Fic: Touching the Fire, Chapter 5
Now it's reached Chapter 8 on Elysian Fields, it's about time I updated here.
This is between Grave and Beneath You, so not exactly full of jolly banter. Things will get better for Spike though, I promise!
It seems that in some cases a return from not-death involves a long, dark tunnel with a light at the end. The end you are staggering away from, naturally.
To be honest, “staggering” was a rather over-generous term to describe Spike’s more or less forward movement away from the cave and tunnel complex in which he had spent the last. What? Hours? Days? Weeks, even? He had no bloody bollocking idea, only that it had endured beyond the limits he would have thought possible and that he was glad to be out.
Beyond the clearing in which the rocky outcrop stood was sparse scrub and the sort of dirt that needed a good soaking with water which it probably hadn’t seen in months, and a few struggling plants drooping for lack of moisture or covered in prickles to deter hungry animals. Jagged spikes snagged at his legs, scraping and tearing the skin wherever it was exposed.
A jagged Spike was about right. He was on many different edges at once, scarred and battered by fights, scraped by harsh rock walls, bruised, bitten and burnt in random patches covering a substantial proportion of his body. And in what he assumed was the East there was some sort of light on the horizon, which in these latitudes meant he had perhaps twenty minutes before sunrise made all his efforts moot. He was too stunned to think, dimly aware of nagging pains of the metaphysical variety rising to the surface but brutally thrust down. Cleansing, scrubbing bubbles they might be, but any sort of self-confrontation had to wait for practical reasons.
The first sunlight was gilding the treetops as he stumbled into the village and made his halting way to the home to which he’d entrusted his earthly goods. He slid through the open doorway as the inhabitants stared at him, eyes and mouths as wide as it was possible. He was the first they’d known to return from those caves, and it took a moment before the father of the family moved to greet him, only to be pushed out of the way by his robust and determined wife, who led Spike with gentle strength to a mat on the floor, helped him lower himself, then busied herself soothing his wounds with warm water and soft cloths.
The next few days were a confused blur to him. Complicated dreams in which he always, always did the wrong thing, or the right thing but too late, or nothing at all when he should have done the right thing. He was falling from a rickety tower, his body slamming into a tiled wall, trying to collect eggs made of plaster or plastic which dissolved in his hands as he tried to grasp them. He was striding down a dark alley, jostled by a big man with stupid hair, he was in a livery stable, he was fighting his way out of a padded box, he was staring at his mother as she dissolved into dust. He wasn’t ever quite sure when he was awake, though the peaceful times with the calm woman soothing his face with cool water had to be a dream.
He didn’t know a word of her language, and he felt guilty about that. It took him three days to work out that was what he was feeling, that strange ache in his stomach and at the back of his throat which refused to go away. When he finally got it, he croaked out a laugh. Guilt. Ten years ago he’d have snapped their necks, ripped their throats to shreds, filled his belly with their hot, rich blood.
Ten years ago he would never have been here. That was before Prague, when he and Dru had feasted on the confused remains of the collapse of Communism across Europe, snacking on disgraced secret police officers, laughing at the mess as people raced from border to border to get what they thought was freedom and he knew was material wealth. They’d done well out of guiding families on secret paths to the frontiers, letting them send a message home, then feeding with reckless greed.
Now he hated himself for it. The Hungarians lined up in his head to berate him in another language he didn’t understand. The Romanians begged for mercy. He and Dru had laughed at them. They’d even worked their way through the entire nursing staff of an orphanage full of neglected children so filthy even Dru didn’t want a taste. Now he could see the huge, yearning eyes in every face. They condemned him with those eyes. They told him just how much worse than worthless he was.
He agreed with them.
Later, he found nodding and smiling worked a little. She pointed at herself. “Miremba”. Then a look of inquiry at him.
“Spike”.
She laughed, a rich, deep sound, full of heart. She had a few, a very few words of English. She knew what a spike was; this bruised, damaged, emaciated pale creature was the last thing she would associate with this name. But the boy was sick. He’d been through the demon caves, her man said, which accounted for the mess of a man in front of her. Miremba ignored the warnings that he could turn on her, be more dangerous than she knew. He was a shattered creature in need of care and peace. She gave what she could.
