You've all been wonderful, and I thank you for your feedback! Early update this week, and we'll see if I can get another one out before the end of the week, too. :)



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“So what does this do?”

“Dunno.”

“How about this?”

“Ask the bugs.”

“C’mon, you must know what something on this ship does.”

“Swiftly crossing the line from polite to irritating, Harris!”

Xander rolls his eyes. “You completely fail at being a guy, you know that?”

“Yeah, like you’re the picture of male virility,” Spike retorts, smirking, and Buffy rests a hand on his arm in gentle reproach.

The three of them are crowded on what passes for a bridge on Spike’s ship, Xander inspecting the controls with interest and Buffy leaning against the wall, content to watch the two boys go at it. Dawn has had a sudden attack of bug fear, and she and Willow have gone out wandering to find a place without the creepies crawling around, deep in the ship.

“Hey! I build stuff! I happen to be very confident in my masculinity, thank you very much!” Xander says indignantly at Spike’s amused skepticism. “You’re the one who can’t even work the controls of his own ship!”

“Don’ need toys to be the consummate male,” Spike purrs, and Buffy tries to swallow past a sudden lump in her throat that’s mysteriously appeared at the look on his face. He turns to face her, a knowing glint in his eye. “Isn’t that right, love?”

She flushes. “Spike…”

Thankfully, Dawn chooses that moment to storm in, the bugs all but forgotten in her anger. “Is this my sweater?” she demands. “I’ve been looking for this for months!”

“I borrowed it?” Buffy says sheepishly. They’d gone up to Seattle a few months before after Spike had heard about a Gunareg demon snatching up children from their beds at night, back when Buffy hadn’t had her own apartment and she’d been making liberal use of Dawn’s closet. “And I was going to- Wait… Aren’t those my earrings?” 

Dawn dodges her grasping fingers and hands the sweater to Xander. “Hang on to this,” she says hastily. “I’m going to head back to Spike’s room now, kay?”

“No more going through my drawer!” Buffy calls after her hasty retreat. Okay, maybe there are a few more of Dawn’s things in there…but to be fair, Dawn’s been stealing her clothes for years, and taking some of the things that would look so much better on Buffy is a public service. Really.

“You have a drawer in Spike’s bedroom?” Xander repeats dubiously.

She snatches the sweater from his arm and turns away. “I’m going to find Willow. Let me know when we land!”

There’s a conversation she isn’t having, not after Xander’s questions, not after Willow’s gentle prying or Dawn’s teasing, and it’s a welcome interruption when Spike pokes his head into his room to inform them that they’ve landed. 

Of course, that means seeing Angel, and judging from the three hostile figures behind her, this isn’t going to be getting any easier. 

It’s still dark out in England, the barest lightening of the sky a herald to the coming day, but she’s still mildly surprised to see Angel pull open the door before they even knock. “I’ve been organizing the texts you might need,” he murmurs, turning away from her to look directly at Spike. “I’m going to go patrol until sunrise.”

“Wait.” She grabs him by the forearm, bent on stopping him from going. It can’t be like this, not anymore. If nothing else, her conversation with Angel had been cleansing, giving them a chance to cooperate without the pain, and she’s determined to keep that opportunity. “The more people we have researching, the better.”

Behind her, Xander snorts disdainfully. Angel’s arm flexes against her palm, and she shivers despite herself. 

And then there’s Spike, an old smirk back on his face as he watches the proceedings. “I’n’t this awkward?” he drawls, amused, and whatever tenseness had accompanied her since she’d opened the door dissipates at the laughter in his eyes. Spike loves discord. She’s feeding into that now and he’s enjoying it fully, and she can’t help but smile at how happy it’s making him.

She turns around, bracing herself for what she’s going to say next. Time to face the elephant in the room before its presence kills Faith. “Come on. We have slayers to save.” She raises her eyebrows at her sister and friends. “I promise, no nookie this time unless Spike gets really obnoxious.”

Dawn snickers. Willow and Xander both look stunned that she can kid about it- and she’s a little stunned, herself. Angel pulls away from her abruptly, turning around to walk to the bookcase in a brooding whirl of black leather. And Spike… Spike looks like he’s just eaten something unpleasant. As, say, poison. 

She rolls her eyes and slips her arm through his. “Come on, vampire. We have things to do.” She feels, rather than sees, him relax, even if he’s still scowling outwardly.

Don’t you know you’re my only vampire? He grabs a book and hands another to her, and when he takes a seat on the couch, she settles down on the floor beside his legs. 

“So what exactly are we looking for?” Dawn asks, seating herself between Spike and Xander. “Big demon, big teeth?”

