Chapter 24: Alive
awesome banner by sourbuckley
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A/N: The lovely dampersnspoons betaed this for me, and did a damned good job of it too. Thanks damps! (I kinda kept the Farley in, but I think maybe it works a *little* bit better because she wants this new girl to know everything...? Or something. Writing is hard.)
A/N#2: Big ups to my Filipino homies.
Darla was alive.
Buffy was still processing this when the car stopped outside of a bleak two-story motel that promised COLOR TV and WEEKLY RATES -- or RAPES, according to the graffiti.
Darla was alive... and lived here?
Spike touched the intercom to tell his driver to stay, then left the car.
Buffy took a long, shaky breath. A rush of cold air hit her side and she peered at Spike's gloved, open hand, not sure she wanted to go where it was about to take her.
Somewhere nearby, a television set blared a manic game show: Jackpot round ka na ba! Are you ready?
Buffy wasn't ready, not even a little bit, but she took his hand anyway.
* * *
A large, stocky tattooed man answered the door. Taking one look at Buffy, he said, hand on heart, "Oh, shit, is it show and tell day? And me without my GI Joes."
Spike was unmoved. "Is she conscious?"
"For now. Ten minutes to morphine paradise."
"Good. Show me your arms."
"My... You serious?"
"Show me your arms, Ernesto."
With a scoff, Ernesto upturned his palms, but all Buffy saw on his brawny arms was the Virgin Mary, Jesus and a haloed portrait of his mother, RIP. "You know I never touch that garbage. I'm a nurse, man. A good one."
"So was the last guy."
Ernesto grudgingly stepped aside. "She won't be happy to see your friend."
"I'm not here to make her happy."
Slowly, Buffy ventured in after Spike.
"Fuck ME I'm a sexy bitch GENIUS," she heard Darla say, then saw the abstract mural she was furiously scribbling. Kneeling on an unmade bed, clad in loose sweats, surrounded by crayons, she colored the wall and muttered nonsense. "And we all have so much FUN together us four I need more red. Where's the red. That's maroon not red you jackass. Black and red. Opening up to the sky like a goddamn Cadillac on fire. Ha! I need red. Where's the red. Where's the fucking--"
"Dee, baby, we got company."
She whipped around, and Buffy reeled.
The ghost of Darla scowled at them from behind an emaciated, pockmarked death mask. "Who the fuck are you?"
"Come on, Dee," Ernesto said casually, sitting in a chair and resuming his DS game, "you remember Spike. He drove all the way out here to say hello."
She squinted at Spike, but showed no sign of recognition. "You wanna fuck me, Richie Rich? That whatcha want? Fifty bucks."
Oh. Wow. Buffy saw Spike straighten and let it go, as if he'd been expecting it.
"Couples is a hundred," she continued, scratching at a scab on her neck. "You got that much? You like to watch, Richie? I could eat your girlfriend's ass for forty."
"Ay nako," Ernesto blithely griped, "I can't take you anywhere."
As Darla backtalked Ernesto, Spike turned to Buffy with a steely expression. "Satisfied?"
She looked down in shame, and he brushed past her.
"Spike!" Darla hissed, suddenly lucid.
He stopped in his tracks, but didn't turn.
"I remember everything about you. You mother. Fucker. Ha! I saw it happen. I saw it."
"Enough." Rattled, he took Buffy by the arm and marched to the door.
"Oh, is it? Is it enough? She never got enough of you, did she, darling boy? Who's your new fuckalike, Spike? Does she know all your pervy little secrets? Hey! Blondie! Lookatme!"
Buffy looked over her shoulder to see a frenzied Darla, held back by her nurse, meeting her gaze for the first time.
"I know who you fucking are," she accused Buffy with a growing sneer. "Barbie fucking Ken Doll! How's my son, you rank whore? He still suckin' on your fake plastic tits in your shiny pink unicorn bed, you sick fucking cunt?! I should have killed you, not her! I should have killed you!"
Buffy stared on in shock until Spike pulled her out the door.
Outside, they could still hear her screaming. "I'll put that whore in the goddamned ground! Just like me. Ha, just like..."
And suddenly, there was quiet. Zero minutes to morphine paradise.
In an impotent fury, Spike flailed and cursed and folded in on himself, but Buffy couldn't think about his pain. Her shock bubble had just burst, and the information had started to sink in.
Darla murdered someone. Spike helped her get away with it. Like this. Like this! And Lindsey...
Brow furrowed, Buffy touched her parted lips. "Was all of that true?"
Spike answered with a tired, rueful glare.
"Who did she...?"
Almost imperceptibly, he shook his head, nodded solemnly toward the car, and in a daze, she followed him into it.
* * *
This wasn't how her night was supposed to go. This wasn't how her life was supposed to go. Crime, deception, traumatic encounters with the walking dead? Buffy wasn't cut out for this. She was too sunny a person, even in her darkest hours; this level of melodrama was completely alien to her. She'd always assumed Lindsey's cynical streak was just for show, but now that she knew what he'd grown up in...