Then tried to hide some where the children would find it later. dead memories of his small sister, Maria who had died of consumption, to find ways to make them laugh. He performed stories in mime and got the children to teach him some of their words. He stared, entranced by the beauty of the dark, tight curls on the little girl’s head. He threw a ball back and forth to the little boy, who learned that if it went through the door into the sun this odd visitor could not collect it. He stroked the downy cheeks of the baby, astonished by the perfection of its face, its tiny hands, the long eyelashes on its sleeping eyes.
Ten days on he started to prepare to leave. He rummaged through his knapsack, finding the gold secreted at the bottom, and tried to pay his hosts for their kindness. They refused. He had no understanding why that hurt him so much.
He cried easily, far too easily, just now. In the end they allowed him to give a single gold piece for each of the children. He held the rest, useless metal, unwanted by the people he owed so much to, then tried, when he thought himself unseen, to hide them where the children might find the money later. Miremba shouted at him for that. He dug out Mr Gordo - could he give the pig to the children?
“No. A grown man carries a toy round the world because it is important. If it is important it must not be given away.”
Relieved, he gave the pig a hug before stowing it carefully back in his pack.
As the sun set on the twelfth day he left. Tears and hugs all round, and a sense of heartache for these kind, straightforward people who hadn’t cared he was a demon (oh yes, they knew) but cared that he was in need. That strange feeling of loss and longing in his belly travelled with him as he strode away to the truck stop only half a dozen miles away on the nearest road.
The driver had been glad of the company and dropped him near the airport with an hour to spare before sunrise. Two days “sleeping” in the confined bedspace of the cab, mercifully dark, two nights keeping the man company, taking over the driving so the guy could get some sleep and still make up his time. It worked for both of them. Spike didn’t try to work out why that mattered to him.
In the cargo area he found a load about to go on board a plane with US markings. If it arrived in sunshine, so what? He’d dust like he deserved. Security wasn’t much in evidence, so he easily joined in loading in the pre-dawn light and nobody noticed that he stayed behind when they left, job done, and the hatch was sealed.
Twenty-four hours later he was somewhere in California. All the time in the cargo hold he’d talked to the pig. Eager, obsessive, he felt he needed to explain where they were, why they were, what they were. A pink pig and a corrupt, degraded thing who rambled about all the terrible things he remembered. Then apologised and covered the tiny piggy ears. No-one should have to listen to what he was. He must have spent two hours apologising, crying, begging Mr Gordo to forgive him.
He was lucky the plane landed after dark. By that point he would have walked straight into the noon sun. It was all he deserved. The world would be better that way.
It was dark, and he had to do something, so he hitched a lift to where he remembered stashing the bike. For a miracle it was actually still there. It took a while to get his bearings. Big motor bikes are not easy to ride when you are shaking with a mixture of grief and guilt. Eventually he got going. The one place he should stay away from, the one girl in all the world who deserved to be left alone by the vicious, dangerous thing that had betrayed her? Every atom of his body was being called to her. Every atom of his being. Every bit, heart and new, rusty soul, craved to see her again.
He ditched the bike in the woods near where the school used to be. Where, he saw with amusement, it now was again. On top of a Hellmouth. Again. Did these clods never learn? At an hour before dawn there was one security guy, half-snoozing with his telly on way too loud. Easy to get over the fence without him noticing. Easier still to climb through a hole where a window was probably going to be. Easiest of all to get down into the cellar, already rustling with small mammalian wildlife.
He lost track of how long he was there. At one point it seemed like Visitor Central, so many people came to harangue him. Sometimes he was clear it was his stupid noggin playing tricks on him. Sometimes he wasn’t.
She came quite often. She told him how disappointed she was in him. She told him he was bad and wrong and Sunnydale needed him gone.
