Title: Who Watch You Fall 3/4
Author: Pythia
Disclaimer: I don’t own any of them – Buffy and the gang belong to Joss.
The silence stretched for a moment, each man lost in thought, drowning in memory and loss. Giles let himself slowly slide back to the support of the pillows, tipping his head back so that he could stare at the ceiling – and at the images beyond it: images of a swaying tower and the coruscating brilliance that heralded the end of the world …
“Well then,” Spike announced with determined briskness. “Let’s not waste the night, when we’ve got some bloody good liquor waiting to do it for us. Course,” he went on, moving forward to lay a cold palm on fevered skin. “I could just … call the paramedics and get *them* to fix you up, but … they’d probably whisk you back into hospital and leave me with the whisky. And as I know damn well you’d be after me with a stake if I so much as *touched* it without you being here … I guess,” he concluded, “I’ll just have to do the best I can.”
The touch of his hand was oddly comforting, soothing the heat and somehow easing a little of the pain. “You could just leave me to bleed to death,” Giles pointed out, oddly certain that this was the one thing the vampire wouldn’t do. “And drink the whisky afterwards.”
“Yeah, right.” Spike’s chuckle was amused, not indignant. “And have the whelp and Red and Glinda on my case? No thanks. I’d rather put up with your glares and your put-downs than … have them haunt me afterwards,” he finished, half under his breath. “’Sides, the Bit’d never forgive me. Can’t disappoint the Bit.”
The words were unspoken, but they were there, hanging in the air between them with the desperation of denial; a prayer for mercy that was too little, and far, far too late.
‘She’s the only thing we have left …’
“Don’t sod about, Spike. I’m hurting here.” The snap wasn’t angry, just fraught; the subject they were skirting round was too close, too raw for any detailed consideration. The admission was also true, on all kinds of levels - but if the vampire recognised just how unguarded that admission had been, he didn’t acknowledge it; he merely nodded, accepting it – and the rebuke behind it - at face value.
“Sorry, mate,” he apologised. “This won’t take long.”
It didn’t.
Spike's touch was surprising gentle – which wasn’t that surprising, considering the punishment he risked every time he stirred a protest of pain – but he was also remarkably efficient in his ministrations. It seemed barely moments before the wound in his side was cleaned, the worst of the damaged stitches removed and the torn flesh firmly sealed with fresh gauze and tape. It *was* a little disconcerting to catch your attentive medic licking your blood from his fingers when he thought you weren’t looking, but while the look Spike gave him was momentarily sheepish, it wasn’t at all guilty - and the man in him pushed the outraged Watcher to one side and let the moment pass with a wry smile.
“All done,” Spike announced, tucking the end of the last crepe bandage into place and studying the result with satisfaction. “Bit of a bodge, but it should all hold. Here we go …”
The vampire had hauled him upright in order to apply the final layer of bandages. Now he helped him lie down again, supporting him as he was lowered back onto the yielding softness of his couch. Giles tensed as the movement stirred remnants of pain, and then forced himself to relax, conscious that his reactions might trigger the vampire’s chip. He had no wish to punish Spike for good deeds done, and he waited until he felt the dead hands leave his skin before he succumbed to the shudder of distress his body was busy demanding.
“Thanks, mate.” His moment of chivalry had not gone unnoticed; Spike’s murmur of gratitude was offhand and dismissive – as was the peremptory way he dragged the blanket over his patient and tucked it in with a few brusque touches. But both the words and the gesture were genuine enough – as was the response Giles found for them both.
“Thank *you*,” he said, and meant it.
Spike quirked an ironic smile. “Don’t,” he advised a little bitterly. “You got enough to regret on your plate without adding me into the mix. I’m only here for the beer. And the whisky. Bottom of the wardrobe, right?”
“Left-hand side, right at the back. Under the boot rack.”
“Gotcha.” The vampire half turned away, then looked back with a wary frown. “I’m – umm – not gonna find the door into Narnia up there, or anything, am I?”
“What?” Giles blinked at him. “Good Lord, no. At least … I-I hope not. It is … possible, that the events earlier this evening have opened a few doors that might have better been left shut but … I doubt you’ll find one in my wardrobe.”
“Yeah?.” Spike thought about that for a moment. “Yeah, right. *Whisky*,” he reminded himself firmly, and strode out of sight, leaving the Watcher staring after him with a decidedly bemused expression on his face.
‘This isn’t real,’ his mind was insisting, using the entirely bizarre turn of conversation as evidence that – somehow, some *when* – he’d slipped from reality into a nightmarish dream state. One in which a totally soulless vampire tortured him with solicitous first aid in order to get him to reveal where he’d hidden the good whisky. One in which he’d been wounded body and soul, cursed with a weariness so deep it had settled into his bones. One in which his beloved Slayer lay dead and broken in her training room at the back of the Magic Box, reverently wrapped in layers of pure, white silk …
“Oh dear *Lord,*” Giles breathed, feeling the shattered pieces of his heart shift and crack, its broken fragments splintering inside him with an anguish too great to bear. It was a nightmare – but it was one he could neither escape, nor deny. It was all true. All too real.
He lifted his hand so he could scrub wearily at the weight of pain behind his eyes – and paused, his palm resting against his face while he wondered, in all seriousness, if he could press down and hold in his own breath; if he could gift himself with the same stillness that he had forced on a lost soul, not so long ago …
“You wanna do the honours, Rupes?”
Giles jerked his hand down with an almost guilty start; Spike was making himself comfortable on the rug, holding out a bottle with one hand while he tugged a cigarette out of the packet he held in the other. There was a second bottle sitting on the floor beside him – along with the now-battered chalice, which was either intended as a totally inappropriate receptacle for the whisky, or an equally inappropriate ashtray. The vampire was busy lighting up the tobacco with a look of quiet bliss on his face; the Watcher might have considered that to be as inappropriate as the rest of his purloined trappings, except that he’d been a smoker once. He knew the euphoria of that moment – the sudden taste of smoke that you’d been yearning for for *hours.*
“I will,” he said, lifting the proffered bottle and turning it so that he could study the label. “If you let me have one of those.”
Spike looked puzzled for a moment, his fingers tugging the slender tube from his lips. He breathed out a soft plume of smoke, looked down at the cigarette, then passed it over with a knowing grin. “Knock yourself out,” he said.
The scent of the lit cigarette was sweet and sharp all at once, a breath of bite and balm that spoke to long-abandoned habits and triggered memories of equally long-abandoned indulgences. It rolled between the Watcher’s fingers with languid ease, and settled between his lips with the softness of a comforting kiss. “For that,” Giles considered wryly, taking a moment to draw in as deep a lungful of smoke as his battered body could bear, “I’d need a completely different kind of cigarette.”
“Yeah, right,” the vampire started to scoff. “You and the wacky baccy? I don’t think … so …” His voice tailed off under the look he was getting – a patient, world weary look, weighted with bitter experience. Giles anchored the cigarette at the corner of his mouth, freeing his hand to twist the top from the Scotch with a practised flick. He tossed the cap away without a moments thought and tugged the burning tobacco from his lips, briefly lifting the whisky in a reverential salute. “*Buffy,*” he declared a little brokenly - and tipped a generous chug of the time mellowed liquor down his throat, drinking straight from the bottle as if it were no more than water and he a man dying of desperate thirst.