Fifth "book" in the series that started with Spike's Will Be Done, and continued with True Colors, Ring of Fire and Fumbling Towards Ecstasy (These links will take you to the different story main pages rather than the stories themselves). Like True Colors, Ring of Fire and Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, it has been split into several sections to make life easier.
Round 8
Lost in Spike Awards
The story so far...
Okay, everything went the same way as the
show at least as far as Entropy, except for one slight difference.
When Buffy had her magical clear out in Gone, instead of
throwing everything out, she gave the box to Spike for safe-keeping.
This resulted in a rather different set
of events when Spike hit "rock-bottom". By the time he reached
the Magic Box, he already knew exactly what spell he wanted
and was sobering up in preparation for casting magic. He
took some time out to comfort Anya, and while they were
indulging in some innocent mutual consolation, Spike wished
that Buffy and Xander had the courage to follow their hearts
rather than always worrying about what could go wrong all
the time. As Anya would say, "wish granted".
Xander got all splotchy and possessive
when he saw them dancing at the Bronze on the nerds' cameras,
so much so that he whisked Anya off from the Magic Box the
next day for a Vegas wedding. (Anya gave her power centre
to Xander as a wedding gift, on the proviso that he didn't
break it.) Spike cast the "Will Be Done" spell and made
three wishes, that Buffy would be honest about her feelings,
that she would work out exactly what she really wanted and
that she'd really understand his feelings for her.
Before the first two wishes could have
too much effect, the third one kicked in, and Buffy found
her consciousness hitchhiking in Spike's body for a while,
leaving her body conspicuously vacant. Eventually everything
got sorted out but not before Buffy found out she'd been
jumping to conclusions over the demon egg affair.
This, the insight she had into Spike's
feelings and the wish Anya granted, led her to actually
give him a decent chance. One thing led to another, and
the "ripples" caused by that first change continued to spread
outward. The nerds were captured and subdued before they
could follow through on their plan for the armoured car
heist, so neither Buffy nor Tara were ever shot. Willow
never went on a rampage. Instead of the orbs being destroyed,
Spike managed to take them from Warren and gave them to
Xander as a wedding present. That sort of takes us up to
the end of 'Spike's Will Be Done'.
Buffy and Spike are now engaged, something
most of the Scoobies have come to accept. Xander, however,
is caught up in some inner turmoil about the whole thing.
He knows he has to come to terms with the relationship if
he wants to remain friends with Buffy. However, he still
doesn't trust Spike, and he keeps putting his foot in it.
Things in LA also turned out just a bit
differently after Buffy and Spike decided to pay Angel a
visit. Spike managed to point out to Connor - Buff and Spikey
were introduced to him as Stephen - that Justine's attempt
to fake something that looked like a vampire bite wasn't
really very convincing. Though he still wouldn't let Angel
help with burying Holtz, things certainly weren't so bad
between father and son as they would have been. Buffy managed
to come to terms with her feelings for Angel, and Spike
and Angel managed to part on neutral terms.
Buffy also talked Giles into offering Wesley
a job at The Magic Box. Though we don't yet know if he'll
take up the offer, he and Spike seemed to get on quite well
with each other. Buffy was intending to invite the LA gang
to the wedding, but then Dawn pointed out that Angel's presence
might be distressing for Giles, so now she's not so sure.
Preparations for the wedding, which by then was about two months off, were and still are ongoing.
On other fronts, the gang began to
put two and two together from Riley's earlier visit and
decided that he must have access to some sort of surveillance
on the Scoobies. They also knew, thanks to Buffy being in
Spike's head, that the vampire wasn't the Doctor. Once Buffy remembered
Sam's comment about working in an infirmary, they began
to have their own suspicions. Anya confirmed from Buffy's
description that the hatchlings weren't suvoltes, but a
relatively harmless scavenger species and that the only reason they
would have swarmed was if they were using a pheromone signature
to find their mother. As Spike pointed out, the smell wasn't
coming from Buffy's underwear, so that only left the clothes
Riley had supplied. All things considered, Iowa Boy and Wonder
Wife weren't exactly popular, and Spike was getting a bit
paranoid. He was even suspicious of Dawn's new boyfriend,
a new arrival in town. He also thought that the government knew
about Dawn being the key and he was worried that if she showed
any sign of being anything more than a normal teenage girl
that they could view her as a threat to national security.
Buffy got to meet some of Clem's family,
his mother Lily, who is an extremely gifted empath, his
niece Rosa and her mother Marie, who is human. When Clem
said that it was nearly two years since Rosa's father was killed,
Buffy began to suspect that he was a victim of the Initiative.
