And the drabble continues...

[shadowkat]

[Just so you know - I did actually write two pages of my own tale today, ie. own made up characters. Also had a nifty chat with my Dad about writing - he writes and self-publishes his work at 1stBooks.com. Has written and self-published five books so far and is about to publish his sixth. Doesn't make any money at it, doesn't care - has a nice following of readers on his island and around him. When I told him about this little exercise, he said and I quote, that he loved writing dialogue. Dialogue he'd read was in fact "action" in a story. IT moves things forward as opposed to pure description. Interesting. Hadn't really thought of it that way. Did have a writing teacher tell me once that it was jockeying for position. Not sure what I think. Day continues to be rainy, rented two movies for viewing after this bit.]

Where we left off? With the names. Will told Buffy he'd taken Gunn's last name cause he couldn't bear the name Spike. And Liam was using Angel as a last name.



Buffy watched him for a while, mulling over in her mind what he'd just said.
Why did he have so much troubles with the name Spike? Angel seemed to be fine with his name, although she'd noticed when he got a soul he got rid of the "us" at the end of it. Liam Angelus would have had a better ring to it.

"Shilling for your thoughts," he said after a few moments ticked on by.

"Just wondering why you have such problems with the name Spike." He said nothing, just raised his eyebrows slightly and gave her a hard sarcastic look that practically screamed, "duh". Chagrined, she quickly amended, "Look, it's not like you changed it when you got a soul - not like Angel did by dropping the "us". You kept Spike, no William or Will then. Why now? " At his continued silence, which hung frostily in the air between them, she hastily added, "I know Angel separated himself from the vampire seeing his demon as a separate entity not an id, not an impulse, but an actual being separate from himself.
You...never seemed to see it that way. What changed?"

He closed his eyes, resting his head against the back of his couch and lay that way for a long time, breathing slowly. Buffy began to regret mentioning it. It seemed an innocent enough question in her head. The old Spike would have said something snarky. Will, grew quiet, still, withdrawing into himself.
She thought about Angel then, how like and unlike they were. Angel also had the habit of withdrawing into himself, pulling away whenever she asked those difficult questions. Was this a bad habit he'd picked up from him?

"Look, I'm sorry I brought it up...we can-"

"No, no...don't.." He opened his eyes and looked at her then away, but before he did she caught a wetness in them. Almost as if he were suppressing tears.
"I gave up the name Spike for some of the same reasons Liam hates the name Angelus. I do identify it with that other life - the one I lead before this happened to me, before I stopped being an undead thing that could leap buildings in a single bound. An undead thing that thought it could be heroic, well wanted to be heroic at any rate. I never quite bought into the whole hero deal not the way Liam did. Wanted to. And when Shanshue came - I thought, at first, hey - I'm redemed. I'm worthy. Sin gone." He laughed or rather snorted.
"Not so much. Memories are still there. All that's gone is the impulse, the pull, the..." he paused as if mulling over how to put it, eyes shifting back and forth, teeth worrying his lower lip. "I never saw the demon as a separate entity until it was gone, then I knew it was. A virus of sorts with it's own agenda. An agenda that was so contrary to everything I was taught to believe in, to feel, to value...yet, oh god, yet...part of me subcombed to it. Wanted it." He visibly shuddered, closing his eyes again. Took a breath. Then he opened them and leaned forward, staring intently at the wall of photographs.
"Rupert ever tell you how I came by the nickname Spike?"

Watching him, she thought back, way back, to the first time she'd met him, at Sunnydale High, stalking her and her friends through the hallways with his gang. Intent on killing them all. The man in front of her bore only a vague resemblance to the vampire she'd known way back then. That still, occassionally, plagued her dreams.

"Liam...Angelus told me when we first met up that I needed a blooder nickname. Willy just didn't cut it."He laughed. "Wee Willy..yeah right, that was Dru's choice." He glanced at her. And pointed at his crouch. "You know." She raised her eyebrows but didn't laugh. "She also liked Billy, for some reason. But me and Angelus, knew better. So the demon went out and proved itself. Got itself a nickname, right proper. One that would make people shudder."

As he spoke, Buffy remembered Willow repeating Giles words. "Giles says Spike got his nickname torturing his victims with rail-road spikes. Ewww. Buff. You don't think he actually did that do you? Because if so, maybe we should skip this dude, let someone else take care of him."