“I know, pet. I know I’m a bad, rude man. I just gotta get some strength back, OK? Just gotta get some more rat into me, then I’ll be gone.”
“Spike”, she glared at him. She could see all the way into him, deep into his battered soul. “I need you not to be here. You hurt me, badly, with what you did. I need not to be reminded of that. And what’s to say you won’t do worse? You might try to have sex with me again. In my house. In my bed or my bathroom. Do I need to tell you how many kinds of Wrong that would be?”
She went and Drusilla was there. “My Spoike. You are covered in her and in that icky soul. You let me down. You said you’d love me forever, but you couldn’t manage any more once you’d seen her. You betrayed me. Then you betrayed her. All the little fishes told me. Who are you going to betray next? Will anyone trust you again? You even hurt the little mice. I see them scurrying round. Like you, scurrying to hide. You should just take a long walk outside.”
Darla joined in, “You let down my Boy too. Didn’t you? Is there anyone in this world or the next you haven’t failed?” She laughed, but there was no fun or mirth in her voice, just cruelty. And disappointment.
Angel was there. Instead, not as well as. He just stared, big broody eyes boring into him. “So, a soul’s the new cool thing is it? Well done.” He meant the exact opposite. “Welcome to a century of worthlessness. She won’t want you now, eaten up inside with all that guilt.”
Beneath them all, there was a rumble. Something was coming. He could feel it.
His soul was hurting more and more. He tore his shirt open. With a sliver of wood he tried to stake himself. It buckled under the pressure. He sat, gripping what was left so tightly his hand started bleeding. It dripped slowly but relentlessly onto the dirt floor. He scrabbled backwards, still seated but feet shoving him away as fast as they could, which wasn’t very fast. He was in a corner now.
Nothing could come for him without his seeing them first. He stayed there for days. From time to time he launched himself at a rat or argued with his visitors. In between he used the sharp stump of the sliver to score away at the pale skin of his chest. He couldn’t stake himself. Perhaps he could carve his way in?
In the bag thrust behind him the little pig lay upside down, crushed by the weight of Spike’s body, rattled by his shaking. Lucky it couldn’t hear his moans.
This is between Grave and Beneath You, so not exactly full of jolly banter. Things will get better for Spike though, I promise!
It seems that in some cases a return from not-death involves a long, dark tunnel with a light at the end. The end you are staggering away from, naturally.
To be honest, “staggering” was a rather over-generous term to describe Spike’s more or less forward movement away from the cave and tunnel complex in which he had spent the last. What? Hours? Days? Weeks, even? He had no bloody bollocking idea, only that it had endured beyond the limits he would have thought possible and that he was glad to be out.
Beyond the clearing in which the rocky outcrop stood was sparse scrub and the sort of dirt that needed a good soaking with water which it probably hadn’t seen in months, and a few struggling plants drooping for lack of moisture or covered in prickles to deter hungry animals. Jagged spikes snagged at his legs, scraping and tearing the skin wherever it was exposed.
A jagged Spike was about right. He was on many different edges at once, scarred and battered by fights, scraped by harsh rock walls, bruised, bitten and burnt in random patches covering a substantial proportion of his body. And in what he assumed was the East there was some sort of light on the horizon, which in these latitudes meant he had perhaps twenty minutes before sunrise made all his efforts moot. He was too stunned to think, dimly aware of nagging pains of the metaphysical variety rising to the surface but brutally thrust down. Cleansing, scrubbing bubbles they might be, but any sort of self-confrontation had to wait for practical reasons.
The first sunlight was gilding the treetops as he stumbled into the village and made his halting way to the home to which he’d entrusted his earthly goods. He slid through the open doorway as the inhabitants stared at him, eyes and mouths as wide as it was possible. He was the first they’d known to return from those caves, and it took a moment before the father of the family moved to greet him, only to be pushed out of the way by his robust and determined wife, who led Spike with gentle strength to a mat on the floor, helped him lower himself, then busied herself soothing his wounds with warm water and soft cloths.
