***************************************

Part 4: Surrender

“Little ones shouldn’t be running around alone in the middle of the night,” Spike says evenly. “Never know what might be lurking about, waiting for a taste.”

She swallows, and his eyes drop to her exposed throat. Above Buffy’s old UCSD t-shirt, her pulse pounds madly. Spike watches it with growing interest.

Oh, God. Pissed-off, insane, hungry vampire. She is so many kinds of dead.

He still holds her suspended a couple of feet off the ground, while the demon’s head drips chartreuse grossness from its stump. Ew.

His hand tightens where he grasps her by the scruff of the neck, like nothing so much as an angry, bleached-blonde mastiff. “What brings you out of bed tonight, Bit?”

“W – Wissenschaft,” she finally croaks out. She tries to nod toward the prize he holds in his right hand.

He glances down. “What, this chap?” He brings the head up and considers it. Dawn shrinks back. “Had rather unusual appetites, he did.” A wolf grin splits Spike’s face as he tosses the head aside. “Though I don’t suppose I’m one to talk. Now…” He turned his attention back to Dawn. “Where were we?”

“I – I came to – the demon – "

He smirks at her fumbling, and that somehow eliminates her nervousness. She peers at him. “Are you still crazy?”

“Better hope not, for your sake.”

She grimaces and fidgets in his grip. He drops her without warning and she stumbles as she hits the floor.

“Heard you traipsing around here, screaming like a banshee. Suppose I should be flattered, that you’d bother to rescue a dog from a burning building.”

She frowns, not understanding. He backs up, still with that nasty sneer, and spreads his arms wide. “This. All this. You figured you’d be all noble and forgiving, save your pet vampire. Put him in another cage, poke sticks at him a bit more.”

“That’s not – " She sets her chin. “I wasn’t going to let some stupid science lab demon kill you.”

“Not when you could do it yourself?”

She falters a little then. There is a strange combination of hurt and betrayal and rudderless rage in his face, and it is familiar. She has seen that miserable mixture before…

Oh, yeah. In the mirror.

No. He has no right to feel her feelings, to look at her and see a traitor. “Excuse me,” she spits out. “What, did you think you’d just turn up again and we’d welcome you with open arms? Buffy would give you a big kiss and half her closet space? Get real, Spike.”

He looks as though he wants to grab her up and shake her again, until her teeth rattle. But he merely squares his shoulders, meets her gaze defiantly. “Am real, now. As real as one of my kind can be. Got a soul.”

He is waiting for her gasp of shock, for realization and regret to shadow her features. He waits, and waits.

Dawn stares at him, unimpressed.

“Did you hear me?” he rails. “A soul! I went out and got myself a fucking soul!”

She folds her arms. “What, is that supposed to impress me or something?”

He frowns. “Well, yeah.”

“Well, it doesn’t. Warren had a soul, and look what he did. Willow has a soul, and she tried to turn me back into a ball of energy.” Her eyes flicker briefly as she finishes, “I don’t even know if I have a soul.”

That’s her secret, the one she doesn’t dare whisper even in the midnight darkness of her sleeping house. The one thing, she’s convinced, that could make Buffy turn away from her; that could transform Dawn from family to enemy in the moment it took to be revealed.

She isn’t stupid. Even as she reeled in horror that long-ago night in the Magic Box, Dawn listened to the tale that tripped from Spike’s mouth – of gods, and Hell, and the mysteries that her body hid. Oh, the monks had been big on form – look like a human, talk like a human, remember like a human.

But…they never said what was inside.

Sometimes, late at night, she lies awake and imagines swirling green galaxies beneath her skin. Or shimmering whiteness, so clean and pure that it must be the stuff of Heaven. Other times, though…other times she sees nothing but blackness, an infinite gaping hole that could prove her undoing. Literally.

Spike’s snort of disgust startles her back to reality. “Lately, I’ve been wondering the same thing myself. Never figured you for the slow torture kind. Been taking lessons from Big Sis?”

“Buffy wouldn’t do this,” Dawn answers automatically. It’s true. Buffy locks away her love and her hate and everything in between; keeps it frozen and hermetically sealed behind too-bright smiles and whimpers at night when she thinks her baby sister is sleeping.

