***************************************

That was the length of time between the first unanswered ring and the moment Spike came barrelling through the double doors of the hospital. During that time, he discovered, there had been intubations and surgeries; the careful but impersonal cutting of clothes from slender young bodies; the injection of drugs and the removal of broken glass embedded in skin.

("This message is for...Spike? My name is Dolores and I'm the night intake coordinator at Fairview Medical Center...")

And, of course, there had been the phone calls. All ignored. The first (minute one) had come as he'd pulled up in front of his building. He saw it was a local number, swore, and turned the ringer off. Those two again, probably standing in the lobby of a movie theater, wanting him to hand them tissue during some deplorable chick film. Suddenly he had no desire to enter his apartment. He started the car again and headed for the nearest dive bar.

The third call (hour two, minute nine) had come as he sat at a sticky shadowed table, open lighter in one hand and the concert tickets they'd given him in the other.

He thought he might kill them. 'And we're gonna be here for you, no matter what.' If they'd devoted everything in their power, they could not have come up with an idea so cruel, so precisely painful, so spectacularly destined for failure. It would have been funny, really, if it wasn't so pathological.

("This is Dolores Hentzle again from Fairview. Someone named Spike, at this number, was listed as the emergency contact for Buffy Summers and Dawn Summers...")

He lit the tickets on fire and tossed them into the ashtray.

The fourth call (hour six, minute thirty-two) came as he was methodically butchering several proud representatives of the Mencius clan.

("Goddamn you, Spike. Pick up the phone. Have you heard your messages? Because the field communications office just played them for me. Are you with Buffy and Dawn? Spike? Answer the fucking phone!")

Most of the blood on his hands was his own, but he'd come to accept that. Humans had such tender flesh, easily breakable. And as soon as that floated unbidden through his mind he cursed himself for going all lyrical during an otherwise marvelous fight.

The seventh call (hour ten, minute nineteen) had come while he was sprawled clothed and facedown in bed. The bottle of Maker's Mark he'd taken off the Mencius and what he suspected were broken ribs sent him willingly into oblivion.

("Hello, this is Jeff from Fairview Hospital calling. I'm looking for Spike - is there anyone there by that name?")

Many nights he dreamed of Buffy, of soft sinuous limbs tangled in his own cold ones. In the dreams he was always dead. A vampire, like before. Always. Tonight, though, she didn't come.

He woke up when the sun slanted through the blinds and onto his face. Emma nudged him, impatient for her breakfast. But the first thing he felt was his cell phone, poking uncomfortably against his thigh. He'd fallen asleep with the damn thing still in his pocket. Sitting up, he took it out and stared blearily at the frantically blinking text on the screen.

New Voicemail: 9

And now he sat in a hard plastic chair, Angel leaning over him. "Did you get your rocks off, boy? Did you hurt her enough? She's just lying there, now. Can't fight back. Why don't you have at her?"

Angel had flown in on the firm's Gulfstream but had only been able to pace the waiting room floor, powerless. It had been Spike appointed as their steward through this silent and suffering journey; Spike who numbly found himself answering questions and outlining medical histories, while at every moment sick terror churned in him.

Angel's hand clamped down on his neck. "What a waste you turned out to be."

Spike shook him off and he'd walked away then, sparing Spike one contemptuous glance before he left. The hospital staff swarmed around in his wake.

They handed him papers to sign, pages about 'consent' and 'resuscitation' and other things he refused to read. And in stark typeface, below the blank line for his signature, the words NEXT OF KIN.

"Family," he mumbled, as someone handed him a pen.

At one point he found himself in a cluttered office, seated across from a man with kindly eyes. It was strange to be the one in charge. The one who mattered. So he tried to listen as the man explained the nature of countrecoup brain injuries, the Glasgow Outcome Scale, the ten levels of cognitive functioning.

"There will have to be decisions made," the man told him, "about when to terminate care -"

Spike got up then. "Nobody fucking touches her." Out in the hall, they told him he could see Dawn. He stood in the doorway to her room for a moment, finding it suddenly difficult to move. She looked a mess. She'd been lucky, they said, but it didn’t seem so as he took in the splint on her right leg, the cast covering her left, the bruises tainting her chalky skin. As he watched, she stirred in her sleep and made a faint, wretched sound.

This is the way my world ends, he thought. Not with a bang, but with their whimpers.

He'd been at her side for perhaps an hour when she finally opened her eyes. He reached for a smile and found one. “Hello, my Bit. How are you feeling?”

“It hurts.”