Attempting to hold herself together, Buffy sat with her limbs tightly crossed on one end of the back seat, flashing furtive sidelong glances at the other end.
Spike pulled off his gloves and opened the moonroof a crack, unconcerned that it let the rain mist the seat between them.
Watching tiny droplets vibrate on the black leather, she heard him light a cigarette, heard the ember burn. The smell reminded her of Paris.
"This girl we knew," he said, breaking the silence. "From England."
Great. It was someone he knew. Exactly why that was worse than offing a stranger, Buffy wasn't quite sure, but covering up the murder of a friend seemed so much more... heartless.
"She'd moved out here. Darla would stay with her sometimes. A little hovel on Venice Beach." He leaned back on the seat, head tilted toward the sky. "She came over that night. We drank, we reminisced, we shagged..."
Buffy frowned at the merging droplets on the seat. "Darla was okay with that?"
"She..." He started over. "We had an odd connection, this girl and I." A nostalgic chuckle. "She was a right nutter. Used to say we were homicidal twins in another life. Married homicidal twins." He sighed. "She'd gone platinum blonde that summer, and Darla got it in her head that she wanted to see us together. I should have known..." His adam's apple bobbed. "She never handled her jealousy very well."
"But she was her friend. You don't just murder your friends."
"She didn't mean to," he reasoned. "She was blasted, didn't know what she was doing, who she was doing it to -- I tried to stop her, but by the time I..." He held a hand out in front of him. "It was too late."
"That's manslaughter, Spike. You could have called the police -- a good lawyer could've gotten her a reduced sentence, some drug-induced insanity plea... You didn't have to stage this elaborate hoax!"
"You think I didn't try? She threatened to pin it on me, Buffy. My DNA was all over that girl, and there were two other people in that house who would have gladly testified against me."
Buffy was quieted with a vision of the two people he was referring to.
"It wasn't some grand scheme, all right? It's three in the morning, the mother of my child is frantic, tweaking out of her bloody mind and there's a dead woman on my floor. All I know is I've got to get this body out of my house!"
She believed him, mostly because his voice, his cold veneer, was cracking under the emotional pressure.
"I carried Dru's body to the car, lay her down in the back seat, thinking she could just look passed out, yeah? Got no idea what I'm gonna do with it. I'm not even fully dressed yet. But then," he tutted a mirthless, helpless laugh, "Darla bolts out of the blue and drives off with her."
Buffy shook her head. She'd asked, felt entitled to the truth, but now she didn't want to know, didn't want to feel more pity for the deceased than she already felt, didn't want to watch another second of the Pratt family freakshow in which she'd become an unwitting co-star -- or in legal terms, an accessory. "You don't have t... I don't need to know any more."
"Yeah. You do." Rubbing his knee, he sucked on and stubbed out his cigarette. "I followed her, tore down the streets after her. Got to the top of Mulholland in time to see her pushing the car over the edge. My car. With a body in it." He looked at his hand, the one rubbing his knee, and balled it into a fist. "It goes over, and... she loses her balance. I catch her just as she's about to tumble down the fucking cliff."
"I'm supposed to applaud you for being a hero now?"
"No, Buffy, god! I want you to know why I did this."
"I get it. You did it for her."
"I did it for Lindsey!"
Whoa. What?
"She begs me to let go, just let her fall, end her miserable life, she hates me and herself and her bloody fucking addiction and the fact that she had my kid..." He ran out of breath and continued in a shaky voice, "Says if I don't do it, if I don't man up and drop her, she'll shoot Lindsey and herself. Rid the world of her legacy."
"Would... would she really do that?"
"After the night we had? I believed it. She told me about him and Harm then, I thought she must be lying, anything to make me drop her..." He got wistful then. "And I looked down at that burning car... and that's when it hit me: That could be her."
Moved by his fragility, she had to remind herself that his choice was made at the expense of another human being. "What about the body? Didn't anyone look for her?"
He sighed. "She didn't have family. Read tarot cards on the boardwalk, talked to inanimate objects... Could have easily wandered off in the night."
"How convenient for you both."
"I'm not saying it was the right thing to do. I just..."
"Did it," she said, folding her hands in her lap. "The coroner's report said she'd given birth."
He knit his brow. "That's news to me."
"So, you didn't even bother to read it?"
"No! I didn't read it. They were the same age, the same height, it was close enough. God, I just wanted to move on and be done with it."
"Is that why you keep her twenty minutes away from you? So you can 'move on'?"
"She won't go away. I bought her a new life in another country, at a sodding retreat she claimed would cure her. A year later, I find out she never even boarded the plane. She's smoked every last cent and she's whoring her wares in MacArthur bloody Park. What do you want me to do?"
"Buy her another ticket? Watch her get on the plane? Force her into detox, I don't know!"
"I can't control what she does, and I don't want to! She made her choices, incredibly stupid choices, and I can't keep trying to fix her for the rest of my bloody life when no matter what I do she self-destructs. I keep her off the street and relatively safe, and that's where it ends."
