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Another installment of the twisted, cross-country-flight-induced AngstySpander for caeru_.
The Magic Number part 2
"What would do that?" Buffy asked, leaning against the stove with her arms crossed tightly against her chest.
Spike shrugged. "Lots of things."
"What lots of things?"
He resisted the urge to roll his eyes. "I can make you a list if you like, but it'll take a while."
"Something whipped him," Red said faintly. "The marks on his back are whip marks, right?"
"Humans'll do that," he pointed out, turning to face her. "What's wrong with his voice?"
She turned even paler. "We think something burned him."
"Burned him?"
"Like a...like a poker or something. His mouth's been burned, his tongue's all scarred, and it looks like his larynx is just--" She broke off, patting her own throat with shaking fingers. Tara ran a hand down her back.
Spike let that sit a minute. He was feeling a little shaken, a little out of his depth. Which was ridiculous--he was a vampire, this was exactly his depth. He'd had the chip for too long, hadn't tortured anyone in ages. All he ever did now was petty theft and bad language. The Watcher walking by with a pair of sweat pants discreetly rolled up--that was enough to give him a strange moment.
"Poker down the throat," he said briskly, mindful of Buffy's eyes on him. "Well, that narrows it down a bit. To things with thumbs."
"That's it," Buffy said, pushing off the stove sharply.
"Just a minute," Rupert said, walking back in with a dish towel in his hands. "Spike, can you tell us about any unusual characters in town?"
"They're all unusual," Spike said. Buffy started to close in again. "Look, I'm a fluffy puppy now, remember? I don't know any more than you do. Far as I know, Glorificus has everyone else on the run."
"He was afraid of you," Buffy said flatly. "He hardly knows who we are, so why is he afraid of you?"
"Maybe he doesn't like fine leather." She was going to boot him out anyway, so he stood up on his own. "Look, you want my advice, find out who's done any magic the last couple of days."
"Nobody," Willow said. "We already tried--if anybody did anything big, like a portal, in the last few days, they hid it so well we can't trace it."
"Then I'm out of ideas," Spike said, starting for the door. "He'll snap out of it. Probably." That sounded weak even to him, and just as he said it he noticed that Dawn was sitting on the stairs, listening in. Crying. "He'll--look, he's a tough nut, he'll be fine." He said it to all of them, knowing how stupid it was, but not knowing what else he could say that would get him out from under the weight of their expectation.
It was an intellectual curiosity. What could do that to a man--age him ten years overnight, strip him down like that, give him old wounds and a new personality--all without setting off Red's magic sensors? Whatever it was, Spike had considerable respect for it. For days after, he had flashes of that skinny white back curled over on itself like a cracked shell. That, and the way Harris had looked at him. Not recognition, exactly--or if it was recognition, it was a strange, impersonal variety.
Mysteries like this added spice to an eternity of underachievement, and there was money in them too. Drifting by the Watcher's flat, Spike found the man elbows-deep in research. Close to the breaking point, with both Glory and the Harris thing to figure out. Spike offered a fair exchange--money for information. He didn't actually have any information, but that wasn't unusual. It wasn't like the Watcher didn't know it, either. Desperation made people do odd things.
He started hanging around the Scoobies more often, on the theory that at least for the moment, Harris was the most interesting oddity Sunnydale had to offer. The Amazing Prematurely Aged Boy. Who couldn't talk. And was afraid of his own shadow. Not much of a show, unless he'd learned to bite the heads off live chickens as well.
In fact, Willow reported, it was hard to get him to eat at all.
"I think it's his mouth," she said, turning her coffee spoon over and over. "I don't think he can taste anything, so he's just not interested."
"How old are the burns?"
She made a quick, puzzled face. "I'm not a burn specialist, I don't know from burns. But they look old."
"Healed."
She nodded glumly, flipping her spoon. "Tara made a decoction, some chamomile and slippery elm and stuff, but he won't take it, and if you go anywhere near his mouth, he gets all--" She widened her eyes and twitched her hands frantically. "He almost knocked himself out on the kitchen door the first time we tried."
"Can't talk," Spike said, mainly thinking out loud, trying to put together something, anything. Enough to get the Watcher to cough up a few more twenties. "Can he write?"
"He just holds the pen and sits there."
"But he gets what you tell him."
"Sit, stay, come here--yeah. He's like a--" She stopped short and looked away. After a minute, she said carefully, "It's like someone's trained him."
"Makes sense," Spike said absently. "Burn his voice out so he can't drive you crazy with that constant nattering, then train him to do something useful." There was a pause--he realized Red was looking at him oddly, and not nicely. "I mean, it's terrible. Poor bugger. What do you think he was trained to do?"
She was already ahead of him, he was realizing--he wasn't so much pumping her for information as serving as her sounding board. Letting her say the things she'd only thought so far. Without a pause, she said, "Manual labor. Some kind of hard manual labor. Did you see his hands?"
He hadn't seen any part of Harris in more than a week--Buffy wasn't letting him back in the house anytime soon--but he remembered. Big, dark, painful-looking. He nodded.
"He had grit in them," she said. "Worn into the cracks, you know?"
"Right."
"I think maybe, mining. Something like that."
"Right."
They sat there for a minute in silence. Around them, the coffee shop was alive with nineteen year-old nits braying laughter. At least Harris wasn't a brayer. He didn't laugh much at all, actually. You had to give him that.
"Thing is," Spike said finally, "how'd he do all that between Monday night and Thursday morning?"
"I don't know," she said miserably, staring at her spoon. Then she glanced up at him, seemed to come to a decision, and leaned down to reach into her purse. "I brought something. To show you."
Hoping it wasn't a pair of damp sweat pants, he waited.
She pulled out a clear Ziploc bag with something ratty folded up inside it--a piece of clothing. For a second he was afraid she'd actually brought him some new low in Harris's loss of dignity, but when she pushed it across the table at him, he saw it was old. Old and dirty, shredded up, barely holding together. A T-shirt, maybe. Red. He frowned and picked it up.
"Xander was wearing it," she said. "When I found him in his apartment."
Spike looked at the shirt. It didn't look special.
"Okay," he said.
"It's GAP," she said, pointing at the faint, frayed remains of a navy blue tag. "It looks like it used to have a number on the front. Like, you know, those athletic numbers--forty-three, ninety-nine, whatever."
He waited.
"Xander doesn't have a shirt like this," she said. "I know what he has, and he doesn't have it."
"Not his shirt," he said. "He borrowed it, maybe. From some other poor sod in the GAP sweatshop dimension."
"GAP doesn't make this shirt," Willow said. "I checked online. They don't make this number, at least, and when I called the distributor and, um, maybe pretended to be a snooty buyer type of person, they couldn't find it for me. They hadn't heard of it."
He sat there holding the shirt, trying to figure it out.
"It has the number twenty-three on it," Willow said. "That's Xander's birthday--the twenty-third."
"Coincidence," he said in an offhand tone, but his eyes were drawn back down to the ragged bit of cloth in his hand, and the back of his neck was prickling.
