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xaaraI've always wondered how Spike got
back from Africa. Because how he just sort of shows up? Doesn't really
work for me. Therefore, because I'm me, I wrote a fic about it:
Constructive criticism is both
accepted and rewarded with chocolate.
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ful∙gu∙rite n. -- A slender,
usually tubular body of glassy rock produced by lightning striking and then
fusing dry sandy soil.
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It is long after sunset and yet he
burns. The sand scorches the tender skin between his toes; the dry night
air insinuates itself between the nape of his neck and his frayed collar.
His stomach knots and rails against its emptiness and his calves scream in
protest at his incessant climb over what seem like hundreds of dunes, stretched
here endlessly under the perfect darkness of an African night. Every
breath he takes screams into his lungs with the gentleness of iron filings and
when he tries to stop breathing, an unreasonable panic forces his mouth open,
forces him to fall to his knees among the millions of grains of sand and gasp
and choke and breathe. The sand grits between his teeth, works its
way into the gashes in his palms and the unhealed wounds across his
chest. And he thinks he must have swallowed it, too, because something
grinds together behind his ribs like the unmatched gears in a machine gone
off-course.
Sand, he thinks, letting it run through
his fingers as he pulls himself up, brushes himself off. Sand. Use
it to shape molten metal; mix it with cement and build blocks; fill bags with
it and cower behind them, because that's what people do, isn't it?
Cower. That's what he's been doing, isn't it? Cowering? Sand,
he thinks again. More uses for sand. Think about sand.
Grow lavender in sandy soil, he remembers from the week he and Dru ate a
dentist and took the magazines from his office so Dru could marvel at the
glossy pictures. Among them: Cosmopolitan, Sports Illustrated,
and Better Homes and Gardens. He'd run out of interest in the
sports after an hour, found that Dru had no interest in giving up her Vogue,
and started to thumb through Better Homes and Gardens: Herb Gardening in
Sandy Soils.
Lavender, lavender grows even if
you try to kill it. Lavender and rosemary, purification and
protection. What else? Anise, which chases away nightmares.
Except not this nightmare. Sage, bringer of good fortune, one of
Anya's favorites. There's another one, another herb he's forgetting, and
it's vitally important that he remember it, so he presses the heels of his
hands against his eyebrows and focuses in on that single goal, on…heather.
Yes, heather, that's the one. Cure your cough, lull you into sleep, guard
against rape—
And he's sprawled on the sand
again, his fingers scrabbling at the earth beneath him and finding no purchase,
grains digging beneath his fingernails and eyelids and fuck it hurts
when his burned torso scrapes across the grit. Maybe, he
thinks. Maybe if he concentrates on the physical pain, it will equalize
and release the bubble of pressure inside him before he simply blows apart and
scatters across the sand.
Sand. Heat it in a furnace
and it becomes glass. But glass is fickle—it wants always to fragment, to
shatter, to return to its roots in little shards of itself. He remembers
the day Papa hired the men to install the panel of stained glass in the front
door, and his pride that his was the first such decorated door in the
neighborhood. Remembers the screams and explosions outside as he tipped a
glass candleholder from its shelf just before he killed—no.
Remembers instead the day Glory smashed a glass against his face, remembers
telling her about Bob Barker. Remembers how, later, Buffy dressed as his
robot, flounced into his crypt, pouted in that endearing way she had, and then kissed—
Glass. There were three panes of glass in every door on Revello drive,
three panes a foot tall and a handbreadth wide, staggered downward from left to
right. Three panes he could see through but could not pass unless
invited. He imagines Dawn, his Dawn, standing just inside her
threshold, one hand on the door, the other on an outflung hip. You
abandoned us, she's saying, and he reaches forward, desperate to touch her,
to anchor himself to the silk of her hair, but his fingers meet an impenetrable
barrier and refuse to travel farther. She closes the door in his face,
deaf to his murmur of Sweet bit.
"Nibblet," he says, and
receives a mouthful of sand for his efforts. Sitting up, he spits out the
offending grains and wipes gritty lips with an equally gritty hand. It's
close to sunrise; he feels the beginning of a prickle just beneath the back of
his skull, warning him to find cover. For a moment, he toys with the idea
of waiting here for the sun, going out in a blaze of glory, an unnoticed pillar
of fire in the midst of an unending desert. He wonders absently whether
the heat of his final death would be enough to form glass. He hopes
so—then, at least, he would have served a purpose.
Spike.
He starts at his name, scrambling
to his feet, swaying in the mild breeze. "Who's there?"
Spike, get the hell up.
