Spike

Spike hadn't been back to the apartment.

By stroke of luck, the mausoleum he'd inhabited at various points throughout his unnaturally long time in Darrow was easy enough to clear out. Haunting the tunnels beneath was a demon of unknown origin. Some slimy, milky-eyed creature who'd seen less sun than he had in the last century and a half, and he'd dispatched of it dispassionately, Mab lingering in the doorway with a low, warning growl.

"Fat lot of good you are," he muttered to her. She lifted her head, ever haughty, and trotted over to sniff at a pile of bones in the corner.

Within a week, he'd dragged an armchair and a couch into the dusty tomb, and had reattached the rigged wiring he'd once used to drain electricity from the caretaker's cottage on the property. It was all he needed.

It was nothing he wanted, but he couldn't very well go back to an empty apartment which still smelled of...

Well, those weren't thoughts he wanted, so he'd stayed massively drunk at just about every waking moment, which were depressingly fewer and further between. Mab was surely fed up with his antics, despite his pitiful efforts to keep up a relatively regular feeding schedule for her, even throwing in a steak here or there to placate her. She'd lost something, too, after all, and she couldn't very well drown her sorrows in bourbon like he could.

He was fairly certain she was contemplating leaving him, too. Running off to greener pastures. He wouldn't blame her. He was pathetic. Drunken, blubbering, singing to himself, forgetting to eat.

Tonight, he wandered through the rows of tombstones, feeling sorry for himself. "Dancing with tears in my eyes..." he warbled to himself, tipping an ever-present bottle of Jack Daniels against his lips.

Spike had been minding his own bloody business. Well, he'd been chasing another vampire in hopes of dusting the bastard, but he certainly hadn't been on the lookout for any doors to other worlds.

He'd chased the fledgling vamp, whom he'd caught skulking around Petros High (the nerve), onto the property of The Clown Motel, one of his least favorite places in the whole bloody city. It was just so ridiculous, and kitschy, and skeevy. The kind of place with peepholes drilled in the bathrooms. Disgusting. Evil. He might've almost been impressed, once upon a time, but those days were long gone. A conscience and a soul and connections with humanity would do that to a demon.

So, it stood to reason that this slimeball would lead him there. Hot on his heels, Spike followed the vamp around a corner, and...

Nothing.

"What the bloody hell?" He muttered to himself, frowning. The vampire was gone, like he'd vanished into thin air. And Spike swore he could smell... wet ash.

Frowning, he took a step, and another, the hairs on the back of his neck prickling. There was no sound, save for the hum of the nearby soda machine and the scrape of his boots on broken asphalt. And then... and then...

Everything changed. He found himself standing in the ruins of a crumbling building– the motel, in what was now a desolate field.

"Oh, you've got to be joking." It was all familiar, unfortunately. As was the siren sounding overhead. Gritting his teeth, he began to walk under an ashen sky, squinting through the heavy fog closing in around him.

He was bloodied, his coat burned by the spewed acid of some kind of armless monstrosity, by the time he walked through another shimmering tear in the world and onto the bustling streets of downtown Darrow no more than twenty minutes later.

Nearly stepping in front of a car, he let out a yelp and dodged out of harms way, roaring as the car sped away, "Watch where you're bloody going!"

He was exhausted, but above all annoyed. There was all this fun to be had. For all he knew, that was his one chance, and instead of having Sweeney at his side, he'd been alone.

"What do you mean, Walter's gone? What's that got to do with a anything?"

Spike had been arguing with the butcher for going on ten minutes now. You see, he'd had a good thing going with Walter, the elderly man that ran the butcher downtown. The man set aside his pig's blood, packaged it carefully and kept it on ice, for Spike to pick up once a week. While it wasn't the totality of his diet, it did take up a good portion of it, and walking into the shop to find out they'd been taken over by new owners, who apparently hadn't been told a thing about his arrangement, well...

It wasn't exactly a high point of his week.

"My grandfather wasn't all there, at the end, and—"

"Now, you hold on a minute, he was a shrewd old bugger, and our deal was fully above board. I'm not asking for keys to the bloody safe, I just want my order."

It was near closing, and there was an impatient looking woman currently tapping her food behind him.

Finally, Spike threw up his arms and said, "Oh, sod off, the lot of you."

Kicking his way out the door with his over-sized boots, he stalked out onto the sidewalk, tapping out a cigarette and hardly looking where he was going.

With demon guts drying on his lapel, Spike stood outside the gates of Innsmouth, pleased with himself and with the direction his night had taken. That was, until he reached into his pocket and, instead of a pack of cigarettes, he pulled out a ring.

