Cause and Effect | By : elizashaw Category: AtS/BtVS Crossovers > Slash - Male/Male > Spike(William)/Xander > Spike(William)/Xander Views: 6461 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0 |
Disclaimer: I do not own Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Angel the Series. I do not make any money from the writing of this story. |
Spike stalked into Wolfram and Hart with Xander trailing behind him, silent and unhappy. The mercifully short ride back to the law firm's offices had been tense. Xander had withdrawn to a self-protective distance when he had emerged from the bathroom, and Spike retaliated with his own confused silence. Neither talked about what had happened in the bed that morning.
"Spikey!" Harmony's greeting grated across his nerves. "You're late. Everyone's waiting for you guys down in the lab."
Without acknowledging her, Spike changed directions and punched the down button to call the elevator. Harmony looked at the two unhappy men.
"What's going on? No one will tell me anything." She whined at them. The elevator arrived, and to both men's chagrin, she joined them. "Wes has been here all night, Fred's been building stuff in the lab, and Angel is growling at everybody. He didn't even notice my new shoes!"
Xander automatically glanced down at her feet. He looked away and caught Spike doing the same. Harmony glared at them expectantly. "Well?"
Xander shrugged. "Nice shoes."
The elevator pinged as it arrived on the research floor, and Spike brushed brusquely out the door, leaving the others to follow in his wake.
"You know, I get that he has problems with women. I mean, the Slayer?? But I thought maybe since he was getting some from a guy, he'd mellow out or something."
Xander sputtered unintelligibly.
"Please, like you guys don't reek of each other, and can I just say ‘Eeew'. Au de sex is so last year. Maybe it's the whole soul thing that has him so closed off. I mean, it's not like Angel is exactly Mr. Share Guy. Oh!" Her eyes widened as Spike slammed her against the wall of the corridor.
"Harm. Shut. Up." He growled before releasing her and continuing toward the lab. Xander scurried after him, willing down the blush that pounded under his hot skin. The last thing he wanted was Harmony outing the new dimensions of his relationship with Spike when he felt so conflicted himself. He knew that he could love Spike the moment he gave himself permission, but the same control that kept him distant from his friends kept him safe from the pain of losing those friends. Love only raised the stakes.
"Spike, Xander. Good. You're here." As Wesley turned from the texts spread out on the laboratory desk, Xander silently admitted that Harmony had been right in her assessment that Wes must have been up all night. He looked more haggard than usual.
"Harmony!" Angel barked at his secretary.
"What? I told them to come down to the lab as soon as they got here. It's not like it's my fault they were late."
"Where is my blood?" The aggrieved tone cut her off.
"Oh. Sorry, boss. It's just that when I got upstairs, there were all these messages, and I had to rearrange your schedule because you wanted me to cancel all those meetings. Which, by the way, the D'Knolan Clan was not happy about, and they'll be filing a complaint."
Despite Xander's determination to keep aloof, he couldn't help sharing a smirking glance with Spike at the constipated look on Angel's face. Spike had to admit, if only internally, that Harmony managed to drive his Sire to greater levels of irritation than even he could, and she apparently did it without expending any focused effort at all.
"Harmony. Blood."
She stared blankly at him before shifting into her demon visage. "Vampire," she hissed, and launched herself at him, pulling a stake from within the sleeve of her suit jacket.
"What the hell?" Angel grabbed her hands as she lunged at him. Startled into stillness, the others watched the struggle for a long moment.
"Hey, knock it off you daft bint." Spike leapt into the fight and tried to drag her from Angel, but she fought with unexpected strength. The two master vampires managed to knock the stake from her hands, but she continued to claw at them, until working together, they sent her slamming into the hallway.
She hissed at them, hatred shining from yellow eyes. "I will see you dead, Demon." The threat focused on Spike. He stepped forward to hit her once more, but Fred's hand on his arm stopped him.
"Something's not right."
Harmony's attention swerved from Spike to Xander. A cruel smile graced her demonic features. "I win." The grin turned to surprise as two tranquilizer darts punctured her abdomen.
Wesley lay the gun on the table. "We had best restrain her before she regains consciousness."
"Will someone please tell me what the hell just happened?" Angel managed to include everyone in the room in his glare.
Spike avoided the question by the simple expedient of picking up Harmony and carrying her into the adjoining room to place her on a gurney.
"Are you okay?" Fred asked Xander gently. He had frozen in confusion and fear as Harmony spoke to him. He shook his head in response to Fred's question.
"Xander, do you know what she meant when she said ‘I win'?" Wesley's question caused the man to flinch in pain.
"That was what the First Slayer said to me. Last night. In my dream." Xander mumbled. He rubbed his hands over his face, careful of the eye patch.
"Damn, what'd I miss?" Gunn looked at the shocked faces and glanced into the adjoining room where Spike methodically fastened restraints on the unconscious receptionist. The others ignored his arrival in favor of watching Xander.
"It would appear that the First Slayer no longer restricts herself to speaking through dreams," Wesley observed.
