Betaed by: Goblin_Dae, Science, and Subtilior

Disclaimer: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and all recognizable characters, locations, and dialogue belong to Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, and the various writers. This is written purely for fun.

 

12.

Buffy (and Spike)'s List of Clues:
- Spell(?) kicked in sometime after 3:15 am on 3rd November.
- Affects entire town, up to a half mile outside of Sunnydale city limits.
- Seems to target living (unliving?) creatures: humans, animals, insects, birds, demons, vampires, etc.
- Slayer was less bitchy when she was asleep.
- No humans seem to have died as a result of the spell.
- Very difficult to get into town. Impossible to leave?
- Telephone lines are dead.
- Reversal spells backfire.
- Food doesn't go bad, corpses don't decay, and wounds on Sleepers heal very slowly.

Sunnyhell Magic Users:
1. Margaret Douglas
2. Jane Espenson
3. Jessica Hix
4. Caroline Jameson
5. Agnes King
6. J. (Jonathan) Levinson
7. Tara McClay
8. Willow Rosenberg
9. Andrew Wells
10. Ethan Rayne?

House Rules for Vampires (according to the bloody list posted on the fridge):
1. No going near Mom's room or my room.
2. No smoking in the house.
3. Clean up your own messes.
4. Keep your boots off the furniture.
5. Rinse out your nasty blood-caked mug (you only get ONE, and it's NEVER to go back with the other mugs. It is now a lone mug.)
6. Do your own laundry.
7. Shower daily, needed or not (and stop using my shampoo.)
8. NEVER touch my underwear. Ever.
9. Or my toothbrush.

Time Suck:
Days stuck in Sunnydale: 11
Useless books read: 261
Books that looked helpful, but turned out bloody useless: 28
Spells attempted: 3
Spells backfired: 3
Hotels searched for Ethan fucking Rayne: 11
Number of ways I've thought of to kill the Slayer: 4,683.5

 

"What are you doing?" Buffy asked, startling Spike out of a daydream in which he'd been just about to beat her to death with one of those sodding hotel room Bibles. He'd seen more than enough of them for one unlife.

"Thinking." He glared at her with all the frustration and malice he'd pent up over the last week and a half.

"Don't hurt yourself, Spikey."

"And yet I'm not the one who pretends to be a natural blonde."

"At least my hair color isn't called Clorox. Get your lazy butt up. Sun set thirty minutes ago. Let's go."

Spike slid his legal pad full of 'notes' under his latest stack of books, then leaned back in his chair. If she wanted to label him lazy, he had no problem living down to it. "What's the rush, Slayer? Not like anything is goin' anywhere."

She braced one hand on her cocked hip and stared at him with contempt. It looked bloody ridiculous with that stupid nose of hers up in the air. "I want to check out those two motels on the east side of town tonight," she said. "I've got a good feeling about them."

Number of 'good feelings' the Slayer's had about shit that turned out to be bloody disappointing? 53. Not that he was keeping track or anything.

They'd fallen into a routine of sorts. Mornings were for sleeping—and don't think Spike hadn't noticed that Buffy no longer came storming into the basement to wake him up. Afternoons were for wading through the Watcher's books looking for anything that might prove useful. Once the sun set and they'd both eaten, however, they wandered Sunnydale in search of Ethan Rayne. Thus far they'd turned up a couple of vamp nests, but no sign at all of the chaos mage.

Privately, Spike thought that even if Ethan had cast the damn thing, he didn't seem the sort of bloke who'd get caught in the spell himself. Either he was out there in the town hiding or he was long gone and laughing at the colossal joke he'd played on the Slayer. When he'd suggested the latter, she'd gotten all huffy, glared, and informed him that he'd never met Ethan, so what the hell did he know? Valid, he supposed, but really, the girl was just desperate for some kind of solution. It didn't seem to matter to her whether or not it made any sort of sense.

