the warm, living neck of a human, and began to drink. Neither of them were ever certain who changed their mind first, but Nika's eyes suddenly shot open and she began to struggle, even as Spike made up his mind to withdraw. He had already taken enough to cause her to lose consciousness, though not enough to kill her. "I'm sorry," he whispered as she fainted. He was never sure what he was apologizing for: for not being able to kill her, or for biting her in the first place.
~~~~~
Nika woke to find a pair of worried blue eyes regarding her intently. "What—" She couldn't quite remember what had happened. Her head was pounding, there was a burning sensation in her neck, and she didn't recognize the man sitting next to her.
"'m sorry," he said, and with his words, her memories rushed back. He was a vampire; she'd asked him to kill her.
She wasn't dead.
"What happened?" At his frown, she continued, "Why did you stop?"
Spike shook his head. "You started to struggle. I figured you changed your mind."
"But why would you stop?" Nika insisted. She had changed her mind. The darkness had begun to cloud her vision, and suddenly keeping a promise to a dead man seemed more important than ending the pain . The curious thing was that the vampire hadn't finished the job.
"Why did you change your mind?" Spike refused to look away from her eyes, and they engaged in a staring contest. Nika was the one who broke first.
"I'll tell you, if you tell me why you didn't kill me." At his nod, she said, "I promised Danny I would keep living if—if anything ever happened to him. I just—I thought I wanted—" Tears choked her, and Nika fell silent, unable to say anything else.
Spike was quiet. He had been there. He'd been inches away from greeting the sunrise after Buffy had died. It was Dawn who had saved him. She'd needed him. "There was a girl," he confessed. Nika lay on the bed still, looking up at him with her solemn eyes and pale face. "She said if I ever got the chip out, I'd start killin' people again. Said I was a serial killer in prison. I didn't want her to be right."
Their misery seemed to thrum between them, bonding them in an unlikely sort of relationship. It was not a bond of affection or desire, but rather of an uncomfortable sort of knowing. They knew pain. That was all. "What happened to her?" Nika whispered, suddenly needing to know.
"She kicked me to curb." Spike stood suddenly. "I should go. You look alright. Bit pale, but that'll pass quick enough."
Nika looked at the clock. It was 6 am, and the sun was rising. "You could stay here." At the vampire's incredulous look, she hastened to explain, "The basement is almost finished. We—we were going to rent it out once it was done. But there's a bed down there."
"We're not gonna be friends, ducks," Spike said, almost snarling, looking suddenly fierce. "Don't need 'em, an' I don't want 'em."
Nika laughed hollowly. "Danny was my best friend. He was my world. I don't have any desire to try and replace him. Ever."
They stared at each other, again at an impasse. "Then what?" Spike finally asked.
"I suppose misery loves company," she replied, trying to smile and not making it. "I don't know who's misery, but the other can be company."
Spike finally nodded, looking away from her and at the steadily lightening curtains. "Alright then." His shoulders slumped, and he reached out a hand to help Nika up.
Shakily, she led the way to the basement and showed him the bed. "Stay however long you want," Nika said awkwardly. "I mean, it's—you have an invitation now, so it doesn't matter."
"It matters," he replied. "Won't stay where 'm not wanted." They did not discuss whether or not she really wanted him there. They didn't discuss the fact that they had saved one another. It was enough that Spike had a safe place to kip and that the house was not empty.
~~~~~
Buffy stared at Richard, not quite comprehending what he was saying. "Look, Buffy, I'm really sorry." His nice, normal, sincere face was regarding her with nothing but concern. "I just don't think this is going to work out. I mean, I really like you, but it's pretty obvious I'm not the guy you want."
"What are you talking about?" she asked, dazed. "I thought everything was going okay." It always ended this way, she was thinking. She thought everything was going fine, but somehow it wasn't. Buffy had missed all the warning signals. Again.
Richard shook his head, feeling bad about ending it, but still firm in his decision. "You're not around. I mean, I know there's weird stuff in this town, and you—do things, and all, but you don't really even seem all that interested in me. Half the time it feels like you're off in your own world. I'm sorry, Buffy. I just can't do this. I think maybe we need different things in a relationship."
She wanted to scream, "Yeah, like I need a guy not to leave!" She didn't. Buffy just nodded numbly and watched as Richard hurried away, not wanting to stay any longer than he had to. Six months. Six months down the drain. She'd finally thought she was putting her life back together, doing the right thing.
All she saw was another man's back.