She was also forced to reassess her own actions and who she had become.
Spike also got Giles to investigate any
possible occurrences where a vampire and a slayer made a
mutual claim, or where a human and a vampire were bonded.
At this point Giles' research had been inconclusive, and he warned
the pair against making Spike's claim on Buffy (which happened
in the heat of passion) mutual until he could research further.
Buffy never really was that good at following the watcher's
advice, though. As True Colors drew to a close, the couple had done
just that and experienced a number of shared flashbacks
to scenes of them together, topped off with a seemingly
prophetic vision of their wedding reception. The overall
effect was similar to what happened when Buffy tasted Dracula's
blood.
The day after the claim was made mutual, while on an LA shopping trip Buffy, Spike and Dawn ran into Drusilla. Spike pushed the two girls into a taxi before he left with his former paramour. Unlike Dawn, Buffy believed that he was trying to protect them both and that Spike was in danger. Before events reached their climax, she was proven right, when they discovered that Dru had turned Lindsey McDonald as a gift for Darla, and the lawyer had been turning A list former clients... granting them immortality in exchange for a percentage of their wealth. Dru wanted to get her family back together. Lindsey wanted Spike around to take care of Dru but Angel was not part of the deal so far as he was concerned, though stripping away everyone Angel cared about one by one might have been.
Buffy roped in the AI team (minus Lorne who went missing later the same night as Spike) to help, and Clem and Lily made the trip from Sunnydale to LA to help out getting Spike back.
Lindsey arranged for Spike's chip to be removed at the clinic where they gave the former lawyer his "evil" hand. Dru subsequently tortured Spike.
Thanks to the claim, Buffy suffered from pains similar to but not as intense as those inflicted upon him and at one point when she tried to use meditation to focus on the bond between them, she seemed to be bleeding and passed out, though she didn't actually suffer any physical wounds. The couple also later discovered that the claim allowed Spike to be aware of what was happening from Buffy's point of view if she became involved in a fight, and vice versa, so that one mate would know if the other needed their aid or if they were already together they could fight even more effectively as a team than they ever had, almost thinking as one. They found that when they were both asleep together they would share dreams. They discovered that when they are in physical contact i.e. skin to skin, they can sense each other's emotional state. They also continued to share prophetic visions whenever the claim was renewed... but they didn't find out most of that until some time after Spike had been kidnapped.
His captors held Spike in the same place where Lorne was being held, along with several homeless kids that the vamps had picked up as food supplies. Spike refused to renounce his claim on Buffy, even after Dru burned away the scars with holy water, but she had one more trick up her sleeve. Using a Tabula Rasa spell, Spike was made to forget all his sire's slights and sins. With no memories of anything after he tried to cure Dru and with the chip removed, Spike reverted to his S2 self.
Spike, Dru, Lindsey and the other vamps arrive at The Hyperion ready for all-out war, but Angel had arranged to have the building enchanted with a sanctuary spell that prevented demon but not human violence. Despite the loss of memories, Spike still recognised Buffy as his mate and was half way up the stairs with her when he felt Drusilla's death and, since Dru had been wearing the crystal that was used in the Tabula Rasa spell and it crumbled to dust with her, the return of his lost memories.
Buffy, Spike, Angel, Gunn and Willow borrowed a helicopter from David Nabbitt and saved Lorne and the kids in the nick of time. Spike and Angel bonded over Drusilla's death (at least a little).
Wes came back from LA with Tara and Willow, thinking he could stay for a week or two and decide after that if he wanted to make the move permanent. Spike temporarily moved into Revello so that Wes could have his apartment. Things went a little more smoothly for a while and the biggest problem was having Dawn's boyfriend over for dinner, and dealing with some of Spike's issues, both from his past and from Buffy's treatment of him earlier in their relationship.
Making the most of her new boyfriend, Brandon, Dawn went out for a night at the Bronze with him when she was meant to be at home. Soon she suspected that she'd been drugged and as she tried to get away from Brandon, she was picked up by a military team led by Sam Finn. Brandon, who had also been drugged, was badly injured trying to protect Dawn and if Willow hadn't intervened using magical healing, he would have died in hospital.
As Buffy and Spike returned home from a trip up the coast, Spike was shot at (with bows) by another team, led by Riley Finn, who thought that Buffy needed rescuing from the vampire's thrall. Fortunately, after some previous trouble Spike had borrowed the orbs of invulnerability from Xander and when he discovered that they protected him from the sun's rays he had been reluctant to rush to return them.
