I dreamed that I was watching the two-hour BtVS series finale. The only bits I remember are:
- Lindsey McDonald playing his guitar and singing a gorgeous country song to entertain an airplane full of passengers. He looked delighted, adorable boy.
- Giles is meeting with a bunch of watchers. A guy in disguise comes and tries to extort money from them, then holds them hostage. He puts all the watchers into some sort of painful force-field, except Giles, who blinks as he realizes he's not being tortured. He goes over to the guy, who removes his magical glamour, and Giles gets a look of shock and breathes, "Evan,*" with a strange, intense mix of recognition, remembrance, and joy. And then we get, at last, the canonical revelation of Giles's bisexuality, as the two of them roll around in a fountain fully clothed, in a gloriously long, erotic, and semi-comical reunion scene of shagging. (*Not actually Evan, but I couldn't remember the dream name; not Ethan either. Sorry. {g})
- Something to do with Buffy and the entire gang dressed in colonial gear, for reasons I'm unclear on but which are related to a mission. They end up protecting some guy--a local football star, I think--from a crowd of eager fans, and there's this great, angsty, thematic moment when the audience is meant to see the ironic contrast of how the fans clamor frantically for the football guy, when it's really Buffy et al who've just saved the world, and we realize that Buffy et al are anonymous heroes, and always will be.
- Spike, off somewhere, having a vamp minion whip him as a form of almost religious penance for his own evil. Gah. I think I just shorted out my brain remembering that.
In other Buffyish news, here's the "mystical rewrite" story I mentioned yesterday. Which is not so much a story as yet another snippet. At the end are some story notes for an AUish thing I envisioned but didn't write--sort of an alternate way for Spike to get a soul. I'd still kind of like to do something with that idea.
Beach: by SpikenTe, August 2000. Disclaimers: If they belonged to us you wouldn't see us very often. / Spoilers: Early 4th season-ness. / Ratings Note: PG-13. / Summary: Spike and Xander hang out at the beach. /
Field: by Anna, March 2002. Disclaimers: Yadda, yadda. Spoilers: none at all. AU, NC-17. Summary: Spike and Xander in a field.
***
Spike's body was hard almost everywhere, mannequin hard, mannequin white. Laid here in the grassy field, he almost looked like a found object, something stripped naked--could you say of a mannequin that it was naked?--and abandoned behind a boutique. You'd need to do a lot of damage for that skin to show scars, Xander thought. And there were a few. Scars after death, or before. He hadn't yet asked about all of them, but now he looked and touched idly. Strange firmness of vampire skin--smoother than skin should be. Not exactly rubbery, but more resilient than human skin. It felt thicker, cooler too. As if it would gel around a knife blade.
"Where'd you get this?" Xander asked, running a gentle finger down the center of Spike's chest, feeling knobs of bone under the flesh. The scar was thin, white against white. Looked like an autopsy scar, but how likely was that? He wasn't sure.
Spike turned his head toward Xander. His hair had spilled from its braid, loosened by earlier eagerness, and a stalk of grass was caught in the thick strands. "Big nasty with a two-foot claw carved me open proper. Somewhere in Asia, sixty, seventy years back. Would've spilled my guts literally if Dru hadn't been there. Nearly nicked the heart, too."
His voice was doing that thing. That thing Xander couldn't get used to. He'd been honed on the flat sharp edge of Spike's voice, its sarcastic inflections, its anger; had come to expect that. And now the vampire had this whole husky, melodious thing going on that made Xander's belly heat. When he talked normally, what seemed normal for him now, his voice was...it was real. Its edge blunted, because conversation between them was not a duel anymore. Spike no longer spoke to draw blood. He sounded most like his old self when ironic or amused. He was ironic far more often than amused. Spike didn't have a lot to smirk or smile or laugh about these days.
Well, yeah, but...he has me, thought Xander. He rested his palm flat against Spike's chest, over his unbeating heart, and Spike closed his eyes as if accepting a benediction. Past the horizon of his body lay a range of distant mountains, dwarfed by sky. Everything was in shades of grey out here. Clouds slid restlessly over the earth; another thunderstorm seemed to be massing, the light dimming except where flares of hidden sun teased nooks and crannies of cloud. Forty-two days since they'd seen the sun uncovered.