She winced at the memory. Another landmine, she thought. Their past appeared to be nothing but landmines for him. She'd assumed coming up here that he'd be like her, fondly reminscent. She realized now, how truly niave that was. Faith had tried to warn her. "B, you can't honestly think this is a good idea? Visiting Spike, a human Spike, no less, after all these years? What you going to say to him? Hi how are you? Miss me? Or is Dawnie right, you going up to get laid? Cause I get that. Really I do, B. 'Cept don't see this new Spike being all that willing..." She'd told Faith that was not the reason and it wasn't. Not everyone thought about sex, something Faith being Faith tended to scoff at. Faith, she realized long ago, would have loved to boink Spike. But Faith wanted to boink most of Buffy's boyfriends or would-be boyfriends. Didn't bother her too much, since most of her boyfriends weren't that interested in Faith. The old, soulless, Spike might have gone there. But the old soulless Spike had slept with Harmony and Anya and that horrid robot.
She wondered if Will regretted any of that? Guessed he probably did. Question was, did he regret her? And if he did, how would she deal with it? She wasn't sure she wanted to even bridge that issue. She herself had few regrets regarding their relationship.

"Got it off people I hurt. Unlike Angelus - whose name comes from his kid sis, who thought he was some sort of Angel come to carry her away - a knight in shining armor. Mine comes from the coal mines and railway tracks of York and South Wales, North London, Brighton, Liverpool...Whitecastle. Where the sky is black with coal and people hack blood from tubercoluous. No fight left in some of them. Ones that do, right dandy bunch, all fisticuffs and curse words. Shagging and brawling, drinking and living, until we happen along. Dru, me, Darla and ole Angelus. My idea to use the spikes - show Angelus a thing or two.
Push them through the wrists and legs like a regular cruxifixon. Then do a jig on the graves, waiting for the corspes to rise, bloody and scarred but ready for a fight. We must have killed about thirty or forty in a night, the bunch of us. Course it sent the police and vampire hunters after us - so we had to hide in mine shaft. Made Angelus bloody furious - he preferred taking his victims hostage to a nice little place, private like, no one knew of, sipping the blood a bit at a time, torturing them for days on end..." he caught her look of horror, and lifted an eyebrow, "What's wrong? Turn your stomach? Come on Buffy, this can't surprise you. You've seen it all, right?"

"Yes, but that's not you any more. And it's not Angel. You talk as if it is...I don't understand. I thought the shanshu washed that away, not the memories maybe, but the guilt."

He sighed. "That what Liam told you?"

She nodded.

"He seem all guilt-free to you?"

"No, but..."

"It washes away the pain, yeah. No more screaming. No more voices. No more ghosts whispering to you in the dead of night. Or nightmares. I sleep better now. Also no more demon whispering to you, tempting you, telling you that you want it, that this is who you are, what you were meant for, that it's your purpose...your calling. The demon, it's gone. And with it - the craving, the pull to do it. To destroy everything just for the hell of it. Because you can.
Not because it's right, not because it's wrong, not because it's necessarily evil, but because it feels fucking brilliant. Makes you feel all manly and powerful. Like you're god. And nothing, I mean nothing can hurt you." He stretched, then got up and walked over to the pictures. "These people they meant nothing to me when I was a vampire. Just toys that I could play with. Toy soliders to knock over. They didn't have lives. They were happy meals on legs...their deaths made me feel powerful. More I killed, bigger I was." He touched the picture of the black girl in the long jacket. "And slayers? The heros? People like you, Summers? Those were the best targets. Killing them, made me a fucking legend."

"But you changed, you fought against it. Surely that counts for something?"

He shrugged, his focus still on the photographs. "Like Darth Vader at the end of Return of the Jedi? Kills the Emperor and suddenly he's all redeemed, makes up for all the lives he destroyed, all the people he killed."

"Not the same thing. Darth was human, you had a demon inside you. You didn't have a choice. It killed you and set up shop in your body - like, like what happened to your friend Fred. Except you fought back, the man that you had been, that you are now, his personality won out in the end - it fought back.
That has to count for something."

"Well," he looked skywards,"he certainly thinks so, assuming he's up there of course. I tend to think he is considering how much he's yanked me back and forth the last few years. Old Liam certainly thinks so. One thing we agree on - religion. That and God. Although he calls him the Powers. I tend to be a bit more of a traditionalist."

"Why don't you?" she asked, setting down her cup of chocolat which had cooled and was beginning to taste a little bitter.

He shrugged. "Because I have to think that something in me made the demon what he was. Not all vamps are alike, right? Some are right pansy wastes. Take Harm for instance, couldn't hurt a bleeding fly. Torture? Mayhem? Turned the girl's stomach. Poor kid. But me? I got off on it. Not the torture so much - never had much patience for it. Visuals ain't my thing. That's old Liam's gig. Angelus, he got off on torture. Me? I just liked killing things. Hunting them down, stalking them, figuring out their moves, besting them, and nailing them to the floor."

"Nothing wrong with hunting."

He shook his head. "Not with hunting, no. But that's..." he swallowed hard.
And she tentatively approached him. "It's like what I told you all those years ago in your basement, you remember, when I begged you to kill me, before those blind ninja priests took me hostage?"

