Bewitched, Chapter 23

[thismaz]

Title: Bewitched, Chapter 23
Pairing: S/X. I promise it will get back there... eventually.
Rating: This chapter PG-13
Summary: Valentine's Day arrived and Dru dipped her finger in the brew, giving it a stir. That was two years ago; the fall-out is still happening.
Word Count: 3,560
Betaed by sparrow2000 and DJ, for which, many thanks. Thanks also to Sparrow for conflabbing on plot twists and forms.
Comments: Are greatly appreciated, loved and cherished.
Disclaimer: here.
Prologue here, with a link to the other chapters, or you can find the whole thing, in reverse order, in tags, or in the correct order, in memories. There's a menu of links on the right hand side of my main journal page.


Many thanks to mwrgana for the beautiful banner.



Note: In spite of extensive googling, I couldn't find a list of subjects taught in a typical Californian, publically funded high-school, or any high-school. From various careers advice sites, I inferred the existence of the subjects Giles and Xander name, but if I got them wrong (for 1996-9) I would welcome corrections.


Chapter 23

When Mr Donato's one, regular, day-time staff left, Xander jumped at the opportunity to take on dayshift, in addition to his evening delivery work. It meant he was working from 11:30 in the morning until after 1:00 at night and as a result was living in a state of semi-permanent exhaustion, but every time he looked at the growing total in his checking account, he knew that it was worth it.

The other downside of his increased hours, besides tiredness, was that he hadn't seen Willow and Oz for over two weeks and only saw Buffy if she swung by the restaurant during patrol, which she'd only done twice. It was a surprise, therefore, when Oz wandered in, late one afternoon.

"Oz, my man," Xander called, before Oz even reached the counter. "Whatcha doing?"

Oz raised an eyebrow. "Buying pizza?" he suggested. A faint smile tugged at his lips in response to Xander's mock frown and he relented. "I'm helping set up for a Halloween party. A scary house needs top notch sounds."

Grinning Xander asked, "And the sound system needs pizza?"

"Well, of course. Want to come?"

"To the party?"

"Sure. You get to dress up. It should be fun." He scanned the menu board behind Xander. "Two family size pepperoni, please."

As he boxed up Oz's order, Xander thought about the last time he'd dressed up for Halloween. He thought about his rent and his need to get out of the motel. Hiring a costume would cut into his savings a little, but glancing over at Oz, he figured that the gesture was important enough to cover the outlay.

Handing Oz the boxes and his change, he nodded. "Let me check that Mr Donato can get cover, yeah?"

Oz nodded back and turned to leave. "Sure, man. See you at Willow's at 7:00, if you can make it." The sound of the bell above the door echoed in the silence he left behind.

Mr Donato was happy to give Xander the rest of the day off. "You deserve a break," he said. "You work too much. I'll get my nephew to cover. He just sits around, doing nothing, eating my sister out of house and home. She says he's a student, but I don't see much studying going on. He can do an honest night's work, for once. You go, have a good time."

At such short notice, there wasn't much to choose from in the costume shops, at least, nothing that Xander wanted to risk turning into. But then he had a brainwave while walking past April Fools and as a result it was 007 who turned up at Willow's and Buffy's dorm room door at quarter to seven that evening.

In retrospect, Xander gave thanks to all the powers that were, for Buffy's impetuous nature. He doubted that they'd have got out of the party house with their sanity, if she hadn't been with them. It might have been Oz who spotted the book with the symbol in. It might have been Willow who found the reference to the fear demon and translated the text, but it was Buffy who decided, regardless of what anyone said, that she wanted a fight. Xander didn't think he'd ever been more grateful to her for not listening to the cautious voices of reason.

Xander was no fool; he knew what it meant that his worst fear was becoming invisible to his best friends. They were moving on with their lives and, while he might be earning a salary, he knew that he wasn't doing anything that could be called a career. And that was part of the problem. The whole idea of a career was a scary concept. It conjured up images in Xander's mind of bank loans and utilities bills and worrying about health care. He was standing on the edge of a cliff and whatever he decided, would fix the pattern of the rest of his life. The safe world of high school (true, even in Sunnydale) was gone and he was stuck facing too many possibilities and not enough choices.

He knew that he didn't want to spend the rest of his life delivering pizzas, but he was gripped by a sort of mental paralysis - fearful of the future, if he did nothing, but equally terrified of failing, if he took a step into the world of adulthood. The need to make a choice loomed over him, like a huge, stinking cloud of dread and that was what the fear demon had tapped into. Gachnar had taken what was inside him and given it a cutting edge.