Xander hated this place, except when he kind of loved it.
The sunlight was as pale as Spike and made the vampire look a little faded, as pale as a dead person should be. Not a mannequin, but what he was. Corpselike. The color of soap. And yet he glowed strangely against the grass, under the heavy greyness of the sky, and Xander had just finished with him. And he wanted more, again, now. Spike was one of the few things real in this unreal place and Xander knew that he'd seized on him as a kind of talisman. And to see Spike outside in daylight, laid on the small, rough blanket, staring now up into the sky. It was...
It just was.
"Give my right lung for a fag," Spike murmured, words issued as if he didn't even have enough energy to sigh.
Smoking. Xander had never gotten that. "I'm not touching that one."
"Lucky Strike." Which sounded like an invocation to heaven, where Spike's gaze remained turned.
Xander ran his palm down Spike's belly, around his resting genitals, down to cup an inner thigh. Spike caught breath with a sound like a match-head flaring, and Xander slung one leg over him, rolled over onto his body and entrenched himself, half on, half off, dick pressed just inside the wishbone of those slim hips. His face hovered close to Spike's, the space between them briefly charged like the buffer between opposing magnetic poles. Lips over lips, eyes looking into eyes, as a cool breeze from the field rippled over his naked back and made him shiver.
He twisted his hips, felt Spike stir. "Another round then?" he asked Xander. And that small hint of lips, that tiny movement, told Xander he'd been given something to smile about.
Instead of answering, Xander kissed him. To kiss Spike was a dry wet coolness and a mouthful of heat. A vampire is by nature contradictory. A vampire is by nature libidinous and wicked and untiring, too, and even if a cross of gold could burn the wickedness out, it left an entire body of residual sin, and Xander wasn't unhappy with that. A vampire is by nature inventive. Vampires also have four arms and twenty fingers, or tentacles or something, because how else could you explain what he was doing right now?
Xander groaned as a brightness inside him flared to yearning, and he shoved his hips hard and lifted his head, offering his neck to Spike, who mauled him with lips and tongue and blunt teeth, never breaking the skin. Dinner had become fetish, hunger desire, and the way he grappled with Xander--teeth in Xander's shoulder now, hands grasping him in escalating rhythms--was a kind of passionate martyrdom. The lust of starvation. A terrible thought, if you looked at it too close, and Xander hoped they'd find some rabbits in the tall grass before nightfall.
Hope was a real word, a big wash of feeling over Xander's entire body, like longing. Like the way he used to feel with Anya, before they'd been lost and stranded here. Rising lust always felt so much like love, and now hope felt like desperation, a knifing need in his dick. He didn't want Spike to be hungry, to feel this kind of wild desperation--for food, not sex--and be unable to fill it.
A terrible thought, a chill like the breeze on his back while between them heat kindled, like the fire that Giles had probably already built thirty yards away, on the far side of the massive rocks. Nightfall, fire, food, nightmares, desire, fire, food--
--and Xander thrust and groaned, feeling his thoughts burn away and his body tremble.
"God," said Spike, and in the sharpness of his voice Xander could hear the echo of anger, of the raging thing Spike used to be, but it was shaped to new words. "Oh god, Xander." His hands moved fiercely on Xander, kneading him, dragging him in. Their dicks were skidding together now, heads hot and messy, smearing their bellies, and Xander kept rearing back, trying to find the perfect angle, the needle due North, it existed somewhere, that perfect, perfect alignment. If he
could just--*oh, god, vampire*, he thought, opening his eyes and seeing Spike's own eyes half-shut with pleasure, his head rolling from side to side, the mane of his hair expanding like a spill of honey--and Spike's face pretended to human even now, but Xander could never forget, and it was gripping him tightly, that knowledge, like a sweet fist on his dick, and he cried out and felt himself spilling, spilling, falling, met by Spike, rising and crying.
