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Forward to Time Past by Unbridled_Brunette
 
Chapter Fifty-One
 
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Chapter Fifty-One





Jesus, I must be one world-class prat to be doing this.

Spike sighed as he crossed the Summers’ lawn. He’d tried to keep his distance since their last encounter because there was still the dimmest hope that she actually might come to him. He wanted to wait until she came to him. Of course, she didn’t come, and he was too impatient to wait any longer.

Even as he climbed the front steps, a part of Spike despised himself for doing it. Crawling back to her like a kicked dog, exposing his underbelly so that she could rip it apart yet again. Bleeding stupid was what it was, and he knew that. But he couldn’t stay away. She was a sickness in his veins; she was an addiction. He couldn’t help himself. He had to have her.

And she loved him.

Granted, it was getting harder to tell himself that after all that had happened between them. In fact, he’d spent the greater part of the afternoon telling himself just the opposite. Yet, deep down, there was the stubborn part of him that insisted she did—that she must—because she wouldn’t have come to him otherwise. She wouldn’t have gone down on her knees.

He could have walked right into her house, of course. Bit had given him the invitation he needed, but Spike was determined not to fuck up things this time. If Buffy wanted him to be bloody William—that weak, worthless personality he had worked for over a century to shed—then he would do it. He knocked on the door and waited impatiently for it to open.

It was Dawn who opened the door, and she didn’t seem surprised to see him. However, there was something else in her expression, something much worse than surprise, or even displeasure. She looked almost—

Frightened?

He felt a surge of guilt over his behavior that morning. He shouldn’t have gotten so angry; he shouldn’t have taken it out on the Bit. Now, he awkwardly tried to apologize for it. “Look, Dawn, I know I was an arse earlier. The shouting and all. It was plain bad timing; you showing up like that when I was pissed as all buggery.”

“It’s all right,” she said quickly. Her voice was unnaturally low, and she glanced over her shoulder in an uneasy manner. Still, she reassured him: “I’m not angry, Spike. I never was. I—I mean, I shouldn’t have asked you that—”

“It’s fine,” he cut in. “Let’s forget about the whole thing, yeah?” He cleared his throat, and when she appeared to have no answer for him, continued, “I’m, uh, here to see Big Sis, anyway. Got some things to clear up with her. Some things to say. Is she about?”

Dawn shifted her weight to her other foot, and the uneasy look increased tenfold. “Well, not exactly. She—”

Abruptly, she stopped, and it took Spike a moment to realize why. Giles had come up behind her.

“Buffy is not here,” he told Spike. “And, that being the case, I think perhaps you should leave as well.”

He started to close the door, but Spike quickly shoved his boot between the jam and the edge of the door. He met the Watcher’s stare with a steadiness that belied his sudden anxiety. Still, he forged ahead. “Not so fast, mate. First, I’d like to know where the fuck she’s at.”

Giles left eyebrow arched in a mild show of scorn, and as quiet as his answer was, it was also painfully caustic.

“Buffy is in Los Angeles,” he said bluntly. “She’s with Angel.”

Having spoken thus, Giles used his own foot to push Spike’s back from the doorway. Spike hardly noticed it. He was trying to wrap his mind around it, the idea that Buffy could have spent a night with him, given him something that spoke, to him, of love…and then gone off to see Angel. It made no sense, and it wasn’t until he heard the click of the door closing that he finally snapped out of his daze. Slowly, he made his way back down the steps.

One world-class prat, he thought bitterly.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~





When Buffy left the bus station the following afternoon, she felt exhausted and more than a little travel-stained. When she looked down at her wrinkled clothes and noticed her limp hair in the reflection of the bus window, she almost wished she had accepted Angel’s offer to let her use the shower in his apartment. However, that would have been awkward on just about every level imaginable. Anyway, she hadn’t brought clean clothes to put on afterward. So, what was the point?

Spike was the point.

Stop it, she told herself angrily as she stepped out onto the street. You are not going to go running to him. You haven’t even thought this through properly—all the things Angel told you. You’d be an idiot to even consider—

Then, I'm an idiot...and I can't stop myself from being one.

With that thought in mind, she began the long walk to the cemetery.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~





Spike was drunk. Stupidly, gloriously, and utterly drunk.

Of course, drinking wasn’t exactly unusual for him; nor was being drunk. However, for the past eighteen hours, he hadn’t been sober at all. He had drunk from the moment he left the Summers’ home the night before to the time he passed out just before dawn. When he woke up a few hours later, he immediately reached for his bottle.