"But how is that possible?" Fred asked, sensing Xander's need for space and stepping back as the man wrapped his arms around himself. "And why would she speak through Harmony?"
"I'm not entirely certain." Wes looked over at the restrained vampire.
"And when the bloody hell did she get so strong? Thought you kept the minions on a non-human diet, Peaches." Spike stepped toward Xander but halted when the man took an unknowing step back. Looks like whatever closeness he had felt developing between them wasn't going to hold up in the cold light of day. He masked his hurt and trampled down the need to comfort his clearly distraught friend.
"Wes? Still looking for answers here." Angel's patience stretched thin.
"As impossible as it may sound, the most reasonable hypothesis is that Harmony, despite being a vampire herself, is also a Slayer."
"Right. That's the last time I'm late for a meeting." Gunn shook his head and leaned against one of the lab's counters.
"It makes sense," Fred agreed. "She isn't really that old, and if she's been living only on animal blood for the last year, which if she hadn't it would have shown up on our test, then there's no way that she should have been able to fight off both Angel and Spike unless there was something else going on."
"And that something means she's a Slayer? Sorry, but I thought these Slayers had to be human and mystically called or some shit." Gunn looked between Wesley and Fred in confusion.
"That is how it has worked for millennia. But several months ago, at the same time that Spike was killed closing the Hellmouth, a powerful spell was invoked to activate, or ‘call' if you prefer, all of the potential Slayers." Wesley turned to search through the notes that littered the table. "We have already seen one instance in which a mentally unstable girl, one who was possibly psychic or otherwise aware of preternatural beings, became a Slayer with rather unfortunate results." He ignored Spike's snort at the understatement. "What is to prevent us from discovering that other potentials with unusual circumstances also became active Slayers as a result of that spell?"
"So, what? We now have a vamped Vampire Slayer on our hands? Damn, man. That just can't be good."
"But Harmony was dead when that spell was cast. How can a vampire become a Slayer?" Angel's disbelief irked Wesley for reasons he couldn't fully define.
"The spell has no precedent. There is no way to know what unexpected results have occurred."
"No." Xander's quiet voice broke through the debate. "Willow wouldn't do that."
"Sure, mate. Like Red's mojo never had ‘unexpected results' before." Spike ignored the flash of betrayal in Xander's eye as he snarked.
"Whether Miss Rosenberg intended it or not, this is the most likely scenario." Wesley frowned. "Further, it explains Harmony's words to you. If she is a Slayer, she is also a vampire, another unstable entity, not entirely unlike Dana."
"This is nothing like Dana!" Xander fumed. "Dana was human. A human girl fucked up by the shit that happened to her. Harmony," he pointed furiously at the other room, "is a vampire. A soulless demon." He hated himself for reacting so strongly, but the need to defend his best friend and the entire Watcher/Slayer community was much easier to escape into than dealing with the fear and helplessness that the gloating from the possessed vamp had engendered.
"We're not saying that Willow did anything on purpose, Xander, really." Fred interjected earnestly. "But this could be important. We've been trying to understand what's happening with this First Slayer and why she's attacking Spike and now you through dreams. None of our tests showed anything unusual in Spike's room, but if she's been possessing Harmony, then maybe we wouldn't have noticed anything. Harmony's presence was in Spike's hospital room, but we expected that, so we didn't think it meant anything."
"And if she went all Slayer-y, the nurse wouldn't have noticed anything till it was too late," Gunn agreed. "Makes sense that she woulda been staked easy."
"How long will she be out?" Angel interrupted the theorizing.
"She should be unconscious for some hours yet. I didn't want to chance hitting her with only one tranquilizer dart."
"Fine. Harmony later. Let's get back to what we need to do for Spike now." Spike blinked at his Sire's clear prioritizing. He had not experienced being first priority in the elder vampire's world in over a century, and not often then.
Fred took a deep breath and glanced at Wesley for approval. They had agreed that her recitation of research and potential plan would be better received than if Wesley spoke. The ex-watcher held in his own bitterness at the knowledge that Fred had a level of trust from the vampire that he no longer enjoyed.
"Okay, well, until this morning, we've only seen the First Slayer appear in dreams. Both the ones that Spike experienced after the attack and the ones that Xander told us about. In each case, the dreams came after an intense connection with a Slayer." She glanced around to make sure that everyone was tracking. "Xander said that last time Buffy confronted her in a dream and convinced her to go away. Basically, Buffy took control from her instead of the First Slayer controlling the dream. That got us thinking. All we need to do is give Spike a way to control the dreams, and that should make the First Slayer powerless." She grinned.
"Does what happened with Angel's crazy girl Friday make a difference to that theory?" Gunn threw out the suggestion despite Angel's clear unwillingness to address the issue.
"I doubt that it would make a difference in what we have devised." Wesley dismissed the concern.
