"You're going to hell."
The slurred voice from behind him stirs Spike from his thoughts. When he turns around, he finds one of the older girls - Anita, Alice, Anneli, something starting with A - standing behind him, swaying drunkenly as she waves her stake at him. She's the religious nut, he remembers, even if he can't remember her name. The one who tried to kill him three times in so many weeks when she was first called. Which religion, he doesn't know, but they're all the same to him these days anyway.
They gave all the slayers a day off after the funeral, like always, which is why he is patrolling alone, preferring solitude to the quiet sniffling of the girls back in the houses. His back still hurts from the battle, and the fingers of his right hand aren't working properly yet either, but he doesn't worry about being overpowered. There aren't that many beasties left in the world that can frighten him anymore.
The girl stumbles, almost dropping her stake, but catches herself with that unnatural slayer-grace that still painfully reminds him of Buffy. He raises his hands in a placative gesture, but the he girl (Anna, Agnes, Amanda, Amelia) just stares at him, coiled into herself like a snake about to strike. She is clutching a piece of paper in her left hand. A photo, he realizes, and he doesn't need to see it to know what it´s of.
The other girl, the one who died, he can't remember her name either, but he remembers that she and Asta (Allyson, Aimee, Aki, Amber, Annalise) were friends. More than friends, if the rumours were to be believed. He pinches the bridge of his nose, feeling a headache building behind his eyes.
He used to have a box for the pictures. Just a small one, small enough to fit in his coat pocket, small enough to take with him if he ever had to leave town in a hurry.
A daguerreotype of his mother, torn and faded and stained with blood. A sketch of Dru, drawn by Angelus long before Spike was turned. Few photos stolen from the Summers family album, a page torn from the Sunnydale High year book. A snapshot of Angel and some baby found in the ruins of the great poof's office.
Just a few pictures - not much, but enough to remember.
He used to have a box for the pictures, but it's long gone now, and he can't even remember what happened to it.
“I think you should go back home,’ he says finally, the words sounding as empty and hollow in his ears as he knows them to be.
She says nothing, just stares at him with so much hatred in her eyes he thinks he wouldn't be at all surprised if she managed to turn him into dust with her look alone.
When she attacks, he dodges her easily. She loses her balance and as she stumbles past him, he grabs her wrist to keep her from falling; swats the stake from her hand and makes a mental note to schedule an extra training session for the girls the next day.
She glares at him when she has her feet under her again, but doesn't go for her stake. Spike ignores her look of contempt and digs out his flask as he sits down on one of the old grave stones. There is a part of him that appreciates the irony, the life-long lesson of "be careful what you wish for" as he watches the girl and sees in her eyes the fourteen dead slayers he now has under his belt.
"One day you will die," she finally hisses, spitting out the words like a curse. "You'll die and you'll go to hell."
He can feel the laughter bubbling in his throat, the madness that's never too far from the surface.
"No, pet," he replies, and tries not to imagine what she will look like when she's dead. "I'm going to live forever."