More of the Memories Project
TITLE: Gamble When You Get A Face
AUTHOR: Dead Soul
RATING: NC-17
WARNINGS: graphic sex and violence, sadomasochism, bloodplay, implied character death, unrelenting cynicism and angst, and just a soupçon of blasphemy
PAIRINGS: Spike/Sunday (BtVS, Season Four, The Freshman), Spike/Drusilla, Spike/Sunday/Drusilla
SPOILERS: BtVS - none past Season Four
DISCLAIMERS: I own nothing and no one. The story title is a line from the song Blank Generation by Richard Hell and the Voidoids. Chapter titles are the titles of Elvis Costello songs.
DISTRIBUTION: help yourself, but please let me know – if I’m going to be a whore, I should at least remember where I’ve been and whom I’ve done
THANKS: to my terrific betas, SpikeMom, juliaabra and Lady Starlight who make me go back and describe things more, who slay the insidious typos, oh, and who make me use more commas (grumble, grumble).
FEEDBACK: might make me too happy to write, which may, perhaps, be a consummation greatly to be desired. Concrit will be met with gales of grateful tears.

SUMMARY: a twenty-year vampiric globetrotting ménage a trois with lots of really twisted sex and yummy gore. Oh, and angst, lotsa angst. Sequel to Sunday Girl.



Someone take these dreams away
That point me to another day
A duel of personalities
That stretch all true reality
That keep calling me - they keep calling me
Keep on calling me - they keep calling me
-- Joy Division, Dead Souls


PROLOGUE – I WANT TO VANISH

“Like Petroneus, perhaps, I take pleasure in committing suicide at leisure.”
-- Dorothy Dunnett, The Game of Kings

Spike should have killed me then in that basement in the Bowery. Drusilla be damned. Which of course she will be, eventually, and when she is, I’ll have been there, wherever there is, if there is, long before. For that reason alone, I hope she stays undusted for a good long time. I never want to share anything with her ever again.

As I drive west towards California, I’m dictating the rest of my story into a micro-cassette recorder I’ve found in the pocket of his jacket. Seems that guy in the diner taped our entire conversation. Or rather, my monologue. What a Daniel wannabe. Too bad he didn’t look like Christian Slater. If he had, I might have some company for this road trip. Guess his coat, his car and his tape recorder will just have to stand proxy, be his insignificant memorial.

I’ve been listening to the tapes since I left Detroit. Examining the story from the beginning, I see the pattern so clearly. Prague was inevitable – so inevitable there’s been no point to most everything I’ve done since being turned. Spike really should have just killed me then. At least then it would have been done in affection and fun, not in the grim and vengeful hatred he feels for me now. But what did he expect the outcome to be? Between the two of them, they made me who I am. The kicked dog will eventually bite. Geez, how fucking trite. If I weren’t driving, I’d back the tape up and record over that last sentence.

I’m going now to the one place where I know he’ll eventually turn up. The Hellmouth. Where the Slayer is. If he’s not drawn there for me, he’ll turn up for her. Maybe she’ll do his job for him. Or maybe, just for kicks, I’ll do his job for him. Get one last dig in. Add fuel to the balefire.

So I may as well pick up where the previous tapes left off – nothing better to do as I flee the rising sun and head for Sunny. Dale, that is. Seems appropriate that the Mecca for our kind is to the west, rather than the east. Some silly part of me, some pathetic shade of the girl I was perhaps, hopes that he’ll hear these tapes and maybe understand why I did what I did. Or maybe I just want to leave something behind besides dust and death. And maybe I just like to hear myself talk. What? Me? Shut up.



CHAPTER ONE – TALKING IN THE DARK

I stayed in the basement for several months, learning my new strengths, my new appetites. Feeding was easy among the junkies, drunkards, and punks (oh my!). A careful bite could be disguised as track marks in the ravaged crook of an emaciated elbow. Sprinkle some broken glass, make a few gashes for show, and the victim of even the most vicious bite would look like just the loser of a broken bottle fight. Mostly I was careful to choose meals who hadn’t shot up recently, but sometimes I’d get a loaded one and spend the next night or so floating in a warm sea of viscerally realistic memories and, for a little while, at least, I wouldn’t feel so alone.