After they'd gotten tired of breaking into hotel rooms (and he couldn't believe he was actually tired of something destructive and illegal), they usually headed back to the Watcher's and loaded up some more books.

All in all? It was way too fucking domestic.

He sort of wanted to ram a railroad spike through his own bloody skull.

Somewhere, he was sure, Dru was staring up into the stars, gleefully watching him squirm. Maybe this is what she'd seen when she'd been on about the Slayer being all around him. He was living in the bitch's basement—it didn't get much more surrounded by Slayer than that.

God, how he hated her. He hated the way she always bounced downstairs in the afternoon smelling like sunshine and hothouse flowers; he hated the way she turned up her nose whenever he heated his blood in the microwave, and the way she scoured the thing clean every single time he used it; he hated the way he'd been allotted a towel, a mug, and a toothbrush, and he was never supposed to mix his kit with hers; and most of all he hated her ruthless optimism every single fucking night.

She was just as frustrated as he was, but she'd slap on that insipidly bright smile and announce what they were going to be doing that night—without ever asking Spike whether he had anything to contribute—and then flounce out of the house as if she could break the spell just because she was Buffy.

And most of all, he hated that he kinda sorta almost believed she could break it, too.

She was, after all, the hero, and that's what heroes were supposed to bloody do.

When he didn't jump out of the chair to do her bidding, she sighed and did this graceful little shrug thing that started somehow in her eyebrows and rolled all the way down to her fingertips. She had on a skimpy, strappy top that left her delicate collarbones exposed; he let his gaze linger there, wondering if he could fit his fangs around one if he opened wide enough and shake her by it like a dog trying to snap a rabbit's spine. He wondered if she'd scream. Somehow he doubted it. Slayer didn't seem like a screamer.

"Get up," she said. "You promised to help, and I'm not going to keep carrying your dead weight."

"Ha, bloody, ha," Spike said. "I'll have you know I just finished skimming three books in three different languages. But next time I'll give you the books written in Cantonese, since you seem to think I'm not pulling my own, here."

His—if you were going to be honest about it, and Spike really wasn't— somewhat shoddy multilingual talents were his only trump card at the moment. He knew she suspected that he wasn't being entirely straight about his fluency in all the languages the Watcher's books were written in. It wouldn't be the first time he'd held his cards close and bluffed sky-high. But he also knew she couldn't afford to stake him. She needed him, if only because he could do this one thing she couldn't. It wasn't much of an ace, but it was the only one he'd been dealt so far, and Spike was going to hold onto it as long as he could.

Of course, eventually they were going to run out of books and hotels—hopefully not before they sussed out what had caused all this.

He let her herd him out of the house, then immediately lit a cigarette just to piss her off.

He didn't want her to know it, but he was grateful for these nightly search missions. Spike really hated being caged. Maybe it was a little bit of leftover resentment for the era in which he'd lived, with its starchy collars and starchier rules about who you could talk to and when and how and what you could say or do or not do and which fork you used for which course and honestly William a gentleman shouldn't waste his time writing bloody poetry and who you were supposed to marry and how you were supposed to live .

Or maybe not.

Maybe it was the result of waking up in a pitch black box that stank of rotting flesh and formaldehyde and the body you were lying on top of was bony beneath yours and you had to claw your way out, tearing your fingernails off and inhaling great mouthfuls of dirt until you reached the surface where there was air and moonlight and deargod the scent of blood everywhere, everywhere, everywhere ...

Then again, it could just be because he'd been tied up or chained up or locked up once too many times in his unlife.

It didn't really matter. In the end he was simply thrilled to little pieces to be out and about, kicking in hotel doors and occasionally staking vamps whenever the Slayer happened on their nests. Not that he didn't resent being made to sniff out vamps and victims like some kind of trained hound, or being forced to stake his own kind in order to preserve his hide … but it just felt good to move. To walk, to smoke, to be out under the stars, prowling the night, to be doing something other than sitting on his arse and squinting at a bunch of rotten books so far out of date they might well have been antiques back when old Bat-Face himself had been a member of the Pulse Club.

