Title: "He Needs Me" sequel to "The one who loves him"
Author: Kathlyn O'Brian
Pairing: S/A
Rating: PG
Summary: Spike takes a painful step
Disclaimer: They're not mine.
Notes: The product of my stress-induced flu - this may not be great!
* * * * * * *
He is on his way to redemption.
I only wish it didn't have to hurt so much.
For both of us.
* * * * * * *
The Powers had a plan. Her death, his coming here to me, it all leads to the eventuality that we will be united in our struggle and receive our reward together.
He has always been more man than monster, able to love with greater fervour and devotion than many humans. But a souless demon could never be a warrior for the good.
And repentance is part of the road to salvation. We have to be sorry for what we have done before we can even begin to make amends for it.
And the Powers have seen to that.
They have restored his soul.
* * * * * *
He had been with me for three weeks. Gradually the tears dried and we began to accustom ourselves to our new life together. He fought beside me bravely and stoically. If asked why, he would say that he did it for me, or for her.
Never for himself.
I came home one evening to find him cowering in a corner of the bedroom, pale and shaking. He had taken a knife and lacerated each of his arms s deeply that the blood had flowed freely down and left a deep, dark puddle on the floor. He was too weak at first to tell me what had happened. He refused to feed.
It was the look in his eyes that told me. Although I have not seen my own face in a mirror for over two hundred years, I imagine that my expression must often resemble the one that he wore just then.
Haunted.
He had become William again, the gentle young man with the soul of a poet and a heart too eager to accept others, too vulnerable to be bruised and broken. Except that William now had the memory of nearly 130 years of atrocity which he himself had committed
* * * * *
He has finally fallen asleep on my chest. He sleeps fitfully and rarely and I daren't risk sleeping myself - I live in terror that I will wake up and he will not be here - that he willbhave walked out into the sun, as he threatened to do so many times during those agonising first few days.
* * * * * * * *
He refused all blood, even of the animal variety. I watched him becoming paler and sicker day by day, until I took matters into my own hands, so to speak. I opened a vein in my arm and forced him to feed. The smell and taste of Sire's blood is irresistible to any child - like mother's milk it is the stuff of (mock) life. I held him in my arms as he suckled from me like a bairn. My boy, my son. I nourished him the only way I could.
He still feeds from me every night. He doesn't even have to tell me he wants to eat - just comes quietly over to where I am usually relaxing in an armchair, a book in my hands, and looks at me with those huge blue eyes, full of desperation and hunger. Without a word I reopen the same vein, pull him to me and nurse him. We never speak. It has become a silent ritual.
He hates what he is. He hates the need for blood. But when the hunger takes over, it is do or die.
And my boy has always been a fighter.
The first few days were a nightmare. He cried, constantly, refused to allow me to touch him. He clawed at his own flesh, causing welts and gouges which have still not healed.
Occasionally he would ask me questions which I found it distressing to answer. What had happened to his parents? Who had been his first kill? (the regaining of one's soul causes gaps in the memory). I saw no path other than to be truthful. He gazed at me in silent agony as I told him how he, Drusilla and I had murdered his family one joyous evening, and how his first kill had been Cecily Marsh, as payback for rejecting him that night at the salon, along with the young fellow who had mocked his poetry. I recalled with horror, how, at my instigation, he gleefully cut out their hearts and presented young George's to a delighted Drusilla. Cecily's he kept for himself - the only way he could ever own a part of her.
Occasionally he begged me to end his suffering. He demanded it - he even handed me a stake. I refused. Not just through my own selfish reasoning - that I love him and want - need - him with me. If he dies now there will be no Heaven. This is part of the road he must travel to reach his eventual redemption.
I have already been travelling mine for over a hundred years.
He is luckier than I was. He has me - with the benefit of my previous experience. When my soul was first restored to me, I had no one on whom to rely. I wandered the roads and villages of Romania, filthy, starving, desperate, unwilling to walk into the sun only because I believed I deserved this punishment and to escape it would only add to my sins.
I think that this is the only thing that keeps him alive.
I have handed over the running of the agency to the others. I have different priorities at the moment. It makes me feel oh-so-human to have to take a hiatus from my work because a member of my family needs me - and maybe this is the way that it is meant to be.
I spend most of the time in an armchair, watching him. Occasionally he paces, sometimes he sits in the corner of the room staring straight ahead. Other times he cries himself into
hysteria. There are times when he rages at me and refuses to let me near him. I can understand why - it was I who did this to him in the first place . . .
* * * * *
My eyelids are so heavy. But I daren't allow myself to drop off to sleep.
I pull him closer and kiss the soft curls of his hair.
I have not made love to him for what seems an eternity although it is in reality more like a few weeks. My body aches for his, to become one with him. I feel that I am in a state of permanent hardness for my boy.
He stirs on my chest and emits a soft whimper. He is waking up. Only in sleep can he find release from the agony which taunts his every waking hour.
And when he wakes, I shall be there.
The End