“Kind of funny-shaped,” Buffy interjects. “A snout-y kind of thing? And the teeth are at the end of that.”

“Like an aardvark!” Willow drops to the floor between Dawn and Xander, her face lighting up with the realization. “Except not with that tail, more like a big, pudgy body and lots of fur.”

“How’d you-“

“I’ve seen it.” Willow turns to shrug toward Buffy’s direction. “Orkanel’s offices are in LA, remember? I’m there a lot. And the city’s crawling with those demons. That’s what we’re hunting down? They don’t even look that dangerous,” she says thoughtfully.

“I guess not,” Buffy admits, and from Willow’s description, they really don’t. But she can still remember the terror, the primal fear she’d experienced in the face of a creature she couldn’t defeat. She remembers running from the not-that-dangerous-looking demon as though her life had depended on it (and now she knows that it had), remembers being handicapped by panic… “But they are,” she says finally, leaning into Spike’s leg. He runs his fingers through her hair absently. “And I guess we’re meant to underestimate them.”

There’s a morbid silence, broken only by Spike perking up to ask Angel, “How’s Faith?”

Angel’s seated at the kitchen table, out of sight of the rest of the Scoobies, but Buffy can still see him from her place by the doorway, see the way his shoulders sag at the question. “Not well,” he says finally, turning to stare at her. She meets his gaze steadily. 

Xander raises his face to look up at the bed barely visible on the second level. “She’ll be fine,” he says, with confidence that Buffy almost envies. “She’s got us, right?”

--

Research is slow, and somewhere between the third and fourth hour, Dawn falls asleep, curled at the longer end of the couch with a lightly snoring Xander. Buffy climbs up to fill her vacant spot, resting her head against Spike’s shoulder. “Anything?”

“Not yet.” He strokes the bare skin of her arm unconsciously. “You should get some sleep, too. We don’t know how long this is going to take.”

“I can take off from work for a few days.” She yawns. “I’m good about showing up. They won’t mind a family emergency. But Xander probably can’t miss work, and Dawn has both school and work, plus Willow-“

“I’m okay with the staying,” Willow puts in, still engrossed in the text she’s perusing. “I told Orkanel what’s going on, and he had me put on a ‘special project’ until we’ve found what we needed.” She tosses them a half-grin. “Now dontcha wish you had a boss like mine?”

“Mine isn’t bad,” Buffy says loyally. “And he’s not even some money-making Wiccan, just a normal guy.”

“I don’t like him,” Spike informs her.

She nudges him playfully. “What’d he do now?”

“I don’t like the way he looks at you.”

“He’s gay!”

“-Like you’re not important,” Spike finishes darkly. “Like you’re just a minion.”

“Josh?” Buffy pokes him. He’s always finding some reason to dislike the men in her life, and even Josh’s blatant ogling of the vampire eye candy when Spike had first come to the coffeehouse isn’t enough to dissuade Spike that he isn’t out to get Buffy, in whatever way possible. “No, he doesn’t.”

Willow rolls her eyes. “Not everyone can worship the ground Buffy walks on,” she says pointedly, smirking at Spike. “That’s the downside to a secret identity. And would you really want this guy to be all over Buffy?”

“Careful, witch.” Spike growls lowly, his arm moving automatically to pull Buffy closer to him. She closes her eyes contentedly, listening to Willow teasing Spike and Spike retorting with completely unwarranted threats, wondering if Angel listening from the outside and craving to be one of them again, if…

…And then there’s Xander’s voice, jolting her back to wakefulness with a too-loud, “I think I found something!”

She shakes her head, blinking out of sleep with groggy awareness. Sometime during her napping, Dawn had gotten up and she’d sprawled across the couch, Spike’s lap her pillow and her book poking into her back uncomfortably. “What time is it?”

“Eleven.” Spike moves to rub her back absentmindedly, kneading away the kinks from her sleep. “I gave Donut Boy some dosh and he got you breakfast. Croissant?”

She pulls herself up, taking the sugary pastry from Spike. “Mm. Thanks, Xander.” Spike clears his throat. “You okay, Spike? Sounds like you need a drink,” she says innocently, watching his eyes darken with frustrated annoyance.

“Buffy, take a look at this,” Xander calls from the kitchen, and she moves from Spike reluctantly, climbing over Willow’s slumbering body to check Xander’s findings.

Angel’s absent from the kitchen, and Dawn and Xander have commandeered the room instead, chowing down on donuts and flipping through the Watchers’ Diaries. “Here.” Xander points to a small paragraph in his current book. “’The demon has amassed a monstrous army of proportions unseen in the area, and it boasts two of the lamiabane in addition that have my slayer incapacitated by terror while in battle.’” 

