Chocolatey Goodness

Part 17: Pillow Fighting

rated NC-17 (well, this bit's really PG-13, but the whole chapter is... you get the point.)

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Tokyo, 1943.

"Tell me a story, Spike," Drusilla begged him again.

But he wasn't in the mood for making something up, even to please her. Not when the hunters had come that close-- close enough that he still had their stink in his nostrils now, as he held her next to him. Not even burying his nose in the perfume of her skin could completely erase it.

They had almost been dust in their own bed. They would have been, if Dru's little friend the Gaki hadn't caught one of the youngest of the vampire hunters napping in the van that had been moving ever closer to the crumbling block of flats where the vamps had set up camp. She'd seen the plans for the raid all mixed up in his dreams, and come floating in to warn them. It had been too close for Spike's taste-- they'd still been yawning and stretching and scrambling for clothes when they heard the footfalls in the corridors.

He was sick of running like rats from these little human boys. Tokyo was supposed to be the vampires' playground, their feasting table. Their European faces were excused by faked-up papers and a good story about being spies for the Japanese government-- with the right details lifted from some bureaucrat's dreams, again by Reikoku. For months, they'd had free reign. It wasn't perfect -- he couldn't get real choccies here, for a start, just those sorry excuses for Smarties that the American G.I.s carried about in their cardboard tubes, and some of the Nip lads had started smuggling in to use for barter -- but it was good. The gutters, such as they were, had run with blood.

He'd grown lazy. He'd allowed himself to forget, for a moment, that there were always things out there that could hurt him, or worse, Dru. It didn't have to be bigger, scarier monsters than they were, though God knew he'd found enough of those, once he'd started taking care of Dru on his own. It didn't have to be monsters at all. He'd forgotten, and his complacency had cost them. From somewhere out in the provinces, a little crusade of stout-hearted farmboys with torches and stakes had appeared with the spring rains. Young, foolishly brave, and armed with the one thing these city cattle didn't have-- knowledge that what they were hunting was real.

"Spike, please? I can't go to sleep without a story. The bad boys come when I close my eyes, and they have fire. It pinches me with its little orange claws, and rips and tears, and hurts when I look at it, because it's too beautiful."

Another monster, then, to add to the collection that already lived in her head. Spike shifted, pulling her closer to him, pushing a stray lock of hair off her forehead. "I can't think of any stories tonight, Dru. 'Less you want a real fairy tale; I could remember one of those, maybe. Snow White?"

Though God knew if he started in on that one, he'd have 'Someday My Prince Will Come' running through his head until he managed to get to sleep.   --Damn Walt Disney, and damn those idiot Nippie soldier-boys who managed to smuggle the flick into the country, and damn me for taking Dru to see it.--   Inane bloody tunes wormed their way into his brain and stayed there 'til he had to either sing 'em or make something scream just to get the melody out of his ears.

"I don't like that story," Dru pouted. "That girl is wicked and cruel to her mummy, who only gave her a lovely apple to help her sleep."

"Perhaps I could tell you a story, then," Reikoku said.

Spike raised one eyebrow at the small female figure who sat tailor-style at the foot of their makeshift bed, floating a few inches off the floor. She was capable of sitting that way for hours, he knew, just watching them, waiting for them to sleep, so she could take what she wanted from their dreams. Had made him nervous, at first-- not that he'd ever minded an audience, waking, sleeping, or shagging, but this one was too still, too quiet when she watched. Gave him the weird feeling she was sucking in everything around her, eating you up without even opening her mouth.

But she didn't seem dangerous. She'd never killed a human in front of them who wasn't already dying. Playing that same Death Angel game that Drusilla had fallen in love with on the little prisoner-of-war island, though Dru had grown weary of it long before they'd escaped to what passed for the mainland. And though she'd shown no qualms about diddling around in a dreaming human's head, slowly pushing them towards the nightmares that were apparently a dream-eater's equivalent to Slayer Blood, Rei had made no such moves on him or Dru .

No manipulation, no attempts to mess about with their heads, that he could tell. Maybe vamp dreams were dark enough already, or maybe she knew Spike would find some way to tear her into little pieces, ghost or not, if she hurt Dru. Bloody well better know, considering he'd laid it out for her in detail right in front of Drusilla. Dru had just laughed, then pulled him to the floor and ripped his clothes off, telling him it was the nicest bedtime story anybody'd ever told her; too bad he couldn't keep his mind still for long enough to think up something similar tonight. Rei had smiled when he threatened her, and said nothing.