Real tears. Because that was what redemption did to you.
***
Notes:
A portal tumble into an AU...
As they are fighting off bandits, Spike realizes his chip no longer works. He goes to it with gusto, and takes them out (non-fatally) while the others (Xander and Giles) scramble. Afterwards they stare at him. He loots the unconscious men for valuables, looks up. Says, what? I'm not going to eat *you*.
Giles: You say that now. But when you get hungry one day, or angry at us, you may change your mind.
Spike: I can control myself, you know. I have will-power.
Giles: I don't doubt that. But you also have will. You can change your mind on a whim, Spike. Nothing holds you back.
Spike: Self-interest, mate.
Giles: I'm afraid that's not good enough.
Spike: That's all there *is*, Rupert. All right, not so. Four things in the world have power over you--morality, affection, shackles, and self-interest. Got no morals, got no affection for you, my shackles are off, and all that's left is self-interest. But that's no less than what your sort operate on.
Giles: What is my sort.
Spike: Humans.
Giles: Ah. Of course.
Spike: [manifesto on human self-interest]
Giles: All that aside, Spike, we can't trust you. And even if we trusted you not to feed off us, there is nothing to keep you from feeding off others. And lying to us about it.
Spike: Yeah? So if you believe that, take me out now. If you have the stones to try.
Giles: I wish I could. [leaves him instead]
Spike follows Giles and Xander after they abandon him in "Dark Pylea." Eventually he barges into their room at some rough inn, says, tough luck, I'm here. What are you going to do about it? Kill me? Here's a stake. He gives it to Giles, melodramatically bares his chest.
Giles: Spike, why *are* you here? [finally driven to real curiousity, frustration, temper, challenge] Your martyr complex is not without its sick fascination, but it's hardly self-interest to invite your own death.
Spike: Well, I'm manipulating you, ain't I? 'Cause I know you won't do it. Get with the program, Rupe.
Giles: [looking at him] You really want to stay?
Spike: How else am I going to get home if not by tagging along with you two?
Giles: If you want to stay, you'll have to wear this. [dangles a cross]
Spike: Are you starkers? That'll kill me. Not fast, but...oh, I get it. Bit sadistic, that.
Giles: Perhaps it will kill you. Perhaps not.
Spike: Pain and slow poison or sudden poof of dust, one way or the other, yeah, it will.
Giles: Spike, do you know why crosses and holy water burn vampires?
Spike: Wait. Know this one. Because we're the walking undead, demons from the depths of hell?
Giles: If that were true, such relics would burn other demons too. No. Common understanding has it that they burn because the vessel you inhabit, this body, has been made a sacrilege. [waits for a beat]
Spike: Okay, dramatic pause. Drop your shoe. Take it there's an uncommon understanding?
Giles: Yes. Amusingly enough, it's psychosomatic. In a magical sense, but still...in the mind.
Spike: Pardon?
Giles: You're an intelligent creature, cast in human form, with all the memories of your host. You respond to what you recognize as sacred, even if consciously you scorn it. Across cultures, different reglious iconography has varying effects on vampires. The more that crosses have become widely recognized as traditional symbols of the sacred, the more they've been empowered. The same power could be invested in any symbol. The burning is in you.
Spike: That's a load of...I don't buy it. [gesturing] Power's in that bit of metal there.
Giles: Spike, what I have to tell you no vampire has ever known, and no slayer. Only a handful of watchers know, a few per generation.... [Kind of a grim reluctance, fierce cold stare.] There is that in you which can be redeemed. If you have the strength for it.
Spike: [a moment's flare of something, then, flatly:] Not possible.
Giles: Not possible on a grand scale, no. Asylums across nations full of restrained vampires, fed on blood, cared for and counseled with crosses by an army of dedicated priests--you can see why we keep the secret. That will never come to pass. And not all vampires are open to redemption.
Spike: But what, you think I am? Bollocks. You know me.
Giles: [challenging] Why are you *here*, Spike?