By the afternoon, he was so out of his wits he didn’t even realize he had an intruder until it was too late to do anything about it. He had made a clumsy job of repairing the door, and although it now shut tightly, it screeched horribly on its bent hinges. Still, he didn’t hear it open; nor did he hear the muffled footsteps above or the soft creak of the wooden rungs as someone descended the ladder. He was lying on his bed (a castoff of someone’s castoff), and he didn’t notice anything at all.

And then…there she was.

At first, he almost thought she was a mirage. It was the knowledge that she had run off to see Angel that accounted for his drinking binge, of course. The very idea that she would do that…that she would go to bloody Angel of all people. When he heard that, he almost believed that he could hate her.

Almost.

Now, after agonizing over it for so long, he couldn’t quite reconcile himself to the fact that she was actually standing there. That, after days of wanting her, she was suddenly just a few dozen feet away. Spike stood up on legs made weak and unsteady by too much alcohol. He started to approach her, but he immediately thought the better of that. He’d be damned if he would throw his pride at her feet yet again.

Instead, he veered off to the right, parked himself on the rickety table where he kept his candles. Let her make the first move for once, he thought.

Although he had told himself he would not, he couldn’t stop watching her as she moved closer. She looked sad and tired, a bit thinner than usual, as if she had not been eating well. But beautiful. So bloody beautiful in the candlelight, her hair loose around her shoulders, her ginger-colored sweater and black jeans following every sleek line of her body. A sharp dart of jealousy went through him at the thought that perhaps she had worn those pretty clothes for Angel’s benefit. He could smell the other vampire on her, and suddenly, he felt angry to the core. The thought that another man—and goddamned Angel, no less—should have been so close to her when she belonged to him.

By the time she finally reached him, Spike was having a hard time controlling his temper.

“You know, you’re behaving like a whore.”

Whatever she had expected him to say, it certainly wasn’t that. He heard her suck in her breath, and her words were hardly more than a hoarse whisper when she said, “W—what?”

The combination of alcohol and jealousy had made him malicious, and although the words sickened him even as he said them, he couldn’t seem to stop. “Running off to Angel like that. Does he still have a soul, Slayer, or did he cash it in to tonk with you?”

She said nothing, which he took as an indication that something—perhaps not sex, but something—had taken place in Los Angeles. He added even more hatefully, “I’ve got to say, you’re a right bitch in heat, you are. When you consider that you once swore undying love to me. It might’ve been a century from my end, but it was less than two fucking weeks ago for you. Your loyalty astounds me, Slayer.”

Buffy blanched under the assault, but she seemed too stunned and hurt to fight back. The ensuing silence was almost unbearable for him, and he suddenly lunged at her, grabbing her shoulders and spinning her around until he’d slammed her back against the tunnel wall. If the chip fired, he didn’t feel it; but perhaps, it did not. His intent wasn’t to hurt her; just to hold her down and prevent what he was certain would be her imminent retreat. His face just inches from hers, he snarled, “Goddamn you. You had no sodding right—”

Finding her tongue at last, Buffy bit back at him: “No right? I don’t belong to you, Spike! And I can go to Angel—or anyone else—if I want to. My God, what do you think happened there? Do you honestly believe that I would just show up at his door and—”

“You showed up at mine,” he pointed out snidely.

“Well, even if we did, it’s none of your business!”

Her voice had a hysterical note that he mistook for scorn. It made him more vicious, and he said in a mocking tone, “So, I hear we’re expecting, love. When’s it due?”

Buffy shoved him away from her so hard that he stumbled backward and fell to the floor, almost taking several pieces of furniture with him. When he looked up at her, he could see that her bottom lip was quivering. There were tears in her eyes, and the sight of them cut into him like a blade across the heart.

“I should have known,” she said shakily. “I should have realized that Angel was right: whatever part of him that’s left in you can’t possibly overcome the monster Drusilla made you into.”

His jaw tightened.

“You think so, do you? You think I’m a monster—”

“Step back and take a look at yourself, Spike. Look at how you behave, and then you tell me that you aren’t one! You’re warped! Like a funhouse mirror of who you were.”

“Maybe I am, but at least I’m bloody honest about it! You spent your time toying with me—made me believe—you made me believe—” His voice broke and he cleared his throat gruffly. A moment later, he continued in a harsher tone: “Then, you bloody left. Disappeared. We all thought you were dead—I thought you were dead. Shot full of bleeding heroin—fucked up in the head—what did you expect would happen when Dru found me?”

Buffy flinched at that.

“I know I shouldn’t have lied to him—or you—or—or whoever. And if I’m to blame for what happened in that alley, then God knows I’m sorry for it. But it happened before—you were a vampire before I left! And whatever happened afterward wasn’t my fault. Angel told me…he said you had a choice not to do the things you did. That you did them because you liked doing them, and that the only part of you that was left was the part that hated. He said—”

“Oh, well. If Angel said it…” His tone was biting.

