FIC / BARGAINING REVISITED: Residual
Title: Soft the Drowsy Hours are Sleeping.
Rating: PG-13
Summary: After the spell to resurrect Joyce fails, Dawn visits Spike's crypt. Friendship / Angst.
A/N: Originally conceived as the first in a series of three fics, but I think it works well as a one shot. If I had been more observant whilst watching Series Three of Angel then I might have picked up on the fact that the song quoted in the title and in the text of this story, "All Through the Night" was Holtz's lullaby of choice ... but as it happens, the overlap is entirely coincidental and I didn't notice until watching an Angel re-run a couple of weeks ago. Oops!
Warning: Unbeta'd. Any spelling mistakes or grammatical errors are down to my appalling grasp of the English language...
He doesn't hear her come in. Bathed in the television's blue light he seems translucent, black jeans and t-shirt muted against pale skin. Like a ghost caught in static.
She hangs back in the shadows in the same way that he hangs around the trees by their back porch, smoking cigarette after cigarette as he waits for a glimpse of her sister. He never sees Dawn watching him from her bedroom window, despite what Buffy has said so many times about 'enhanced vampire senses'. Kinda funny. Like maybe those initiative guys installed a dimmer switch along with the chip they stuck in Spike's head. That would explain her stealthy entrance, she thinks, her lips almost twitching into smile.
"Planning on lurking there all night, Nibblet?" he drawls, eyes never leaving the TV screen.
So much for stealthy.
"I'm not lurking," she says sullenly. "I'm standing about. Apparently it's like a whole different vibe."
Spike doesn't seem to hear, but he's paying more attention than Dawn realises. Her voice is too brittle, he thinks, held together by memories of the night when Dawn ended and the Key began. The night the Slayer celebrated her twentieth birthday and Spike stood on the porch step hugging a bent box of chocolates, catching Dawn's covert shimmy down the drainpipe while the Scoobies celebrated inside. He tried to play the Big Bad but as usual she wasn't impressed, explaining with a look of smug superiority her plans to break into the Magic Box and steal stuff. He tagged along for what he thought would be the hell of it, but if he was being honest it was because he knew that it would kill Buffy if anything happened to the brat. How was he supposed to know that half an hour reading the Watcher's fruit fly handwriting would turn her into mystical green energy? He was only in it for the bloody troll hammer!
He should have known better. This was the Hellmouth, after all.
Standing in his crypt a few weeks later she looks neither green nor mystical. Bambi-legged and pale, she's no more than a vulnerable child. Tasty treat for all manner of things that go bump in the Californian night. The surge of protectiveness that floods his veins at this thought disturbs him no end. It's just animal instinct, he tells himself - doesn't want other scavenger's stealing his prey. But he knows that's not true.
Don't like to see Summers women take it on the chin, is all.
So what the bloody hell does she want now? Not like she's some orphaned waif - helped her resurrect her bloody Mum, didn't he? Got half-trounced by a Ghora demon in the process and she's still not happy. Bloody women!
Unless...
Startled by grief, Spike tries to sound harsh. "So? Go 'stand about' somewhere else," he says curtly. Can't very well have you showing up in my soddin' crypt every time the fancy takes you. Like a bad smell, you are."
Silence. Spike counts exactly thirty-seven seconds of it. With any luck she'll just turn around and-
"Passions is on soon," she says, quirking a thin eyebrow in the direction of the TV set.
"Exactly. Now bugger off and let me watch it in peace."
Instead of doing what she's told, Dawn clunks over and deposits herself next to him on the flea bitten sofa. He gives her one of his patented glares, the muscles in his jaw twitching, but Dawn seems utterly oblivious.
Spike lets out a sigh. "I thought you hated Passions?" he remarks wearily.
"I do," she says.
The uncertainty in her voice tells him everything he needs to know. Joyce won't be coming back.
Not that he'd expected the spell to work. If resurrecting the dead was something a ninth-grader could do, albeit a mystical ninth-grader with vampiric assistance, then every man and his dog would be at it. That's not what bothers him. What bothers him is that he had wanted it to work, for Buffy's sake, and ... and for Dawn's.
She watches TV with her chin rested on bony knees. He knows she's been crying. Salt hits the back of his throat strong enough to make him gag, but he forces himself to ignore it. She's all cried out anyway. Doesn't want her running to him for comfort, it wouldn't be proper. Silly bint doesn't know a monster when she sees one.