Maybe Rei really did think of them as friends, as much as two different sorts of monsters who couldn't really do anything nasty to each other anyway, could be considered friends. He'd gotten used to her ways, anyway; figured out that she could be provoked into talking, if you purposely said something stupid enough that she had to correct you. Teased into laughing, which always made Dru laugh as well, and that was worth anything, now, to hear his princess laugh in this arse-backward city where they, the masters of the hunt, were suddenly the prey. So if Reikoku was willing to entertain Dru when he couldn't get his head straight enough to do it, he wasn't about to turn down the offer.

"Yeah, tell us a bedtime story, why don't you?" he agreed, sitting up a bit and letting Dru use him as a pillow. "Something with lots of blood and gore, for my girl."

"I know many of those," Reikoku agreed, but Dru shook her head.

"No, I want a different story," she said imperiously. "I'm tired of blood and gore." Spike looked at her, wondering if she'd gone irretrievably over the edge, past charmingly insane, and all the way to who are you and what have you done with my dark goddess. She fluttered her eyelashes at him, and he sighed, knowing it wouldn't matter a mite, one way or the other. "Blood can run too much like fire, " she said, swaying just a little in his arms, the way she would when one of her half-cocked visions took over. But this was just Dru being Dru. "It's all red behind my eyes. I want black, tonight. Just cool, black water.

Reikoku seemed to consider this, for a second, then nodded. "I know a story like that." Drusilla clapped, and Spike shrugged. As long as Dru was happy, he didn't care if Rei wanted to recite the entire history of Japan; he'd probably fall asleep halfway through anyway. The Gaki half bowed her head, a little formal conceit that still tickled Spike, and the curtain of her straight black hair hid her face as she began to speak.

*****

"Once, many years ago, there was a girl who lived next to a river. She had feet that were a little too big, from running barefoot in the dirt, and eyes too close together to look like the perfect ladies on her mother's wallscrolls, and she wanted... oh, many things. To be a princess, or a Geisha, or a poet, like the Lady Murasaki. Anything but a chicken farmer's daughter on the banks of the Shinano, whose waters flowed through the province and away to places she would never see, carrying fish and fallen blossoms and the leaves of strange trees from far upstream where she would never travel either.

One day, when she was seventeen, a soldier came riding through the village on a foundering horse. Lost and weary and separated from his troop, he stopped by the river for a drink of water, and she saw him. The man took off the straw hat he had made to shade his face from the sun, and dipped his hands in the cool water. He poured it over himself until his hair lay flat against his head, and she could trace the shape of his skull with her eyes.

From that moment, all other want became nothing, became only this want. The need to touch that skin on his cheeks where the sun had burned it, and see if it was still warm. To be held in front of him on his horse, and ride with him, to wherever he was riding. Or even to stay here, in this little place, where nothing ever moved except the river, as long as he would stay.

He did stay, for a while, because he was lost and his horse was crippled, and her family gave him a place to sleep, food to eat. Gave him one small daughter to follow him about asking questions, chattering endlessly, and one older, to watch him silently. To creep to his bed in the stable at night, and listen to him talk about what lay somewhere down the river. The cities, the people. Silks and gold and the foreign accents of the Gaijin who came from far across an ocean that she could hardly believe existed. Except that she believed him, believed anything he would say when she was wrapped warm in his arms, in a bed of straw.

She believed him when he said that he would take her with him when he went. She believed him when he told her she was more beautiful than any of those silken women in those unseen cities. When he put his hands on her body and said that she smelled of jasmine, though she knew full well she smelled of sweat and chicken droppings, the softness in his voice made her feel that it was true. She believed every word that he spoke, and when he left one dawn, early in the flood season, riding away at the end of a line of soldiers who had come at last to find him, she believed she would go with him.

He laughed at her. Very gently, so gently that she did not understand, for a moment, why he was laughing. He laughed, and kissed her on the forehead, and told her to be a good girl. Then he went, and the rains, as if they had been waiting only for the signal of her tears, came pouring down.

Unable to walk back to the house, to see the sad and knowing face of her mother, she ran to the river. She watched it churn for hours, watched the broken branches that she tossed in, spin and bob in the water, and disappear beneath it. Sucked away somewhere by the hunger of the flood. To follow him downstream, towards the sea? But she knew there was no following, any more than if she had lost what little dignity she had found in herself, and run barefoot after his horse shouting at him to take her along. There was no following. There was only the swirling water, and the darkness.

There was nothing she could do, but fall.

Tripped over a root, she tried to convince herself in the first few moments. Slipped on the muddy bank of the swollen river. But there was no truth in it. She fell of her own accord, plunging through dark waters, cool and sweet. She opened her mouth as she sank beneath the current, drawing it in gladly. She gulped water, chewed mud and stones, wanting, aching, hungry for more. By the time she reached the bottom, she was unsurprised that she had not stopped falling, that the river had no bottom. She was too busy trying to eat.