Without warning, she hauled off and hit him. Not hard, considering what she might have done, but her palm cracked against his cheekbone with enough force to rock his head to the side. “You talk about me being loyal!” she spat. “You say you’re William! Then, you tell me how you could swear undying love to me, and then go off and fall in love with Drusilla!”

Spike put his hand to his throbbing face, feeling strangely elated by her sudden violence, by the venom in her tone.

Is she jealous? he wondered. Is she jealous of Dru?

“I was never in love with Drusilla,” he told her. All the hardness was gone from his voice now, and he moved a step closer to her.

“You made a good show of pretending, then!”

“I wasn’t in love with her,” he insisted. “I loved her, of course. Couldn’t much help loving her. She needed me, and she was all I had. She was like—like a child—”

“A child you slept with,” she cut in shrilly. His temper flared.

“As if you’ve been a bloody model of chastity! You’ve got more notches in your headboard than I do in mine!”

“You’re disgusting.” She turned away.

“That’s right, Slayer!” he shouted after her. “Run, goddamn you. The disappearing act is what you’re best at.”

One hand resting on the rung of the ladder, Buffy paused. She didn’t turn back to look at him, but her voice was cold and clear carrying as she said: “It wasn’t my decision to come back.”

“But you knew it was a possibility! You fucking knew that any day you might just bugger off into a cloud of smoke courtesy of those two bitches you live with. You knew that, and you still went and made promises you had no business making. Promises you fucking knew you couldn’t keep!”

He darted down the length of the cave to where she stood, grabbed her by the wrist and pried her hand from the ladder. “Look here”—digging into the pocket of his jeans—“You bloody look at this, and then you tell me I don’t love you. That I didn’t spend every minute of every day for a hundred and twenty-one goddamn years thinking about you.”

He shoved something into the hand he held, forcing her fingers to close around it, and then he released her. Buffy looked down at the object—a small wooden box—with some confusion. It was worn smooth, as if he had carried it for a long time, and there were a few dirty remnants of what looked like velvet still clinging to the edges. It almost looked like—

She glanced up at Spike, who said stubbornly, “Open it.”

Buffy did. A small piece of folded paper fluttered out, but she caught it before it reached the floor. It appeared to be the page of a book—the upper right corner, judging from the shape of it. The thick paper had gone soft and yellow with age, and when she unfolded it, the crease from the fold was so deep it had almost become part of the paper. Spike could have told her every line of text that was printed on it; instead, he hung back, and watched silently as she smoothed out the paper with her thumb and began to read.

When thou smilest, my beloved,
Then my troubled heart is brightened,
As in sunshine gleam the ripples
That the cold wind makes in rivers.


When she looked back up at him, her eyes were wide with shock.

“What happened to the rest of it?” she whispered.

He chuckled humorlessly and rubbed a hand over his chin. The sting of that loss was as fresh today as it had ever been. He told her bitterly, “Dru tore it up, the crazy bint. She got angry…because she knew that I…”

His voice trailed away; she was staring into the box again.

“What…”

It sounded like a question, but Spike didn’t answer because he knew that it wasn’t one. However, he couldn’t have answered even if he had wanted to because, as he watched her dip her fingers into the box, he felt a lump form in his throat. He felt almost sick with love for her.

It was a long moment before he could gather himself together enough to say, “I told you it had to be the perfect ring.”

He didn’t intend the words to be hurtful, but suddenly Buffy looked as if he had slapped her. She made a small, strangled sound, and shut the lid of the ring-box with a snap. She pushed it back at him, and, overwhelmed by a confused mix of hope and fury, she lashed out, shoving him in the chest so hard that he stumbled back against the far wall.

“But you can’t be him!” she choked out. “You can’t be—he wouldn’t do that. All those you things you’ve done—he would never—”

Immediately, his own temper rose.

“Well, let’s just take away everything that means anything to you, Slayer, and then take away your bloody conscience, too. Then, you tell me what you’d be capable of doing!”

“I wouldn’t do what you did! I wouldn’t kill my own mother!”

Spike winced at that, but he didn’t try to deny it.

“Not going to pretend it didn’t happen, pet. That I didn’t—kill—her. But I’ll ask you to keep your goddamned mouth shut about it until you know what happened because it wasn’t like that.”

“Then, what was it like?” she demanded. Her voice was low, but spiteful, goading him to answer even when he would have said nothing.

“She was dying, Buffy. Did you forget that on the trip back? She was all I had left in the fucking world—and she was dying. After it happened—after Dru—well, after that I went back to the house to check on her. We’d both disappeared, and I reckon the stress of it made her worse; she was worse. Idiot that I was, I thought I could—”

He paused, and she prompted quietly: “Thought you could what?”

