Welcome to the Hellmouth

Author's Notes: As promised, Dru and Angel will soon be gone. I now present to you, the start of Spuffy!


The Kind That Hurts


He should have known.

The previous day could not possibly have been worse; he had followed some demon child to the Mistress, had a little tiff with the vampire which had ended with him lying face down in a pool of water, a bite wound on his throat, deader than the dead things he slayed each night. Willow had saved his life, breathed air back into his lungs after pushing the water out, and in the end, he had killed the vampire bitch. Granted, she had put up one Hell of a fight, but he had never felt so strong in his life, ironic given the fact that he had died.

He had made certain that she couldn’t rise again, grinding her bones into powder finer than the most expensive cocaine in a fit of sudden fury and strength he hadn’t known he possessed. He had destroyed the table in the library, but his father had wept with joy and embraced him rather than screaming.

Instead of accompanying Willow and Xander to the Bronze, he had made yet another in his growing list of mistakes – he had gone home with Drusilla.

He had been dazed and desperate for something to ground him to the mortal world, for it seemed that some part of him wished he had remained dead. Every slayer had a death wish, or so he thought. He’d wanted to die again, and he had. At least, it had felt a bit like dying and being reborn, all that poncy boy nonsense.

While he had been nervous and insecure at first, he’d thought he’d performed well. Dru had been very encouraging and patient with him, vocal and appreciative, and so he’d assumed that he’d done things properly. Evidently, he’d been wrong, for he’d woken in bed alone. It had been bothering him the entire day, and now, he would confront her. There had to be some kind of rational explanation for it; Dru wouldn’t just leave, not after that.

Pacing the length of the un-living room of Drusilla’s apartment, he lit his tenth cigarette of the hour and dragged a hand through his disorderly hair. No, no, there was a reason for her sudden disappearance, though it might not be a good reason. Something could have come up, something terrible, that needed her immediate attention. That, he thought, must be the reason she had left him.

He was jarred from his reverie when the door opened and Drusilla entered, looking so calm and casual that he felt the sudden urge to shout at her for no apparent reason. Perhaps death had driven him off the deep end.

A secretive smile playing at the corners of her lips, Drusilla queried, “What are you doing here?”

“You just left,” Spike blurted out unintentionally. He hadn’t meant to sound so lost and dejected.

“Yeah,” she replied lightly, “like I really wanted to stick around after that.” Her flat onyx eyes never left Spike’s wounded blue ones; she wanted to see the pain fill him.

“What?” he asked, his voice little more than a startled whisper.

Laughing haughtily, the brunette shook her head in disbelief. “You have much to learn about women, young William, although I suppose you proved that last night.”

“What are you saying?”

“Let’s not make an issue out of it, all right? In fact, let us never speak of it again. It happened,” she answered coldly.

“I… I don’t understand.” He crushed out his cigarette in a nearly empty can of Dr. Pepper, listening to the soft hiss as the liquid extinguished the embers. He pitied the dead cigarette – he knew how it felt to be snuffed out. “Was it m-me? Was I… not good?”

“You were great, really. I thought you were a pro. It was a good time, you mustn’t make it into a big deal.” Drusilla watched with glee as the slayer visibly shrank, the brilliant fire in his eyes dimming with his defeat. It was the most exquisite he had ever looked.

“It is a big deal!” he protested.

There was more to him than she had previously thought, and the brunette vampire smirked. Breaking this one would be a challenge, so much more difficult than Liam had been. Choosing her words carefully to inflict the most damage, she continued, “It’s… what? Bells ringing, fireworks, a dulcet choir of pretty little birdies? Please, William, it isn’t as though I’ve never been there before. I should have known you wouldn't be able to handle it.” To strengthen the pain of her words, she touched his cheek gently, inwardly rejoicing when he recoiled.

“Don’t touch me,” he spat, backing away from her as though he had been scalded. A muscle in his jaw ticked with the effort it took to contain his rage, and he shoved his cigarettes into the pocket of his duster and stormed toward the door.

Drusilla, eager to get in one final dig before the slayer left, added flippantly, “I’ll call you.” The glass in the few windows in the apartment rattled when the slamming of a door was her only response. Alone and free of the boy’s weak-minded prattling, the vampire laughed.