Oddly, Spike seems to follow her train of thought. “No. No, she wouldn’t,” he answers. “But my Little Bit…” he steps close to her now, so that there’s nowhere else she can look but at him. “My girl’s just full of surprises.”

“You deserved it,” she whispers hotly.

“Sure. But that’s not why you did it.”

“I did it so –"

“You did it because you could.” Sudden, hot accusation and that pain again, underneath. “You did it because I was there. And because I would stay, no matter what. Whatever you dished out.”

She is abruptly robbed of righteous ammunition. Killer, would-be rapist, deserter! Gone now as he stands before her, armed with his own terrible knowledge. He’s leaning down, murmuring in her ear.

“Did you like it, love? Like the way it made you feel? Strong, when you’d been so powerless before?”

In a burst of energy she shoves him away. He retreats obligingly, though she knows she could beat on him for days and he’d barely feel it.

“Go on,” he mocks her. “Take your shot. That’s all I’m good for, isn’t it?”

“You left!”

“And I came back!”

They stare at each other, hate and love travelling a bizarre feedback loop between them.

“You think it’s easy loving you? Either of you? It’s not. It doesn’t bring me any joy, not a moment’s peace. But I keep coming back. Sadistic, venomous little bitches, the both of you are. Wormed your way inside me, hollowed me out.”

The tears fall freely down her face. They should blur her vision but Spike remains in all his beauty and sharpness and clarity.

“So take your shot,” he repeats. “What, no stake?” he asks, and his brow furrows as he looks her over, perhaps for the first time tonight. “Idiot child. Ought to know better than that.”

“I’m not a child.”

“No?” He snarls down at her, then jerks his head away as if he’s been caught at something. “No,” he agrees then, in a harsh voice. “I suppose you’re not.” He seems to collect himself.

“Still ten kinds of stupid, though. Look at you – wearing your bloody pajamas. You know how many brutes could have had a piece of you tonight? Not just demons, neither. Nasty human types that I couldn’t do a thing about.” She watches as he slips easily, unconsciously into the role of protector once again. Hands on lean hips – too lean, now – as he rants about danger and reckless roaming as he has so many times before.

“Doesn’t even have a jacket,” he’s grumbling. “Just fell out of her bed and decided to go monster-hunting. Left her brain behind –"

“What if – what if it happened to me?”

He stops short. “Wh – What?”

“What if a guy did that to me? Would you forgive him?” By the expression he wears now, Dawn is not convinced that he’s left insanity behind entirely.

“Not asking for your forgiveness.”

“Tell me.”

“What do you want to hear? That if a boy did that to you, I’d do the proper thing – the right thing – and turn him over to the cops? Or maybe you think that I’d give him a slap on the back, because guys like us have to stick together?”

“I want the truth.”

“You want another reason to hate me. Fine, then.”

He backs up from her now, and she knows that he uses the distance to steel himself against her censure.

“Truth is, I’d separate his flesh from his bones with a smile. Truth is, I’d devote a week to his dissection. And yeah,” Spike finishes, “I’m aware of the irony. But there you have it.”

Dawn knows she should condemn him for his claim, should confront him with this admission that he is, in fact, no more than a monster. But, God – he is so lost.

Across the room from her now, barely able to look at her, as he reaches for violence because his hands can’t seem to hold on to anything else. Or maybe it is that nothing else has ever held on to him.

He seems to deflate suddenly, slumps against the far wall. Gropes at his side for a pack of cigarettes until he realizes that he’s not wearing his coat. Slides all the way down the wall, leans his head against the battered concrete. His next words are tinged in defeat.

“It’s a terrible thing, you know. This curse.”

She takes a few tentative steps toward him. “The soul?”

A short chuff of laughter. “Loving you.”

“Um…thanks?”

He shrugs. She creeps closer. “Soul’s my own problem – and my own business. But you Summers women…” He sighs. "You get me every time."

“Why – why did you come back?” She almost thinks she knows the answer but she’s afraid, so afraid. They’ve come back before, but never to stay. Before she can stop herself she’s crouched next to him.