The next few days were a confused blur to him. Complicated dreams in which he always, always did the wrong thing, or the right thing but too late, or nothing at all when he should have done the right thing. He was falling from a rickety tower, his body slamming into a tiled wall, trying to collect eggs made of plaster or plastic which dissolved in his hands as he tried to grasp them. He was striding down a dark alley, jostled by a big man with stupid hair, he was in a livery stable, he was fighting his way out of a padded box, he was staring at his mother as she dissolved into dust. He wasn’t ever quite sure when he was awake, though the peaceful times with the calm woman soothing his face with cool water had to be a dream.
He didn’t know a word of her language, and he felt guilty about that. It took him three days to work out that was what he was feeling, that strange ache in his stomach and at the back of his throat which refused to go away. When he finally got it, he croaked out a laugh. Guilt. Ten years ago he’d have snapped their necks, ripped their throats to shreds, filled his belly with their hot, rich blood.
Ten years ago he would never have been here. That was before Prague, when he and Dru had feasted on the confused remains of the collapse of Communism across Europe, snacking on disgraced secret police officers, laughing at the mess as people raced from border to border to get what they thought was freedom and he knew was material wealth. They’d done well out of guiding families on secret paths to the frontiers, letting them send a message home, then feeding with reckless greed.
Now he hated himself for it. The Hungarians lined up in his head to berate him in another language he didn’t understand. The Romanians begged for mercy. He and Dru had laughed at them. They’d even worked their way through the entire nursing staff of an orphanage full of neglected children so filthy even Dru didn’t want a taste. Now he could see the huge, yearning eyes in every face. They condemned him with those eyes. They told him just how much worse than worthless he was.
He agreed with them.
Later, he found nodding and smiling worked a little. She pointed at herself. “Miremba”. Then a look of inquiry at him.
“Spike”.
She laughed, a rich, deep sound, full of heart. She had a few, a very few words of English. She knew what a spike was; this bruised, damaged, emaciated pale creature was the last thing she would associate with this name. But the boy was sick. He’d been through the demon caves, her man said, which accounted for the mess of a man in front of her. Miremba ignored the warnings that he could turn on her, be more dangerous than she knew. He was a shattered creature in need of care and peace. She gave what she could.
Then tried to hide some where the children would find it later. dead memories of his small sister, Maria who had died of consumption, to find ways to make them laugh. He performed stories in mime and got the children to teach him some of their words. He stared, entranced by the beauty of the dark, tight curls on the little girl’s head. He threw a ball back and forth to the little boy, who learned that if it went through the door into the sun this odd visitor could not collect it. He stroked the downy cheeks of the baby, astonished by the perfection of its face, its tiny hands, the long eyelashes on its sleeping eyes.
Ten days on he started to prepare to leave. He rummaged through his knapsack, finding the gold secreted at the bottom, and tried to pay his hosts for their kindness. They refused. He had no understanding why that hurt him so much.
He cried easily, far too easily, just now. In the end they allowed him to give a single gold piece for each of the children. He held the rest, useless metal, unwanted by the people he owed so much to, then tried, when he thought himself unseen, to hide them where the children might find the money later. Miremba shouted at him for that. He dug out Mr Gordo - could he give the pig to the children?
“No. A grown man carries a toy round the world because it is important. If it is important it must not be given away.”
Relieved, he gave the pig a hug before stowing it carefully back in his pack.
As the sun set on the twelfth day he left. Tears and hugs all round, and a sense of heartache for these kind, straightforward people who hadn’t cared he was a demon (oh yes, they knew) but cared that he was in need. That strange feeling of loss and longing in his belly travelled with him as he strode away to the truck stop only half a dozen miles away on the nearest road.
The driver had been glad of the company and dropped him near the airport with an hour to spare before sunrise. Two days “sleeping” in the confined bedspace of the cab, mercifully dark, two nights keeping the man company, taking over the driving so the guy could get some sleep and still make up his time. It worked for both of them. Spike didn’t try to work out why that mattered to him.
