Fic: Losers
Title: Losers
Creator: drizzlydaze
Rating: PG
Setting: NFA battle
Word count: 919
Prompt: The Faithful Knight
A/N: /waves/ Remember this? I know, me too. Part Twelve. Parts One ( Chapters), Two ( Like Old Times, But Not), Three ( Help), Four ( Victim), Five ( Property), Six ( Escapee), Seven ( Interrogations), Eight ( The Plan/The Book), Nine ( The House), Ten ( Clues), Eleven ( (Some) Answers).
She pulls herself out of the trance, pulls herself out of his mind. She feels clumsy in her physical body, disoriented. Helga catches her from the chair in concern. “You okay? Did it work?”
Buffy shakes her head. “But I have a plan. I think I know,” she says quickly, eyes shining. “There was nothing there but a house.”
“A house?”
“A hollow, skeletal house. Empty.”
Helga’s eyes widen. “So you think…”
“Yeah. Do we have an Orb?”
“I was using one as a paperweight. Let me grab it from my office.” She leaves.
Buffy sinks into the chair, weary to the bone, and gazes upon Spike’s face. Smooth now and uninjured, so eerie in his unnatural sleep. His face is devoid of emotion, his mouth a simple uninspiring line, his arms and legs laid neatly in parallel. Motionless. Expressionless. It is the sleep of the dead. She’s seen it many times before, and she hates it.
But he’ll come back. She’s making sure of it.
The first step is retrieving the soul and storing it to safety in an Orb of Thesulah. As Helga performs the spell, Buffy closes her eyes and hopes.
~~~~~
Spike throws the note into the fiery river below, but not before a column of fire runs up his arm. He rolls on the ashy ground; his arm’s not on fire anymore, but blackened and charred. He closes his eyes and sinks to the ground with his back against the wall.
The wall is moving.
The ground is moving.
Hell is shaking. That can’t be a good sign.
Spike braces himself against the rocky walls as he moves along, carefully minding his burned arm, and tries to reason out what’s happening. “Oi!” he shouts. “What’s going on?”
“It appears your Slayer has met our expectations.”
He smirks. “Busting me out, is she? Knew I’d get out, one way or another, and you’re no match for-” A rib cracks. Bugger. Not again.
“As I was saying,” the voice continues coolly, “it appears your Slayer has met our expectations at failing miserably at her task.”
Bits of rock fall from the high ceiling of the cavern, too numerous to avoid. They aren’t large or heavy enough to cause actual damage, but they’re hot enough that there’s a danger of Spike’s hair catching on fire. Trails of smoke follow their plummet to the ground.
“Really? Seems she’s succeedin’ well at destroying your prison.”
“You are still in the prison she is destroying,” the voice said dryly. “You do not consider that a failure?”
“Well, she’s beating you.”
“Try to keep up, William. We say she’s met our expectations, and that means she is playing nicely into our hands.”
Spike can’t imagine what she’s doing. It doesn’t scare him at all.
~~~~~
Buffy is destroying the house and hell, Spike is ridiculously passive, and Angel grips the pen till the ink stains his hand. The conduit plucks it from him and gives him another.
“Oh, hurry up and sign it already, gramps,” he says. “You’re on a deadline.”
Information. Miscommunication. They can topple giants. Standing by and watching it fall, destruction by their own hand, is nothing short of torture. And he has to sign it, lose to win and lose another day. If only there were some way he could get to Buffy, tell her the entire happening and the trick, and the Partners’ plans would be shattered.
He watches as Spike’s mind, precariously held up by the beams of the house, sways ominously. There will be an emptiness after that, with no soul and demon trapped. Vegetable.
The Hell Spike is in is his own, made possible only by the soul. They are inextricably linked, because once there is no soul there cannot be suffering. There cannot be Hell. So it will collapse when the house does, killing the demon.
No soul, no demon, and an empty body.
They may have the soul in the Orb from that, but they cannot put it back when there is no demon to sustain the dead body. And when Spike doesn’t wake after they try the restoration, Buffy will enter once more, enter the gaping oblivion of the dead and be robbed of the presence of mind to emerge.
The conduit looks at him expectantly.
If there’s one thing he’s learned about Wolfram and Hart, it’s Read the Contracts. This mightn’t even help them, or else there’s some loophole the Partners can exploit. But there simply isn’t time, so Angel just glances through it perfunctorily, so quick barely any words register at all-
But it’s enough.
Shock washes through his system. He raises his eyes to the conduit. “This isn’t for the Senior Partners.”
“Don’t be daft,” says the conduit. “Who else would it be for?” And winked.
Angel stares, his mind racing. There’s been a schism, he remembers Buffy telling him. Half the employees for the Partners, half against. It’s chaos out there. Partners want to keep Spike for bargaining, the rebels want to thwart them. The most simple option is killing Spike, but for the ambitious…
The conduit raises a finger to its lips. Shh.
Angel’s got no choice even now. Puppet for both sides trying to outmanoeuvre each other. Who are you, he wonders, mutinying right under the Partners’ noses?
On the three screens of the White Room, events are advancing as quickly as ever. Soon the house will be crumbled, and Hell, and Spike, and Buffy.
He dashes off his name on the contract.