“Lamiabane,” Buffy repeats, squinting down at the page. “It sounds like it could be-“

“But here’s the weird part,” Dawn interjects, reading on. “According to this watcher’s accounts, the lamiabane thing was harmless. Or mostly harmless, I’m not sure. He writes it off as an annoyance, nothing too dangerous.” 

“Maybe we got it wrong.” The idea nearly breaks her right then and there, another theory lost to oblivion. “Maybe the demon didn’t spread the virus.”

“Harmless?” And there’s Spike’s voice, doubtful and sardonic. “More likely, the watcher got it wrong. That slayer live long?”

“Another three months.” Dawn frowns at the text. “Killed by the demon king, not a disease.”

“Then this lamiabane’s not our demon,” Spike points out reasonably. “No slayer’s gonna last three months without her watcher noticing that she’s been infected, yeah?”

Unless if she hadn’t been infected, if she’d somehow avoided being bitten. Buffy had, and she’s sure that she isn’t the only one. “Keep looking into other demons,” she orders them, wandering over to the fridge to prepare a mug of blood for Spike. On second thought, she gets a second glass and sticks it into the microwave, too. “But don’t write off the Lima Bean thing entirely.”

The microwave beeps a few moments later and she takes the first cup out, eyeing the silhouette visible from behind the half-wall on the top floor warily. “I’ll be right back.”

Faith is limp and silent, the only hint of noise in the bedroom coming from the low beeping of a heart monitor. The room has been transformed, the newly installed ad hoc medical equipment giving it an air of finality that shakes Buffy to her core. Faith’s just…fading away, the slayer who’d loved life a little too much now losing more and more of it each day.

“She hasn’t opened her eyes since yesterday,” Angel murmurs. He’s holding one of Giles’s books open as he stands vigil over his housemate, his gaze fixed on the body on the bed. “It takes too much out of her.”

“Oh,” is all she can think to say, passing him his blood before she speaks again. “You must…it must be hell, watching this.”

“I’ve seen a lot of death. I’ve caused a lot of death, slow and agonizing like this is,” Angel says quietly. “Only once before did I have to watch someone I loved die that way, and even that doesn’t compare to this. Neither of them deserved it. I might, but Faith…Faith doesn’t deserve this.”

“No.” And she wonders at what he’s said, at how he counts Faith among his loved ones. “She’s done a lot for you, hasn’t she?”

His head dips downward in a nod. “Once…once I believed in her when no one else did. Maybe I saw myself in her, I don’t know. But she needed someone, and I needed to be that someone.”

“I remember.” She remembers hurt and betrayal and the pain of not being the one Angel had chosen, the rejection he’d leveled at her and the accusations he’d made, the long ride home after knowing that he’d found new purpose without her. She’d been so young, so caught up in lost love, and he’d lashed out in all the right places and left her heartbroken.

She doesn’t say any of it, but he must have heard it in her voice, because he stiffens and goes on quickly. “And when I’d finally crossed a line- the line that couldn’t be uncrossed- she came back for me. Believed in me.” There’s a sudden smile in his voice, one born of nostalgia and affection. “Dragged me out of my misery and dumped me into the shower when she’d decided that I was stinking up the apartment, ordered me to go patrolling one night when she wanted to go clubbing, chained me up when I tried to meet the sunrise. She didn’t give me a choice in healing myself, didn’t give me the option to give up. I’m not going to give up on her.” 

“I understand.” And she does, just as she understands the slight curl of Faith’s mouth as Angel speaks. This isn’t about jealousy or rejection anymore. They’re all past that. And while there’s still that petty part of her that yearns for the Angel who’d deny Faith for her sake, even that selfishness is quiet in the face of Angel’s devotion to Faith now.

She wants to be loved. But that’s not Angel’s place in her life anymore.

“I’m not leaving here without answers,” she tells him, leaning over to squeeze Faith’s limp hand in support. There’s a subtle twitch, a sign that the other girl knows she’s there. “We’re going to keep looking.”

She descends the stairs two at a time, smiling softly at Spike as he glances up to meet her gaze. “You hanging in there, pet?” he asks, rising to follow her into the kitchen.

“Yeah.” She hands him his mug and settles down in the seat beside Dawn, pulling over one of the Watchers’ Diaries from the unread pile. “Anything we can find, right?”

“Another mention of lamiabane,” Dawn offers, holding out her book. “But this one’s interesting. Looks like the watchers used it.”

“They what?” Buffy snatches the book and reads aloud, Spike peering over her shoulder with curiosity.