Spike: [rolling eyes] Self-interest. [scoffing] But if I'm gonna get a lecture [missionary], forget it. [But hard as he is, there's a chink in his armor, and he doesn't move. Staring at the chain.]
Giles: If you want to stay, you'll wear this.
Spike: And that's all it takes...you're mad. You could have tied me up years ago, hung that from my neck, had your missionary will with me.
Giles: [smooth, low, and scarily cool] But I have no missionary zeal, Spike. I don't like vampires. I have no interest in dedicating my powers to a mission of redemption for your kind. I believe that it is better for the original soul to be released [some better word] by the body's return to dust, rather than to inhabit the earth as a walking travesty of humanity. I believe in eradicating the cause, the evil, the contagion--not in finding a home for it in our world.
Spike: You might want to punch up your sales pitch.
Giles: I wouldn't hold out this hope to you, but...here we are. We can't kill you and we can't shake you, and you are a risk to the humanity of this universe.
Spike: Told you--
Giles: If you mean it... [holds cross closer, Spike flinches] You are persistent, stubborn, willful. You feel great love. You've come to spurn and kill your own kind, given aid and comfort to those who should be your enemies. What you are now is unnatural and you know this.
Spike, becoming mesmerized....
Time goes by. There is great pain at first, and feverish sickness, like an infection in the skin, radiating from where it rests against his chest. He looks gravely ill, sallow, miserable. Then this passes off a bit and into a chronic, low-grade fever, a burning ache, an exquisitely mortifying pain that is half-pleasure, ecstasy. As it sinks into him and takes him over, he begins to feel himself waking up, physically, emotionally, spiritually, as if his entire self is a limb that has been asleep, atrophied.
Pain, pain, and then tingling sensations as he feels wonder, genuine kindness, laughter, moments of joy, as he returns to a boundless love of all that is human and natural--with which comes in time great anguish, nightmares, grief, shame.
Oh, and for those who don't religiously track my old entries for new comments (what's wrong with you?! {g}), here's some of the stuff from my hard drive I've been dredging up: my little Snape/Harry thing, and a bit of Stargate slavery here and here.
- Lindsey McDonald playing his guitar and singing a gorgeous country song to entertain an airplane full of passengers. He looked delighted, adorable boy.
- Giles is meeting with a bunch of watchers. A guy in disguise comes and tries to extort money from them, then holds them hostage. He puts all the watchers into some sort of painful force-field, except Giles, who blinks as he realizes he's not being tortured. He goes over to the guy, who removes his magical glamour, and Giles gets a look of shock and breathes, "Evan,*" with a strange, intense mix of recognition, remembrance, and joy. And then we get, at last, the canonical revelation of Giles's bisexuality, as the two of them roll around in a fountain fully clothed, in a gloriously long, erotic, and semi-comical reunion scene of shagging. (*Not actually Evan, but I couldn't remember the dream name; not Ethan either. Sorry. {g})
- Something to do with Buffy and the entire gang dressed in colonial gear, for reasons I'm unclear on but which are related to a mission. They end up protecting some guy--a local football star, I think--from a crowd of eager fans, and there's this great, angsty, thematic moment when the audience is meant to see the ironic contrast of how the fans clamor frantically for the football guy, when it's really Buffy et al who've just saved the world, and we realize that Buffy et al are anonymous heroes, and always will be.
- Spike, off somewhere, having a vamp minion whip him as a form of almost religious penance for his own evil. Gah. I think I just shorted out my brain remembering that.
In other Buffyish news, here's the "mystical rewrite" story I mentioned yesterday. Which is not so much a story as yet another snippet. At the end are some story notes for an AUish thing I envisioned but didn't write--sort of an alternate way for Spike to get a soul. I'd still kind of like to do something with that idea.
Beach: by SpikenTe, August 2000. Disclaimers: If they belonged to us you wouldn't see us very often. / Spoilers: Early 4th season-ness. / Ratings Note: PG-13. / Summary: Spike and Xander hang out at the beach. /
Field: by Anna, March 2002. Disclaimers: Yadda, yadda. Spoilers: none at all. AU, NC-17. Summary: Spike and Xander in a field.
