Backfire - Spander Files

that long to begin with, but clearly it didn’t take long girl-like fingernails to cause
the type of damage Xander had done to himself. Even though Willow had cleaned
Xander’s hands before she began, the skin she found under the nails as she was
cutting had twice sent her running to the bathroom to vomit.
Throughout the entire process, Spike continued to whisper in Xander’s ear. No one
knew if Xander heard any of it, not even Spike. And no one knew what it was the
vampire was whispering, except Buffy. Buffy heard it all.
So no one knew that it wasn’t Xander’s condition that was causing the tears to fall
from Buffy’s eyes. It was simply Spike’s words. Words that had been spoken to her
as recently as two nights ago from her very own vampire.
Buffy wept for her loss. She wept over the inevitable death of her friend. And she
wept for the pain that this evil vampire was going to endure when the end finally
came.
With blank expression and empty eyes, Xander sat.
*`*`*`*`*`*`*`*`*
Xander lost track of the world. Some time after his last encounter with Spike, just
when he thought he had fallen asleep, something attacked his brain. Maybe attacked
wasn’t the right word. Took over? Was that right? It was part dream, part hell.
He lived in a hallway with endless doors. The doors on the right were locked. He
tried them all. But the ones on the left opened easily. Effortlessly. But behind them
all was pain. Each one opened to blood, pouring out onto his bare feet and staining
his skin. He tried to stop opening the doors, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t because he
knew that behind one of those door would be his deliverance from evil. He just had
to get through all the pain before he found it. The pain was his penance.
So he waded through the thick blood in the hallway, getting deeper and deeper with
every door he opened. He couldn’t scream. The pain tore through his body like
razor blades, but he couldn’t scream.