They wandered east, out past a couple of the major cemeteries and into a part of town that was only a little run down. There were a couple of small roach motels, their neon signs advertising that they had in-room cable. The Slayer still insisted on the pretense of checking the desk registration records, even though he knew she'd make him play Scratch-n-Sniff at the door to each room. They'd found a couple of other vamps; although, after that first horrific discovery, none had living victims in their rooms. The Slayer had taken an almost vindictive pleasure in finding them out and staking them. At this rate, by the time they finally managed to break the spell, the Hellmouth would see a plunge in the vampire population.

Hell, she might even clean them out completely—minus one William the Bloody, whom she would run out of town on a rail.

It only took a couple of hours to search the two small motels, and by the time they'd finished Spike was still itching for more to do. Which was why, when he saw the decrepit little building on their way back into town, with the faded notice advertising it as a bed and breakfast, he suggested they check it out.

"No," Buffy said, barely giving the place a glance.

"Hold up," Spike said. "Don't see why we shouldn't. Just because it looks abandoned doesn't mean someone might not be squatting."

"There's no one in there," she said, not even looking at the building. There was something shifty about her eyes. Every predatory instinct in him twitched—Buffy was hiding something. Now she wouldn't be able to pry him away from the place with a crowbar.

"You seem awfully certain, Slayer," Spike said. "When was the last time you were in there?"

"January. I dusted a couple of vamps. Trust me, no one is in there."

"January?" Spike shook his head. "Any number of demons looking for a place to set up shop would love digs like this, Slayer. You can toddle on home, if you like. I'm gonna take a peek."

"Spike—" she said, but he was already sauntering off, whistling to himself. She'd follow, he was certain; no way was she going to let her vampire off the leash.

The yard was so overgrown that weeds and grass brushed against the knees of his jeans as he made his way up what was left of the walk. Up close he could see there were blackout shades on most of the second floor windows. That was odd... or not, if the place was really a vamp nest. Considering the Slayer's new search and destroy mission, you'd think she'd be more interested in investigating.

And speaking of the Slayer... Five, four, three, two—

"Fine," she said, wading through the mess of the yard toward him. "Listen at the door or sniff or whatever it is you have to do. If you don't sense any humans, we're out of here."

"It's a big place. Can't tell just by listening at the locks, Slayer. I'm going in."

"Spike—" But he was already twisting the knob and opening the door.

Inside it was nearly pitch black, with only moonlight trickling in through the doorway. It was just enough for Spike to see an old fashioned light switch on the wall nearby. He flicked it, not expecting anything to happen, and was surprised when a couple of small lamps illuminated the room.

"What a dump," he said. The furniture was threadbare in some places and gutted by rats in others. The carpets had long ago worn down to rags. Trash littered the corners and the main floor, and the remains of a fire had crumbled to ashy chunks in the fireplace. The wallpaper was yellowed and peeling, and several dozen spiders were dreaming spidery dreams in huge cobweb mansions near the ceiling.

The place smelled of wood smoke and mildew, of dust and stale air and death.

"Old blood," Spike murmured, sniffing. "Someone died here."

"Couple of someones," Buffy said softly. She was standing in the doorway, her arms folded across her chest protectively. Her gaze swept the room, and he got the feeling she was seeing ghosts. Something had happened here, he concluded. Something bad enough that it still had her jittery and uncomfortable.

He couldn't wait to find out what it was.

Spike followed his nose. In the corner of the room there was a tall crate standing on end. It was open and empty, but judging from the number of locks on it, it had held something dangerous. The tattered remains of a straight jacket lay on the floor beside a long smear of old blood. The dangerous something had gotten loose and had itself a snack. The table nearby held an empty pill bottle and a dusty glass. The prescription on the bottle was for some pretty powerful sedatives—something for the Mysterious Mister Box?