The image was laughable in hindsight, she thought and for a moment thinking back on it she couldn't help but wonder if Xander had a point. Maybe their God was an insane comic book geek with an obsession for musical theater and old sci-fi movies, the type with bug-eyed monsters in them and screaming girls in alley ways.

"About the girls, yes..."

"I enjoyed it Buffy. That wasn't all demon. Something in me wanted that.
Sought it out..." he bowed his head.

"Did you though? Did you really? Spik- I mean, Will. We all have demons inside us. We all have nasty desires. Years ago when a demon tried to drain my soul out of me, I felt these things, I wanted to kill and maim. Hell I felt that way towards Warren when he killed Tara and I certainly felt that way towards Professor Walsh, who set me up to get killed."

"You've never tried to rape anyone."

"Got me there." God, she thought, this conversation reminded her oddly of one
she'd had with Faith. Hadn't they'd had it before themselves? She vaguely remembered one like it? No, she thought, they'd skirted around it because at the time, she still hadn't quite figured out how to deal with it or him or what he'd become. She was so young, so scared, and so insecure back then. And it didn't help, thinking back on it, that she had all these people watching her, judging her every move, telling her how to behave, what she should do. It wasn't until she got to Rome, actually got some time alone, traveled, that she began to make peace with it all, think it through and come to her own conclusions regarding it. She and Faith ended up discussing it and in a way that helped more than anything else. Hearing Faith's side, how she almost raped and murdered Xander, when all he'd tried to do was help her, helped Buffy understand what happened in the bathroom and finally realize that it wasn't her fault. Oh she had a hand in it, but not necessarily a negative one. It had very little to do with her actually and everything to do with the war that was going on inside of Spike. A war, Faith explained, had been going on inside her as well. Except in Faith's case, the demon won and nearly destroyed her. In Spike's the man did and nearly destroyed him. Ironic that. Further evidence of Xander's theory, not that she believed in God.

"But humans rape people, Will. It is a human crime. You didn't have a choice when you tried to do it with me or when you raped and murdered those other girls - you weren't human. You were a demon. The fact you didn't actually rape me...I think, surprised us both."

"You stopped me."

"Yes, but I was vulnerable. I had no stake. I'd been injured. The room was small. You could have easily killed me that night. We both know that."

He looked down at her then past her towards his books. "Instead I got myself a soul." He laughed. "We wanted to be like Angel. Good enough. Course we found out that that wasn't possible...we found out how ugly we truly were. Stained. Shanshue doesn't wash that stain away, Buff. Nothing does."



Okay, now hopefully I can watch Being Julia before I fall asleep. Did this a lot later than I intended. I blame watching Gilmore Girls reruns.

[*Note - edited one brief section - the name "Willy", blame Being Julia - which reminded me what it means to the Brits. Also changed who repeated Giles comment about how Spike got his name to Willow. Just doesn't work as Xander.]

Comments

[qadgop.livejournal.com]

Hi there. I've been quite enjoying this story, but I've noticed that most of what we're learning about Will is coming out in what he's directly telling Buffy, but most of what we're learning about Buffy is internal--the actual conversation is almost all Will. I suppose that's intentional, but I wonder if we'll be seeing any of this go in the other direction; Buffy's being at least somewhat affected by what she's learning about Will, so will she start opening up to Will and affect him somehow in the course of this conversation?

[(Anonymous)]

Very interesting ideas on the nature of the "shansue" and also on guilt and responsibility and owning up to one's sins and perceiving them as such. This Will seems very clear eyed and his past. Jane

[aycheb.livejournal.com]

Thinking about it, and thank you for making me think, your Will makes so much sense. When Spike got his soul he seemed to avoid dwelling on his past sins after the initial insanity passed unless a direct reminder like Dana happened. He still had that demon pulling at him and he had to keep running just to function in the world. But with the demon gone he can afford to look back and see what he was.

[petzipellepingo.livejournal.com]

Not because it's right, not because it's wrong, not because it's necessarily evil, but because it feels fucking brilliant. Makes you feel all manly and powerful. Like you're god. And nothing, I mean nothing can hurt you." He stretched, then got up and walked over to the pictures. "These people they meant nothing to me when I was a vampire. Just toys that I could play with. Toy soliders to knock over. They didn't have lives. They were happy meals on legs...their deaths made me feel powerful. More I killed, bigger I was." He touched the picture of the black girl in the long jacket. "And slayers? The heros? People like you, Summers? Those were the best targets. Killing them, made me a fucking legend." A very nice description of William becoming Spike the Legendary Dark Warrior. I'm also finding your take on what the Shanshu did to both William and Liam interesting.
This is such an interesting story.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

This is just compelling.