In the cargo area he found a load about to go on board a plane with US markings. If it arrived in sunshine, so what? He’d dust like he deserved. Security wasn’t much in evidence, so he easily joined in loading in the pre-dawn light and nobody noticed that he stayed behind when they left, job done, and the hatch was sealed.
Twenty-four hours later he was somewhere in California. All the time in the cargo hold he’d talked to the pig. Eager, obsessive, he felt he needed to explain where they were, why they were, what they were. A pink pig and a corrupt, degraded thing who rambled about all the terrible things he remembered. Then apologised and covered the tiny piggy ears. No-one should have to listen to what he was. He must have spent two hours apologising, crying, begging Mr Gordo to forgive him.
He was lucky the plane landed after dark. By that point he would have walked straight into the noon sun. It was all he deserved. The world would be better that way.
It was dark, and he had to do something, so he hitched a lift to where he remembered stashing the bike. For a miracle it was actually still there. It took a while to get his bearings. Big motor bikes are not easy to ride when you are shaking with a mixture of grief and guilt. Eventually he got going. The one place he should stay away from, the one girl in all the world who deserved to be left alone by the vicious, dangerous thing that had betrayed her? Every atom of his body was being called to her. Every atom of his being. Every bit, heart and new, rusty soul, craved to see her again.
He ditched the bike in the woods near where the school used to be. Where, he saw with amusement, it now was again. On top of a Hellmouth. Again. Did these clods never learn? At an hour before dawn there was one security guy, half-snoozing with his telly on way too loud. Easy to get over the fence without him noticing. Easier still to climb through a hole where a window was probably going to be. Easiest of all to get down into the cellar, already rustling with small mammalian wildlife.
He lost track of how long he was there. At one point it seemed like Visitor Central, so many people came to harangue him. Sometimes he was clear it was his stupid noggin playing tricks on him. Sometimes he wasn’t.
She came quite often. She told him how disappointed she was in him. She told him he was bad and wrong and Sunnydale needed him gone.
“I know, pet. I know I’m a bad, rude man. I just gotta get some strength back, OK? Just gotta get some more rat into me, then I’ll be gone.”
“Spike”, she glared at him. She could see all the way into him, deep into his battered soul. “I need you not to be here. You hurt me, badly, with what you did. I need not to be reminded of that. And what’s to say you won’t do worse? You might try to have sex with me again. In my house. In my bed or my bathroom. Do I need to tell you how many kinds of Wrong that would be?”
She went and Drusilla was there. “My Spoike. You are covered in her and in that icky soul. You let me down. You said you’d love me forever, but you couldn’t manage any more once you’d seen her. You betrayed me. Then you betrayed her. All the little fishes told me. Who are you going to betray next? Will anyone trust you again? You even hurt the little mice. I see them scurrying round. Like you, scurrying to hide. You should just take a long walk outside.”
Darla joined in, “You let down my Boy too. Didn’t you? Is there anyone in this world or the next you haven’t failed?” She laughed, but there was no fun or mirth in her voice, just cruelty. And disappointment.
Angel was there. Instead, not as well as. He just stared, big broody eyes boring into him. “So, a soul’s the new cool thing is it? Well done.” He meant the exact opposite. “Welcome to a century of worthlessness. She won’t want you now, eaten up inside with all that guilt.”
Beneath them all, there was a rumble. Something was coming. He could feel it.
His soul was hurting more and more. He tore his shirt open. With a sliver of wood he tried to stake himself. It buckled under the pressure. He sat, gripping what was left so tightly his hand started bleeding. It dripped slowly but relentlessly onto the dirt floor. He scrabbled backwards, still seated but feet shoving him away as fast as they could, which wasn’t very fast. He was in a corner now.
Nothing could come for him without his seeing them first. He stayed there for days. From time to time he launched himself at a rat or argued with his visitors. In between he used the sharp stump of the sliver to score away at the pale skin of his chest. He couldn’t stake himself. Perhaps he could carve his way in?
In the bag thrust behind him the little pig lay upside down, crushed by the weight of Spike’s body, rattled by his shaking. Lucky it couldn’t hear his moans.