Gray
Gray
After having her world destroyed by the Winchesters, Eve wanted to rebuild her family. She claimed a soul with his own dark power and his own moral gray. He would be her champion. Hopefully. Xander just wanted to go home, preferably before the hunters Sam and Dean Winchester caught up with him.
Chapter ONE :: Chapter TWO :: Chapter THREE :: Chapters 4+5 :: Chapter SIX :: Chapter SEVEN :: Chapter EIGHT :: Chapter NINE :: Chapter TEN :: Chapter ELEVEN : Chapter TWELVE :: Chapter THIRTEEN :: Chapter FOURTEEN
Chapter Fifteen
Spike wants to get Xander out into the world and around other demons. Maybe that will distract him from his own frustration.
“You alright, pet?” Spike asked as they walked down the street.
“Peachy.” Xander didn’t even try and pretend any honesty. Willow and Buffy were terrified he was going to start spawning and yet angry that Spike was pushing him around. They wanted Xander home, but they didn’t want him home when he was all demony. And someone had definitely forgotten to tell him about the whole magic thing.
“They mean well.”
“She fucking lied,” Xander snarled. Immediately, Spike grabbed him by the neck and hauled him into an alley where Xander quickly found himself slammed face first into the brick. Spike locking his hands behind his back wasn’t even a shock at this point.
“You get control right now,” Spike snarled, and from the sound, he had his fangs out. Xander stood trembling, Spike’s whole body pressing him into the rough brick.
“She should have told me.”
“Yes, she should have,” Spike said. He grabbed Xander, yanked him off the wall and spun him around and then slammed him back into the wall so that Xander’s cuffed hands and shoulders were tightly up against the brick. “She should have told you about the magic, but what would you have done? You got that magic dumped into you saving the bloody world, Harris, and if you remember, Red wasn’t exactly herself at the time.”
Xander remembered the feel of dark Willow’s magic pouring into him, burning him from the inside. The pain had caught him like a vice and held him so tightly that he felt like every cell in his body might pop open at once, and wouldn’t that be a mess. But Xander had still loved her.
“Right then, calmer?” Spike asked.
Xander nodded. “She still should have told me that I still had that magic in me,” he said, but now he was more weary than angry. He was sure he’d be angry again later. His emotions seemed to be circling like that. Yep, his emotions were circling the drain, just like his life.
“Yes, she should have, but she didn’t. Besides, it’s not like you could have done anything about it.”
Xander made a face. He wasn’t ready to forgive her yet. He would be in a day or two, but right now he was still pretty much okay with being in his mad place.
“On another note, your demon form is starting to show,” Spike said.
“My… what?” panic crawled up Xander’s spine.
“No worries, luv. You’re still just as handsome. You just had a bit of a red-eyed moment there.”
“Great.” Xander sagged back against the building. “So I can’t even get mad without outing myself to all the little hunters. This is just wonderful.” Xander closed his eyes and tried really hard to avoid thinking about what Giles would do to him now. He was officially a full-fledged demon, and his quantum-mirror father figure would behead him in about two seconds. It was hard on the self-confidence.
“It just gives us another power to practice,” Spike said firmly. “Now I’d rather not escort you around Chicago cuffed, but if I need to-”
“I’ll behave,” Xander said. Oddly he was less and less aggravated with Spike’s sudden penchant for bondage, but getting picked up by the Chicago police would be awkward.
“We need to see how you’ll react to demons.”
“I feel like a dog you’re training,” Xander complained.
“You’re not far off,” Spike said without much sympathy. Xander understood Spike’s whole need to dominate, and if he didn’t, the visions of dead orphanage children were usually somewhere in the background to remind him. He nodded, even if the whole dog metaphor aggravated him more than the actual bondage.
Spike manhandled him around again and opened the padlock. “Behave,” he ordered sharply, and then he tugged on Xander’s arm to get him moving.
“Were you this pushy with your minions?”
“Nope. If they got killed, I didn’t much care,” Spike said cheerfully. “I did get pushy with Dalton, but that’s because it’s hard to find a minion who’s still good at research after the turning. He had more human in him than he rightly should have.”
“Dalton… guy with glasses back in your world-ending Drusilla days?”
Spike rolled his eyes. “I never tried to end the world.”