When she finally landed, she wished that she could have stayed in the dark waters forever. The place where she found herself was dry and hot and full of little flying things that chittered at her and tangled in her hair. In Gaki-do, the hell of the hungry dead, she lived a thousand empty, aching lifetimes, the food becoming filth as it touched her lips, the water turning to fire in her throat. She wanted, and wanted, lost herself in it, until that fallen girl just disappeared. It was someone else who screamed and ran and somehow wanted out enough to rise. Someone else found herself standing a few feet downstream from where she had fallen. The moon above was a mere bite less round than it had been, the ground still muddy from the receding waters, and the one who stood on the bank was the ghost of the river, who named herself Reikawa.

She was hungry still, and the water did not fill her, could not satisfy. Mist, fog, untouched by river or stone, she drifted towards what had been home, trying to consume anything she could find on the way. Anything to fill the void that raged inside her as strongly as the river had raged over the edges of its banks, days or an eternity before. Nothing. Nothing noticed or touched her. The hens and the dog chased each other around the yard, and paid no mind to her as she moved past them. Her mother stared straight ahead, not seeing her as another day was crossed off the ricepaper calendar on the wall.

Not seeing, as what had been her child concentrated, willed herself to be what she had been, and sat human-shaped and hungry at the table. Legs crossed just so, feet bare, waiting for a bowl of rice that was never set before her. Not seeing, or pretending not, mother's eyes dry as the hungry one's were, but her hands shaking as she laid out enough places only for the family that was left. The rice wouldn't move when the ghost tried to steal some from her sister's bowl as she had done so many times in play. Not even a single grain of rice, could she lift to her mouth to see if it would fill the empty place where something else had once resided.

But when they slept, she drifted into the second room where her mother and father lay side by side on pallets stuffed with straw and feathers. When she saw her mother turn away, pull apart from her husband, alone in her dreaming, ah, then. Then she came close, and while her mother shuddered in her sleep, the ghost pressed her mist against salt-wet skin, and tasted. Not the few tears on the wind-reddened cheek, still held half in check even in sleep, but the ones that overflowed the river in her mother's mind. Someone was drowning in it, a girl with eyes too close together, feet too big to please some who would go unnamed. She flailed and gasped for air, long hair floating out around her, then twisting at her throat to strangle her, as if the water had not done a good enough job, by itself.

She should have felt something, the ghost of the river knew. That this was herself, that this was something precious, gone forever. As she touched and tasted, the one who had named herself Reikawa knew only that the sorrow was the finest thing she had ever placed upon her tongue, the guilt more potent than a hundred jars of rice wine. It sucked her in, drew her on, past the little noises, the tiny thrashings of her mother's body, the squeak of fear. She stirred the nightmare with her fingers, churning the dream river until the woman gasped out loudly in her sleep, and finally the water became real, pouring from her eyes. The ghost girl drank of the dream, and that river was cool, dark, delicious. When she had finished, the mother slept peacefully, salt tears drying on her face, but the river ghost was already moving to the next sleeping body, and did not look back.

When she had eaten and drunk her way through the entire village, and realized that the empty place within her was still there, she laughed for many hours, deep in the night. Finally she named herself again, for the thing that pushed her onwards, down the river to the next place: Reikoku. Relentless.

"Hungry."

*****

"That was a lovely story," Drusilla said, and Rei smiled. Bowed. "But there was no princess. All stories should have a princess in them, somewhere. Even if she gets eaten by wolves."

"Later, there was a princess. The ghost met a princess, and her knight," she said. "Who walked in the night with her, and they had many adventures together."

Such a princess looked back at her-- a princess with great dark gray eyes, whose laughter sounded like music in a dark place, whose wide red mouth was as hungry as Reikoku's own. And her knight... Rei floated over to where Spike lay, fast asleep beside his mate, one arm tight around Drusilla's thin shoulders. She brushed her hand across his forehead.

He was dreaming of fire. It licked at the edges of his consciousness, burning him as if he were still human. His paler-than-Gaijin skin reddened and blistered, instead of charring and turning to ash as it would have if the hunters had really caught up with them. His head was filled with the smell and taste of his own burning flesh, but his dream-eyes were fixed straight ahead, on Dru, who screamed and blazed like a candle. Reikoku pulled her hand away, not wanting to see what had not happened, what she had raced across the city to prevent from happening.

"Does he taste good?" Drusilla asked her. "I think so, but I never know if I'm imagining things. I do that sometimes."

"He does." It was true enough, though the dream was nothing special. Spike's night-terrors were a decent meal, perhaps a little sweeter for his woman's presence in them. They were nothing like the heady wine of Drusilla's mad visions, which could be sipped from the air around her, even when she was awake, while she walked and sang and danced on the pavement with Spike. Those, when they happened, left Rei utterly satiated for hours. Satisfied, for the first time in three hundred years.