Finally, once the soldiers had been overpowered and the two groups compared stories, they worked out that, unknown to Riley, Sam had been the Doctor all along and her most recent experimentation subject was a Key. Appalled at the idea of his wife experimenting on a little girl, Riley, along with Graham and some others, helped Buffy, Spike, Wes and Willow to get her back, though Angel and AI crowd were first to get their hands on Sam.
Fumbling Towards Ecstasy picked up as Dawn began her recovery from the kidnapping ordeal and the Glargh Guhl Kashmanik venom that Sam had injected her with. Sam had reasoned that this would prevent her from being able to tell her story, and also ensure that Buffy would be too busy looking after Dawn to investigate either this or any future dealings she might have in the area.
Dawn knew recovery was not going to happen overnight, but she also knew that Spike had been through a similar ordeal and would be there for her if need be.
Anya tried to induct Wesley into the world of The Magic Box, but it turned out that Clem's widowed sister-in-law, Marie, a lawyer with the DA's office, had a better proposition for someone with a PI licence.
There was a need for an investigator who was aware of Sunnydale's demon population, and Wes found that he should be able to make a living determining the real stories behind the local court cases.
Willow meanwhile decided to help Dawn's healing process, by making it like nothing ever happened. By the time the other Scoobies realised what she planned to do, it was almost too late. However, her efforts to summon a demon who could turn back time were spoiled when the puppy she was using as a sacrifice had a puppy-type accident and washed away part of the circle binding the demon. The freed demon cursed Willow for her arrogance, before going off to have a few drinks and catch up with her old friend Anyanka. Buffy, meanwhile, had Spike using his vampire senses to track down the puppy, partly to salve her conscience and partly as a gift for Dawn to help take her mind off what had happened to her. Enter Rogue as the latest member of what was about to become the Summers/McClay/Giles (the name on Spike's fake papers) household.
The spell was the final straw for Tara as far as her relationship with Willow was concerned but, with only a little nudging from Spike, Buffy asked Tara to stay and threw Willow out instead, saying that the witch had endangered them all again.
Thanks to Anya's catch up session with her friend, the Scoobies discovered that the curse on Willow was such that for each of her actions that failed to meet the Wiccan ideals the witch claimed to espouse, Willow would age so that her decrepitude matched the decay of her soul. However, it was completely reversible. If Willow had actually studied the Wiccan teachings and put them into practice, eventually, she could have atoned for the sacrifice of the doe when she raised Buffy and returned to looking her own age.
Willow, however, preferred to try to use magic to defeat the curse, thereby making it worse, and doing herself no favours when she used magic to keep up her end of term averages despite not having studied. She found herself back home, living in her parents' basement.
Wes moved into the house opposite Buffy's, where the bug man from the Order of Taraka had attacked Buffy's neighbour back in S2, which in this 'verse had been vacant ever since, using it as both his home and the offices for his new business. By the time he found his own place, Giles had arrived to help out with wedding preparations, so Spike stayed in Revello and Giles moved into Spike's apartment.
Lily threw a "Welcome to Sunnydale" party for Wes where she blatantly tried to matchmake between Wes and Marie, though both of them give the outward appearance of being rather gun-shy and Wes was still more than a little in love with Fred. We also got to meet Bee, who lived in the apartment block Marie owns, a ditzy blonde, seldom seen without her Siamese cat, Rupert, following close behind, someone who had a better knowledge of demon languages and demon history than Giles, and a rather low opinion of the council and its lackeys.
Spike fell ill in the way that vampires don't, and Bee was drafted in to help with the research. Wes later tempted her to join him as a junior partner since income from her career as an artist was unreliable.
Spike was convinced that his symptoms were those of a vaudaun curse he'd seen used before, but in the end it turned out that Robin Wood, freshly arrived in town in time to recruit staff for the new high school, had been poisoning all the blood supplies at the various butchers in town, using poison supplied by none other than Quentin Travers.
Willow was first to realise what was going on but she was still smarting from the humiliation of being asked to leave Revello and she decided not to tell the others what was wrong. She did magically alter all the poisoned blood, however, so that it smelled off.