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Spike had been in the cemetery for nearly three hours. Even the obliteration of a mostly harmless vengeance demon and several vampires had given him no satisfaction, and he was beginning to wish he could die again, for good this time.

He had given Drusilla everything he had to give, his trust, his love, his friendship, his innocence, and she had taken freely, drained him of those things as eagerly as she had once drained the blood of humans. Perhaps she had never stopped drinking from them. For all he knew, she had lied to him from the first moment she had seen him.

Her previous words came back to haunt him, and he realized too late how accurate they were. She had never said she was his friend. That bitch had played him for a fool; she had even managed to convince his father that having a soul made her different from other demons. The fact that she had once saved his mother’s life no longer mattered – she had probably done that in the hope of one day using it against him. As she had said, she had been watching him since before he’d been born.

“That stupid fucking bitch!” he bellowed, shattering a headstone with a solid kick. As the marble monument crumbled to the ground, he dragged a hand over his face, fighting the inevitable tears. He had wept immediately after leaving Drusilla’s apartment and didn’t look forward to doing it again.

“Usually, when you’re hunting for vampires, the point is to remain hidden, not to advertise that you’re here.”

Glancing up from Lars Halstrom’s headstone, the slayer finally saw Buffy. She looked paler than usual, and her bright green eyes were slightly swollen and rimmed with red. Spike vaguely wondered what it took to make a soulless demon bitch cry. “Go home, Buffy.”

“While she’s out there lurking around, waiting for the right moment to make a meal out of you? I don’t think so,” the blonde vampire replied, hopping up to perch on a headstone.

“I wish she’d killed me,” he muttered as he lit a cigarette.

Rolling her eyes, Buffy shook her head vehemently. “Trust me, you don’t. She likes to play with her food. You need to go see your watcher right now, Spike. Drusilla’s lost her soul; you’re not safe.”

“She… what?!” Spike demanded, stepping away from the demolished headstone.

“Angelus… he said you were going to die and nearly drained me to keep me from helping, but that’s a non-issue here. The point is, he woke me up with his babbling about how the nasty slayer was still alive, but that his mummy had gotten rid of the bad thing inside her,” she explained. “I had Wesley check it out with Jenny Calendar, and apparently, when the Gypsies cursed her, they had a… a clause in the curse.”

Confused, weary, and more than a little intrigued, the slayer inquired, “What kind of clause?”

“If Drusilla ever experienced a single moment of perfect happiness, she’d lose her soul. You must be quite an athlete if you could make someone as miserable as she is perfectly happy.”

“Shut up!” It was so much to process, too much.

“I’m sorry,” the vampire whispered sincerely. “I… I never thought to check, to investigate it. If I’d had any idea, I would have had Wesley ask around…”

“Who the bloody, buggering Hell is Wesley?!”

“Ask your father,” Buffy replied. “He’s a fellow watcher.”

His eyes widening with shock, Spike laughed bitterly. She was either lying, or this Wesley bloke was a few cards short of a deck. “Why would a watcher help a vampire?”

“Later,” she vowed. “I’ll explain it later, but right now, you have to ask your father what Drusilla has done in the past, the way she hunts and tortures and kills. Read it for yourself, but you have to know the kind of demon she is.”

“She’s the kind of demon you all are,” the slayer bit out in between heavy drags from his cigarette.

“That isn’t true,” she said sadly. “You’re smoking more than usual.”

“I’m in pain! You know, the kind that hurts!”

“Aren’t we all?”

Enraged, Spike crushed his cigarette out beneath the toe of his boot, grinding it into the ground far longer than necessary to put it out. “Don’t be bloody cryptic with me. Don’t be like… like her.”

“I’m nothing like her, Spike, nothing at all. How… what do you know about me?” she questioned.

“Not much,” he replied. “Only what Dru told me, and that wasn’t really anything.”

“Walk with me, I’ll explain things, and if you don’t believe me, you can ask your father.”

“Don’t really have anythin’ else to do right now… Don’t see the harm in a walk,” he murmured as he lit yet another cigarette. “Let’s walk.”

And so, in hindsight, he really should have known that Drusilla had lost her soul.