"It hurts him, though. My boy doesn't like to be hurt, not really. Not like me." Drusilla spoke softly, her eyes clouded as she watched Spike whisper something unintelligible under his breath. "He likes to play games, and he likes to be punished, sometimes, but it's not the same." Her voice turned conspiratorial for a moment. "It's because of Daddy. The King of Clubs made the princess, you see, but her knight was made by the King of Hearts, who fed him chocolate toffees and spanked him when he was good."

Reikoku smiled at the image, and Drusilla smiled back at her, one of the few who had never flinched at the sharpness of her teeth, or ever seemed to fear her at all. "And yet it is you who want him back the more, this creature who beat you and tore you and killed everything that you ever loved in life. You both call for him in the night, but Spike has given up hope of ever finding him, and you..." Drusilla babbled about him constantly, their lost Sire, as if he had been gone only hours instead of decades; as if he had meant to meet them at the pub around the corner, and had just lost track of the time.

"Hope is a lie, and Spike can only lie to other people. Not to himself, not for very long. " There was something of that familiar sweetness in the air now, and Rei moved closer to the vampiress, as her eyes turned darker. "There's no hope for Dru, not for me, but I don't need hope, when I know. We'll find him. Blood and fire and black magic, and I'll dance..." Spike's sleep was becoming more restless, dirty-blond hair falling into his face as he shook his head, denying something, or someone. Dru let him toss for a moment, his arm drawing her closer, then she pulled away, watched it fall by his side. "But Spike hurts. He's going to hurt, again. Again and again and again..."

She hugged her arms tightly around herself, and began to rock. Reikoku moved even closer, reaching a hand to touch Drusilla's hair. It felt like a touch, to her own ghostly fingers, though the tangled curls never moved. Drusilla shivered happily -- she felt something, then, at the stroke of Reikoku's hand. Something.

Spike made some sort of whimper, like a wounded animal, and Drusilla matched the sound in an eerie duet that made Reikoku want to clap her hands over her ears, as if she truly used them to hear, anymore. "Shhh," she said quickly. "Do not worry. I will take his dreams away." She turned to do that, to touch Spike again and eat, instead of just tasting, but Drusilla stopped her.

"It won't make any difference. He won't stop hurting for ages, yet. I'll hurt him, and Daddy will hurt him again... They'll do bad things to my Spike, that hurt his head, hurt his heart...It's lovely, all black and red and blue like lightning, but Spike doesn't like to hurt."

It was like ripe raspberries, the air around her head -- Rei could sense it on what she still sometimes thought of as a tongue. So why did the sound of Drusilla's pain make her want to retch?

"But it will stop. You said so, that it would stop," she said, trying to soothe the distress from that voice. Rei floated, poised, between them. Ready to partake of Drusilla's sweetness. Ready to tear herself away from that to bite away the pain of Dru's sleeping lover, little as she cared about Spike himself, beyond the meal.

"Someday. There's a little boy in my head, with big black eyes. There's words on his face, but I can't read them. I get lost, when I try to read them, and my William has such bad handwriting; I shall have to smack his hands for it. Did you know that there's a rhyme for orange, if you say it in French?" Reikoku waited patiently, having grown used to Dru's apparent lack of sense, and after a second, she continued. "He's for Spike, like Spike was for me, and he'll make it all right. But there's no little boy, not yet. He's just a story." As if Drusilla had forgotten that it had been she who stopped Rei in the first place, she pouted accusingly at the Gaki. "And Spike hurts."

"Then, for now, I shall make it better," Rei said, and put her hand back on Spike's forehead, dissolving into smoke. Telling herself not for the first time that she wasn't doing this for wide gray eyes and a red mouth with the beautiful nonsense of a thousand bloody fairy tales spilling from it. Not for that. Only for the taste of Dru's visions. Nothing more.

*****

Los Angeles, 2000

The boy with the dark eyes stood on the balcony, railing at the sky, and the rain, and Spike, and himself. Himself the most of all, though it was Spike's name called out to the darkened air with a hundred curses attached to it. Some of which the boy must have learned from the vampire, Reikoku decided, unless 'knocked-kneed Limey guttersnipe' had become the newest southern California teen sound byte.

When he finished shouting, he laughed. Laughed long enough that Reikoku wondered if he'd given himself a new name, by the time he finally stopped. If he had, he didn't speak it aloud. He turned off the lights and crawled into the bed and buried his face in the pillow, and let his body shake.

When his breathing finally slowed, she walked out of the darkness and traced a misty finger down his cheek. There were no tears to touch. She placed her hand on his forehead. With no one watching to shy away at the sharpness of her teeth, she smiled, and let her body turn to fog as she tumbled down into his dreams.

They tasted of burnt chocolate, and fear.