When Tara and Wes performed a spell to see magic they found her "mark" on all the blood but also they discovered that the orbs which Spike has been using for UV protection contained the soul of a famous champion of the Nezzla demons, from whom they were originally stolen by The Trio. The poison was identified as the same one used against Angel back in S3 and Bee enlisted a demon doctor (disclosing to Wesley in the process that she was half demon, her mother being from another dimension while her father was from a family of prominent LA mages) to carry out transfusions to Buffy, Faith (who Angel brought down from LA) and Dawn after they each donated blood for Spike to drink - since the episode on the tower with Glory showed that Dawn's blood and Buffy's is to a certain extent interchangeable - thereby eliminating the risk of Spike draining any of them.
Unfortunately, before they could get that far Spike had disappeared. He had insisted that Buffy should take the orbs when she went to interrogate her former friend about her mark appearing on all the spoiled blood, in case Willow turned out to be dangerous while in her unbalanced state and meanwhile, despite being barely ambulatory as well as delirious and/or seeing the First, he had gone off to have a one-on-one meeting with Wood.
For his part, Wood was under the influence of the First and planned to use Spike's blood to open the seal under the high school construction site. Buffy et al. arrived in the nick of time but only just.
Before Angel went back to LA, Spike was appointed to act as mediator between Giles and Angel. Buffy wanted Angel at the wedding, but not at the expense of ruining the day for Giles. Spike made up a drinking game, the idea behind which was to get Giles and Angel to be honest enough with each other to work out where the true problem between them lay. When it became apparent that Giles blamed Angel for the fact that he was never able to heal the rift between himself and Jenny, Angel suggested that Giles should curse Spike with Jenny's soul.
Meanwhile when Faith, Fred and Gunn walked in on Wes and Marie having a business lunch a friends-pretending-to-be-more-than-that kiss, that started out to spare Wes his obvious embarrassment at seeing Fred, persuaded both Wes and Marie that maybe they wanted more than just friendship.
Back at Spike's apartment all three participants were more than a little worse for wear, and despite Spike's protests the plan was enacted. Once Spike agreed to come out the bathroom (he was a little unhappy at the physical effects that Jenny's feelings for Giles were having on his lower anatomy) the rest of the Scoobies got involved. Giles hypnotised Spike so that he would remain dormant, leaving Jenny's soul in control of his body until either midnight or until Jenny left. He also hypnotised Jenny so that when she heard the town clock strike midnight she would experience true happiness, on the assumption that there was little chance of her reaching that state without that sort of assistance (especially as Spike had insisted that everyone's clothes should remain on at all times). Tara provided a glamour to make Spike's body look and feel like Jenny's and enabled the couple to have one last evening together.
Spike came to on the beach with Giles' tongue in his mouth about an hour before midnight. Fortunately, Tara and Dawn were able to lend a hand talking Spike round when he began to sulk about not being a proper vampire any more and when Buffy got back from patrol she did an even better job of convincing him.
Section 1 - Holding Out For a Hero |
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We've moved on a whole three and a half days since the end of FTE. Cordy has been trapped on her higher plane ever since True Colors. By my reckoning she's probably getting impatient by now.
Section 2 - Tubular Bells |
Okay, Cordy's made it back to earth, even if she can't quite hold onto her hero just yet. There are still other problems to be sorted out and the people who can help are everywhere but LA. What are the chances that one of the founder members of the 'We Hate Cordelia' Club will step in and save the day?
Section 3 - My Last Breath |
The ritual is done. The entity that would have become Jasmine has been driven out of Cordelia and is unlikely to pose a threat at any point in the near future. I would say she's gone, but then when you're talking about a deity who still has followers there aren't any absolutes. Now, however, as Spike is wont to say, "There's always consequences..."
Section 4 - Angels and Demons |
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It's a couple of weeks after Willow's death. Things between Buffy and Spike are strained to say the least. Someone unexpected is about to show up at the Summers household. Tara is making a moral stand on an issue she has wanted to settle for a few weeks now. Will she succeed? Or will practicality win out over her desire to do the right thing?
Section 5 - Like Father, Like Son |
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With Roger Wyndam-Pryce's arrival in Sunnydale, Wes faces a battle that may be more difficult for him than any apocalypse.
Section 6 - The Healer in your Heart |
Andrew Michaels is about to head back into town bringing news with him. How are the Sunnydale crew going to react?
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The build up to the final battle with Caleb begins. Two of our favourite guys head for Gilroy to investigate happenings at the mission there.
Section 8 - It's the End of the World As We Know it (and I Feel Fine) |
The latest apocalypse is over and in its wake almost everyone is going to find their lives altered beyond recognition...
It's been a long time coming (especially in real life terms) but the day that some of you readers have been waiting years for is finally here.
