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spike drops his cigarette out of his mouth, watching it flutter to the ground before crushing it beneath his boot and grinding it into the asphalt.
he sucked in a breath, appreciating the stench of a desolate, dank, terrifying sunnydale alley, and turned to re enter the demon bar behind him.
only to be stopped abruptly at the sight of a vengeance demon entering the alley, because even though he’d seen hundreds of them before, this one just seemed to make his heart stop beating for a second- which wasn’t even possible considering it hadn’t been beating for over two hundred years- and he found himself staring dumbly at her curly hair and sheepish smile and the bumps and grooves of her face. and, oh, she was staring right back.
“…william?” it sounded almost like a whisper, and god, when was the last time he heard that name?
he stared, eyebrows scrunched as he tried to decipher just who on earth this demon was, and then her features dropped in realisation and suddenly they were morphing into something else entirely and-
cecily.
it was fucking cecily, staring right at him, two hundred years and over five thousand miles since he last saw her.
If there was still breath in his lungs, he would’ve stopped breathing.
“william-“
without thinking, he rushed forward, and punched her square in the face.
he reeled back, shouting and clutching at his head, but she barely blinked, just stood there staring at him.
“cecily. cecily fucking addams-“ he was still clutching at his head, the sharp pain now a dull ache, making the world just ever so slightly blurrier, and he was wondering just why exactly such anger had overcome him, when another question entered his mind, and he straightened up, hand moving back down to his side.
“wait, you’re- you’re a fucking vengence demon? since when? why? how? what the fuck?”
she looked down, seemingly almost sheepish “scince before I ever met you, william. hundreds of years before, in fact. I don’t have to ask how long you’ve been a vampire for, your disappearance was in the papers a few days after the party. I… I did feel sorry, for what I said. you were a sweet man.” she smiled sadly, and spike just wanted to punch her all over again, stupid government chip be damned.
but he bit back any snide remark, or physical blow, and instead looked behind cecily, to the empty road lit by a flickering streetlight. he paused, letting the silence linger as he tried to figure out the sea of emotions whirling around in his brain, before he spoke again, timid and quiet and nothing like he usually was.
“I was so heart broken… I ran and sobbed like a baby in some backstreet, and that was where dru found me. it was your fault I died, in a way. but…” he scoffed, looking back over to cecily, who was looking at him with such sorrow and sympathy it made him feel sick “from what you’re telling me, none of it was even real. you were just there to fuck with one of those horrible men at the party, and some doe eyed idiot who had no concept of the horrors of the world just happened to fall for you, and you had absolutely no reason to care for him. he was beneath you. this entire hellish existence… because we were in the wrong place, at the wrong time. worlds a fucked up place”
cecily bit her lip “I’m sorry, william. truly, I am.”
he stared at her, “my names spike.”
for some reason, this broke a small smile out of her. her face shifted back to its previous form, and she held her hand out for him to shake.
“I’m halfrek. it’s nice to meet you, spike”