***
Spike's body was hard almost everywhere, mannequin hard, mannequin white. Laid here in the grassy field, he almost looked like a found object, something stripped naked--could you say of a mannequin that it was naked?--and abandoned behind a boutique. You'd need to do a lot of damage for that skin to show scars, Xander thought. And there were a few. Scars after death, or before. He hadn't yet asked about all of them, but now he looked and touched idly. Strange firmness of vampire skin--smoother than skin should be. Not exactly rubbery, but more resilient than human skin. It felt thicker, cooler too. As if it would gel around a knife blade.
"Where'd you get this?" Xander asked, running a gentle finger down the center of Spike's chest, feeling knobs of bone under the flesh. The scar was thin, white against white. Looked like an autopsy scar, but how likely was that? He wasn't sure.
Spike turned his head toward Xander. His hair had spilled from its braid, loosened by earlier eagerness, and a stalk of grass was caught in the thick strands. "Big nasty with a two-foot claw carved me open proper. Somewhere in Asia, sixty, seventy years back. Would've spilled my guts literally if Dru hadn't been there. Nearly nicked the heart, too."
His voice was doing that thing. That thing Xander couldn't get used to. He'd been honed on the flat sharp edge of Spike's voice, its sarcastic inflections, its anger; had come to expect that. And now the vampire had this whole husky, melodious thing going on that made Xander's belly heat. When he talked normally, what seemed normal for him now, his voice was...it was real. Its edge blunted, because conversation between them was not a duel anymore. Spike no longer spoke to draw blood. He sounded most like his old self when ironic or amused. He was ironic far more often than amused. Spike didn't have a lot to smirk or smile or laugh about these days.
Well, yeah, but...he has me, thought Xander. He rested his palm flat against Spike's chest, over his unbeating heart, and Spike closed his eyes as if accepting a benediction. Past the horizon of his body lay a range of distant mountains, dwarfed by sky. Everything was in shades of grey out here. Clouds slid restlessly over the earth; another thunderstorm seemed to be massing, the light dimming except where flares of hidden sun teased nooks and crannies of cloud. Forty-two days since they'd seen the sun uncovered.
Xander hated this place, except when he kind of loved it.
The sunlight was as pale as Spike and made the vampire look a little faded, as pale as a dead person should be. Not a mannequin, but what he was. Corpselike. The color of soap. And yet he glowed strangely against the grass, under the heavy greyness of the sky, and Xander had just finished with him. And he wanted more, again, now. Spike was one of the few things real in this unreal place and Xander knew that he'd seized on him as a kind of talisman. And to see Spike outside in daylight, laid on the small, rough blanket, staring now up into the sky. It was...
It just was.
"Give my right lung for a fag," Spike murmured, words issued as if he didn't even have enough energy to sigh.
Smoking. Xander had never gotten that. "I'm not touching that one."
"Lucky Strike." Which sounded like an invocation to heaven, where Spike's gaze remained turned.
Xander ran his palm down Spike's belly, around his resting genitals, down to cup an inner thigh. Spike caught breath with a sound like a match-head flaring, and Xander slung one leg over him, rolled over onto his body and entrenched himself, half on, half off, dick pressed just inside the wishbone of those slim hips. His face hovered close to Spike's, the space between them briefly charged like the buffer between opposing magnetic poles. Lips over lips, eyes looking into eyes, as a cool breeze from the field rippled over his naked back and made him shiver.
He twisted his hips, felt Spike stir. "Another round then?" he asked Xander. And that small hint of lips, that tiny movement, told Xander he'd been given something to smile about.
Instead of answering, Xander kissed him. To kiss Spike was a dry wet coolness and a mouthful of heat. A vampire is by nature contradictory. A vampire is by nature libidinous and wicked and untiring, too, and even if a cross of gold could burn the wickedness out, it left an entire body of residual sin, and Xander wasn't unhappy with that. A vampire is by nature inventive. Vampires also have four arms and twenty fingers, or tentacles or something, because how else could you explain what he was doing right now?