“After six days of searching, we’re forced to concede the impossible. Divya has betrayed us for her demon lover.“

“That’s so sweet!” Willow coos as she wanders in, rubbing her eyes. They stare at her. She shrugs. “Demon, slayer, star-crossed love? Seems kind of…”

“Familiar?” Xander cracks, raising his eyebrows.

Buffy ignores them. “I have contacted the Council, who have been prepared for this eventuality. An Uri’lan’i lamiabane will be sent out, courtesy of the Council coven, to locate Divya. We anticipate little difficulty.”

“And that’s where it ends.” Spike downs the last of his blood with a gulp and drops his mug into the sink. “Uri’lan’i, though…sounds kind of familiar.”

“It should.” And there’s Angel in the doorway, something akin to optimism in his eyes. “We killed one once, remember? Napoli, 1884.”

Spike nods slowly. “Dru was sick. She’d been feeding off of cholera victims, and we’d gone to get her help…” He grips Buffy’s shoulder suddenly. “There were vampires running for miles, terrified of the creature ravaging the hospital.” He pauses, his face whitening even more than normal at the memory. “They called it Uri’lan’i, didn’t they?”

“How’d it look?” Willow asks curiously, and Spike’s hand tightens even as he takes a step back.

“I don’t know,” he admits. “We…”

“We burned down the hospital,” Angel says flatly. “Killed hundreds of diseased humans, and never thought of it again. The Uri’lan’i had been taken care of.”

“Oh, god.” Buffy feels nauseous. It’s rare nowadays that she and Spike are confronted with reminders of the fact that he was once evil, and she isn’t quite sure how to process anymore. He’s different now, she reminds herself as he pulls away from her abruptly to shove past Angel into the other room. This is hurting him more than it’ll ever hurt me.

And remembering the guilt that’s consumed her since last year, the way she’s been torn apart for nearly destroying everything precious in life and the way he’s forced her to focus on the good instead, it’s all the more simple to follow Spike to the bookcase.

She slides an arm around his waist and ducks under his arm. “Any ideas?”

He stares at her.

“Spike,” she says patiently, and her voice is laced with sympathy and understanding. “I know it’s not easy. I can’t…I can’t imagine what you’re…but that’s over now. That’s not you. I know that. Talk to me?” It’s almost pleading, and she can see as his eyes clear from their despair, as they bore into her own for a moment and widen with awe.

For a moment, she thinks he might kiss her. Instead, he leans down to press a cool cheek against her own, his lips millimeters from her neck. “You are extraordinary, Buffy Anne Summers,” he whispers against her skin, and the goosebumps that break out at his words have nothing to do with his cool breath at her neck.

Her fingers toy with the bottom of his shirt, stroking the soft skin beneath. “I…um…do you know where we might find something about these Uri-thingies?” she blurts out, and he pulls away almost reluctantly. 

“Now that we have a name, it’ll be easier,” Spike agrees, but he’s looking over her shoulder as he speaks, his eyes on-

-Angel. Oh. But as she watches, her former love just gives him a short nod and joins them at the bookcase. “Right…here,” he announces, flipping through a book he pulls off one of the higher shelves. “Uri’lan’i. See also: lamiabane. This is it!”

There’s a picture of what is undeniably the demon that’s been wreaking havoc on them for months, round and furry body incongruous next to the snarling snout tipped with yellow fangs. And she still feels a shiver of dread at the picture alone. 

Angel glances at the page. “Designed with the mystical ability to hunt down slayers. But it’s harmless to them. It feeds off of vampires, and it’s supposed to be calm…”

“That’s not even a little bit true,” Buffy interjects.

“Maybe not.” He frowns. “They’re also supposed to be rare. And under control.”

“Someone’s been tampering with them,” Xander agrees, coming up behind them to take the book from Angel. “Making them aggressive, attacking slayers…”

“It doesn’t say anything about venom, either.” Buffy frowns thoughtfully. “You don’t think that someone did that, too? Maybe we’re-“

“We’re not wrong,” Spike says with a stubbornness that makes her meet his eyes gratefully. “The demon is connected to the disease. We know that already. The only question is, how do we undo it?”

Willow raises a tentative hand. “I have an idea.”

--

Willow’s idea involves working with her boss to capture a lamiabane and analyze its saliva in some high-tech facility, and much as Buffy wants to be involved in the cure, this is one thing she can’t help with. Science and Buffy are most definitely not mixy.

So instead, she has Spike drop off her friends at their respective homes and they brave the sunlight on the roof to get him inside for the remainder of the day. They watch daytime soaps until even Spike is bored and fall asleep against each other for hours before the sun goes down and it’s time to patrol.

And for the first time in weeks- maybe even years, since they’d last come up against an undefeatable foe- Buffy is energized by hope.