Welcome to the Hellmouth

Author's Notes: Muwahaha, a little twist. Hopefully it was a twist, at least. Everyone chill, I'm not killing off Joyce this time! I like her too much.


Buffy the Vampire Slayer


Spike and Buffy’s walk soon found them at the Bronze. As Spike listlessly poked at an onion blossom and chain-smoked, the vampire watched him in silence, simply watched. While Dru had always done the same thing, Spike felt none of the nervousness he had when the raven-haired vampire had observed him. With Buffy, he got the distinct impression that she was seeing him rather than his cocky slayer persona.

After sitting in relatively comfortable silence for nearly an hour, the slayer met Buffy’s gaze firmly, and his scarred eyebrow lifted in question. Of all the ways he could have prompted to vampire to speak, this was perhaps the most personal, for he had been forced to accept something most would have found disconcerting – the two of them, slayer and vampire, could communicate without uttering a single word.

“You know that they can’t curse her again, don’t you?” Buffy asked gently. “Wesley, he looked into it, and the spell is so old that not even the Gypsies know it.”

His heart ached a little more at having his suspicions confirmed, but the slayer nodded bravely and said, “I know. I don’t want to hear about that. Who are you?”

With a slight inclination of her head, the blonde vampire began, “I could always go the Interview with the Vampire route and be cryptic, you know.” When her words earned a small smile from Spike, she began anew, “I was born February the fifth in eighteen sixty-two in Boston. I won’t bore you with the details of my early childhood; I’ll just pick up where the story gets interesting. You’ll find it a bit familiar, I think.”

“Familiar?” Spike queried, once again dragging his hand through his disheveled hair.

His hair… Buffy had almost forgotten that it was curly until she noticed its current state. “When I was sixteen years old, these very strange men approached me. They wanted to talk about destiny, a calling. In every generation… Well, you know the rest.”

“Y-you were a slayer?” he asked incredulously, and yet somehow, he believed her. After all, what possible reason would she have to lie to him now when she had been honest about everything else?

“Correct-o-mundo, we have a winner!” the slayer-turned-vampire exclaimed brightly. “I’m actually surprised your father didn’t mention it. After all, he read up on Drusilla when she showed up, and I’m a big part of her past.”

“Buffy…” he warned, jabbing a stalk of onion blossom in her direction in a silent command that she continue.

With a teasing smile, Buffy went on, “You know how the story goes. There’s the shock, the disbelief, and finally acceptance. It was much harder to keep secrets in those days when fathers kept their daughters under lock and key. Luckily, my father was too busy banging our housekeeper, and my mother was… She was very sick. My watcher was a woman named Dolores Lemmings, but that’s beside the point. I fought and killed every vampire and demon I ever laid my eyes on; I always won, but when I was eighteen, I met Angelus.”

“The nutter?”

Buffy’s vibrant green eyes flashed a strange shade of burning crimson before returning to normal. “It’s not his fault,” she said fiercely. “I met him after a fight with a particularly nasty chaos demon, and when he spoke to me, I just… I couldn’t fight him. He had me under his thrall. That’s his thing, you know – hypnosis. He turned me, and when I woke again, he was crying…” Even now, free from his influence, the memory of seeing her Angelus so distraught caused her to shudder.

Spike, on the other hand, felt no sympathy. Munching on the last of the onion, he lit a cigarette. “Well? Go on.”

“He kept babbling about how I had nastiness inside me, that I’d come back… wrong, that I was beneath him. He was right, and he was wrong. I did come back wrong, and I was beneath him in a way, but what I have inside me… it’s not nasty.”

“Your soul,” the slayer said with a bitter laugh. At Buffy’s surprised expression, he added, “It’s in that prophecy book you gave Da—my watcher, but you already knew that, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, but I didn’t think you’d actually read the book. It’s… very long-winded.”

“Well, yeah. Written by a bunch of ponces, what do you expect? ‘Sides, when some dusty old book says I’m gonna die, I want to know everythin’ else it says. I didn’t get far, though, after I read the ‘You’ll die this Saturday’ part, just to the bit about a slayer-turned-demon an’ how slayers keep their souls if they’re turned,” he explained.

Taking one of his cigarettes, Buffy lit it and inhaled deeply, enjoying the unnecessary air and the warmth of the smoke. “Anyway… At first, Angelus was crushed that the first person he’d ever turned was wrong, but then he stopped babbling and just sort of… zoned. He had a vision that the faeries – don’t you dare fucking laugh – told him that he would need me, that Drusilla would leave him. Two years later, she did, but not before trying her hardest to make me into a monster.”

Chortling as though she had told the most amusing joke he had ever heard, Spike muttered, “Yeah, right. You became a monster when you were turned.”

“Was your precious Drusilla a monster to you before she lost her soul?” Buffy snapped. “She was cursed with a soul, I kept mine naturally.”

“I’m sorry,” Spike said regretfully. In truth, he had never really felt one way or another about most vampires. Killing them, while therapeutic and often enjoyable, was not a vendetta for him – it was his job. Drusilla, he had loved, and Buffy… Well, Buffy was a challenge. He enjoyed her company, felt that she was his equal, and truly hadn’t meant to offend her, but… “I’m just so bloody confused and frustrated right now.”

“No big, Spike,” she replied nonchalantly. “And… you know.” It was the closest she could bring herself to come to an apology for what she had said about Drusilla, whom she had never liked.

“Go on.”

“I had to feed, so I fed on the terminally ill, people who would die within a matter of weeks or days, sometimes even hours. I couldn’t do it, kill a person with so much life left in them… I even kept killing vamps.”

“You were a regular pariah,” the slayer commented off-handedly, but there was something in his tone that almost resembled pride.

“Dru didn’t like it,” she said flatly, “so she tried to break me the way she’d broken Angelus. She… she killed my entire family, my watcher… I think she might have killed me if she hadn’t gotten cursed after she wiped out half the Gypsy clan.”

“I’ve read about her. ‘Bout how she used to be.”

“How she is again,” Buffy gently corrected. “Spike… be careful. She’s always been a fan of mental anguish. She’ll hit you where it hurts, your friends, your family… Please tell me you’ve never invited her inside your home.”

“Err…”

“Spike!” she admonished.

“Oh, fuck!”

“What?!”

“Mum.”