Chapter Text
It was her 18th birthday. Buffy didn’t know if in her other life, this was something she had looked forward to. When she thought back, which she never did, she couldn’t remember thinking that far into the future. The next school year had seemed a world away. The next slumber party an eternity away.
“Excited about your birthday, little Slayer?” The blond leaned against the doorway, a vicious smile playing around his mouth.
Buffy scratched the skin beneath the chain around her ankle and didn’t answer. She tried not to visibly recoil, and instead let her thoughts wander backward again.
The time before the Watchers had snatched her.
“Little Slayer?”
His voice sounded more insistent.
Buffy fixed her eyes on a spot straight ahead of her and kept silent. She tried to recall the world before the Watchers had come for her. Since the brief time she had left would likely be filled with pain anyway, it seemed pointless not to indulge.
“Little Slayer?” His voice came from above her now. She could hear the frown. His shoes stopped straight in front of her legs. The sudden yank brought her from the floor, and her back was pressed into his chest. He stroked her filthy hair away from her neck, and whispered into her ear, “Tell me, Buffy, do I like to be ignored?” He ran his tongue over the raised wounds on her neck.
The thought that it was possible to ignore Spike would have made her laugh any other day. Buffy remembered with exact clarity the two times in her life that she had been kidnapped, both the time she had been dragged out of her bed in the middle of the night because she had the potential to become something which the men who took her called a “Slayer”, and the time they had all been killed and she and all the other girls in the training facility taken.
“You did not fight as hard as the others.” Angelus put his head to the side and looked at her consideringly.
Buffy’s arms ached, the stump of her sword lying useless behind her. Around her other Potentials were crying as the last of the girls were being rounded up. She didn’t bother trying to wipe away the smear of blood on her cheek. She had no ambitions about being a beautiful corpse, anyway. They were brought outside, and she was glad.
The cold night air made the small wounds on her hands and midriff sting and the stiffness in her wrist more pronounced. She would not die in that place.
But while Death had come for them, it did not bring them home. Instead they were taken to a derelict part of town where Buffy would spend the first months of her second captivity. When she was separated from the others and dragged upstairs she felt mostly numb. The sight of the filthy, drunk man lying on the floor had not been what she had expected when she was hauled in a bedroom door.
No, Spike had been impossible to ignore right from the beginning.
Angelus had thrown her away from him and marched towards the blond man in large, angry steps. If Buffy had been a stupider girl, she might have considered this her window of opportunity to escape.
“We were all out hunting tonight, William. Hunting for Slayers.” Angelus grabbed the man by the collar and pulled him upwards. “Except for you of course. Too drunk and lying in filth that I’m not even sure is your own.” He shook him violently.
The man had made clumsy, un-coordinated attempts to defend himself. “Hey! Lay off!” The contents of the whiskey bottle still clutched in the man’s hand sloshed over them both.
Angelus stopped shaking him abruptly. Holding the man at arm’s length, Angelus snarled angrily, “You disgust me.”
“She left me, all right!” The blond man wobbled on his feet. “She wasn’t mine after all, just like you said when … when … when you slept with her, you bastard!” He made a swing at the other vampire.
Angelus let go of him, lifting his fists in anticipation, priming for a fight. Instead the other man just sagged to the floor, clutching his whiskey bottle. “She left me, my dark princess. She just left me … ” He leaned his head against his knees.
Angelus took a step a back. He let his fists fall. For a moment he just looked confused to Buffy. Then his features hardened and he pointed in her direction. “That’s one of the might-be-Slayers there. You will take care of her. I’ve had it with this and you. If you don’t pull yourself together, I will stake you, Spike!” When he did not receive a reply, Angelus left the room, closing the door behind him with an audible sound.
Buffy could hear a key being turned in the lock. For the longest time she just sat still.
For the most part Spike was either asleep or drunk. This of course was a vast improvement over the rest of the vampires in the house, or so she gathered from the intermittent screaming that managed to penetrate floors and walls.
There was no way to escape from the room. It was too high from the ground for jumping from the window to be a feasible option. There was, however, food there. A strange kind of cereal and something called “Marmite.” For her first meal there Buffy ate Weetabix with marmite and nearly threw up.
There was also water. The water had the added advantage of being connected to a shower and other facilities. Buffy scrubbed both herself and her clothes with relish one evening she was sure Spike was out cold. Instinct or common sense commanded her away from the beautiful dresses hanging in the closet and instead she opted for one the male shirts in the drawer while she waited for her clothes to dry. It reached beneath her knees.
Her main worry soon became that something would happen to Spike. Angelus’s words started to ring in her ears, leaving a colder trail through her heart each time.
Filling one of the empty whiskey bottles with much warmer water than usual, Buffy grabbed a bar of soap and a washcloth and walked into the bedroom. Washing an incapacitated vampire proved less difficult than she had feared. She removed first his duster, and then his shirt with some nervosity. Her usual nimble fingers shook when opened the last of the buttons. She swallowed hard before pulling the shirt open. He had a surprisingly nice chest, with a line of course hair that went straight down to… Buffy started to wash him hurriedly.
