No, they aren’t mine. I wish they were, but they aren’t. They belong to their creators. No money is being made. I just take them out, put them in pretty dresses, and make them fight each other. No harm, no foul. Feed the writer. Review.

:: :: Indicates thoughts

Then again, the floor was coated with the dust of vampires, not cigarette ash. The remnants of vampires past lay piled in dunes and valleys over scarred maple, blending in with graying walls.

Most of the ash was from minions. They'd fallen quickly, never expecting to be struck down by the hand of their master. He'd done it with the only memento he'd taken from Sunnydale: a stake from Giles' collection. One by one the youngest of his flock had vanished, skin burning away to bone and bone clouding the stagnant air with swirling, iridescent dust.

Spike didn't miss the minions. They were unbalanced, angry, and impulsive. No matter how hard Spike tried, they refused to learn subtlety or grace. Eventually he grew tired of constantly watching over them, monitoring their every move. It was simply more than he could handle.

Three mounds of ash drew Spike's attention more than the others. They belonged to his childer. Geoffrey, who insisted upon being called The Bane of Boston. Marisol, his lovely Darkling. Brutus, the quiet one--and the dumb one, if his siblings were to be believed. They had arrived home from feeding and carousing to find Spike working his way through the minions. His Darkling had of course joined in, using her favorite blade to hack off limbs, disembowel, and generally make a horrific mess. Underneath all the ashes and dust lay the remnants of her work.

Brutus simply stood in the doorway, watching Spike with confused eyes. It actually hurt Spike to stake him, his most simple childe. Brutus' death roused Geoffrey into action as the eldest of Spike's childer realized that Spike wasn't just cleaning out the riff-raff. Unfortunately Marisol got carried away and sliced up Geoffrey, making Spike's job that much easier. Marisol never noticed the stake sliding through her shoulder blades. She disappeared in a squeaky cry and the sharp scent of sulfur.

Spike didn't regret killing Geoffrey. He, like the other childer, was crude and unskilled. Spike wondered if it was his blood. Was it tainted? Did the soul make his childer insane and worthless? Was it his damnedable humanity, that festering shroud of who he used to be, hanging over his head like the Sword of Damocles, that weakened his offspring?

Or was it that he was lacking and not his childer? Did his soul, his failings as a Master vampire, make him unable to raise up and lead others? Were his childer fine examples of demonhood, ruined by his shaky hand?

It mattered not in the end; his childer were gone, crouching at his feet in a display of obeisance that they never even approached when they still had bodies. This was what he wanted, wasn't it?

Spike lit another cigarette off the last one. He had precisely three left in this pack; once they were gone he was leaving. Running was more like it. Chasing something he wasn't even sure still existed. It wasn't as though he had a choice, though. Spike had been holding onto air for so long that he'd almost forgotten what the ground felt like.

Every day passed and took with it another facet of his sanity. He had to leave, to find himself before he lost what little mind he had left. Somewhere out there was the rest of him, stored away like so much junk mail, meant to be discarded but forgotten. Spike hoped that it would remain that way, dusty and unnoticed, until he came by to claim it.

If Angel would let him.

Spike wasn't very confident that Angel would acknowledge his existence, much less help him. The last time they'd talked... well, perhaps torturing one's Sire wasn't the best way to mend fences. But that had been before, before the soul, before Buffy, before...

Before the world had been torn apart, crumpled up, and glued back together with mucilage. The seams were obvious, lined with feathery paper fibers and yellowing glue. Creases and dark spots from rotting garbage marred the once-perfect surface. Humanity, once blessed but now in whole a curse, stumbled upon the warped ground, scrabbling for mercy and taking it wherever it could be found. The murder that was the future had come, riding Spike's soul with a riding crop to his flank, bringing its favored horsemen along for company.

Spike remembered when he'd been evil; recalled with bitter fondness the days when the blood he spilled had been horrifying in its excess. Those sepia memories were trite in comparison to the seething, pregnant decay of today's night, ever eternal and overwhelming in its magnitude.

Perhaps the bygone years hadn't affected Angel as they had Spike, hadn't frozen his soul and shattered it into crystal dust like so much sugarpane. Angel was the stronger of them, the one with a century's worth of tempering and curing to inure that precious soul. Spike had been reborn on the cusp of the darkest night; soul given to crawling, tendons atrophied from regret. If only he'd had a few decades to crawl the gutters and wish for oblivion.

But that was the past, all behind him with the spilled tears and fallen blood, the cries to heaven and hell. His present was drier, all ash and dust, idle clouds following his ankles as he exited his tumbledown home.

Very little existed to make Spike want to remember either.

But his future, that was something he could bear to look at, even if only out of the corner of his eye when he was sure the future was looking away. The only thing he could see when he dared glance ahead was Angel. His Sire.

The blasted irony of it all made Spike want to laugh, were he a laughing man. Angel as his future. That was so rich, so perfect, so fucking screwed up Spike couldn't see straight. His Sire hated him, despised the very existence of Spike in his memories. If Angel could go back in time and obliterate William, the bloody awful poet, he would.

No, that wasn't accurate. Angel would have turned his light-and-dark, calculating-and-calculated family away from that pathetic fool, would have left William to get over his aching obsession over Cecily, to marry some comfortable, cold woman and die with a household full of children who didn't understand their lonely, sorrowful father.

Spike couldn't help but prefer the course of history as it had actually occurred. That life would have been lived unexamined, lived in a dreamland of regret. Not that his life as he'd lived it was any better; one of the few things he'd learned in his long life was that regret was a chronic condition. Those who said that they lived life without it were little more than liars, deceiving the world and themselves like grifters with their shell games. Those who thought that giving something voice made it true.

Spike knew differently. The word given voice only brought truth along when truth was there in the word. Otherwise falsehood was pursuant. Angel could tell the difference, separating lies and truth like wheat and chaff. His Sire was ever fallible in his perfection, but there was one place where he would never fail to read what was there, if he really looked. That place was Spike.

If only he could be persuaded to look when Spike came to him.