There was a kitchen off the main room with a rusty sink and rustier stove. On the counter sat a plastic-wrapped loaf of bread that was hard enough to use as a weapon. The broken fridge yielded eggs long past the spoiled stage, some extremely moldy cheese, a carton of milk turned science experiment, and the liquefied remains of what might have once been vegetables. The ice box, however, held several bags of blood, also long past their expiration date.

Spike was willing to bet his duster that Mr. Box had been a vampire.

The dining room confirmed it. Someone had had himself a real good day in here. He took in the blood smeared on the walls and dried in big Rorschach blotches in the middle of the table. Spike could close his eyes and picture how it had all gone down: from the way dinner had been backed into the room, to its frantic escape attempt out of the other door, to the way it had struggled its last while the vamps (there'd been more than one, he was sure now) had fed from multiple points on the body.

Buffy made a gagging sound from the doorway. "Oh, god …" Her voice was faint. "They didn't—"

"Didn't what?"

"Clean it up."

Spike eyed her pale face. You'd think that for someone who spent every night dealing death to his kind she wouldn't be so bloody squeamish.

Two doors led out of the kitchen. One of them—the one that most likely had led outside—had been bricked shut. The other led down to the basement, but he decided to save that for last. Basements and attics held secrets, and Spike wasn't quite ready to spoil the mystery yet.

Spike picked his way up the living room stairs, testing each tread. The banister was broken at one point, as if something had barreled through it, or someone had tried to kick it out.

Curiouser and curiouser.

Then he opened the first door at the top of the stairs.

"What the ...?"

Someone had clearly bought stock in Polaroid judging from the amount of film they must have gone through to totally paper the walls with photographs. The angle the pictures were taken at changed, but the subject didn't: a dark room, a single chair, a helpless victim tied and gagged. It wasn't until he took a closer look that he realized the face in the photos was familiar.

"Someone was dumb enough to kidnap your mum, Slayer?" Spike laughed. "Bet you ripped him to pieces with your bare hands."

He knew she was behind him, because he could hear her breathing, hear the frantic pounding of her heart. But she didn't say anything.

Spike wandered around the room, looking at the photos with interest. This was his sort of art gallery, though he felt a twinge of anger at seeing the Slayer's mum as the subject. She'd been nice to him once, and try as he might—and he'd tried bloody damn hard—he'd never quite been able to rid himself of a bit of a soft spot for mothers. Pathetic little mother's boys, on the other hand—

A funny strangled noise came from the doorway. He glanced over to see Buffy standing there as if frozen, a look of horror on her face like he'd never seen before—a real achievement, that.

"What?" he asked, frowning. "Didn't you know about this?"

When she swallowed, the sound was so loud it echoed in the small room. "I knew," she said finally, her voice little more than a whisper. "I just ... I thought ... this shouldn't still ... why didn't they take them down?"

Spike wiggled a finger in his ear. He hadn't know she could be so shrill. Then she was moving, her little hands tearing at the photos, scattering most on the floor but trying to wad the rest into a ball of rubbish. There was something frantic and furious in her movements, like she was righting some terrible wrong. Spike leaned back against the door frame and watched her.

Then he realized she was too short to reach the highest photos. She would jump and swipe at them, but while she got some good height thanks to her Slayer strength, she couldn't jump and yank down all the pictures at the same time. With a sigh, Spike straightened and started collecting the highest photos. When Buffy finally clued in on what he was doing, she froze long enough to stare at him in shock, then she bent to collect all the loose ones on the floor.

They took them down the hall to another abandoned bedroom. This room was dustier than the others, with sheets covering the bed and armchairs and bureau. The fireplace, however, appeared to have been used at least as recently as the one downstairs. Buffy stuffed all the photos in, then looked around for something to light them with. Wordlessly, Spike held out his Zippo.

"Why are you helping?" she asked, suspicious.