"Already passed all your
trials," he says, inhaling sharply through his nose. "Won my
damnation fair and square—you've got no right—"
Spike!
He's not sure how a voice in his
head has any right to sound exasperated. He chances listening to it,
tense, sure that it will become one of his victims at any moment. Then
he's suddenly lucid, as if someone has bypassed the—the—and found the
small part of him still capable of linear thought.
I don't know what exactly you
think you're doing, Vampire, but you've managed to cause quite the stir in our
offices. A
female, then, doing the speaking.
"I'm sorry," he
whispers. "I killed, and then I loved, and then I—"
Tried to hurt the Slayer. We
know. We've heard it before. Many times before, actually; we're not
exactly out of the loop.
And now he's royally confused, and
tired, and frustrated that the voice interferes with his contemplation of
waiting for dawn. "Go away."
Um, no. You didn't summon us
and you don't get to tell us what to do.
Snorting, he says, "Now that's
mature."
A whisper of a touch against his
shoulder, as if a ghost had tried to slap him. We're cutting you a
break here, O He of the Iridescent Hair. Now listen for a sec before you
jump to all sorts of conclusions.
"You've got ten
seconds. Use them well."
We're sending you back home.
He waits for the voice to
elaborate. When it remains silent, he asks, "Home where?"
Sunnydale. Of course.
Where else?
"Sunnydale's not home,"
he says. "It's just a place."
Stop being difficult. Where
else do you think of as home? And don't bother answering that question—we
can read your mind anyway. Sunnydale is your home, whether you want it to be or
not. You know what they say—Home is where the heart—
"Shut up," Spike says
levelly. He presses his lips into a thin line, folds his hands over his
stomach. "My heart's no use to anyone."
They warned us you'd be stubborn,
but not that you'd be a flaming idiot. Here's the deal, Spike: we take
you back to Sunnydale, and you forget about us. You help the Slayer fight
her good fight; you do whatever needs to be done there. We keep an eye on
things and deal with whatever comes up. Now get your ass into some sort
of condition to return.
"Who are you?" Spike
asks. He's made too many bad deals not to be suspicious of this offer.
We're just an arm of a
corporation. We deal with acquisitions, normally, though we were sent
after you for some reason.
"Corporation? So you're
what, a stockbroker?"
Again, the rush of air past his
shoulder. We work at the direction of the Senior Partners of Wolfram
and Hart, the voice said, its tone pompous. We resent being lumped
with stockbrokers, inferior demons.
"So let's go over this
again. I agree to your deal—you're not giving me much choice, mind—and
you send me back to Sunny-D. First class?"
Instantly. You won't even
have enough time to open a package of peanuts.
Spike shrugs. "Deal."
Pleasure doing busin— Dark.
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Glass. That night,
after his inexcusable transgression, he'd poured a glass of bourbon for
himself, downed the alcohol in one smoldering swallow. Somewhere amid
flashbacks and agonizing and double-guessing, the glass had imploded in his hand,
slivers of it slicing his palm and creating a cheerful sparkling lightshow as
they rained to the dirt.
Spike wraps his arms around his
knees and rocks softly, twisting his head to read the high school flyer
trampled beside him. "Be There or Be Square!" it
proclaims. "Buy your tickets early or pay at the door."
I never bought tickets early, Spike thinks, and it's somehow a
ridiculously deep idea. Then again, never paid at the door, either.
Idly, Spike wonders how long he's
been here. It seems like years or perhaps seconds since his trip to
Uganda, and his hunger is no good measure—he's been hungry for weeks now.
"How long have I been here?" he asks the empty room, just to test his
voice.
Footsteps sound behind him, and he
whirls, his eyes seeking movement in the shadows.
Drusilla steps forward, dressed as
he first saw her a century ago. Her hands, covered in black lace gloves,
coil and writhe like independent creatures. "I've missed you,
Spike," she murmurs. "You've been a naughty boy. But
you're ready to come home now, aren't you? Ready to see your home?"
She sways like a cobra, back and
forth, side to side, ever-advancing. "You glow like the streetlamps
in the fog," she says. "Burning, burning, useless."
Another step forward, and she
stops inches from him. His arms hang limp at his sides. When her
eyes meet his, they glaze over and lose focus—he imagines she might be
searching him for something. Caught up in the sight of her, Spike jumps
when she laughs, once, loudly, sounding more like a crow than a woman.
Drusilla claps her hands and smiles, then wraps her arms about herself in a
childish expression of joy.
"Welcome home, my
Spike," she says. "Welcome home."