Exams had always affected him the same way. In the weeks before, when he knew he should be revising, he was always frozen. Willow tried to help, first with encouragement, later by nagging. Neither approach achieved anything, except temporary rifts in their friendship. She might take credit for the fact that he graduated at all, but Xander was more inclined to believe that he'd done it in spite of her, rather than because of her.

The argument with Giles, the day after the party, was a bit like those explosions of pre-exam nerves. The future had caught Xander in its headlights, just like exams used to do.

When he went around to Giles' apartment, as he did most days before work, he didn't realise how tightly wound he was. He enjoyed his visits. They got him out of the motel and gave him something to do with his mornings. Over the weeks, they'd sorted through the library books, which were now either shelved, or boxed and labelled, and that daily task had been replaced by drinking tea and idle conversation. Xander suspected that Giles was feeling at a bit of a loose end. It appeared, from what he said, that he'd hardly seen Buffy since the day of the ring.

On the morning after Halloween, Xander was a little earlier than usual, but Giles didn't seem to mind the interruption while he was eating his breakfast. He went straight into the kitchen to make more tea, while Xander sat at the counter and gave him the full scoop on the events of the night before.

"You'd think college kids would have more sense than to invoke fear demons by accident," he finished.

Giles put the kettle back on the stove, picked up the tea mugs and turned around, bringing them over to the counter. He pulled out his stool and sat down opposite Xander. "And what makes you think that academia and common sense are in any way related?" he asked, opening a jar of marmalade and spreading a spoonful onto a slice of cold toast. "Toast?"

Shaking his head to the offer of a second breakfast, Xander replied, "But UC Sunnydale's a good school. That means you have to be pretty clever to get in."

"So is Oxford a good school," Giles observed, taking a sip from his mug and peering at Xander over the rim.

Xander was at a momentary loss, not seeing the connection. Then it dawned on him. "Ah," he said.

"Ah, indeed," Giles agreed. "Believe me, there are times when I would trade all my, so called, academic intelligence for a better portion of common sense."

Frowning, Xander objected, "But common sense doesn't get you a good job. You need a college degree for that."

Giles put his mug down and studied Xander thoughtfully. "Xander," he said, and just by the way he said it, Xander knew that he'd triggered Giles' teacher reflex, "you may not have hit the honour roll, but you did well in the practical subjects: woodworking, drafting and such. Have you considered developing those skills further?"

His voice held that sympathetic note that never failed to annoy Xander, the one that his math teacher had used when asking if Xander enjoyed working with his hands. He bristled. "Because those classes so weren't invented to be the consolation prize."

Giles frowned and hesitated. "What were your favourite subjects at school?" he asked. "Bearing in mind that I already know your grades." He smiled and the smugness in it fanned Xander's resentment.

Sitting up, he scowled. "Which is what makes that question so totally unfair."

Pushing his plate aside, Giles picked up his tea again and gave a small shrug. "You simply need to find a job that suits you," he said. "One that allows you to develop your natural talents."

It was as if he was mocking Xander for his inability to see something that should be as clear as day. Xander felt a pressure building in his chest that was almost painful in its intensity. "And what if I don't have any?" he asked.

Giles pushed himself back from the counter, so he was sitting up straight on his stool. "I'm sorry," he said coolly. "I was only trying to help. But if you want to spend the rest of your life delivering pizzas, I'm sure - "

Cutting him off, Xander snapped, "I don't!" He glared at Giles. "But I don't want to be talked to like an idiot either!" He saw Giles' eyes widen and his mouth open, but he ploughed on, refusing him a chance to speak. "Yes, I enjoyed drafting and woodwork and technology," he said, slamming his mug down and standing up. "I even liked Ms. Beakman's American Literature, but so what? I never got more than a D minus from her." Grabbing his jacket, he stalked over to the front door and wrenched it open. Without looking back he fired his parting shot: "I have to go. I have pizzas to deliver!"

Behind him, he heard Giles call out, "Xander, I'm sorry..." but what ever he was sorry for was lost to Xander, when he pulled the door closed behind him.

The clear, bright morning did nothing to lighten his mood, nor did the quiet, sunlit streets he walked along while waiting for it to be time to go to work. All they did was remind him that everybody else in the world had better things to do than spend their days wandering aimlessly around town. They were all in their busy offices, chasing their busy careers.