Why was he? It was a good question. Watching her have hysterics over something that her mum had obviously survived was amusing, yet he'd helped her out. A bunch of ridiculous snapshots of the Slayer's bound and gagged mum—well, it wasn't anything he hadn't seen before. Spike was more of an eat and run kind of guy—except when he was a pick up take-home and play with his food kind of guy. Angelus, on the other hand, had played kinky games with hostages and torture and leaving pictures for the person he was really trying to mess with. That sort of thing tended to bore Spike to tears.

Maybe that was why.

Or maybe ...

No. That was why. There really wasn't any better explanation.

"Felt like it," he said. "Does it matter?"

Buffy stared at him long enough to make him shift uncomfortably. Bloody hell, her eyes were as big and creepy as one of Dru's dolls.

"No," she said finally. "It doesn't matter."

She took his Zippo and bent to light the photographs in the fireplace. Spike stopped her, checked to be sure the flue was open, then gestured for her to start again. No sense getting himself toasted while the Slayer torched the evidence.

She sat on the floor and watched the flames. After a moment, Spike sank down beside her.

His curiosity won out. "What happened here, Slayer?"

She was silent for so long he was sure she wouldn't answer. Then, "Do you ... have you ever heard of the Cruciamentum?"

"No," he said. "Sounds painful."

She laughed, but there was no humor in it. "Yeah, it does, doesn't it?"

She was quiet a little longer, and when she did start to speak the story came out slowly, as if she was a bit rusty at storytelling. "It happened right before my eighteenth birthday. I got sick. Not sick sick. But ... my Slayer powers were just ... gone. No strength, no speed, no coordination. I almost got staked by a vampire while out on patrol, and then ... this big guy at school tossed me around like I was just ... a girl. I wigged. I thought ... maybe I wasn't the Slayer anymore. Maybe someone upstairs had decided I wasn't good enough, and they'd fixed their mistake. So I went to Giles. He ..."

She broke off, her eyes swimming with tears. Spike frowned. What the hell had happened to her?

"He told me that it'd be fine. That he was working on it. I believed him. Still freaked, of course, but ... it was Giles, you know? So I didn't panic. Not until … I was going home and ran into this vampire. I ... I screamed for help. But no one came. I mean, of course no one came. I was the Slayer, but I couldn't save myself. So I ran. Giles found me eventually, and ... he told me it was a test. That, when a Slayer reaches her eighteenth birthday, the Council tests her. They ... drug her, remove her powers, and then they send her into … a death trap. This place was mine. They'd shipped this insane vampire in for me like some kind of big fangy present. Somehow he escaped. He turned one of the Watchers who was supposed to be watching him. They ... ate the other one. Then they broke out. He was the one that had chased me. He ... he went to my house and grabbed my mom ..."

She shivered, despite the heat from the fire. Spike just stared.

"Giles told me everything. He was the one who had ... who had drugged me. When I found out that my mom was ... I grabbed every weapon I could carry—not much—and came here. We fought. I won."

In the fireplace, the photos had become a flaming lump of black plastic. "I saved my mom," she said.

She was silent then. Spike mulled it over in his head. "You ... fought an insane vampire when you had no Slayer powers ... and won?"

"Yep," she said. She didn't sound pleased about it. Spike would have crowed it from the rooftops if it had been him. "He was some big famous vamp, too. Kralik."

Spike blinked. "You ... you fought Kralik? Zachary Kralik? And you won?"

She nodded.

Bloody. Fucking. Hell.

When Spike finally killed her, he was going to mount her head on his wall. For a moment he knew precisely how Captain Ahab must have felt. The Slayer was his own personal white whale. Nothing, nothing, could compare to the bragging rights he'd get for taking her out. He remembered Kralik, had met the bastard on a couple of occasions. The wanker had been criminally insane before he'd been turned, and being a vampire had just made it worse. Big guy, too. Not the kind of vamp that the Slayer would have fought easily.

