Waiting on a Friend - Part Five
NOTES AND SUMMARY: This chapter is the Night before Spike and Giles's Research Trip to the British Library and the hidden river below it.
Night-mist rose from the dark water, making his bones ache. He could hear the Thames slapping against the wall below. In the lamp-light, though, something sparkled on the South Bank Pier. Something worth money, maybe?
The vagrant glanced at the lights of the Royal Festival Hall behind him. He was supposed to meet a contact there-- knew someone who knew someone, could find a place to doss. But the sparkling object drew his eyes. What if he could make his own way with this 'found' thing? Just laying there, right. No need for charity or sleeping rough if he could recover treasure. He dropped his backpack in an inconspicuous place, then made his move.
He cracked the lock on the pier gate and slunk in. His object glittered even more the closer he came, and a grin cracked his worn face. His lucky night, yeah.
The first and second steps onto the walkway were easy, but then it was as if the water rose up through the rails to chew on his trainers. He grabbed for balance, but the chewing of the waves didn't stop-- he slipped. The water pulled at him, and he went over and down, down, down--through to Below. No time to scream.
The backpack rustled in a sudden gust of wind. The aluminium can, which had sparkled so in the lamp-light, blew into the river.
***
He splashed water on his face then dried it on his sleeve. Right, then.
"Come out of the bathroom, Spike. We want to see your new look." Buffy's voice came all too clearly through the closed door.
"Yeah, Spike! Reveal yourself!" Dawn said.
His fingers gripped the basin rim. 'Reveal himself'-- Bit had no bloody idea. Not that William would have worn the oversized, misshapen blue jumper (found in Giles's closet, part of what Rupes called 'the Winter 1999 'Drinking-Heavily' Collection') or the battered lace-ups Anya had bought him at Oxfam. Besides, he wasn't that man any more.
It terrified him how easily he could feel like that man again.
Fine. He was just playing a part, just like Spike had once been a character he'd created (assisted by bloodlust, vanished repression, and bone-deep fear of Angelus). Suit the action to the word, the word to the action. He shook out his poofy hair so a lock flopped into his eyes, slumped a little, and quietly opened the door.
Seated on the bed, his audience clasped their girlish hands to their bosoms and sighed in mock-ecstasy. Real clowns they were. He half-smiled-- Christ, he remembered when his every smile had been an apology-- and said, "So what do you reckon, m'dears?"
Dawn surveyed him closely. "Well. You certainly don't look like yourself." He couldn't hold back a bitter little chuckle. "I think you'll pass."
Buffy stopped her fluttering and giggling; she just stared. He looked away, anxious not to be pinned down or analyzed, then swallowed and looked back at her.
Silence. Then Buffy said, "Dawn. Leave us alone, please?"
"You're going to jump him or something, aren't you. Geez, Buffy, it's like I can never turn off the porn channel, living with you guys." When Buffy glared, Dawn amended it to "Well, only soft-core porn in front of me. And I'm learning so much, really."
"Can't express fully my sense of obligation, Dawn. But I thank you," Spike said.
Dawn grinned. "Well, aren't you getting all Inside-the-Actor's-Studio." She got up and announced, "Remember, Buffy, you and Wes are going on patrol in a few? Don't allow yourself to be seduced by the power of William, Scholar Boy." In the words of my beloved, Spike thought, as if.
When the guest-room door shut behind her, Buffy and Spike looked at each other. She said, "Why are you so scared, honey?"
"What?" The hell?
"Come here." He sat down beside her, and she took his hand. Tracing the lines on his palm-- heart-line short, life-line long, irony priceless-- she said, "I can feel your moods sometime. When I turn off my own head and listen to what you don't say. Spike, I can feel that you're unhappy about this. Scared."
"Well." She could sense his feelings? No added terror there, damn it.
"Do you want me to do the investigation instead? I knew you and Giles were trying to cut me out of serious action, the way you wouldn't answer my questions. It's a job that requires the Slayer, isn't it." Her eyes were huge and serious--
Which was the only reason he didn't break something over her pretty head. "No, Buffy, it fucking is not!" Sod William, he thought as he sprung up to pace, I need to move. He took a lap around the space, fighting down the urge to smash his foot repeatedly into the corner armoire. Once sure he wouldn't hit something, he turned to her. "First: I told you the facts, Buffy, it's just bloody research, stop accusing me of trying to cut you out! Second: you've just demonstrated why Rupert and I don't always give you chapter and verse. 'Cause you think every damned dirty job in the world is yours, which is just bollocks."
So much for taking an anger time-out. She looked as though he'd slapped her. "Spike, no, I don't..."