Once he got to work though, the need to smile and be polite to the lunchtime crowd eventually forced him into a better frame of mind. By the end of his day shift, while he sat in the kitchen with a cup of coffee and a bowl of Mr Donato's pasta, he was willing to admit that Giles hadn't really said anything that he hadn't thought for himself already. By the time he got back to the motel that night, he was feeling a little ashamed of himself.

The next day, he considered not going to see Giles, but that seemed a bit petty. All the same, he knocked and waited for Giles to open the door, instead of walking in unannounced. If Giles' welcoming smile contained more than a hint of relief, they neither of them mentioned the fact. Instead they drank tea and talked about the last year of high school, finding more than a few incidents that they could both laugh about, in retrospect.

When they reached the end of the year and spoke of the final battle, Xander recognised the pain of responsibility Giles carried behind his eyes, because it so closely reflected his own, and the final kernel of resentment from the day before melted away in the face of it.

As he was leaving, Giles offered him a copy of the morning paper, saying that he'd already read it and Xander might as well take it to read during his break. It was folded open at the help wanted pages. Xander suspected that, in the absence of Buffy to guide or library books to sort, Giles had decided to make Xander his next project. It was officious, maybe, but there was also something comforting in it. Xander grinned and accepted the paper.

*****

Spike was bored. He was more than bored; he was furious, frustrated, in pain and bored. He'd lost count of the days, somewhere around day five or six. With the constant light and no way to keep a record, he only had his innate awareness of the sun to mark the passing of time. Unfortunately, with the drugs they gave him to knock him out between studies, he was never sure how long he'd been asleep, each time he woke up.

When he'd first heard of sensory deprivation as a form of torture, in the forties, it had been in the context of darkness, but after a few days he decided that constant light could be at least as effective. The ceiling of the room he was in was the same white panelling as the cell they'd had him in before, but whereas that area had smelt of many demon species, this room smelt of nothing but human sweat, cold metal and burnt flesh. The monotony was mind numbing, with only the hourly visits from the scientists to break it up. Strapped to a table, not even able to move his head because of the clamps on either side of it that held him still, he came to welcome their arrival, just to hear another voice, even if they never spoke to him.

From what they'd said to each other, he'd gathered that during the first round of burn and measure, they'd been concerned that he might die and ruin the results. The fact that he had no vital signs making it difficult for them to tell if he was still there, until they saw his throat respond to the blood they forced down him. He tried playing dead, in the hope that they'd toss his body out somewhere, from where he could escape, but in the middle of day four there was a shift in their handling of him. They became more confident and he learnt that they had seen a vampire go to dust. There were some harsh words for the scientist who had disposed of a 'perfectly good specimen' who he had thought was dead, when he obviously wasn't. The soldiers were sent out to make sure that 'the specimen' hadn't escaped into the community and there was a notable reduction in tension when it was reported that 'Hostile 9' had been tracked down and dispatched.

After the first two days, Spike slipped into gameface and stayed that way. A human appearance had failed to elicit any sense of commonality from his captors and gameface didn't require the slight effort that maintaining his human mask did. By day three, his fangs were so deeply imbedded in the rubber gag they used to both keep him quiet and to facilitate the dispensing of measured quantities of blood, that he wasn't even sure they'd come free if he did change. He could feel the brush of air at the tips, where they'd penetrated through to the feeding hole in the centre.

The scientists talked amongst themselves with remarkable freedom. There was Briggs, who he had nicknamed the Weasel, another who looked like Van Gogh in his 'self-portrait with pipe', and the last of the regulars, who reminded Spike of a soppy spaniel to look at, but was anything but spaniel-like in fact. In addition, there were a number of technicians who Spike only got glimpses of because they spent most of their time at the back of the room. Between themselves, they discussed the depths and diameters of the burns inflicted on his flesh and the time it took for each to heal, but they also chatted more generally, about their other experiments and about the facility itself.

Finally, there was the Witch, a very different sort of witch from the Slayer's sweet little friend. When she was in the room the conversation followed her lead and she seemed to be excited to have discovered such a large population of vampires she could draw from. Not that she used that term. She blamed vampires' ability to camouflage themselves, what she called their 'mimicry of human appearance', for the fact that her teams had not recognised them as 'hostiles' until recently. It appeared that it was his lack of a heat signature that had given him away. There was nothing Spike could do about that, although he spent some of the boring hours when his only company was the pain of their latest branding, to speculate about making clothes out of electric blankets, and other, similarly impractical devices. The rest of the time he spent in imagining the day he'd be in a position to turn the tables on his torturers.