So, were his hookers literal stand-ins for Darla? Or did they have nothing to do with her at all? Was he pining over his still-living ex, or was he completely over her? Which prospect bothered her more? She felt dizzy. Maybe it was his stupid cologne. Was it terrible that part of her just wanted to grab him and feel his warm skin and pull him into her, just to make all of this go away?
Focusing on the passing scenery, Buffy let a heavy silence fill the car. Are we there yet?
"You've got to stop him, Buffy."
He did not just ask her to double agent.
"If he gets too close to the truth--"
"And what if he does? Shouldn't he know that his mother is alive? That his father didn't kill her?"
"You think that's wise, do you? Want him to go in there and see her like that, be propositioned by his own mother? It's bad enough he--" He caught himself before going any further.
"It's bad enough he what? Was molested by his stepmother? You can say it, Spike, I heard her loud and clear." It occurred to her then why Lindsey had gotten off on her Spike-imposed Barbie doll look. Why he was so sure Harmony didn't do it... and what it meant when he said he had to listen to her complain 'all night'. To be fair, Harmony did resemble a Playboy Bunny, and Lindsey was a teenage boy... "No wonder you hate him."
"That's not... I don't hate him. I blame her for that."
"You were cheating on her in her own house. It can't go both ways?"
"I would never... He was a child, Buffy. I don't care how young or pretty she was, you don't do that to a child."
Spike displaying a strong sense of morality? That was new. "Is that what happened in Paris? ...Harmony?"
"What? No." Their eyes met. "Let it go, Buffy. There are things we're all better off not knowing."
"No one is better off believing a lie."
"Which one should tell him about us, then? You or me?"
She averted her gaze. That was not the point. Darla was the point. "He's her son. He could get her into rehab."
"With what documentation? She's dead."
"I don't know, there's got to be a way--"
"Her mind is gone," he said, gesturing emphatically in Darla's direction. "That's permanent damage. There is no getting her back." He growled in frustration. "Just tell me how close he is!"
"No!" She held her hands over her ears. "I won't do this, Spike! I won't! I'm already wedged so far in the middle, don't make me your fucking go-between!"
He pried her hands off her head. "I know what it's like to have a sorry excuse for a mother. I can't let him have one too!"
"God, why do you do this to me? Why do you show me these things? Why do you get me caught up in all of your lies?"
"Because I'm in love with you! For god bloody's sake, haven't you figured that out by now?"
She stared at him, stunned.
Eyes earnest, he ran his grip up her arms and squeezed. "I'm in love with you, Buffy. You're all I think about. You're all I want in this world."
Love? No. No. "You don't love me. You love what I can do for you."
He frowned at her.
"I'm not here to fix your failures, Spike," she said, teeth grit. "I am not your second chance."
"My second...?" he breathed.
"I finally understand you now. You've been working out your rage on the dial-a-girls who look like her all these years, but then you meet me, and you see opportunity. I'm the girl you think you can control and manipulate into the perfect little wifey she never was. You don't love me. You just want a new and improved Darla."
"You listen to me," he said, angry. "If that's what you think, you don't understand me at all. All my life I've been fighting off my demons. All my life I've been transforming pain into power, drive -- something I can use. When I couldn't stop her..., when she turned a dalliance into a bloody snuff film and made me cross a line I never thought I'd cross, I knew I'd lost that fight. So, I gave in. I let the demons consume me and eat me alive and make me what I was the day you met me. But then," he searched her face, "you..."
"No! Don't you dare imply that I made you a better man. Not when all you've done is made me worse."
He gasped, as if she'd hurt his feelings.
Did that honestly surprise him? "Take a look around you, Spike! You ruin everyone you touch. You turned Darla into a homicidal meth head, you turned me into a lying cheat, and you turned your son, your beautiful son, into a bitter, vengeful man who wants to see you burn in Hell!" She laughed through her tears. "Your mother must be so proud."
Buffy didn't even see the slap coming.
Hand on her stinging cheek, she gaped at him.
Panting, he shut his eyes, opened his quivering lips to speak, and instead of the apology she expected, he said, "Get out."
She didn't quite understand that he meant right now until he pressed the intercom button and said, "Stop the car."
Buffy blinked in confusion as the car pulled over.
Turning away, he wiped his cheek with the back of his hand and sniffled.
Spike Pratt ...was crying?
...Over her?
"Spike...?"
The car stopped. Steeling himself, staring straight ahead, he said, "I don't want you anymore. Get out."
"I didn't--"
"GET OUT!"
She scrambled out of the car. He slammed the door shut, and just like that, Spike sped away and left her there, all alone in the rain, outside of the 7-Eleven on Gardner and 3rd... half a mile from her car.
Blindsided, shell shocked, Buffy sat numbly on the cold, wet cement divider behind her.
He doesn't want me anymore?
Read on... >>
A NOTE ABOUT PLAGIARISM: Don't do it. Call me crazy, but I don't like finding my hard work pasted into other people's stories. If I find out you've plagiarized me or any other author, I will make sure everyone knows it. If you're not clear on what 'plagiarism' means, the definition is here.