Or perhaps she does see the monster, but chooses to look past it. He is disturbed by the prospect of what she might see there, somewhere in the middle distance, and by the way her trusting gaze can dredge up memories of people and places that he's tried very hard to forget.
Something about Dawn reminds him of what it was like to be human.
Soft, the drowsy hours are creeping...
Shaking off the memories, Spike risks another sideways glance. Bad reception makes the light from the telly jar and stutter across her face, like demons trapped in a prison of skin. She watches without watching, absorbing the sights and sounds of her mother's favourite soap opera. Almost a communion. Her cheeks glisten with tears, and the dead organ in his chest spasms slightly. Probably just a bad lot of pig's blood, he tells himself, an excuse which keeps him paralysed for a few moments before his hand reaches out, seemingly of its own accord, and touches her hair.
It feels wrong. Evil soulless thing such as himself has no business tainting something so pure. But Dawn doesn't flinch at his touch. Instead she curls swiftly into his trademark stink of musty leather, fags and bourbon, smells that somehow mingle to soothe, despite being rather unpleasant in separation.
He pats her back in absolute terror, trying to ignore the dizzying aroma of blood and her pulse, beating like a bloody brass band through his veins. He grits his teeth together to stop himself from shifting into game face, trying to work out what on earth he is supposed to do now.
Absently it strikes him that the memories he shares with Dawn are mostly fake. And in those memories - as in the real ones that have followed - he has been a grudging friend and protector, rather than a predator.
The role fills him with a queasy mixture of pride and discomfort. He tells himself that it is all the monk's fault, that they planted the memories as a way of ensuring the Key's protection at all costs - but he knows that the truth is more complicated.
Spike sighs miserably. He never was much of a thinker.
Now the Scoobies, they liked to believe that when a person died the soul made a clean break, that the residue of human memories left behind were nothing to do with the person they had once been. He'd overheard Giles describe them as a blueprint to help the newly sired demon blend in with its prey. Spike had never once tried to correct the Watcher in his mistake - he'd sooner be strung up by the testicals than admit that he still shared anything in common with the spineless wanker whose body he inhabited.
But still...
He looks down at Dawn. She is starting to drift into a fitful sleep, her breathing hitched into a tearful staccato. Awkwardly, he pats her back again. Then, almost without thinking, he finds himself dipping back into the vaults of his Victorian boyhood, murmuring the words of an old lullaby in a cultured and strangely gentle voice that he hasn't used in a hundred years.
Soft, the drowsy hours are creeping...
All through the night...
Somewhere between sleeping and waking, Dawn seems to find this foreign tone soothing. It draws her away from familiar grief and lights the lamps in a long ago parlour where a woman sits by the fire, dressed in black silk, singing a lullaby to a young boy whose head is laid in her lap.
Soft the drowsy hours are creeping,
All through the night.
While the moon her watch is keeping,
All through the night
Angels watching, e'er around thee,
All through the night,
Midnight slumber close surround thee,
All through the night.
Soft the drowsy hours are creeping,
Hill and dale in slumber sleeping,
I my loved ones' watch am keeping,
All through the night...
Slowly the lights in that long ago parlour dim and gutter, the memories dissipating like smoke from a burnt out candle. Spike emerges from his trance and looks down at the sleeping girl. The tension has left her body and her thin frame is heavy, her head curled trustingly just beneath his jaw, leaving her neck exposed, her blood a languid beat in his eardrums which doesn't bother him so much now.
It even makes sense in a demented sort of way. The Slayer tells him she can't love a monster, so he walks in the shoes of a man. With every step a few more dregs of that bad Victorian poet are dislodged and float up to the surface - and so, by turns, his feelings for Dawn become more than a territorial extension of his love for Buffy. They become something old, and new, and strangely reassuring.
It's getting late. Past ten o' clock, although it won't take them long to work out where the Nibblet's scarpered off to and send the cavalry over. So he gently extricates himself from the sofa, draping his duster over her shoulders and standing back to cast a weary glance around the crypt. Any moment now the Slayer will burst through the door for another round of Kick the Spike.
Looking down at Dawn, sleeping peacefully at last, he decides that he doesn't care.