Samson and the Broken Dolls - chapter five

She comes with him like a child, one that could rip him into shreds and dance on the remains, but one with all the demonic innocence he left behind him in a cave in Africa. "He was a hero. They both were. My boys were heroes."

Sometimes he really wishes he had that innocence back, that immersion in the moment, in the emotion, in the idea that things can change, be better in the move on to the next rush of feeling. But all that burned out of him when his soul lit him up and all he can offer is empathy, distraction, and giving her a focus that might just save her from burning in her turn. "Bloody amazing fight, love. Best dance of my life, that was."

"Dance? I do not understand." She stops and lets him pick up the flame-thrower.

Losing her hand shouldn't hurt the way it does. Losing that crushing hold should make it easier not harder to flick the switch and add door and walls to the flames consuming his friends. But it doesn't, and he's too damned tired and hurt to even attempt to ask why. All he can do is watch the flames grow and lose himself in the memories of loving destruction. "Fight, blue. Dancing, fighting, fucking - all different shades of the same thing, innit?"

She allows him to stop the bursts of flame before she takes his hand once more and with a complete lack of nonsense pulls him away from the ever-growing inferno. "No. The only purpose to fighting is to win, to grind my enemies to powder beneath my feet. Nothing so pointless as moving bodies to music or lust, and far more pleasurable."

"S all something bigger, faster, more powerful, something a bloke can lose himself in and get carried away in the ultimate rush." He remembers the words, remembers feeling it once upon a time. He felt in the alley, he knows he did. Right now, he's numb, but he knows the words have meaning and that if he can break through the cotton wool that's separating him from his life he can taste that joy again. The part of him that never gives up really, really wants to.

Pulling him down the hall doesn't stop her talking. "I am the 'ultimate rush', as you call it. Millions lived and died at my whim, knowing joy that their insignificant deaths could serve My Glory even for a moment.

He knows that feeling. "Had some amazing fights in my time, I have, for good and bad. Ok, brought the roof down on The First by surrendering to the fire and letting it come, but that fight, love, that fight in the alley, that was the best fight I've ever had. The best dance."

She stops at the door to Cordelia's room and looks at him with absolute determination. "It is only the first fight. I will return the pain the Wolf, the Ram and the Hart have inflicted on me a thousand times over and leave them sprawled in the ashes of their power."

He can't help a small smile at the image. "Sounds a good plan. So, that was only a first dance, yeah?"

Her smile's lethal. "Yes."

And the thought of the truly epic battles, the glorious sweep of slaughter against insurmountable odds such a crusade against evil offers, it's tempting. "Bloody tempting."

"And you will help me." She's so sure, so absolutely sure - it's almost irresistible.

But he's got to think of what's his and what's being tortured. "Got to save Angel first."

"First we must stoop to 'extraordinary sneakiness' and conceal ourselves from our enemies so we may destroy them at our whim." She pulls him into Cordelia's room and looks at his look of concern. "And retrieve the vampire."

He nods acceptance and shrugs off the flame-thrower. "Runes?"

"Yes."

She picks up the top papers from the ordered pile on the bedside table. Reading it, she resembles nothing more than a computer taking a scan, if one with a far messier blue screen of death. Suitably omniscient in runes, she casts down the paperwork and works her will. Red-black battle-gear flows away from the whole top half of her body, bulking out the armour around hips and legs, leaving an almost invisible layer on blue-mottled skin far, far paler than his own - a layer that soon begins to solidify into runes across her arms and breasts.

He knows that it's not Fred undressing in front of him, that it's Illyria and that she's has the same unashamed innocence about her nakedness that he used to have about his own - something he misses so much sometimes he could scream. Spike knows he's seen some of it before. He remembers a ghost seeing a dream of Fred through steam when he tried to thank her, for helping him, for believing in him, for trying. It doesn't help, the ghost of the English Gentleman he once was knows he shouldn't be seeing Fred's body this way, and that he most certainly shouldn't be noticing that her nipples are blue and wondering what else is. "This necessary, pet? Can't help thinking that body's previous owner'd be none too keen at you stripping off in front of anyone that's not Wes."

She waits until the runes are a sharp, solid blue before looking up at him. "Irrelevant. It was necessary to form the runes."

"So, you're sorted?" He really, really hopes she is, and even more so that she suits back up again nice and quick. It hurts that she isn't.

Just as it hurts when Illyria's battle-dress creeps its way back over Fred's body, runes and all, scratching at the wound of losing her all over again.