He swallowed. “I know, pet. You’ve been banged around good and proper. Had me worried there.” One tentative, trembling hand alit on her bandaged arm. “But you’ll be fine. Doctors said you’ll be fine.”

“What happened?” She arched into his touch blindly and it was a struggle not to weep in her arms.

“Car accident. You and Buffy were on the overpass, do you –"

Her pretty eyes went big and aghast, and then she was wailing at him. "It wouldn't stop, the car just wouldn't and Buffy tried...where is she? Where's Buffy?"

He watched in alarm as she twisted herself up in the sheets, jostling her cast and coming dangerously close to dislodging the IV in her arm. "Shhh. Shhh, sweetheart. You're going to hurt yourself. Please, don't cry. Don't cry." Oh, he'd always been undone by her tears.

When he went to still her she suddenly pushed him away.

"You! I hate you! You hurt us - I remember what you said - get away from me! I hate you!"

"Calm down, Dawn. I know. I know you do but please, you have to calm down or else they won't let me come back, understand? They'll make me leave and not come back." It was too awful to threaten her with this but he didn't know what else to do; hadn't known what to do since the moment he set foot in this building. He should be more of a man about it, should be bearing up stoically in the face of these latest casualties.

But they were his girls. And so small.

Her bare panic at his words made something twist in his gut. "I'll stop," she whispered.

"Good girl. So brave you are. Listen to me, Dawn. I don't want to bother you with this, I know you're not well but we have to talk. About Buffy."

Tension stretched between them, and then she nodded.

"Buffy's not - the doctors say she isn't going to wake up. Say it's only a matter of time before it's over. You get what I'm telling you?"

Dawn gasped and jerked uncontrollably. But he was there, and he held her steady. He edge the chair closer so he could cradle her bent head in his arms. "It should have been me," she sobbed.

"Never, pet. Not how it works, not what anybody would have wanted. It's a blessing, Dawn, that you're healthy and intact, or getting there. You're a blessing."

She fought for composure. "That's not what they'll think. You know," she said unsteadily, and Spike did. He remembered those sideways glances from the Scoobies three years ago, when they thought she wasn't looking. But she'd seen them, every one.

"Don't give 'em another thought, Dawn. Just you and me here, and I love you, and I need your help. Please help me. I don't know what the right thing is. Must have gotten some sort of off-brand soul 'cause I'm having all manner of thoughts and none of them seem wrong."

Dawn's dull gaze sharpened. "What thoughts?"

"I want to get her back for you. All of her. But Willow tried that once and it didn't go swimmingly, did it? Stole from Buffy what she'd earned and tore us all up in the meantime. And you weren't asked, when you had more right to speak than any of them. So I'm asking you."

Her voice was hard and brittle. "She's not dead yet, Spike."

"I know that. But the doctors -"

"Fuck them." Dawn shifted abruptly, wincing, and brought a hand up to her stomach. "They don't know, Spike. She was the Slayer, and I was a great big ball of energy, and you can bet that's not on our charts. They don't know anything. What are you going to do?"

"Whatever I can. Whatever it takes. Got a plan, and if it doesn't work I'll just tear up this dimension and the next 'til I find one that does."

Dawn leaned back, her exhaustion evident. "Good. You do that. Bring her back to us."

He brushed the hair back from her face. "You certain?"

"Yes."

"Guess it's unanimous, then." He dropped a kiss to her cheek. "Will you be okay for a bit? I don't want to -"

"Go. Hurry."

He turned away but when he reached the door she called him back. "Spike?"

"Yeah?"

"Like you said - whatever it takes. A trade, if that's what they want. It'd be better than going through life as the consolation prize again."

There was no answer for that, none that she would receive, at least. He rested his forehead against the cool metal of the door. "Sleep now, Dawn."

When he stepped back into the hallway Angel was there. "Don't you dare. Don't even think of it."

Spike shoved past him. "I want a sit-down with the Powers. Make it happen."

"Since when do I have them on speed-dial?"

"Since you inherited that law firm from hell, though of course you never realized it. What do you think I've been doing down in that basement, playing shuffleboard? Been going through the old files. Plenty of interesting tidbits I discovered."

"Such as?" Angel was intrigued despite himself, striding alongside Spike as he stalked the corridors of the hospital.

"The Powers got duped by Wolfram & Hart. More than once. Got themselves harnessed, no better than ponies at a petting zoo, with the Senior Partners holding the reins. So I'm telling you: you call them, and they'll come. They won't like it, but they will." Spike turned to him. "It's all about restoring the balance. They're desperate to even things up."

