Title: Imperial
Author: Sunalso
Pairings: Buffy/Spike (Willow/Oz, Xander/Anya)
Rating: NC-17 (this chapter: PG)
Length: ~21 K (this chapter: 545)
Timeline: Prologue S3, the rest S4, this is an alternate reality world in which things didn’t go quite the same for Buffy at the end of S2
Warnings: Character Death, Violence (including gun violence), Sexual Situations
Summary: Buffy returns to Sunnydale in order to take down the Initiative and find her chosen mate, she’s just a little different than when she left. My love letter to heroic bloodshed movies. This one’s for fun!
Notes: The Initiative is bigger and badder than in canon. Beta’d by Gort and 13Lilies. Response to a challenge on Elysian Fields by Sharade.
Prologue
The words coming out of the redhead witch’s mouth weren’t making sense.
“What do you mean the Slayer’s gone?” Spike snarled. That was impossible. The bint existed to guard this piece of hellmouth-adjacent real estate.
The boy, who he’d been forced to drag along when he’d kidnapped the witch, frowned. “Buffy’s not here anymore. Get that through whatever part of your brain isn’t completely sloshed right now.”
“Giles won’t say it but he thinks that, uh,” the witch wrung her fingers together. “He thinks that Buffy’s probably dead.”
Fury, thick and hot, erupted inside him. The pleasant haze of the booze was gone, burned away by his anger. This wasn’t how his return to this nightmare of a town was supposed to go. The Slayer was his. He was the one who would kill her, drain her dry, and dance on her bloody grave. She couldn’t be gone.
Spike spun, his fist slamming into the wall as he howled his rage. His mind was filled with her. Her laugh, her shining golden hair, the quips that spilled from her while she flowed flawlessly through a fight. The way her hand wrapped around a stake.
Buffy couldn’t have just…ended.
He shouted and howled, ranting pointless threats at a world that didn’t have her in it. Curses fell from his lips and he heaped them on the Powers and her Watcher for not protecting her, and the girl herself for not staying safe and alive. For not waiting for him to bring her death.
The burnt wooden dresser was pulverized beneath his hands. Spike raked gashes into the walls, tore at the floor, and destroyed every object he could get his claws on, all for the sin of it still existing when she didn’t.
The vampire’s temper finally departed when the room was at last in complete shambles. He was left shaken and unexplainably bereft. The witch and boy were still there, cowering in a corner. Spike had to leave, had to get away from this town and the crater of anguish it was fast becoming.
Something had broken deep inside him and it hurt. It wasn’t something that understood thought or reason. It was blood screaming that the world was wrong.
The vampire grabbed his captives by their shoulders and propelled them up the stairs, avoiding the rickety ones, and out into the night. He left them standing, their mouths agape, on the sidewalk.
Spike had to run, had to flee. He gunned the DeSoto’s engine and pointed the car’s front bumper away from the hellmouth. But no matter how many miles of asphalt he put between himself and Sunnydale’s cheerful Welcome Sign, the pain still hounded him.
He missed his girl.
