Title: The Mimic

Author: G. Petronius

Rating: PG 13

Spoilers: Mid-Season Six

Authors Notes: Sometimes the smell of flowers is not so sweet.

Spike swept Buffy's slender body up into his arms. She didn't move or struggle. Her eyes, unblinking and expressionless, only stared out at the night sky. Her chest rose and fell almost imperceptibly as her breaths came in shallow but steady spurts. Her arms dangled limply in the air as a stake on which she had had a firm grasp only moments before, dropped from her hand and fell without a sound to the cemetery lawn.

As Spike hefted her body once to get a firmer grip under her legs and shoulders, the faintest cloud of dust, the remnants of a recently destroyed vampire, drifted off her clothes and spread like a curtain of glowing particles into the moonlight.

Only minutes before, Spike had stormed off into the night as Buffy, for what seemed like the hundredth time that week, cursed him out for stalking her while she was on patrol. He hadn't gone through the stones more than twenty yards where he planned to wait behind a crypt and have a smoke. He'd pick up her trail after a few minutes and track her until she couldn't resist him any more. He smirked. These nights it always ended the same way. She needed him now, more than ever.

And then out of the darkness came that peculiar cry. Not the sharp shriek of panic or fear that Spike still understood and relished despite the Initiative chip in his skull. It didn't even sound like Buffy, rather a wailing moan of final despair that he imagined the soul of a vampire's victim might utter as its existence fled away into nothingness.

At first, Spike stood rooted to the spot. "What the bloody hell?" he said. Then he heard the unmistakable sound of a stake puncturing flesh, the rush of air as a vampire disintegrated into a cloud of dust and the soft thump of a body dropping to the ground. Only then did Spike run back to the cluster of graves where he had just left Buffy.

He found her alive but still and curled up on the ground, her eyes staring out at nothing.

"Whoever it was, you got the blighter!" Spike muttered to himself as he cradled her body. At the same time his nose crinkled at a pleasant but peculiar smell in the air of either flowers or perfume. It wasn't Buffy's. He knew her scent, yet this was somehow familiar as well.

"Come on, love, nappy time's over," Spike whispered in her ear as he held her up in front of him. That remark should have merited at least a smack on the side of the head, but she hung limp in his arms. Under his hands, her muscled arms and legs were unresponsive. For the first time, Spike became worried.

"Buffy," he said

Buffy's breathing gave him no answer.

"Buffy!" he said louder this time. He tried to tip her neck up so that he could talk directly into her face. Before he could speak again, he saw in the dim light the two marks on the skin below the jaw line. They were not large or deep, not the result of an intense life threatening feeding, but minor, merely gentle pin pricks as if the attack had been more a kiss directly over her jugular.

"Buffy!" Spike shouted as if the volume of his voice could pierce through the veil of unconsciousness that had descended over her. At the same time he knew she probably didn't hear him.

"We got a problem here, luv. I better get you home."

With Buffy draped across his arms in front of him, Spike began walking in the direction of the cemetery's north entrance. In a few moments, he picked the pace up to a trot and by the time he reached the gate itself, he had broken into all out sprint. His black trench coat flapped behind him. Buffy's body bounced in his arms and her blond hair flew wildly as every so often it caught the glint from the beams of the street lamps overhead.

"Bring her in here!" Tara called over her shoulder as she tossed the portable phone on a wing chair and led Spike into the living room towards the sofa. Through the front window, she had seen Spike running up the street carrying Buffy and had dialed "911" before he could kick open the front door.

Dawn's eyes bulged with terror as she watched the emotionless expression on her sister's face. And then Spike gently lowered Buffy's body into the same position on the sofa where Joyce had lain.

Tara spun and grabbed Dawn by the shoulders before the shriek could leave Dawn's lips.

"Dawn" she shouted, her words laced with "control," "Buffy's alive! She's not dead! Do you understand me, She's alive! She's going to be all right!"

For a moment, Dawn whimpered as the impact of Tara's voice reigned in her short circuiting emotions.

"The ambulance is on its way. It'll be here in a minute. Now I need you to call Willow and Xander and let them know what's happened," Tara said, trying to exude every drop of calming strength she could muster.

"Have them meet us at the hospital," she continued, knowing that the busier she kept Dawn, the less chance there was of Buffy's sister dissolving into hysterics.

Dawn nodded. She respected Tara, far more so than any of Buffy's other friends. Tara said what she meant, did what she said she was going to do and never talked down to her. Dawn believed Tara when she said Buffy would be all right. She turned and ran into the kitchen to the wall phone to call Willow.

Tara then turned to her other problem, Spike, who had been hovering in the hallway.

"What happened," she asked firmly.

"I don't know," came his flippant answer. "Found her that way."

Suddenly Tara's eyes blazed as she swung both hands up before her in an outward arching motion. As if struck by an invisible force, Spike was lifted off his feet and hurled violently against the closed front door. He hit the wood paneling with a slam and slid dazed to the floor.

"Hey! Wot the Bloody Hell was that for!?"

"I've had enough of you, Spike," Tara growled, "I know what you've done to her, and I want to know what happened!"

"I didn't touch 'er! I swear!" Spike was now cowering. "We had a squabble in the cemetery. Words only! No hitting!" he shouted desperately as he saw the glow in Tara's eyes become threatening again.

"I got mad and left. I didn't get far when I heard 'er cry out and tangle with some vamp or something!"