"What's this big plan then? You're not planning on mojo'ing me, are you Percy?" This time it was Xander's turn to take a comforting step closer, but the rigidity of Spike's stance kept him from reaching out to touch. He berated himself because he knew his own retreat from the bed this morning and subsequent withdrawal lent to that rigidity. Confusion mounted as his desire for the vampire warred with his own insecurities and fears.
"Not magic," Fred chirped. "We're gonna use science."
"That's so much better," Xander muttered, flashing on the Initiative.
"There's been lots of research on people learning to control their dreaming. The technique is called lucid dreaming. In it, the dreamer first trains himself to recognize when he's dreaming and then to take control of the direction of the dream."
"Sounds simple enough," Gunn agreed. "What's the catch?"
"Time," Angel said shortly. "Lucid dreaming takes time and practice. Some people never master it despite years of attempts."
"Thanks for the vote of confidence, Peaches."
"Yes, while that's true, I think we've found a way to get around that problem." Fred took a deep breath. "Dreaming really isn't anything more than electrical impulses in the brain, just like all thought. So with a combination of manipulating those impulses medically and applying the techniques of lucid dreaming, we should be able to put Spike into a dream state and then give him the control he needs to take over his dreams from the First Slayer."
"There are a few things we need to talk about first," she continued. "We're going to use a combination of hypnosis, manipulating electrical impulses, and lucid dreaming techniques. Essentially, we'll put you to sleep with hypnosis, take you to a dream state by manipulating your brain waves, and then use a simple signal to help you with the lucid dreaming, for example tapping fingers on the back of your hand. We'll use something tangible like that, something that someone outside the dream can do to help make the lucid dreaming that much easier."
"So I'll be dreaming, you pat me on the hand, and slayer bitch goes poof?"
"Um, well, essentially, yes?"
"Let's do this then. Sooner that bitch is out of my head, the better." Spike shrugged out of his duster. "Where do you want me doc?" He winked at Fred, who blushed.
"What if it doesn't work?" Xander blurted out. "What if this lucid dreaming thing doesn't work? I hate to be the voice of doom here, but I would have died the last time if Buffy hadn't gotten rid of her."
"Gimme a minute with the whelp." Spike grabbed Xander by the arm and ushered him into the hallway.
"What the bloody hell is wrong with you?" He hissed. "You think just because we're not your precious Council, this can't work? We're supposed to trust in your girl Willow's oh-so-pure methods but not in Fred's?" Spike knew that Xander's trust or distrust of Angel's team was not the heart of the issue, but he reacted out of the frustration he had been feeling for the last few hours.
"No, that's not it," Xander insisted. "I just want us to think about this."
"Seems like ‘thinking about this' has been the last thing on your agenda today, mate." Both knew that Spike wasn't talking about the plan Fred laid out.
"Spike," Xander cursed himself for sounding so broken. He cleared his throat and tried again. "I just…I don't want…what if something goes wrong?"
"What if it does?" Spike spoke harshly. "One less vampire in the world and Slayer life goes on as expected." Bitterness laced his words, and he wished he could take them back. Fighting with Xander wasn't helping anything, but he couldn't reign in the frustration at being pushed away after the vulnerability they had shown one another. It smacked of his relationship with Buffy, and that was a path he had promised himself never to walk down again.
"I'm sorry. Is that what you need to hear, well, I am." Xander wrapped his arms around himself once more, as if that was the only comfort he allowed himself. "I'm sorry I freaked on you this morning."
"Just tell me why. Can you do that much? Thought everything was going fine. What did I do wrong?"
"It wasn't you. It's me." Xander paused. "And could I be any more cliché?" He closed his eyes and leaned back against the wall. "I'm not used to…I mean, I don't…Oh hell, Spike, I fucking fell apart on you last night."
"Seems to me, I did the same to you."
Xander shook his head. "You don't understand. I let you in, let myself go, and I'm not the same guy that can do that anymore. Can't. Won't. Whatever. I haven't let anyone that close since before…"
Spike took in the misery on the man's face and chanced stepping closer. He lifted Xander's chin. "Look at me, pet." He waited for Xander to open his eye. "Not going anywhere." Slowly he leaned forward and placed a gentle kiss on the trembling lips. Xander hesitantly gave himself over to the kiss, but then pulled back regretfully.
"You can't say that, Spike. What if this doesn't work? What if they're sending you to be killed with this plan? I can't watch you die."
Spike sighed and pulled Xander into a reluctant embrace. "You've been through more than any human should, pet. Don't want to put more on you."
The regret in Spike's voice pulled at Xander's heart. He tightened the embrace, trying to communicate need, want, desire, and fear through his actions.
"Promise me you'll kick her ass. Kick her ass and come back to me?"
Spike placed a gentle kiss on the warm neck, unsuccessfully attempting to mask his own fears. "Gonna try, pet. Promise you that much."
Xander pulled back and nodded shakily. Together they walked back toward the lab, each fearing that Fred's simple plan would go the way that most simple Scooby plans went and become far more complicated than anyone could have ever anticipated.
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