Chapter 2
Chapter Notes: Lines taken directly from the episode “Lover’s Walk” in this chapter. Some things are like the episode, and some things are mine. Just FYI for those thinking, “Hey, that didn’t happen!” Well, duh. That’s because this is a story and not an episode and why the heck would I retell it the same way? I’d do it if I did lots of drugs, but I don’t, because crack is whack. Work hard and stay in school, kids.
Now get the heck off my porch so’s I can watch the sun rise or I’ll make you pick out a switch! (I’m just kidding, you guys. I’d never watch the sun rise.)
“Stupid vampires,” Buffy mumbled to herself as she walked up the sidewalk towards her home. She and Angel had lost track of Spike almost three hours ago but Angel was determined to sniff him out. Her feet were killing her since she was wearing high heels for her not-a-date. It wasn’t like they were going to have any fun anyway, not when he was all in Track Spike mode, so she made up a lame excuse and left him to it.
“Well, looks like you’ve got this under control. I’m kinda sleepy,” she’d said, dragging it out a bit to see if he’d protest.
Angel simply nodded in reply as if he hadn’t really heard her and no matter how hard she scowled at the back of his head, he wouldn’t turn around or say anything more. She sighed, loudly, and then stomped her way home.
When she opened the front door, she heard her mother speaking from the kitchen. Buffy dropped her keys on the table by the door and walked inside, listening closely.
“Well, she sounds very unreasonable,” she heard Joyce saying to someone.
“She is!” was the reply Buffy heard next. That familiar voice that she’d thought gone for so long, in her damn house. Spike. In her house! Talking to her mother! Without wasting any time, she ran to the kitchen only to find them both sitting pleasantly at the island with cocoa and marshmallows served up in mugs, sitting together like old friends reminiscing about old times. “She’s out of her mind! It’s what I miss most about her.”
Unable to speak from the shock of the odd as hell sight before her, Buffy stood motionless in the doorway and remained unnoticed by the two of them.
“Well, Spike, sometimes, even when two people seem right for each other,” Joyce said sympathetically to a doe-eyed and miserable vampire, “their lives just take different paths. When Buffy’s father and I started having trouble—”
“Oh my God!” Buffy finally shouted, raising stiff hands to her forehead, appalled that her mother would divulge such personal information to her enemy. Who, by the way, should so not be here in the first place!
“Slayer!” Spike said abruptly, finally noticing her. He scrabbled to his feet but was kind enough not to drop Joyce’s favorite mug in the process, setting it down gently. “You’re home already, eh?”
She began to charge forward, ready to kill him. “Get out of my house!”
“Now, Buffy,” Joyce said, placing one hand on Buffy’s arm to stop her, “Spike has just gone through a bad break up and I don’t think that’s a very nice way to talk to our guest, is it?”
Spike snickered quietly, but she heard it. Buffy looked at him with barely contained rage before she said to her mother, “He is not a guest. He’s a pest. And a vampire! Mom, how many times do I have to tell you not to let the undead in this house?”
Joyce looked confused. Spike looked hungry. He licked his lips and waggled his eyebrows, taunting Buffy behind her mother’s back.
“Don’t tell me who I can and can’t let into my own house, young lady!”
“Yeah, Slayer. Mum’s house, Mum’s rules,” Spike said a little too enthusiastically for Buffy’s liking.
“That’s it, you are so dead!” Gently pushing her mother out of the way and pulling out her stake, Buffy ran around the island towards Spike who was laughing in amusement at her distress.
But she got a little too close to him with that weapon of hers and his eyes widened. “Willow!” he blurted out right as she raised her arm to strike.
She lowered her stake, chest heaving. “You took Willow?”
He sniffed sharply and stood up straight, “You do me now and you’ll never find the little witch.”
“Willow is a witch?” Joyce asked from behind them.
Ignoring her mother, because she didn’t have time to get into that after school special, Buffy addressed the more pertinent problem. “And Xander?” she asked, knowing that her friends were hanging out together that evening.
“Him too.”
“Xander’s a witch?” Joyce said, her struggle to comprehend becoming more and more apparent though her attention to the dangers at hand were subpar at best, something Buffy would have to talk to her about later.