***

Although my first hunt was rather a debacle.

I was so high on my new power, my new strength as I strode into the club. Leather corset from the night of my turning worn over a pair of Spike’s discarded jeans, the legs rolled up just over my ankles to show off my glossy new spit-shined black kicker boots, tight white t-shirt tied in a knot between my breasts, hair in a long tight braid, I glittered with Spike’s abandoned silver and leather jewelry. I thought I was hot shit; hear me roar

He was tall, pale and pretty. Slender and gawkish, his black hair falling into his eyes, he had such a long, tender neck, and he was so obviously an incompetent poseur, but god he was cute. We played eye contact across the crowded club, although he looked surprised every time our eyes met as if he thought I must have been looking at someone behind him, not him.

Slam dancing must have been invented by vampires, for vampires. I could have had a quick nibble, a friendly bite from just about anyone on the packed dance floor, salty, pale flesh glistening with sweat, hearts pumping an adrenaline overload, even the ones who weren’t speeding their asses off, but my appetite had its heart set on him. I didn’t have to disguise my strength as I shoved my way through the packed, smelly, hot crowd of puerile disenchantment and sophomoric nihilism.

It was so easy. So very, very easy.

As a human, I’d have wasted hours tossing my hair, pretending to ignore him while at the same time stealing sidelong looks out of the corners of my eyes. The teenage mating ritual. The ‘no, no, yes’ that leads to so many misunderstandings and missed opportunities.

But, as a vampire, I saw what I wanted and I took it. If I’d known boys were this easy, I’d never have had a free Saturday night since hitting puberty. I walked up, grabbed his hot hand and took him home.

Once there, I was too hungry to wait. He was so warm and moist. He smelled like fresh-baked brownies and roasting turkey and grilling burgers, like all the food smells rolled up into one über-food smell. I had him down on his back across the fainting couch, straddling him, kissing his heated mouth, running my fingers over his neck, searching out the best place to bite to get as much of his blood into me as possible, as quickly as possible. He had a strong, fast, excited pulse, the veins very close to the thin, fresh, fragile skin

I ran my tongue down his salty neck, grasping the collar of his shirt in my hands, easily tearing it all the way to the hem. His hands were busy too. He pulled my white t-shirt over my head, baring my breasts. As I leaned in to bite, I pushed them against the naked skin of his chest. But before I could slide my fangs into his pulsing throat, I felt a scorching, a searing against my breast, totally unlike the hot wax or even open flame Spike had tortured, tempted, teased, and taunted me with. There was nothing erotic about this feeling. It was entirely and completely a ‘get it the hell off me’ kind of pain that felt like it had burned a hole in me big enough for a fist to reach in and yank out my unbeating heart.

Hissing, fangs out and face bumped, I reared back and stared in disbelief at the tiny gold cross the boy was wearing on a long chain so that it had been hidden underneath his shirt. I was stunned. Why on earth would a cross do that to me? I was Jewish. Crosses weren’t a symbol of my former religion. A burning Star of David or Chai I could understand, but why would a cross affect me?

As I paused to consider this interesting metaphysical inconsistency, the boy was screaming and struggling to get away. Reflexively, I tightened my knees, crushing his ribs, holding him in place. Recovering from his panic enough to see where I was looking, and reminded of some half-forgotten legend, he grabbed the cross and thrust it out towards me. In spite of myself, I recoiled, and not just from the memory of the pain. Something in me couldn’t bear to even be this close to it. Like how, even when you know it’s on a leash and you know you’re out of its range, if a dog lunges at you, you shy away. Ya know?