It hurts even more when he tries to obey instructions to, "Remove your upper clothing. I will inscribe your flesh." His hands are clumsy now they've used up a century's advance on his adrenaline output. The broken bones can cope with pushing his coat off, but they make it really hard to pull his T-shirt over his head.

She notices. "You are damaged." And pulls his shirt off for him.

He doesn't know whether to be embarrassed or relieved, and he's too tired to bluster, so he sticks to facts. "Just multiple fractures. I'll heal, given time and blood."

She stands there, head half-cocked and looking at worlds he can only imagine for an age before she looks into his eyes. "I cannot believe I am brought so low. But I... need you and I cannot wait for you to heal -" She uses her gauntlet to part a hairline cut in her cheek, one he hadn't even noticed was there, and lets the blood flow down her face. "Taste."

It seems strange, wrong somehow that her blood's red. It looks too human, too much like Fred's. He can't help thinking it should be something colder, older, something blue. But isn't, its red and its on her cheek, and it's Illyria's hands holding his head - hands that could crush his head like a melon - that almost gently forces him to drink.

Her face, he's hit it, had it rip at him with the loss of its previous owner, but he's never really looked at it before let alone tasted it. Close enough to taste, her skin's not human, but it's not vampire either. It's as pale and unreal in its likeness to life as one of the old bisque dolls he used to get Dru. But the dolls had scents all their own, even before Dru made them her own - made them home. Illyria still lacks a scent of her own. She's a feast to his nose now, but it's all borrowed, nothing that's her. He doesn't know if he'll ever get used to the lack.

But her blood, her blood makes up for all of it. It's sharper than crystal meth, a faster rush than coke, brighter than acid and takes him into orbit. It's beyond anything he's ever had in lifetimes of exploring every substance capable of getting him off his head offered by human and demon worlds alike. If drinking a slayer is a powerful aphrodisiac, tasting the blood of god - there are no words.

Words whirl and dance, racing past him, taunting him with the perfect phrase, the stunning simile, the marvellous metaphor that can even begin to tempt at capturing the taste of the divine on his tongue. But nothing catches the sublime; it's faster than light, faster than life, love, pain and death. Sophia melting into his mouth taunts him with the understanding of infinity while spiralling ever away from him. She's his mum's love, the finest single malt, Geoff Hurst's hat-trick in '66, Buffy's kiss, Dru's eyes and so much more that they're motes in the something effulgent sliding down his throat. Illyria might be a god without a heaven, but if her blood's the greatest heaven a souled vampire can aspire to, at this moment, it's more than enough.

Its certainly more than enough to fix the damage the night's battles have inflicted on him. As he falls backwards onto the mattress, he can dimly feel his cuts closing, and bones knitting together as the ecstasy of sheer primordial power washes through him, supercharging demonic healing with the rocket-fuel of home.

Cool henna tightening into bands of fire on his arms and chest should take him back to the horrors of other signs and portents sliced into his skin, but somehow he feels safe surrounded by her. He knows it's insane, that maybe it's his final slip into the comforts of madness Dru dwells in, but he's never felt more in touch with the truths of the universe. And somehow it feels right that the fire that consumed and remade him should be etched onto his skin for the world to see.

Losing her, as she climbs off him, is like loosing the light that killed him and almost as painful. But the blood working its will inside him combines with the drying, cooling brands to keep him within an ecstasy of creation and destruction that blinds him such that all he can do is ride the storm.

And it's a storm of fire as the hotel dies around him. The blaze crackles with a ravenous hunger, consuming the Hyperion with the enthusiasm of flames for vampires. Sighs of relief from the ghosts as they're released from their long imprisonment goes right through him. He's everywhere and no-where. He is the fire and the dead, and he is going to check out of Hotel California, and God help the beasties he's going to stab with steely knives on his way to what's his because the fire in his blood - it could melt granite.

The creaks and groans of the dying building are punctuated with the bangs and crashes of a god ransacking the room, throwing the spoils of conquest into leather and onto the bed next to him. The impact of cloth against mattress might be a butterfly flapping its wings, but it's a hurricane on skin whose nerves are exposed beyond the wildest dreams of man or demon. He tries to speak, but he's caught beyond speech and even understanding travels through a glass darkly.

Her words are the very essence of music. She is the majesty of Wagner, the smoke in Billie Holliday's pain, the anger of The Clash and the passion of The Pistols, but her directness burns all magnificence to ash in a Gotterdammerung that's purest Illyria. "We must leave this place, yet require much what is stored here. I will seize it, while you heal and allow the runes to finish branding your flesh. Rest. I will return."