He knelt at her side, taking her hands. "Once when I was being a nasty git to you, should have been staked, I told you that you were in love with being a martyr. Those were horrible, hateful words, and they weren't true. But they weren't a lie, either. You're so strong, you've taken on so much in your life, lives--" and he entwined their fingers-- "that you think you have to protect everyone and everything in the whole damn universe. You don't. I love that you're a hero, Buffy. But this is MY job."
Fabulous, she was crying. One guilt-headache coming right up, sir, and would you like a being-a-bastard stomachache to acccompany that? "Buffy. Love, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, I shouldn't have said that--"
"Why?" Her fingers pressed his strongly, then detached. She reached across the bed for a tissue. Not looking at him, she said, "The thing I can always count on with you, Spike, is that when it comes down to it you tell me the truth. Even when I hate you for it."
"Yeah. Well, about that." What had he done to deserve this reputation for truth-telling? Worse, why did he feel so bloody compelled to follow through? Spike ran his fingers through his mop of hair, then said, "Let me explain why I really was scared when I walked in here." She wiped her eyes, then looked at him steadily.
"Remember that night I told you what purported to be my history? 'I've always been bad'?" She nodded. He waved down at his shapeless clothes, then pushed his spectacles higher on his nose. "I meant 'bad at living.' Meet William Bennet, love. An ineffectual, bookish prat who knew sod-all about what the world, or women, or he himself was really like. I've been dead afraid if I put on these clothes and this attitude, he'd come back."
***
Dawn was afraid to go into the kitchen. She knew those noises-- sighs and odd thumps in the middle of silence. Giles and Anya probably would use Spike and Buffy's standard excuse, but she knew what dishwashers sounded like, people, and that was no dishwasher. Let me take this pause, she thought, to be creeped out by the idea of my old but attractive father-figure and his vengeance demon doing nasty sex things on their kitchen table. Romance on the Thames was one thing, but this? Ick.
Dawn stood in the hallway, pondering her options. Where was Wes? He should be ready for patrol by now-- maybe he'd want to play a video game or something while he waited for Buffy to stop groping her boyfriend. Actually, they might have to play two.
Then that funny English double-ring of the phone went off. There was a muffled male "Sod a dog," Anya's giggle, and, a few long seconds later, Giles's barked "Giles." Which struck Dawn as hilarious, the repetition in her head? Then Giles said, "I'll see if he's available."
Damn. No time to run-- she was going to be caught standing outside a room listening to her hosts have sex, which she was pretty sure Mom would have called bad manners.
Giles, rumpled and with unbuttoned shirt, poked his head around the kitchen door and saw her frozen in the hall. He turned red, stammered, "Dawn! Did you--? Sorry, um, sorry." Pulling himself together, he said, "Here you go, please. It's some woman for Wesley, wouldn't give her name," and threw her the cordless phone. "And no need to hurry in bringing the phone back downstairs."
"Yes, Giles, whatever you say, Giles," she replied. He retreated back to the kitchen and wherever he was in the nasty-sex-thing process. "I'll expect more presents for this!" she said loudly, then ran up the stairs toward the top of the house, calling Wesley's name.
He was coming outside his room when she got to his floor, slipping a card into his back pocket as he did so. "Yes, Dawn, you bellowed?"
"Phone for you. Woman, no idea who, Giles said." Wesley looked profoundly suspicious, but he took the receiver anyway. After he said his name, he listened for like 30 seconds, then clicked off without speaking at all. Dawn hadn't seen a face look that empty since, well, last spring.
He took the card out of his pocket and crumpled it up, then threw it back into his room. After he watched it fall, he turned back to Dawn and said in a normal voice, "Thank you, Dawnie. Now-- where's that sister of yours? We should get going-- Brompton Cemetery awaits."
***
Lilah hung up the phone. That should get him going, she thought, and she stretched out on the hotel bed and sighed.
The comforter was satiny-smooth underneath her fingers, and she pleated a fold in it. Then she folded again, layers enough to rub together, making a silky sound. She needed the smoothness after that rough ride on the Thames.
The Bruxit demon had started off slowly, noting a few piers that seemed more threatening than others. The further west they got-- "going toward Teddington, Tide-End-Town," said Kemp the pilot-- the twitchier the demon became, the higher the chop on the river.
"It's all going to rise, it's all going to wash away," the demon finally had growled. He'd jumped off the boat at Chelsea Harbour, running as fast as he could.
Lilah admitted it: she was worried. Not an emotion for which she was paid, not one she enjoyed feeling, but there it was. Nothing else explained her call to Wesley. Once she'd heard that smooth-rough voice on the line, she'd said, "My darling Wesley. New evidence obtained by Wolfram and Hart suggests that a tide of death will be sweeping over London by week-end. Want to run away with me?"