“What did you do with them?” she asked Spike through clenched teeth, frustrated and pissed for so many reasons. So very many reasons.
“Well…”
One and a half hours earlier…
“No more smoochies,” Willow said to Xander with a quivering chin, fingering the ingredients for the de-lust spell that lay between them on a table at the school’s chemistry lab. What did it all mean? They were friends and she used to really, really like Xander in the more-than-friends kind of way but she was with Oz now. And he bought her Pez! And Xander was with Cordy, which, who saw that coming? But he was with her and they seemed happy. They were even sweet with one another at times. But those kisses and naughty gropes that she and her best friend shared in secret had to come to an end.
“Right, I’m with you. No more…smoochies.” Xander wasn’t so sure about using magic to get rid of his lusty thoughts for his redheaded friend considering the luck he’d had with magic in the past. But she was crestfallen and he really did like Cordelia and if anyone ever found out, they would be doomed. And probably pointed at. Maybe there would be scowling and disappointed gazes. No one wanted that. “But do we really have to resort to black magic to make it all stop?”
“Yes, Xander! I can’t stop it on my own, can you?”
He looked at her longingly for a moment, she returned his gaze with watery, pitiful eyes. His body slumped. “I guess you’re right.”
At that very moment, the lights went out. Willow gasped and Xander, being the brave young man he was, got up to check it out. All he had to do was flip the switch back on and the light returned, but what he didn’t know was that during the time when darkness fell, a very drunk vampire had made his appearance behind him.
Spike’s plans weren’t so creepy when he’d had that much Jack Daniels swimming in his system, but they were teenagers and stupid so it all worked out nicely. He lunged forward, grabbing Xander from behind.
“I need to borrow the little girl,” he said in Xander’s ear, “hope you don’t mind.”
Willow screamed and Xander started swinging uselessly, unable to free himself from the vampire’s hold on him. Spike pushed him and they both fell into a few school desks. Willow looked around frantically for something to hit the vampire with and picked up a microscope. As she came up behind the two men on the ground, Spike punched Xander, then quickly spun around to catch Willow’s microscope in mid-swing.
Dizzy from spinning around a bit too fast, he closed his eyes for a moment and then said, “Are you threatening me? Not nice. We’re all gonna be best friends.” He smiled at her and Willow cowered before him in fear. He heard Xander rise up behind him, so Spike swung the microscope hard, crashing it against the boy’s face. He fell to the ground unconscious.
It wasn’t a walk in the park, but he managed to carry the boy while keeping a firm grip to the girl’s arm as he took them both back to the factory. He tied the girl to a chair, the boy to a bed with his face in a pillow, and then he lit a smoke. Willow watched him pace the floor with wide, wet eyes, but he didn’t mind. In fact, he would have kissed her for giving him a bit of fun that evening. It’s just that after he saw the Great Wanker and Miss High and Mighty, he got to thinking about magic and how he could make Dru love him again. That would teach Angel a lesson about taking what was his and then he and Dru could kill the slayer and be one big happy again.
Thing was, he didn’t know dick about magic and instead of taking the time to learn how to cast a spell, he’d make a witch do it for him, which is how he wound up at the Magic Box, looking for whatever he could to remedy the situation. That’s when Red came into the picture. Turned out, the little girl fancied herself a novice of the dark arts, or was trying it out for a bit of a hoorah and she’d be a lot easier to take on than a powerful witch. And, she was one of the slayer’s friends so, bonus there.
“You’re gonna do a spell for me,” he finally said, straddling a chair a few feet in front of her and dumped out the contents of a brown bag, filled with the stuff he’d nicked from the magic shop.
“Um, what kind of spell?” she asked nervously.
Well, that cracked him the hell up. Didn’t she know that his dark princess had left him? Didn’t she know that his heart was absolutely broken? “Are you brain dead? A love spell!” Now he was pissed because he didn’t have time to explain everything to this bitch. So he stood up and stomped over to a table in the corner and plucked up a bottle of liquor he had stashed there and took a long, powerful swig. “You’ll do it. You’ll make her love me again! You’ll make her love me so much she’ll have to sodding crawl her way back to me.” He squeezed his fist tightly around the neck of the bottle and stomped over to the girl. “You’ll do it.”