Yanking, he broke the chain and pushed the cross towards my face. I had to release him in order to get away from it. Looking at it physically hurt my eyes, kind of like a too-bright light that wasn’t light. The torment came from a different place. Maybe crosses do emit light of a sort – light that is outside the spectrum visible to human eyes and that vampire eyes can only detect as pain. Have to remember to ask someone about that someday, I thought. Meanwhile…

I reeled off of him and across the room, anything to put more distance between me and the source of the brain-splitting agony. He scrambled to his feet and towards the door but he made a mistake. His last mistake. Disoriented, holding his bruised and possibly broken ribs, instead of taking the door that led to the stairs out of the basement he stumbled down the familiar hall to, you guessed it, my old cell. All the better to corner him in, I thought, as the discomfort finally receded enough for me to act.

No lights down there, but I could see well enough. Well enough to observe him banging against the walls, feeling for a door, a way out. I let him go. Let him think that perhaps I was still huddled, cowering and blinded by the might of his tiny, little cross, instead of silently stalking him. This was beginning to be fun again.

He was feeling along the wall for an exit when I soundlessly entered the cell. Creeping up on him, I let him blunder into me. I heard the tinkle of metal hitting concrete when he dropped the cross, as he jumped back in surprise and fright. I could see the gleam of the faintest light on the whites of his wide-open eyes, glistening and shining like something dipped in syrup. No more messing around. I was hungry enough, and angry enough, to suck those sweet eyeballs right out of his head.

I was also still inexperienced enough to be surprised by my own speed as I rushed him, toppling him to the floor and striking at his neck with my sharp, famished fangs. I closed my teeth over his gorgeously protruding Adam’s apple and pulled. It popped into my mouth, a chewy, warm, wet mouthful of deliciousness. I sucked it dry and spit out the gristle then leaned down to bathe my face in the river of blood still pumping from his mutilated throat.

I fed like a wild beast. What was left after I’d sated myself was hardly recognizable as having been human. A rag, a bone, a hank of hair.

***

But unless the hunger was on me, I spent my time in Spike’s old room, turning over his detritus, his relics, burying my face in the smell of his unwashed clothes – the smell I was never able to catch until I lay dying, just before I was turned. I played the tapes he’d left behind and scratched his name on various parts of my anatomy with the safety pins I found, watching the bloody letters fade imperceptibly, the way, no matter how closely you watch it, you never quite see the hands of a clock move their way around the dial.

Evenings I was particularly missing him, I would smoke his brand of cigarettes and use the glowing ends to brand myself his. These marks would be a little more permanent, but they, too, would eventually fade.

I had discovered his room down an unexplored hall. I guess it was remote from the others so he could play his music and watch his ‘stories’ without disturbing Drusilla. A typical masculine mess – heaps of dirty jeans and t-shirts, the floor littered with cigarette butts and broken cassettes, shiny mylar threads criss-crossing the floor like fallen streamers in the aftermath of a wild party. Or the aftermath of someone packing in a hurry.

The unbroken tapes, I’d listen to over and over on his singularly clean and pristine stereo system, the bass and the volume turned all the way up so I could feel the vibrations of the huge speakers thumping through the cold concrete floor as I lay there, memorizing the short, frenetic songs full of fuzz guitar, feedback and screams of alienation, boredom and self-congratulatory silliness.

I also found a Polaroid camera and several packs of film, which came in handy as I was learning to do my make-up by feel. The early ones, the ones that looked particularly clownish, I saved to show Spike one day. I thought it might give him a giggle. But one night in a fit of self-loathing and despair I tore them to tiny shreds and set fire to them. Why should I be saving things to show him if I was never going to see him again?

What finally broke me out of this funk, was a taste of others of his, my, our kind.

***

The simplest way I’d found to catch a meal was simply to walk out by myself late at night. There was always some mugger/rapist/thug type hanging around who thought he’d found himself an easy mark. The fun of pointing out his mistake could momentarily alleviate the gloom – especially if I let him, or them, if I was lucky, beat up on me a little first. But one night the muggers weren’t human.