The Witch would be his first target. She was in charge and the fact that she never wielded the branding iron herself, only made her guiltier in Spike's eyes. She would learn what it meant to be at the mercy of someone who knew human anatomy well enough to maximise pain, without ever running the risk of killing.

The Weasel would be next. Spike spent hours remembering exactly how many extremities could be cut from a human body and cauterised, before the body gave up the fight for life: fingers, joint by joint, then toes. Hands and feet could be removed, if you gave the body time to recover between surgeries. Lastly he'd cut off the bastard's gonads and stuff them in his supercilious mouth, but he wouldn't kill him. No, Spike fully intended to leave the bastard like that, tied to a table, while he went and made a phone call to the ambulance service. He didn't care if the FBI mounted a nationwide manhunt, he'd know that the Weasel was living with the knowledge that he'd eaten his own balls.

The Spaniel and the Artist, he'd burn, turning the branding iron on the branders, slowly, inch by inch until their entire bodies looked like they'd been broiled. In all cases, the most important thing to Spike was to leave them alive. Alive and raving about inhuman monsters, the FBI would discount their testimony.

The fact that they spoke so freely in front of him, confirmed for Spike his suspicion that he would be 'disposed of' once they were done with him. In that respect, it was almost a relief each time he woke to find himself still tied to the metal table and a white coated torturer with an electric branding iron, hovering over him.

They fed him immediately after each application - pigs' blood, cows' blood, sheep's blood, occasionally and oh so thankfully, human blood, both whole and in its separate constituent parts. Then they measured the diameter of the burns on his chest, every hour until they healed. After that, he'd have a reprieve, until they came back to repeat the process.

The day he woke up to find a larger than usual gathering in the room and a more muted level of conversation, he felt a tendril of fear curl up his spine.

The Witch appeared at the edge of his field of vision. "Very satisfactory," she remarked, staring at a clipboard in her hand, which he knew was covered in the measured moments of his pain, all scientifically tested, one variable at a time. She looked up and glanced around the room. "I think we're done here, gentlemen. This one can go back, until it's reassigned. We've gathered useful data, but we need to expand the study to other subjects."

She signalled one of the technicians over to the head of the table and there was a soft clunking sound as the brakes on the legs were released. Then the table, with Spike on it, was wheeled out of the room and into a long, white ceilinged corridor. Another technician and the Spaniel each took hold of a corner by Spike's feet to guide the table's direction.

"Is it safe?" the technician in front asked.

The Spaniel looked at him across Spike's feet and pursed his lips. "None of them are safe," he warned, "but we think this specimen is a particularly weak example. He was in very poor condition when he came in, which doesn't suggest he has very good survival skills."

They turned a corner, pushed through a set of double doors and Spike gave silent thanks for the olfactory cacophony of multiple demon species, confined in too small a space, that assailed him. He was back in the corridor with the holding cells. He still couldn't see anything to either side, but there was no mistaking that smell.

The table stopped and the Spaniel pulled a key card out of his pocket and walked out of sight.

The technician at Spike's head turned to follow, asking, "Do we leave him on this? Is he safe to undo?"

Because Spike was listening, he recognised the faint scratching sound of the card being swiped through a reader. "Wait a moment," the Spaniel said, reappearing on the last word, "we'd better be cautious." He picked up a small box from between Spike's pinned down knees, opened it and withdrew a hypodermic. "Just in case," he said, pushing it into Spike's neck and depressing the plunger.


Bewitched, Chapter 24

Comments

[texanfan.livejournal.com]

Xander would certainly hear Giles ascertions as patronizing. After all, like Willow, he has such impressive academic credentials. But what Xander has is so very valuable if he can only see it. it is interesting how something like delivering pizzas can feel safe, even if you're constantly exhausted and unfulfilled.

Treating Spike like he's a dumb animal will definitely bite them all in the ass eventually. I have some hope Spike can burn the facility down around their ears.

[thismaz.livejournal.com]

Poor Xander is at the point of stepping into the unsupported world of adulthood; I think he is finding it very difficult to see himself, at the moment.
I have some hope Spike can burn the facility down around their ears.
Hmmm... That would be nice. I'll see if he can manage it, but no promises *g*
Thank you, hon.

[texanfan.livejournal.com]

It's just a fantasy. :) You've made me hate the Initative more here than I did in canon. and you did it without going over the top. give yourself a hand!

[thismaz.livejournal.com]

Thank you very much. *bows*