“Yes, I’ll do it!” She nodded frantically, scared to death.
Christ, he loved it when they were scared. But it wasn’t enough, so he smashed the bottle on the bedpost and held the jagged end against her face, all mafia like, and said, “If you’re lyin’ to me, I’ll push this bottle into your skull, you hear me? Straight through your cute little face and right up into your brain! You want that?”
That’s when the waterworks started and Spike was glad to be a vampire.
“No…please…no,” she barely managed to say between sobs. Now that wasn’t right. Wasn’t right to feel bad for making a lady cry. Maybe he’d had too much to drink.
“She didn’t even kill me,” he whispered, all his anger gone in the blink of an eye and Willow watched in a mixture of fear and confusion. “Didn’t have the decency to torture me. Is that too much to ask? Is it too much to ask that she give me a sign that she cared?” He sat down heavily beside her and poured his heart out. But he wouldn’t tell Joyce and Buffy that part of the story. Nothing scary about that, was there?
One and a half hours later in the Summers’ kitchen…
“So as you can see,” said Spike, “it’s a dire situation here and unless you help me, they’re both dead.”
Buffy folded her arms across her chest and tilted her head with a bored expression. “My God, that was the longest story I’ve ever heard. I can’t believe I sat through all of that.”
“I just can’t believe he acted it all out,” Joyce said from her seated position at the island, sipping her second cup of cocoa. She’d made more as Spike’s story progressed.
Spike shrugged at Joyce’s comment.
“Where are they?” Buffy asked, her patience growing incredibly thin.
“As if I’d tell you! Don’t work that way, sweetheart. Your friend’s gonna do a spell for me and then I’ll let her go.”
“Oh, Spike, I’m really disappointed that you would resort to magic to fix your problems,” Joyce said sadly.
Spike actually looked ashamed for a minute and darted his eyes to the ground. “Don’t have much choice. Hurts too much.”
“Oh, boo hoo!” Buffy had had enough. “You, outside. Now.”
Spike threw her a defiant, angry glare over his shoulder as he wisely moved to the back door. He opened it, ready to run for safety again, but wouldn’t you know it, Angel was standing right there with his hand raised to knock like the polite fucker he was. Spike recognized that look in his eyes, too. The bulky git was right brassed off. But there wasn’t enough time to take a walk down memory lane, and standing between his pissed off maker and a slayer was the sort of sandwich Spike never wanted to be the meat of. He blinked and looked at Joyce for help but she was too busy washing cocoa mugs to see.
“What the hell is he doing in there?” Angel growled and tried to come in but the magical barrier in the doorframe halted his efforts.
Spike smiled. “You mean, tall dark and hackneyed doesn’t have an invite and I do? Well, everything’s comin’ up roses, isn’t it?”
“Shut up, Spike,” Buffy said, and grabbed Spike by the duster and hauled him outside. He wiggled out of her grasp and huffed, adjusting his lapels. “Before you say a word,” she said to Angel who was about to say a word or two, “we need him alive. He’s got Willow and Xander somewhere.”
“I should have let you stake him,” Angel said lowly, his eyes shooting daggers at Spike.
“Let you? Slayer, you gonna let him talk to you that way?”
Ignoring Spike’s attempt to bait her, she said, “Right now we need to get Willow and Xander. Then we stake him.”
“Hey! Not the plan! I help you, you help me. That’s how it’s gonna go or all bets are off! We call a truce again or I’ll suck ‘em dry.”
“Fine. Let’s just get this over with,” Angel said, defeated. “Start walking.”
Not one to be ordered around unless he was naked, Spike smirked and lit a cigarette, just to be more annoying. But Buffy looked like she might not care if her friends were ever found when her fingers twitched a few inches from that stake she had in her waistband. So he said, “Fine. This way,” and rolled his eyes as he whirled around to lead them to his hiding place.
“Ten bucks says it’s the factory,” Angel whispered to Buffy as they walked after him.
“He wouldn’t be that obvious, would he?”
Spike was wide-eyed in front of them, doing his best to remain silent.