Xander groaned as a brightness inside him flared to yearning, and he shoved his hips hard and lifted his head, offering his neck to Spike, who mauled him with lips and tongue and blunt teeth, never breaking the skin. Dinner had become fetish, hunger desire, and the way he grappled with Xander--teeth in Xander's shoulder now, hands grasping him in escalating rhythms--was a kind of passionate martyrdom. The lust of starvation. A terrible thought, if you looked at it too close, and Xander hoped they'd find some rabbits in the tall grass before nightfall.
Hope was a real word, a big wash of feeling over Xander's entire body, like longing. Like the way he used to feel with Anya, before they'd been lost and stranded here. Rising lust always felt so much like love, and now hope felt like desperation, a knifing need in his dick. He didn't want Spike to be hungry, to feel this kind of wild desperation--for food, not sex--and be unable to fill it.
A terrible thought, a chill like the breeze on his back while between them heat kindled, like the fire that Giles had probably already built thirty yards away, on the far side of the massive rocks. Nightfall, fire, food, nightmares, desire, fire, food--
--and Xander thrust and groaned, feeling his thoughts burn away and his body tremble.
"God," said Spike, and in the sharpness of his voice Xander could hear the echo of anger, of the raging thing Spike used to be, but it was shaped to new words. "Oh god, Xander." His hands moved fiercely on Xander, kneading him, dragging him in. Their dicks were skidding together now, heads hot and messy, smearing their bellies, and Xander kept rearing back, trying to find the perfect angle, the needle due North, it existed somewhere, that perfect, perfect alignment. If he
could just--*oh, god, vampire*, he thought, opening his eyes and seeing Spike's own eyes half-shut with pleasure, his head rolling from side to side, the mane of his hair expanding like a spill of honey--and Spike's face pretended to human even now, but Xander could never forget, and it was gripping him tightly, that knowledge, like a sweet fist on his dick, and he cried out and felt himself spilling, spilling, falling, met by Spike, rising and crying.
Real tears. Because that was what redemption did to you.
***
Notes:
A portal tumble into an AU...
As they are fighting off bandits, Spike realizes his chip no longer works. He goes to it with gusto, and takes them out (non-fatally) while the others (Xander and Giles) scramble. Afterwards they stare at him. He loots the unconscious men for valuables, looks up. Says, what? I'm not going to eat *you*.
Giles: You say that now. But when you get hungry one day, or angry at us, you may change your mind.
Spike: I can control myself, you know. I have will-power.
Giles: I don't doubt that. But you also have will. You can change your mind on a whim, Spike. Nothing holds you back.
Spike: Self-interest, mate.
Giles: I'm afraid that's not good enough.
Spike: That's all there *is*, Rupert. All right, not so. Four things in the world have power over you--morality, affection, shackles, and self-interest. Got no morals, got no affection for you, my shackles are off, and all that's left is self-interest. But that's no less than what your sort operate on.
Giles: What is my sort.
Spike: Humans.
Giles: Ah. Of course.
Spike: [manifesto on human self-interest]
Giles: All that aside, Spike, we can't trust you. And even if we trusted you not to feed off us, there is nothing to keep you from feeding off others. And lying to us about it.
Spike: Yeah? So if you believe that, take me out now. If you have the stones to try.
Giles: I wish I could. [leaves him instead]
Spike follows Giles and Xander after they abandon him in "Dark Pylea." Eventually he barges into their room at some rough inn, says, tough luck, I'm here. What are you going to do about it? Kill me? Here's a stake. He gives it to Giles, melodramatically bares his chest.
Giles: Spike, why *are* you here? [finally driven to real curiousity, frustration, temper, challenge] Your martyr complex is not without its sick fascination, but it's hardly self-interest to invite your own death.
Spike: Well, I'm manipulating you, ain't I? 'Cause I know you won't do it. Get with the program, Rupe.
Giles: [looking at him] You really want to stay?
Spike: How else am I going to get home if not by tagging along with you two?