"How'd you kill him?" he wondered aloud.

Finally, Buffy looked at him. There was something dead and cold in her eyes that the flickering firelight couldn't reach. Spike shivered for the first time in ... well, almost ever. He knew, at that moment, that it didn't matter if you drugged the girl up, if you took her powers, made her weak. Inside of her, deep inside, in a place where no mystical powers lived at all—she was the Slayer. The one and only. You could never drug that part of her—not while she was in her right mind. It would always be there, and it would always destroy anything that hurt someone she loved.

"He took pills," she said, quietly. Spike remembered. "I switched his water for holy water."

Spike hadn't even known that vampires could get goosebumps until that moment.

She'd ...

Christ.

He was damned certain he'd never blindly drink anything again.

When she turned back to the flames, Spike studied her openly. He'd been watching her for a couple of years now, seeing her grow up; not in small daily doses as he imagined her friends and family did, but in stolen snatches of time that were days, months, years apart. She'd grown in leaps and bounds, not just as a girl, but as a Slayer. He had a feeling that as time went on she was only going to get better.

Other Slayers had been good, yeah. They'd gone out and fought demons every night, and they'd fallen one by one. Even that Slayer he'd killed back in the seventies—she'd been good. Very good. But none them held as much potential as Buffy Summers had in her littlest finger.

She should be dead. By all rights she ought to be dead. But she'd led a vamp to holy water, and tricked him into drinking it, and she'd lived to fight another day. She was clever, resourceful, adaptable. She had the protective instincts of a mother bear and the survival instincts of a wolf. Given the time for her to grow, mature, she was going to put a hole in the world so big that it would change the shape of everything.

If a Big Bad didn't get her first, of course.

He tried to picture her the way she'd described: screaming, whimpering, helpless. He remembered her during the Halloween when Chaos Rayned, remembered the fear in her eyes, the terror. She hadn't been the Slayer then. Of course, she hadn't even been Buffy then. She'd just been a silly girl, in a sillier dress, who bore the same face as his arch enemy. That girl was Buffy's weak spot; Spike was astute enough to recognize that. That girl was buried in the Slayer—a girl longing to be nothing more than ornamental, normal, and hoping for a hero to save her. Spike loved weak spots, vulnerabilities. He loved to find them and exploit them.

Only ...

When she'd been given the chance again, this time with her memories intact, she hadn't wanted it at all. From what she said, she'd loathed it.

The photos were nothing more than an acrid heap of blackened plastic and embers now. Slowly, the Slayer picked herself up and dusted off the seat of her pants. She left the room without looking back.

Spike levered himself up and followed her, now seeing the place through her eyes. Death trap, he thought. That's what she'd called it, a death trap. And it was. The upper floors of the old B&B opened onto rooms that were nothing but dead ends. The windows were covered in blackout curtains, nailed to the walls. He watched as she opened every door, even poked her nose into the bathrooms and the closets—though he had no idea what exactly she was searching for. More vamps, maybe, or something else that had been left behind.

With the windows all shut, the little light the electric wall sconces provided did nothing to alleviate the shadows. There was plenty of light for a vampire's eyes, plenty of light in which to stalk prey and run it to ground. Not nearly enough, however, for the prey to see what was coming or from where.

There was a third floor, and she went through it as well, though it was clear from the thickness of the dust on the carpets that no one had been here for a long time. There were the prints of the the men who'd hung the curtains, but even those had already been covered with more dust. Still, she searched, then turned and went past him, down the stairs to the living room and the horror that still lingered there.

She stood for a long time in front of the crate, and he wondered what she saw. Had Kralik waited for her there? Or had he stalked her through the shadows? Chased her through the house?

After a while she went back to the kitchen and descended the stairs to the basement. The door, Spike realized, had been kicked off its hinges.