“The Judge,” Xander said with a bit of sing-song.
“Bloody hell. Did Rupert tell you lot that the Judge would end the world?”
“Well, yeah,” Xander said, and suddenly he wasn’t so sure. “The book said-”
“One of those end of the world tomes he had with all the dust and Latin writings?”
Xander nodded.
“Here’s a lesson for you. Every person who ever put pen to paper claimed that the local big bad was the end of the world. What every person means is that *their* world would end. Maybe that was enough for those blokes. After all, it wasn’t like people travelled much, so if you took out land the size of Vermont, they’d consider their world gone.”
“So, no hell on earth with all humanity destroyed?”
Spike shrugged. “He probably would have taken central and south California… maybe a bit of Mexico. There comes a time when even a demon that big is sated and he doesn’t want to walk far enough to go find another meal.”
“That makes my brain hurt,” Xander said. Now he had to rearrange at least half his childhood memories.
“Nothing is truly world ending in any global sense unless it messes with dimensions. There are so many different worlds out there that if there’s a tear between dimensions and demons find it, the world could be looking at a full-scale invasion. Other than that, most evil is local.”
“In our world.”
Spike snorted. “Seems like the only world ending this world is looking at has to do with tearing down walls between heaven, hell, purgatory, and earth. The rules haven’t changed, only the players.” Spike got an arm around Xander’s back and moved closer as they walked. This wasn’t a great part of town, and more than one person stopped to glare at the man-on-man touching, but no one seemed willing to actually try and say anything. These people were smarter than the ones in Xander’s world.
“Would Angelus’ statue have ended the world?”
“Acathla? Yeah, that bugger would have. Only stupid gits mess with mojo like that, but then Angelus never was the brains of the family. I don’t know anyone stupid enough to mess with dimensions the way he did.”
“Except Eve,” Xander said quietly. Eve had definitely done the dimensional mojo. Well, and then there was the whole Buffy and heaven thing “And Willow’s spell.”
“The one sending me here?” Spike asked.
Xander blinked. “Actually, I meant the one that brought Buffy back, but yeah, she messed with dimensions sending you here, too.”
“Angel and company opened a dimensional rift after the cheerleader went missing,” Spike said quietly.
“Anya opened them all the time. She really was obsessed with bunnies and shrimp, which makes me kind of wonder what kind of bunnies and shrimp they have in other worlds. And of course Glory and the portal.”
“Warren and that bloody spell that turned Buffy into some chit in an insane asylum.”
“Buffy and her college roommate,” Xander countered.
“Old Heinrich, 1937.”
“Huh. We know a lot of stupid gits.”
Spike laughed. “That we do.” He leaned close, his breath tickling Xander’s ear. “How can you tell this is a demon bar?”
Xander gave him an odd look. “Oh, I don’t know. The big, honking, glowing demonic runes all over it, maybe,” Xander guessed.
Spike frowned. “Right then, we’ll add that to the list of powers we’re having you practice.”
Xander closed his eyes. “Don’t tell me, you can’t see them, can you?”
“Of course I can.” Spike snorted. It was the sort of sound he made when he was truly annoyed and upset. Xander looked over, and Spike had a disgusted look on his face. “If I look close and really concentrate, I can see some shimmers around the edges of ‘em,” he admitted. “Just move.” Spike gave him a shove toward the door, and Xander went.
Okay, time to meet the cousins. Xander frowned as he realized that in this world, all demons were cousins of a sort. Eve had given birth to all their alphs, so demons were sort of familish. Weird. Xander definitely preferred his demons. Well, not his demons as much as his world with its demon rules.
Xander just stopped thinking as he headed into the darkened bar.
The music wasn’t as loud as it had been in the Bronze, but it was the same sort of ‘appeal to the young’ rock. In fact, the people in the bar looked a lot like the sorts of people you would see at the Bronze-young, trying too hard to be attractive and not hard enough to watch what was going on around them. Other than the fact that Chicago had a lot more minorities and a lot less hellmouthy fun, Xander might think he’d just been dropped into Sunnydale.
“Spike, is it just me or…”
“I see, luv,” Spike kept pushing him toward the back. “It could be a cover.”