Giles: If you want to stay, you'll have to wear this. [dangles a cross]
Spike: Are you starkers? That'll kill me. Not fast, but...oh, I get it. Bit sadistic, that.
Giles: Perhaps it will kill you. Perhaps not.
Spike: Pain and slow poison or sudden poof of dust, one way or the other, yeah, it will.
Giles: Spike, do you know why crosses and holy water burn vampires?
Spike: Wait. Know this one. Because we're the walking undead, demons from the depths of hell?
Giles: If that were true, such relics would burn other demons too. No. Common understanding has it that they burn because the vessel you inhabit, this body, has been made a sacrilege. [waits for a beat]
Spike: Okay, dramatic pause. Drop your shoe. Take it there's an uncommon understanding?
Giles: Yes. Amusingly enough, it's psychosomatic. In a magical sense, but still...in the mind.
Spike: Pardon?
Giles: You're an intelligent creature, cast in human form, with all the memories of your host. You respond to what you recognize as sacred, even if consciously you scorn it. Across cultures, different reglious iconography has varying effects on vampires. The more that crosses have become widely recognized as traditional symbols of the sacred, the more they've been empowered. The same power could be invested in any symbol. The burning is in you.
Spike: That's a load of...I don't buy it. [gesturing] Power's in that bit of metal there.
Giles: Spike, what I have to tell you no vampire has ever known, and no slayer. Only a handful of watchers know, a few per generation.... [Kind of a grim reluctance, fierce cold stare.] There is that in you which can be redeemed. If you have the strength for it.
Spike: [a moment's flare of something, then, flatly:] Not possible.
Giles: Not possible on a grand scale, no. Asylums across nations full of restrained vampires, fed on blood, cared for and counseled with crosses by an army of dedicated priests--you can see why we keep the secret. That will never come to pass. And not all vampires are open to redemption.
Spike: But what, you think I am? Bollocks. You know me.
Giles: [challenging] Why are you *here*, Spike?
Spike: [rolling eyes] Self-interest. [scoffing] But if I'm gonna get a lecture [missionary], forget it. [But hard as he is, there's a chink in his armor, and he doesn't move. Staring at the chain.]
Giles: If you want to stay, you'll wear this.
Spike: And that's all it takes...you're mad. You could have tied me up years ago, hung that from my neck, had your missionary will with me.
Giles: [smooth, low, and scarily cool] But I have no missionary zeal, Spike. I don't like vampires. I have no interest in dedicating my powers to a mission of redemption for your kind. I believe that it is better for the original soul to be released [some better word] by the body's return to dust, rather than to inhabit the earth as a walking travesty of humanity. I believe in eradicating the cause, the evil, the contagion--not in finding a home for it in our world.
Spike: You might want to punch up your sales pitch.
Giles: I wouldn't hold out this hope to you, but...here we are. We can't kill you and we can't shake you, and you are a risk to the humanity of this universe.
Spike: Told you--
Giles: If you mean it... [holds cross closer, Spike flinches] You are persistent, stubborn, willful. You feel great love. You've come to spurn and kill your own kind, given aid and comfort to those who should be your enemies. What you are now is unnatural and you know this.
Spike, becoming mesmerized....
Time goes by. There is great pain at first, and feverish sickness, like an infection in the skin, radiating from where it rests against his chest. He looks gravely ill, sallow, miserable. Then this passes off a bit and into a chronic, low-grade fever, a burning ache, an exquisitely mortifying pain that is half-pleasure, ecstasy. As it sinks into him and takes him over, he begins to feel himself waking up, physically, emotionally, spiritually, as if his entire self is a limb that has been asleep, atrophied.
Pain, pain, and then tingling sensations as he feels wonder, genuine kindness, laughter, moments of joy, as he returns to a boundless love of all that is human and natural--with which comes in time great anguish, nightmares, grief, shame.
Oh, and for those who don't religiously track my old entries for new comments (what's wrong with you?! {g}), here's some of the stuff from my hard drive I've been dredging up: my little Snape/Harry thing, and a bit of Stargate slavery here and here.
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