The bloody ring. The Gem of Amara.

He stared at it. And stared. And stared some more.

It hadn't been in his pocket early. Of that, he was certain. He'd turned out those pockets dozens of times. He'd torn his whole wardrobe apart. His closet. His drawers. It hadn't been there.

But now, there it was, winking back at him from his palm. Mocking him.

Gritting his teeth, Spike growled, his suspicions proven.

He took out his phone, pacing impatiently while it rang. The moment the call was answered, without waiting for a greeting or giving one of his own, he said, "We've got a bloody ghost."

William had the strangest dream.

In it, a woman came to him. She was unlike any woman he'd ever seen. A black ember burning cold in the dark, sweet and alluring, as some deliciously wicked poison. She whispered in his ear, all the things he'd never known he'd needed to hear. She told him wonderful things, awful things, and made promises he was powerless to resist.

In his breast, his heart thundered with life and with hope, a desire unbefitting a gentleman. And then his heart slowed, weakened, darkness overtaking him, enveloping him like a wayward friend.

He awoke with a gasp.

He had not slept in his nightshirt. Instead, he found himself scandalously unclothed, sprawled across tangled sheets in a room much smaller than his own. There was a large shape occupying the bed beside him, breathing heavily. With a muffled yelp, William recognized the shape as that of a man.

Unnerved by the strange stillness he felt within his own body, and the sense that much more time had passed than only a night, William clambered to his feet, snatching a terry cloth towel from a nearby chair and holding it modestly against his front.

The man in the bed was massive, with a bright shock of fiery red hair. An Irishman?

William wrinkled his nose.

On the bed, the man stirred, sheets slipping down a broad chest, his face mostly obscured by a woefully unkempt beard. Alarmingly, William's nethers stirred and with another yelp, he fled the room on ungainly feet, bursting through a door and into the lavatory.

Chest heaving, he braced himself on the sink, peering into the mirror...

At nothing. There was nothing. No reflection. Eyes wide, he prodded at his own face, the towel dropping to his feet as he stared into the shiny surface of the mirror.

Seeing only the wall behind him, William opened his mouth and let out a horrified shriek.

Spike tried his level best not to let it get to him.

It was just a bit of Darrow foolishness, he told himself. Over and over, as the days wore on. It would be over soon, and they could get back to their lives. Their lives together.

It was perhaps the third day that it truly hit him, just how terrified he was. He'd heard of other people disappearing only to return after a short while, with their memories wiped, as if they'd never been in Darrow at all. He told himself that this wasn't one of those times. The amnesia would be temporary. Sweeney would wake up one morning and smile at him, like he had every morning for quite a while now, and that cold fear in his belly would fade away.

But he couldn't be sure.

And it frightened him, knowing he could've lost him and gone days without realizing the truth of it. And what then? It wouldn't have been his first loss, and it certainly shouldn't have had the enormity of the loss of his wife and son, but what should have been wasn't always what was.

The possibility of it looming felt as large and painful as waking up without Andrea or William, and perhaps that frightened him most of all. He'd never intended to fall in love again, certainly not so hard or so quickly, but he'd gone and done it, anyway.

His plans never quite worked out, did they?

It was after dark and he escaped the apartment simply because he couldn't stand the strangeness of it all, missing someone who seemed to be there, but very much wasn't. He walked towards the boardwalk, fingers trembling minutely as he brought a cigarette to his lips.

"You stupid twat," he muttered to himself, jaw twitching as he swallowed down the urge to weep.

They'd settled into a bit of a routine.

Not to say they were boring, of course. Their lives didn't have room for that. They were still, at the core of it, a leprechaun and a vampire, cobbling together something of a relationship. They fought alongside one another, they bickered, they fucked. Rinse, repeat. So, there was a level of monotony to their days, but where he once might've claimed such a domesticated life would've made his skin crawl once upon a time, deep down it was something he'd always craved. The last two years without had left him feeling rather listless.

As shameful as it was, he found himself happiest waking up in the night with Sweeney's hulking body sprawled on the bed next to him, taking up too much bloody room and often snoring like mad. He found himself happiest in the quiet moments, wondering if perhaps he'd lost his edge years ago. If Andrea and the baby had perhaps taken it with them. Or, it could've been Buffy, with her determination and her goodness and her light.

Or maybe he'd never truly had much of an edge at all. For him, it had always been something of a pantomime, after all.