There was a less than professional quality to it, with too much soap in some places, and not enough in others. Additionally, Buffy was fine with letting the excess soap air-dry in the same manner as the water when it proved difficult to remove all of it.
The boots’ laces was so tangled up in themselves and things that Buffy was grateful not to know what was, that she almost despaired of removing them, but eventually she succeeded and nearly fell backwards when they came off. By then she was almost too tired to feel embarrassed when took off his pants. The red in her cheeks whenever her gaze grazed his underwear wasn’t all from exhaustion, however.
The only time he came close to waking up was when she poured water over his head in order to rinse his hair, and then a few muttered replies of, “That must be so awful for you,” and, “I don’t understand how she could do that to you,” lulled him back into oblivion.
When Angelus returned after some nights, he stared in bemusement at the vampire lying at the floor in mismatched clothes, a puddle of water still under his head. Spike’s old outfit was hanging over a chair to dry. Buffy had opted for washing them when she didn’t find somewhere to burn them.
“I came to offer you something to eat,” Angelus said, “as you seem incapable of even catching your own prey these days.”
Spike made a rude gesture from the floor. The words that followed were in the same vein and seemed to indicate that he had no use either for Angelus or anything that he had to offer. “I wish to die,” he enunciated, rolling over. His forehead hit the wet floor. Then he seemed to quote what sounded to Buffy as…poetry?
Angelus looked exasperated. When it seemed as if he were going to take a step towards Spike, Buffy quickly interceded.
“He said it was because of me.” Buffy swallowed when Angelus slowly turned his head towards her. “He said that he longed to be out there, killing brutally and gruesomely, and…” Her voice trailed off, “and ... grotesquely … ”
Angelus stared at her.
“But he couldn’t, because of me! You had asked him to guard me, so therefore he couldn’t go anywhere! That’s why he’s been drinking,” Buffy added, impressed with her own cleverness, “because he hasn’t been able to kill people in awful ways!”
Angelus slowly turned away from her again. The he walked quickly over to Spike and yanked his head up.
Buffy’s breath caught in her throat. But he just bit over his wrist and forced it into Spike’s mouth.
When it seemed as if he felt that Spike had had sufficient, Angelus let him go and went for the door. Hand on the handle, he stopped for a moment. “When Spike is ready again for one of those hearts-to-heart about the finer finesses of hunting, you might also mention to him, Miss Summers, that I admire his new fashion style.” He opened the door. “Which seems to involve quite a penchant for khakis.”
Some Pop-Tarts had appeared later that evening and Buffy had dug into them gratefully.
The somewhat comfortable routine had been disturbed when the worst had happened. Spike had gone empty for liquor.
After a great deal of swearing and searching amongst empty bottles, Spike sat down heavily on the bed, and fell backwards. Buffy, who was equally eager to get him hammered again, moved towards it.
“I think I saw one behind here.” She leaned forwards and started to search under the pillow. Her silver cross, akin to that all of the girls wore, fell downwards from her neck and met with unprotected skin. His. Spike rose from the bed with a howl.
Buffy fell back, shrinking. Spike turned towards her in full fury. “Did you think that was funny? Clever?” Buffy shook her head, mute with terror.
Spike stalked over to his duster and tore something out from its pockets. “Do you know what it feels like for a vampire to be burned by a cross, little Slayer?” He shook her. “Do you? Well, you soon will.” He grabbed her cross by the chain and lit his lighter with under the cross. It heated, turning nearly yellow instead of silver, though that could be the flame. Then he let go of the chain.
Buffy screamed. It was burning, searing into her skin. The pain was unimaginable, that something like this should happen was unimaginable. She tried to yank it away from her chest, burning her hands in the process. But that did not have the same horror attached to it. She yanked hard enough for the chain to break and held the cross away from her skin, but by then it was already cooling off.
Crying violently, she curled up into a ball. Without actually touching the wound, she clutched her hand protectively over her chest.
Spike stood still for a second. Then he swore softly and headed for the bathroom.
Buffy made a pitiful sound when he pulled her arm away from the sore. “Please,” she whispered, but it was without hope. Spike didn’t answer. Instead he pressed something ice cold against her chest. She flinched away, but he held her fast. “It’s a burn, you silly bint. You have to cool it down.”
She didn’t know how long they sat there, her crying gradually subsiding into sniffling. Finally he seemed to determine that some necessary time span had passed, and rose with one of the sudden, fluid movements she would come to connect with him.
He walked restlessly around the room, before turning suddenly towards her. “Would you like to go the movies?”
Buffy stared at him. “…What?”
“The movies!” Spike waved his hand impatiently. “Girls like to go the movies, don’t you?”
“Yes,” Buffy said, still staring. “Sure.”
“Then what are we waiting for?” Spike broke the lock on the door easily. “They might show Little Orphan Annie,” he added encouragingly.
When they walked out of the cinema, Buffy still held the bag of chocolates clutched in her hand. It had been three years since Buffy had last been to a movie, not since she lived at home, so not even the fact that Spike’s idea of an appropriate movie had been Pocahontas could ruin it for her.
Spike changed between repenting that Annie hadn’t been on, apparently it brought back fond memories of some orphanage he had slaughtered in the 1930’s, and commenting on Pocahontas’s legs.