Since I’d become one myself, I hadn’t been around other vampires, so I didn’t recognize them as such right away. And since I was so young and looked so small and helpless, they didn’t peg me as one of their kind immediately, either.

I was doing my scared-scurry impression of a girl out too late in a bad part of town when I heard them stalking me. I walked a little faster, throwing pantomime glances of fear over my shoulder, but really thinking that if they didn’t hurry the hell up, I’d get to ‘safety’ and lose my shot at them. Finally they surrounded me and pulled me into a handy alley, all grabby hands and grubby clothes. Grubby hands too, to judge by the taste of the one held over my mouth as I pretended to struggle

I was hungry and not really in the mood to play with them, so I made my move to break free and attack, but, to my surprise and extreme irritation, I couldn’t break the hold of the attacker clutching me from behind, pinning my arms to my sides. Angry and a little genuinely scared, I vamped out. As soon as I had done so, so did the ring of four or five others. They looked like such typical minions that I was ashamed they’d gotten the drop on me, but I was still pinned, held off my feet, against the chest of one big motherfucker whose grasp I couldn’t wriggle out of or break.

I still wasn’t seriously frightened. I guess I figured that as soon as they’d realized their mistake, that I wasn’t a late night snack, they’d release me and we’d go our separate ways. No harm, no foul. Neither Spike nor Drusilla had thought to mention how territorial your run of the mill vamp gang is, and now, it seemed, I was trespassing.

Shit, I’m about out of gas.

***

Funny how the taste of motor oil cuts through the flavor of the blood, completely ruining it. Note to self: no more mechanics for breakfast. Although the smell of gasoline does continue to appeal to me, sharper and even more intoxicating than I remember it being when I was human. Mmm, brain-buzz.

Where was I? Oh yeah. That lame-ass vamp gang. Who really gives a shit about them? I’m here, aren’t I, so I must have gotten away. I’m bored with that subject, although the incident did give me my first understanding of how truly flammable we are. A lesson I’ve since put to good use.

What I want to talk about is Rome and what happened there

If I were going to wax literary, I’d justify the topic jump by saying that linear narration, while logical and expected for this kind of story, reminds me too much of this motherfucking highway. Could you guess that I’m in Kansas now? Mile after mile, event after event, all of it going nowhere. If I jump ahead, maybe it’ll help me imagine the Rockies, which must be up ahead there somewhere. Wax off.

And a question. Do all these pop culture references make this a work of postmodernism? Or is it just the gasoline fumes causing an overweening sense of self-referential self-importance and mock-hubris? And is the metanarration really called for?

***

So anyway, once I got my ass in gear I took to hanging around JFK, trolling for a girl traveling by herself who looked like me and had a passport and a plane ticket to anywhere in Europe on a flight that both left New York and arrived at its destination after dark. A fairly specific list of requirements, but it only took about a week for all the elements to fall into place, and I found myself in a seat in coach on a flight to London’s Heathrow airport. Train to Dover, ferry to Calais, more trains to Paris, and then to Rome. First class sleeper car tickets, paid for with the travelers’ checks and American Express card I’d swiped along with the passport and plane ticket in New York.

Once in Rome, I had no idea how I was going to find Spike or even if he was still there. Best I could figure was to hang around the rough areas of town and cause some trouble, maybe get him to come to me.

So I was in this alley sucking on the neck of some young guy who’d had the nerve to pinch my ass when I smelled something familiar. Something I hadn’t smelled since the last night I was alive. Something I’d only caught the faintest cold memories of from unwashed jeans and t-shirts two thousand miles behind me. Nonchalantly, I took a last sip and snapped his neck, letting him slide to the rough paving stones. I shook off my vamp face and turned.

Wiping the blood from my mouth, I said, “I don’t know what Dru was talking about. I love eating Italian.”

TBC