“Save her.”

The meaning behind the words was clear, and Buffy didn’t have to ask him what he meant. There was a quiver in her voice—rage and something that was not rage—when she said, “What happened afterward?”

“I did something wrong. She was—she came back—wrong. She wasn’t my mother anymore. And she said things—kept saying things—about me. About us. She and I. You and I. And then, she tried to—so I—” His voice cracked.

Quickly, he turned his face away from her—

Bugger all.

—and tried to choke back a sob.

Buffy grabbed the ladder again and started to hoist herself up onto it, but for whatever reason, before she did, she paused.

Spike heard the soft crunch of her footsteps on the dirt floor as she approached, but he didn’t look over at her. He didn’t want her to see the tears in his eyes. When she was right in front of him, he said harshly, “Well?”

“I can’t,” she whispered. Her voice was so soft that he quickly glanced up. Her eyes were soft, too. Green filmed with silver, soft and sad. As he watched, a tear slipped from the corner of one eye and snaked a trail down her cheek, and he remembered, as if from a dream, the way her tears felt as they fell onto his bare throat. The circumstances here were almost laughably different, and he was hardly the same creature he had once been. But she…she was still his. Still Elizabeth. And his heart hurt for her.

She loved him. Spike was certain of that now. Perhaps, she did not want to admit it, but she did love him.

“You can’t….” he began.

Buffy narrowed her eyes, and she was arguing more with herself than with Spike as she said, “It’s stupid! It would be stupid. Maybe you are. Maybe part of you is. But it would still be stupid. You’re still a vampire. You don’t know how to be good; you’ve forgotten how to be good. You don’t even know wrong from right—”

She started to turn away then, but he grabbed her arm and held her back.

“Then, teach me!” he said hoarsely. Desperately.

Buffy pulled her arm out of his grasp, and immediately, Spike turned his head to the side, his muscles tensing for a blow. But, unbelievable as it seemed, she did not hit him. Instead, he felt her hands touch his face, both of her warm, smooth palms passing over his temples. She slid her fingers around to the back of his skull, burying them in his hair, and when he looked over at her in shock, she nuzzled his cheek.

“I hit you,” she whispered into his skin as he immediately wrapped his arms around her. “I hit you—God, you stupid idiot. How could you do all those things?”

The words sounded hard, but they were barely audible even to his sharp ears. He mumbled back, “You lied to me.”

Her mouth grazed a path along his cheekbone to his ear. Her breath was slow and wet and warm on his cool skin, and an involuntary shiver ran through him. As it had before, the century melted away, and he became that same pathetic virgin—the same thirty-year-old boy—he had once been, almost overwhelmed by her presence. He bent his head, nudging hers to one side so that he could bury his face in the crook of her neck. “God, Buffy,” he groaned into the soft flesh. “Oh, God. It’s been so frustrating.”

“What has?” Her voice was gentle.

“My whole fucking life. It—it’s been so bloody hard. Jesus Christ, I know I’ve done wrong…everything I’ve done has been wrong. But if you were there…if you hadn’t left…Dru wouldn’t have mattered.”

Buffy’s fingers stroked through the hair on the back of his head, making delicious trails along his scalp. He was nestling into her warm skin with his mouth and nose. A vampire at her throat, and she didn’t even react, except to murmur, “Drusilla would have found you anyway; I didn’t change anything to make that happen.”

He raised his head at that, and his grip on her shoulders became so tight it was a wonder the chip didn’t fire. “You don’t understand,” he told her through gritted teeth, struggling to find a way to make her. “It wouldn’t have mattered.”

“What wouldn’t have mattered?” asked Buffy. Although she looked bewildered, her hands never stopped petting him.

“If you’d been there, it wouldn’t have mattered what Dru did. Hell, Buffy…all I wanted was you. When I crawled out of that coffin, the first thing I thought of was you. If you’d been there, I could have been good. I can be good—teach me to be good. Let me be—”

The soothing caress of her hands stopped. Suddenly, they were clutching at his hair, dragging his head down toward hers. Her mouth, petal-soft, was now only centimeters away.

“I hurt you,” she whispered.

“Yes.”

“You hurt me, too.” Her tone wasn’t accusing or angry, just very, very soft. He gave a slight nod, moving his head as much as her grip would allow. Her gaze was so direct it was startling; she only ever looked at him that steadily when there was hatred in her eyes. But there was no hatred now. Now, there was only…

Love. She loves me. She does.

And almost as if she read his mind—almost as if to illustrate that point—Buffy brushed her mouth across his bottom lip, murmuring, even as she did so, “Let’s not do that again.”

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

 
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