"Duped? The Powers aren't exactly natural-born suckers."

"The firm used them, played them. Sleight of hand, to make them think they were keeping order in the universe when really Wolfram & Hart was just pointing them in the right direction - or, wrong, as the case may be - and telling them what to do. Plaguing an entire village became 'preventing the dissemination of powerful magic.' Striking a mother and her unborn child dead turned into 'saving the world from the next dark messiah.' See where I'm going, or do I need a dry-erase board?"

"How come this is the first I've heard of it?"

"Maybe because it wasn't you poking about among the dust and creepy-crawly dead things. Or maybe because the Powers weren't exactly going to raise their collective hands and bellow 'Oi! Over here! Owe you one!' But they do. And now it's time to collect."

"Whatever it is you're planning, it won't work. The Powers - they give you what you want, but not how you want it. One way or another you'll regret this."

"I know."

"You don't know, or you wouldn't even be considering it. Spike - what happened to Dawn and Buffy happens to millions of people every day. It's tragic and senseless and beyond unfair, but it's human. It's the risk of living."

"Don't care. The Powers got a debt outstanding. And if you're thinking of your boy, that's over and done with. You couldn't give him a better life than he has now."

"Not another word about Connor. I've accepted his fate, just as you ought to accept hers."

Later, much later, Spike thought that they had never hated each other as much as in that moment. "You walk away. I fight for what's mine. That's always been the difference between us."

Angel's laugh scraped through the hall. "Fighting for what's yours? Is that what you call it? You fool. You're raping her all over again."

When he was gone, Spike slipped outside for a smoke. He needed fortifying for what came next. He'd always been so weak. Weak monster, weak man. But at least he had a purpose. Armed with marching orders from Dawn, the general of his heart, he turned back to the ICU.

He couldn't get close to Buffy, could only stand at the thick plastic window and stare at the monitors and tubes and wires. Hard to believe there was a body buried under all those death-trappings. A bit of her golden hair spread on the pillow beckoned him, as did one impossibly narrow gauze-wrapped wrist. He closed his eyes and inhaled the stench of antiseptic.

"Hello, love."

No answer, of course. Still, he clung to the hope that she was there, somewhere; suspended patiently in stasis while he ran around looking for miracles. So he pressed shaking fingertips against the window and continued.

"It's a terrible thing, to see you like this. You were always so strong, weren't you? Slayer or no. I was proud, you know, for sending you away all those times. I just never thought this was how you'd leave.

"Won't let that happen, though. Angel's fussing but he'll do what I ask. There's a debt there, too. And he's curious. Can't help but like the idea of having the Powers under his thumb. If he's got any brains he'll milk it for a while yet."

He was stalling, he knew. Everything he wanted to say sounded too much like goodbye. Regret choked him, stilling his tongue. The tirades and hunger-poetry of his past had deserted him; he was left with broken endearments and pleas to deaf ears.

He wanted to tell her that every beat of his heart shamed him; that the traitorous life he harbored would be hers if he could only will it so. He wanted to tell her that he had never been as staggered as when she'd demonstrated, heedless and defiant, that he was cherished despite himself; Buffy and Dawn both bound to sabotage his shallow-and-slipping indifference. He wanted to tell her that believing her dead, for even that short time in the baking, rapacious sun of California, was a wound that had never healed. He wanted to tell her that her capacity for love was a magnificent and terrible thing, as deadly as any of her absent mythic strength. And that he accepted it only now, when she was so far from him, was a suitable punishment for his transgressions against such charity.

His speech, when it was finally delivered, was clumsy and plain. The words came in a torrent, unchecked; alien to him but oddly befitting regardless. He would not have changed a one.

"...And I just need you to stay here, just stay here for a second and listen, okay? Don't go. Because we can start over, you and me. You and me and Dawn, we'll be a family. I know how much you wanted that. You don't have to say it."

Strong arms encircled him from behind, holding him when he would have beat his hateful human fists against the glass. Angel. The words kept on.

"Please, you just have to...I remember what I said before but I'm ready now, I swear I am. It's been so long, Buffy, won't you –"

Language surrendered then, and he was bereft. Lost to what was surely his own selfish and craven desire, the wantingneedinganguish that had been imprisoned but now burst forth a thousandfold.

He was being pulled away. "It's been arranged," Angel murmured against Spike's skin. "Downtown, an hour from now. Come on, let's get you cleaned up."

Part 11: The Lights All Fried In Brightness

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