“Left my heart here. With you two.” He turns to look down at her then, the saddest smile playing on his lips. “But you won’t have me. So what’s a lad to do?”

She feels the wetness on her cheeks – she is crying again. Stupid, but she can’t seem to stop. Maybe there is something to all that Health class talk about hormones, after all. “Big talk from a guy who practically forgot my name while he was boffing my sister.”

He shakes his head. “Never forgot about you. Was…distracted. Might not believe this, but I’ve got a bit of a one-track mind.”

Her teary, hiccuping giggle startles them both. “I hadn’t noticed.”

“Yeah, well, I’m subtle.”

They sit side by side, and Dawn wonders how to ask for his forgiveness. How, when she’s not sure she can offer her own?

But when she turns her gaze up to his, she finds she doesn’t need to ask.

He’s looking at her with such tenderness, such acceptance and she’s undone. It’s acceptance of all of her cruelty and adoration and fear and curiosity and foolishness. A flash of insight that this is what he felt for Buffy, what he gave to her, and it’s bottomless, this well of worship. Just bottomless.

“You love too hard,” she whispers. “It’s going to kill you someday.”

He closes his eyes. “Sure,” he murmurs back. “But what a way to go.”

She shakes her head, then buries it, carefully, on the strange comfort of his hard chest. The muscles beneath her tense up, but then – very slowly – relax. She shuts her eyes, too, and after a few moments his jaw drop lightly onto the silk of her hair.

This is how Buffy finds them.

***************************************

When Spike looks up at her from over her sister’s head, she knows he’s back. Fierce vampire, breakable lover, protector of chestnut-haired Keys, aching and jumbled and knotty warrior. All of this she sees in him.

Should she be worried, seeing him embrace her sister like this? Impossible.

“Been waiting for you,” he says, and she flinches.

He frowns as Dawn shifts to regard her sister. “The demon,” he goes on. “Bit came looking for it too. How’d you –"

“Followed the trail of beakers,” she cuts in, finding her voice at last.

“I knew it!” Dawn bursts out triumphantly. Spike and Buffy both stare at her. “Never mind,” she huffs. She does not seem inclined to leave Spike’s side.

But he unfolds himself from the wall, and Dawn by necessity follows. She seems so young, standing between two people who have aged more than they should have. She looks like promise, thinks Buffy, and she wonders if there can be something new amid all the death that seems to surround them.

“Anybody want to tell me what happened?” Buffy asks.

Spike shrugs. “Bit drove me sane.”

“Uh-huh.” She tries to sound appropriately stern. “Dawn?”

But her sister suddenly will not look at her. Spike seems unconcerned, though, and gives Dawn a gentle shove. “Off with you, now.” Dawn hesitates but he is firm. “We’ll settle up later, you and me.” Words that coming from his mouth would cause terror to anyone else; but Dawn appears reassured by this.

“You drove here?” Buffy demands, and Dawn’s gaze is once more irresistibly drawn to the ceiling.

“Good,” Buffy says. “Spike’s lost some weight; I’m not sure he can make it all the way to the house on those skinny stick legs.”

“It’s the Zone diet,” he snarks, and then her meaning hits him – a more effective stunner than any punch she’s delivered in the history of their acquaintance.

He cocks his head. She doesn’t know why that makes her want to cry.

Dawn is tugging him forward by the hand. He’s still got that dazed expression on his face. And when Buffy takes his other hand in hers she’s almost sure she hears him gasp. They’re watching each other, hungrily, fearfully.

Can this be real? Are they really walking out of here, hand-in-hand, like in some movie or something? But they’re still walking, still watching and Dawn is ahead of them now and Buffy can feel the bite of nighttime air.

They’re outside, and Buffy and Dawn head for the Jeep. Spike, though…his steps have slowed and he’s studying the starless sky, searching it. “What?” Buffy asks him.

“I feel like I should be seeing something,” he tells her, faintly frustrated. “I don’t know what to look for.”

She’s smiling at him before she realizes it. “Maybe you’ll know it when you see it,” she suggests. “Worked for me.”

When she tightens her fingers around his he lowers his head, meets her eyes again. “Imagine I will.” He lets her lead him home.

The End.

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