That evening, Sweeney was on the warpath, ready to smash in the head of whatever came at them. Spike was, as always, enjoying the rush and the thrill of a fight with a worthy partner, though he was admittedly a bit distracted. One couldn't blame him, really, with the view he currently had, Sweeney massive and bloodstained and looking every bit the king he'd once been.

The demons they currently fought were a pair, the two of them crawling out of the caves near the northern part of the countryside, strange and unfamiliar. They were fast moving, keeping low to the ground and skittering on all fours, and while they weren't particularly impressive fighters, their claws more than made up for it.

Chuckling, Spike dodged a sweep of one unnaturally long arm, but the next swipe caught him in the arm, slicing right through his sleeve. He growled with annoyance, reaching now for the blade he kept under his coat, when heat flared alarmingly down his arm, the sudden tingling burn nearly enough to bring a pained cry to his lips.

He grunted, stumbling a step back, flexing his fingers and finding that his entire arm had gone partially numb. Poison. Wonderful.

"Watch the pointy bits, love," he warned, switching the blade to his other hand just as he saw one of the creatures lunge at Sweeney from the corner of his eye.

Spike hated the beach.

He hated the sand. The bloody ocean. Well, truth be told, he hated a lot of things, as of late. It wasn't particularly healthy, he knew, but he was a bloody vampire. He was supposed to skulk about in the dark, thinking about death and mayhem. Happiness, stability, a home-- those were all things left better to humanity, of which he hadn't truly been a part of for quite some time.

While he hated being maudlin, and he certainly wasn't a brooding sod like Angelus, he knew that he hadn't been himself in a while. First there was Andrea and William, and now Buffy, and no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't seem to find his footing again.

So, he was going through the motions, for lack of anything better, patrolling when he could, going to work, keeping track of the few people in Darrow he gave a damn about, whose numbers were slowly dwindling.

That night, he'd found himself on the boardwalk, chasing a pair of ghouls down to the water's edge, cursing the whole bloody way.

"Alright, you bastards," he muttered, drawing out his machete, and catching one of the creatures by the back of its tattered shirt. Unfortunately, the rotted garment tore, a chunk of moldering skin coming off with it. "Oh, wonderful," he snarled, chucking the glob of offending meat and fabric onto the sand, swinging his machete wildly but with enough skill to lop of the head of the nearest monster.

It landed in the sand and rolled, bouncing through the bubbling tide.

Spike felt good. Better than he had in quite a long time, really. A certain blonde Slayer had a bit to do with that, of course, but he wouldn't make the mistake of burdening her with full responsibility for his happiness. Not again.

He still slept alone (most nights) and woke up alone, but he could think on his family, on the people he'd lost, without wanting to walk into the sun. So, progress, he supposed.

That evening, he went out with the setting of the sun, had a bit of food he didn't need at a little dive bar downtown with decent wings, then he made his way north, checking all the usual creature haunts for anything in need of being dealt with. There were a few nests of vampires and the like, but those were all harmless, and he chose to keep an eye on them instead of going in with weapons drawn.

It wasn't until he made it to the boardwalk that he came across someone who might have been in need of a bit of assistance.

It was a young man, cornered in the dark near a burnt out lamp post. The boy was frail, clearly frightened, and was being accosted by three burly men in leather jackets.

"Aren't you a bit old to be shaking down a boy for his lunch money?" He asked as he approached. The taller of the three turned, a large hunting knife clutched in his meaty hand.

"Oh," Spike smirked, "This is going to be fun."

Spike was drunk.

Sloshed. Just bloody hammered. It wasn't even particularly late. In fact, he'd started before the sun had gone down, huddled in the darkness of his tomb awaiting the night with a bottle in hand.

There wasn't any reason for it. Not one that he was willing to admit. It wasn't his son's birthday, or his wife's, or their anniversary, though that was fast approaching. There wasn't any real excuse for this weight of melancholia, but he'd never been one to overanalyze his moods.

Despite his inebriation, he'd still managed to take out a slim demon in the sewers, and a vampire behind a fast food taco restaurant downtown. Leaning against the pole of a corner streetlamp, Spike finished off a cigarette, his eyes drifting shut.

Something needed to give, he knew. He couldn't live like this anymore, weeping and feeling sorry for himself. It was coming up on a year since his family had vanished, and he knew Andrea wouldn't want him moaning and suffering for so long.

"You pathetic bastard," he muttered to himself, but at the sound of commotion in a nearby alley, glass breaking and something heavy hitting the pavement, he froze. When his eyes snapped open, they were no longer blue, but an eerie yellow.

Dropping his cigarette butt onto the pavement, he stalked closer to the darkened mouth of the alley, reaching under his coat for the machete hidden there.