In the basement a single overturned chair sat just beneath a dim, bare light bulb. Cut ropes coiled on the floor like snakes. Tools lay scattered beneath an overturned shelf. There were two long smears of ash and dust on the floor, one slightly greasy, like it'd been cooked at high heat. Spike shuddered.

Buffy was staring down at the chair, an unreadable expression on her face.

"Why?" Spike asked, voicing the question that had been nagging at him since she'd divulged her story. "You said the Watchers did this. Why?"

"Because I was eighteen," she said. Only that didn't make any sense to him at all.

"You turned eighteen, so ... they stripped you of your powers, then locked you in a death trap with an insane vampire? What the bloody hell for?"

She shrugged. "I don't know. To prove I was smart enough to be the Slayer?"

"The fact that you'd managed to survive for, what—three years—didn't prove that enough? They had to be sure? What happened if you'd gotten killed?"

"New Slayer, I guess."

"Yeah, and that helps the cause exactly how? New Slayers are easy to pick off. Too wet behind the ears to fight properly, not experienced enough to know how to deal with the gray areas and the weirder cases. I did some reading on Slayers, once, you know. Did you know the average lifespan of a Slayer, once called, is less than a year? You wouldn't believe how many die within the first month—"

"Shut up," Buffy said.

He ignored her. "The point is ... what's the bloody point of a test like this? I'm assuming you passed."

"Oh, I passed," she said quietly, but there was bitterness tinging it and an odd inflection. "See me with the flying colors?"

"You passed. Who didn't?"

Silence stretched between them until it was too uncomfortable for her not to answer. "Giles," she said. "They fired him. They said that … that he loved me like a daughter, and he wasn't objective enough. Because he told me about the test." She laughed again, without the humor.

Spike frowned. "So, first he drugs you up til you're weak as a kitten, then he warns you that they've shipped in a special guest for your birthday party who's about to eat your mum and sends you scampering off to fight the bad guy all on your own. And the Council of bloody Wankers has their knickers in a twist because this might give you an edge?"

"He helped," she said, as if that explained everything. "The last vampire. The one that used to be a Watcher. Giles staked it."

There were moments when Spike really didn't understand humans. Sure, he'd once been one of them, but that had been a long time ago.

"You should have killed the lot of them," he said. "It's a bloody stupid test. Seems like the only reason for it is so they can kill off Slayers before they're old enough and smart enough to figure out that the bloody Council doesn't care sod all for them. All they want is a Slayer they can keep under their thumb, all neat and tidy. Truth is, without you, they're a bunch of old farts fighting a war they can't hope to win. But they've got a never-ending supply of you. All they have to do is punch your time card when you start getting uppity and stick another in your place."

She was silent, so he kept going. "Ought to beat them to it, Slayer. If they want to play the game that way, I can tell you, luv, there's an unending supply of stuffy English blokes who'd be wetting themselves to put on some tweed and prance about like they run the world. Needn't feel guilty about replacing the current set. Not like they're collectible."

Buffy was staring at him. "You think … Spike, I can't just go kill the Council because—"

"They tried to kill you first."

"Not the point! I can't ... You don't just ..." She stammered for a bit. It was nearly adorable. "It would be wrong," she said, as if coming to some profound conclusion.

Spike smirked at her. "You thought about it."

A sly look crossed her face. "Only a little."

"That's my Slayer," Spike said, then froze for a minute, surprised at the real surge of affection he felt for the girl.

Buffy stared at him, wide-eyed. Then she began to giggle. Her giggle turned into a laugh that seemed to banish all the darkness in the room, scattering the horror like vampire dust. It was bright and real and free sounding, the laugh of a girl who had finally sussed out the great cosmic joke that had been played on her—and who wasn't bitter about it. Oh, not this girl.

After a minute, Spike joined her. Because when you once again find yourself sympathetic when you had no right to the emotion in the first place, and what's more, when you're sympathizing with your mortal enemy—you might as well admit that the joke is on you, too .