She'd expected the angry click on the other end of the line. Still, at least she'd warned him. After all, how could she torment him if he were dead?
***
Buffy watched
Wesley pay off the taxi-driver, then she turned to survey the cemetery. In her experience, graveyards did not have little plaques on railings, identifying them as part of the Royal Parks system. A cemetery as a park-- this was so another country.
Then somehow she heard in her mind Spike's voice, telling her about William, the man he'd once been. She couldn't believe how stupid she was, that she'd just accepted his first story and never asked about the way his accent changed, the odd things he knew, his bond with Giles. Her dangerous, manic, loving vampire Spike as scholar-poet ("sodding horrible poet," he'd clarified) William.
This was so another country.
"Come on, Buffy." Wesley motioned to her to follow him. He went round a corner to a hidden entrance, then pulled out a key and opened the gate. "Elton didn't give me much-- didn't want to surrender the files, much less the key-- but he did tell me that most of the activity was centered on the chapel areas here, south of the Middle Walk. There've been a couple of kills this week." Buffy walked in, and he shut the door behind them.
Amazing. So many gravestones and memorials were crammed together, but in an oddly formal pattern. In the near distance, a domed structure gleamed under the moon. Even the scent of grass was different from her Sunnydale patrol areas. But Buffy knew how to do this job. She started to move in, to take her territory. At least this was familiar.
"One more thing you should know about the cemetery, Buffy. It seems that--"
"Wesley." She turned on him. "Do you have any more information about the nature or location of our whole seven vampires we'll be dusting this evening?" He shook his head. "Then shut up and let me work, 'k?"
He hesitated, then gave an odd little grin. "You go right ahead."
He was close on her heels as she patrolled through the rows, listening and looking around her. A moan, a rustle-- there. Two figures grappled in a pool of shadow, and she ran toward them. Her footsteps pounded on the grass, and she leapt, stake raised, ready to kick some vampire ass.
Except neither was a vampire. The two men so closely wrapped together screamed when she jumped in. Oh my God. Oh. My. God. "Sorry, damn, I'm so sorry, really, didn't mean to interrupt..." Not listening to her stammered protests, they pulled up trousers and fled down the Central Avenue.
Oh. My. God. They were-- this must be-- she whirled around to see Wesley some distance behind her. He was perched on a tombstone, his head in his hands, shoulders shaking.
She paced toward him. "That's what you were trying to tell me, wasn't it. To be specially careful because this is a place where gay guys cruise or something."
Muffled, but in that maddeningly reasonable Moo People tone, he said, "Yes. Famous for it."
"But you just let me charge forward because I told you to be quiet."
"Well, Buffy." He lifted his head and smiled. "I wouldn't want to challenge your authority."
"Uh-huh. I have just one thing to say to you, Wesley Wyndham-Pryce. In my considered opinion, All. Watchers. SUCK!"
Stupid jerk fell off the tombstone, he was laughing so hard. She couldn't help but giggle, too, and she joined him on the grass. "'Shut up and let me work, 'k'?" he parroted. Then the two of them grabbed each other and roared.
If they both seemed a little hysterical to her ears, she wouldn't tell anyone.
***
"I can't believe he hasn't told anyone." Anya pulled Rupert's arm more tightly around her waist, then snuggled into her pillow.
Giles kissed the back of her neck. This was the part of their lives together he liked best: wrapped up in their bed, in the dark. (Although kitchen romps certainly had their place, mind you.) His straightforward darling never needed much prompting to tell him what was on her mind, but she seemed even freer at times like these. "Were you worried about Spike knowing, Anya?"
"Not really." She pushed one of her feet back between his ankles. "He kept quiet a very long time about sleeping with Buffy. He can be trusted. Which just sounds wrong when you say it out loud."
"Hmm. Of course he has been dropping hints like a madman for two days, thank heavens no one ever listens properly to him." He still could feel tension in her spine. One more possibility to explore, then. "What does worry you, darling?"
"Your mission." She kissed the hand holding hers. "It's just-- Rupie, the river's so angry and there's so much screaming for blood and your assignment has to do with the Thames, and I'm scared."
"You know we're just researching? And Spike and I have every reason to be careful." He turned her around in his arms, so he could look in her eyes. He had to make sure she believed him.
"Yes, Rupert. You'll be back home, safe and sound, before Friday." Her fingers caressed his face as she recited the words.
He caught one hand and pressed his lips to the palm. "Go on, say the word, darling. There's no jinx here, and I'm not a weak little boy." He kissed her deeply before saying, slowly and seriously, "I'll be back home, safe and sound, before our wedding."