He's no choice but to believe her. He can't move if his life and soul depended on it. He knows they do, but with her blood in his veins there's somehow no way he can doubt she will return and that he can rest.

So he does, if passing through the fires of restoration can ever be described as restful. And as vision clears to show a stripped and ransacked hotel room in place of the divine acid trip of all time, he's half-tempted to try and slip back under the influence.

But he can't. Life and vision after the fall won't let him. It's too bright, too crisp, and so is he. His hands feel powerful enough to rip through dragon scale, his legs like he could run for days and never tire, and where there were shattered bones and torn skin there's the strength of ages and the smoothness of silk. He can't help reaching to his brow and feeling for the scar, half-afraid that Illyria's taken everything that's him in healing his body. He's lost too much to lose anything more. Finding the reassuring mark of Cain, he can't help being relieved that she hasn't taken all of him, that he's still himself.

A self that's marked by Illyria and the runes she's decorated him with, but one that's intact and fighting fit. And since that's more than he ever expected to be when he raised his hand and volunteered to bring hell back down on his head, he's happy. He's happier still when he brushes off the remaining dried henna to find striking sienna tattoos, not the burnt black scars he couldn't help expecting from the fire of their birth. He's checking them out as well as he can without a mirror when Illyria returns. "Not bad, huh?"

In Illyria's puzzled silence he really misses Harm.

But what he has is a god holding two overstuffed hold-alls. Bags she drops before throwing him the man's dark purple shirt from the mattress. "Cover the runes."

"T-shirt's fine for me, Highness." But looking at the clammy, blood stained and torn rag, it strikes him that it is, "Possibly not all that inconspicuous."

He gets Fred's smile on Illyria's face and that warm voice saying, "Kinda not, and Cordy did buy that shirt for Groo - and I gotta wonder what happened to him - so y'all gotta know it's a good shirt and you wanna wear it."

It makes him be a good boy and put the thing on. "Time for the second half then, love?"

Her feral grin makes him hunger.

And don his coat for battle. "I've been thinking, if we can get ourselves to Rio, Willow can mojo us through to the Senior Partners and then we beat the crap out of them to get the Great Poof back." Off her look. "Ok, I know it's not exactly the plans for D-Day, but she might help us do that, and, fuck knows, we're going to need some help in getting there at least."

"I bow in supplication to no-one." She gives him a bag that has to contain half of Wes' library.

Spike remembers all too well how hard it was for him to ask for help. "Not asking you to, Highness." He'll expect her to do the impossible, but he'll never ask for miracles.

"Neither does what is mine." She is the essence of absolute, in word, in the narrowing of her eyes, and in her sweep of the flame-thrower over the blood stained T-shirt, stripped bed, and a floor and tables denuded of everything of use.

And he can't say that it's not appealing, but there's no way he's rolling over and begging. "Not yours. Been trying to give that whole thing up. Don't do me any good. My own man now."

But she's so damned sure. "You are mine. You will always be mine."

And there's fire as she throws the emptied flame-thrower onto the bed, and the siren call of heaven still staining a pale cheek. He's so damned. "Then again."

She picks up the other bag and sphinx smiles. "There are compensations?"

As they stride through burning corridors he has to admit, "Oh, yeah." And he can't help remembering another time, another goddess. "Dru told me once I'd touch the face of God. Thought it was all part of her being away with the pixies. Then I thought it was the light, feeling my soul the way I did. I never thought it'd be this."

"I am... adapting." He knows her shame in having to do that all too well.

So he can't help tying to ease her passage. "And bloody well too, pet."

"You are my pet." It's the same words, but her tone is somehow almost teasing.

And he can't help slipping into a low rumble for his own dance-step. "Not a pet."

She smiles, "My companion," and takes his free hand to pull him down the stairs and into the lobby, showered with sparks all the way. But he's still damp enough to be safe, and rushing through the fire without burning helps quench the cinders of fear left over from his flash frying. He can't help grinning as they run out the front door of the hotel creaking and groaning in its death-throws.

They take a moment to look at the growing pyre. He can't help exulting that he's passed through the crucible, but he knows that it was once Fred's home and it's saving what she loved within the blaze. "You going to miss it?"

Confusion's writ large in Illyria's eyes and the echoes of grief shades the God King's voice in all her need to move forward to vengeance. "Let it burn."