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The first time Spike lives the long, hot night in early July that would eventually be his undoing, he spends it the way he spends the majority of his nights: up at the crack of dusk, hair and nails (all the while practicing what he might say if he happens to run into Buffy), then out onto Sunnydale’s darkened streets so that he might have the best shot at, well, running into Buffy.
She’s loitering outside the door to his crypt. Spike tries, and fails, to rearrange his features into something resembling disinterest.
Buffy starts at his presence. “Oh my god, skulk much? You know, one of these days, I’m gonna accidentally turn you into a coat rack.” She gestures with Mr. Pointy.
“Oh? Shall we whittle a special stake from the stick that’s so firmly up your arse?” he snarls, glad he’d practiced. Something changes in Buffy’s gaze, and he belatedly realizes why she might have been lurking around the entrance to his crypt to begin with. He opens his mouth to salvage the situation, but Buffy throws up her hands and rolls her eyes in a move Spike knows intimately. He’s being dismissed.
“Spike, I don’t have time for this.”
He boggles at her for a moment. “You - you came to me, Slayer.” But she’s already gone, stomping off into the graveyard, and he wants to try to kill her for being such a hypocrite. He wonders if he should go after her, and beg her to fuck him.
He’d probably get beaten to a bloody pulp either way.
The night continues to go poorly. The corner store is out of Morleys, and he has to buy a single pack of substandard Geronimo’s, setting one between his teeth and blowing twin plumes of acrid smoke out of his nose.
“Another ship has rolled out,” wails the jukebox at the Lounge Room, “you say you don't wanna go”.
By the end of the evening he’s out of kittens, out of smokes, and out of patience. A final crap hand of poker sees him slam his fists on the table in an embarrassing display of bruised ego, and stomp out of the bar, back home, where even the season finale of Passions can’t buoy his spirits.
By the time sunrise blooms over Sunnydale, Spike is just glad it’s over.
—
The second time Spike lives that night, it so closely resembles every other night of his life that it takes longer than he cares to admit to notice.
He shoulder-checks Buffy on his way out of the crypt, so shocked to see her for what he believes to be the second day in a row, that he gawps at her like an imbecile. She’s wearing the same sweater, the same plastic butterfly clips in her hair. Spike frowns.
“Oh my god, lurk much? You know, one of these days, I’m gonna accidentally turn you into a coat rack.” She waggles the stake at him.
His brow knits. “Haven’t we already done this, Slayer?”
It’s her turn to look confused, but the expression quickly smooths into irritation, then, as expected, dismissal. “Spike, I don’t have time for this.”
Watching her retreat, Spike has the awful sinking feeling that something is, perhaps, afoot. Something is always bloody afoot in Sunnydale. He scrabbles in his pocket for a smoke, comes up empty, and decides that unless the foot in afoot is directly up his ass, he doesn’t need to bother.
Still no Morley’s, so he buys Geronimo’s, sucking up a lungful of smoke to soothe his nerves.
The song playing at the Lounge Room catches like a fishhook in his memory. “Another ship has rolled out,” the jukebox caterwauls, “you say you don't wanna go”.
The group playing poker is the same as yesterday, seated in the same order around the table, and Spike thinks dispassionately that the game will play out more or less the same as well, so why not do something he’s actually good at? Drinking has always come easier than cards.
When he stumbles home and slaps on the television, the season finale of Passions is once again airing - but he’s too drunk to notice.
—
The fifth time, he crashes out of the crypt, nearly knocking down Buffy.
“I’m in a bloody loop.”
They say it in unison: “Spike, I don’t have time for-” she stops, but he finishes for her “-this”. Buffy stares at him, baffled in the way only Buffy can look, brow furrowed, mouth slightly open, like he’s done her some grave personal injustice by confusing her.
If she’s staring after him while he jogs away, all the better - let her be the one slackjawed on the stoop of his crypt for once.
Just for shits and giggles, he tries to buy a pack of Morleys from the corner store. When the gent behind the corner explains they’re out, they only have Geronimo’s, Spike throws the fellow into a display of crisps.
He doesn’t bother with the Lounge Room, though as he passes he can hear that same snippet of song - “Another ship has rolled out,” he’s never hated the jukebox more, “you say you don't wanna go”.
Back at the crypt, he puts his foot through the TV rather than suffer through a frankly mediocre season finale of Passions. Sleep doesn’t come easy, but it comes nonetheless.
–
The eighth time, he swallows his pride and goes to Giles for help.
“Of course!” The librarian exclaims, “an Osokin demon!”
If Giles notes the blank look on Spike’s face, he doesn’t take it personally. “They feed on potentiality! By trapping you in a loop, they can feed on all your potential lives at once, all your potential outcomes. The only way to break it, ah, is to do something so completely out of character that it constitutes an unrepresented potential outcome - at which point, all your potential lives will cease to be, leaving the demon with nothing to feed on. You ought to wake up the next day, time having been set on its proper course once more.”
“Terrific,” Spike says, and doesn’t mean it.