That made some sense. If you were going to be a demon, you probably wanted a good cover, and having lots and lots of humans around would be of the good.
A thin man with a wide smile stepped right into their path. “Totally awesome, the whole alternative lifestyle,” he grinned as he looked down at Xander’s cuffs. “If you ever want a third, I definitely wouldn’t mind getting fucked by either of you… or both. What the hell?” He laughed and threw his arms wide. Okay, they definitely sold better drugs in here than at the Bronze. At most, people traded a little marijuana back home. This guy was on something with a whole lot more punch.
“Sod off,” Spike suggested before guiding Xander around him.
“What he said,” Xander yelled over his shoulder, but Spike had already shoved them far enough away that their potential suitor had wandered off. “Spike, I’m having some WTFery moments here.”
“You mangle the language enough without adding those stupid acronyms to your list of sins.” He sounded almost absent-minded, but then he seemed pretty busy looking around.
“Okay,” Xander said slowly. “Let me rephrase that. What is going on?”
Spike glanced over, and before Xander could blink, he was shoved in the corner on his knees. “Eyes!” Spike snapped.
Xander slapped his hands over his eyes as he tried to calm down. Damn, damn, damn.
“Hey, this isn’t that sort of club.”
“Take a walk, mate.”
“But you can’t-”
“I don’t have my willy out, so until you see my short and curlies, you can sod off or I can put you on your knees.”
“Hey don’t hassle the gays.”
Xander groaned as the fight went on around him. At least it was distracting him. He could feel his emotions start to settle, the aggravation at finding an entire bar full of humans in a demon club slowly faded until Xander was left with a sort of weary amusement. He tried to find demons, and he couldn’t. He tried to avoid them, and they kidnapped him out of his bedroom. Yep, the universe loved him.
Xander carefully looked up, and Spike was watching him while two goth chicks ripped on the bouncer about alternative lifestyles and respecting others. This was… this was weird. And coming from Xander, that said a lot.
“You better then?” Spike asked.
Xander swallowed and nodded. “Yep. Feeling hugely with the stupid for getting annoyed so easy, but better,” he agreed.
Spike held out his hand, and Xander let Spike haul him up to his feet. “That’s not exactly unexpected, either, mate.”
“Great, I get the temper upgrade along with everything else. Can we maybe go somewhere else?” Xander said. The crush of bodies and the smell of so much humanity all jammed in a small space was making him a little crazy.
Spike gave him the hairy eye and then started pulling him toward the nearest exit.
Outside, the air was just as hot and muggy, but at least Xander kept getting lungs full of car exhaust instead of body odor. And oddly body odor didn’t smell nearly as bad as it used to. “Okay, is it just me or was that oddly unodd in there.”
“It wasn’t what I expected,” Spike agreed. He looked around the street and seemed to pick a new direction at random. “Do you see any more markings?” he asked as they started down the street.
“Way too many,” Xander said. Mostly they were small things tucked up under rooflines. “This city is full of runes, but then, New York was too. And don’t even get me started on Giles’ offices. Rune central. These people are way more into spells than folks back home.
Spike made a moue of disgust, so apparently he wasn’t a fan of runes. Or he wasn’t a fan of Xander having the power to see runes, that was an option. Xander scratched his arm. His skin felt too small for his body, and he was really hoping that was not literal. He could not handle any more weirdness, and popping out of his skin would be weird.
With a hand on his back, Spike kept him moving. “Could be the place got too hot-too many hunters had figured out they had easy pickings on this street. We’ll try another one. If ya see more of those glowing runes, give a shout.”
“So, this is another test?” Xander was really getting tired of tests. He felt like he was back in high school, and he wasn’t doing any better the second time around.
Spike gave a quick nod. Only Xander was suddenly not convinced he was telling the truth. The way Spike’s gaze scanned the street and the way he moved with this demonic grace that was way more about fighting than about blending in with the humans suggested something different.
“Um, Spike, why are you twitchy?”
Spike glanced over to where Xander was still scratching. “What’s wrong with you, mate?”
“What? Nothing. I just feel a little-” Xander froze. Oh shit. Shit and more shit.
“It’s a powerful bugger, whatever it is,” Spike said, agreeing with Xander even though Xander hadn’t actually said anything yet. They wanted demons and they’d found one.