“Or you could kill the demon. Though it looks-” Giles points at a diagram, of an enormously ugly creature trapped in a complex summoning circle, pierced through by seven ritual blades, and burning merrily in holy fire, “complicated.”
When he tells Buffy, standing in the doorway of his crypt like it’s he who shouldn’t be there, despite the fact it’s his, she grimaces.
“Spike,” she sounds less sure than she has in all the other loops, “I don’t have time for this.”
“Like hell you don’t.” Spike crowds her up against the doorframe, feeling her tense up momentarily, seeing the gears of we shouldn’t and this is wrong spinning behind her usually frank gaze. When he kisses her, those gears grind to a halt.
He doesn’t think fucking Buffy counts as out of character for him, as infrequently as it does happen, but when her eyes go wide and excited as he hands her the strap-on, he thinks, yes, this has got to do it.
She’s a quick study, and terrifically strong, nailing him to the bed in long, powerful strokes that leave him gasping for the breath he doesn’t really need.
The TV is intact again. He doesn’t use it.
—
The eleventh time, he’s thinking outside the box.
“By trapping you in a loop, they can feed on all your potential lives at once, all your potential outcomes.” Giles says, again. “The only way to break it, ah, is to do something so completely out of character that-”
“Yeah, yeah, unrepresented potential outcomes.” Spike leans down, closes the gap between them, voice as low as it goes. “I been tryin’ those.”
Kissing Giles is about as out of character an action as he can imagine, and he half expects the older man to hit him out of shock alone. Or die of a heart attack. Giles surprisingly does neither, and Spike smirks, smug as a man can be dropping to his knees in front of a librarian.
Giles white-knuckles the bank of cabinets behind him, glasses slipping forward on his nose, breathing raggedly. When it’s over, Spike wipes the corner of his mouth with his thumb, safe in the knowledge he’ll wake up tomorrow and this will all be over.
–
The fifteenth time, he’s not so much thinking outside the box as he’s thinking outside the stratosphere.
He makes his pitch to Willow and Tara, who sit nervously on their shared bed while Spike has what he imagines must appear to be some kind of manic episode. When he finishes, he looks at them imploringly. Willow purses her lips, “I take offense to the insinuation that sleeping with us would be out of character for you. We’re hot! We’re cool! Wait-” she turns, flustered, to Tara, who pats her hands soothingly.
“You’re all the temperatures, baby.” She coos.
Spike points an accusing finger. “Aren’t you the witch who famously said hello, gay now?”
Tara arches an eyebrow. Willow flushes. Spike can smell it under her skin. He raises his hands in the universal gesture of don’t shoot the messenger. “Anya told me.”
Willow rolls her eyes. “I only wanted to get her off my back about Xander,” she complains, as though she’s had to explain this a hundred times and Spike is an unwanted one hundred and one. “Dating Tara doesn’t erase the legitimacy of my bisexuality.”
“Terrific. Do you want to have sex?”
Willow has clever fingers and a cleverer tongue, and Tara’s kind doe-eyed gaze turns wicked, smoldering from beneath her lashes while she watches from the armchair, hand moving lazily between her thighs.
Spike returns to his crypt a little smug and more than a little sticky - if shagging the pair of lesbians (Red’s judgmental faces flashes across his frontal lobe and he retracts the thought guiltily) wasn’t out of character for him, he doesn’t know what is.
–
The twenty-second time, Spike tells himself that desperate times call for desperate measures.
Xander shuts his eyes, his face scrunched up in miserable anticipation. Spike can’t believe he’s doing this.
It had taken only a pint of cheap beer for him to get the glorified bricklayer out of his trousers, it was all so incredibly depressing, but Spike’s own situation bordered on suicidally pathetic so maybe they were meant to be.
“Be gentle, huh?” Xander quips, though his voice catches and shakes like a teenagers. Spike arches a scarred eyebrow, hooks his thumb into the harness at his waist to test the tightness, and smiles with all his fangs.
“No.”
—
The twenty-ninth time, Clem suggests that maybe shagging various members of the Scoobies is a weird move, regardless of how out of character it may or may not be, that he may be less trying to end the time loop than he is seeing what he can get away with, that he’s living out fantasies because of the lack of consequences.
Spike punches him in his sagging face.
Because of the lack of consequences.
–
It takes an additional twenty-seven tries, but the fifty-sixth time Spike lives that long, hot night in early July, he manages to draw the summoning circle with the correct number of runes, locate and obtain all seven ritual blades, and correctly light the sacred fire without immolating himself (immolating himself, as it happens, did not end the loop. He's certainly tried).
“Bloody hell,” Spike wheezes to himself, squatting alongside the crackling pyre, “at least that’s fucking over with.”
The demon, in its dying breath, snorts: “Hah.”
—
The next day is, blessedly, the next day.
Spike shoulders the door to the Magic Box open, ready to put the last fifty-seven days far, far behind him - the smell of blood rising hits him like a slap.
The Scoobies, the whole bloody lot of them, flush simultaneously, and dread hits him like, uh, a second slap. They remember.
“Ah," says Spike.