"Go on!" Tara glowered at Spike.

"By the time I got back, she must have got whatever it was, but she was lying on the ground."

Tara went to raise her hands again.

"I swear it!" Spike shouted.

"And those marks on her neck?" Tara countered without lowering her hands.

"I didn't touch 'er! You think that was me?!"

"Who else would she let get close enough to do that," Tara said with ice in her voice.

"Maybe she got surprised. Caught from behind. Does happen," Spike said, his confidence returning.

"Not to Buffy, it doesn't."

"It Wasn't Me, Damn It!"

Outside, the wail of the ambulance siren echoed down the street and grew louder with each passing second.

"Besides," Spike continued, "those aren't feeding marks on her neck."

Tara huffed. "You would know!"

"You're bloody right, I would, Witchy!"

The ambulance stopped at the base of the driveway. Tara lowered her hands as Spike breathed a sigh of relief and got to his feet.

"Funny," she mused. "I believe you."

Late the following afternoon, Giles arrived. Within an hour of receiving Willow's desperate call, he was at Heathrow, scrambling to get on any plane that would take him across the Atlantic. He finally snagged a flight into Kennedy where he made a connection on a non-stop to Los Angeles.

Buffy's condition was unchanged. Her vitals were stable. Everything seemed normal, X-rays, CAT scans, no loss of blood (Sunnydale Hospital had finally begun to perform that test routinely whenever scratch marks were found on a patient's neck.) Unable to attribute her semi-comatose state to any physical cause, her physician suggested to Giles that Buffy's condition could be the result of a severe emotional trauma.

Giles sat by Buffy's bedside for over two hours, quietly talking about nothing in particular. Xander and Anya were puzzled at his subdued behavior but Tara and Willow fully understood. As Giles explained later to Dawn in the hallway, talking to a patient who is unresponsive may actually help build the bridge by which they eventually return to consciousness.

"Dawn, it's very likely that Buffy can hear us," Giles said as he placed his hand gently on Dawn's shoulder, "She just can't respond. The more we talk to her, the more she knows we haven't abandoned her and it gives her the strength to overcome whatever shock she's undergone."

"What did this to her?" Dawn asked, and Giles sensed the desperation and fear in her voice.

"I'm going to find out," Giles said firmly.

For the first time in months, Dawn felt a sense of security she so desperately craved. Giles was like Tara. He would do what he said.

"Go sit with her. Talk to her."

"What about?" Dawn asked, nervous once more as she faced the uncertainty in the hospital room.

"Whatever you like, silly things," Giles said calmly, "what you had for lunch, anything Xander's done. . . . and tell her how much you love her."

Dawn nodded again and put on a brave grin. Giles turned and began to walk away.

"You're not leaving?" Dawn asked.

"No."

"Where are you going?"

Giles contemplated the blaze of white lights up and down the hospital corridor. When he replied, it was if he spoke to the bare sterile walls all around them.

"To find out," he said quietly.

"This is the spot?" Giles asked, his voice barely rising above a whisper.

"Right 'ere's where I found her," Spike replied.

It was exceptionally quiet in the cemetery that night. Usually the soft rumble of traffic outside the walls and the occasional bark of a car horn drifted through monuments and statues. Tonight there was virtually no background noise. Even the night birds were silent, and none of the nocturnal animals that usually scurried about the gravestones were in evidence anywhere.

"And you didn't see what attacked her?"

"No," Spike muttered as he looked at the ground in front of them and scuffed the grass with his shoe where the vampire's dust had finally settled. There were still traces faintly visible on the tips of the green blades at their feet.

"There wasn't any fighting I could hear either," Spike said after a few more minutes. "She just suddenly cried out. And when I got there, she was already down . . . there was this weird smell, like someone's perfume. I think it was gardenias."

"She wasn't caught by surprise, or there would have been a struggle," Giles mused as he put his hand on his chin and rubbed it back and forth, "She must have clearly seen what attacked her . . . and didn't respond until the last second."

"Are you saying she knew what came after her?" Spike asked. Giles' train of thought was beginning to get disturbing even for Spike.

"Very possibly . . . you say the smell was gardenias? . . . hello? What's this?"

Giles bent down and swept up something in his hand that glittered of gold under the faint light. It was a chain and a small cross.

"That's Buffy's," Spike said with a grin, "She always wore it when she wanted me to pee off!"

Giles was silent and his brow furrowed as if finding this new piece of evidence asked more questions than it answered.

"Must have fallen off when I picked her up," Spike volunteered.

Giles shook his head slowly.

"No . . . the chain is too tight to slide over her head. She would have had to unhook it . . . to take it off . . . "

"Hey!" Spike snapped, "What are you saying?"

Giles ignored Spike. Rather he gazed out into the night as a horrible fear came to him, something he had pondered and dreaded for close to a year now surged forward to overwhelm his thoughts. He broke into a run, heading down one particular path and looking for a specific stone.

"Wait up!" Spike shouted out from somewhere behind.

Giles knew the way. He quickly found what he was looking for, a relatively new grave, the sod before the stone disturbed by a recent rising.

"Dear God, Buffy!" Giles hung his head and buried his face in his hands.

"What is it?" Spike shouted as he caught up with Giles. He then turned and stared down at the grave as well.

"Oh, Bloody Hell . . . !" he muttered.

"Stay here!" Giles ordered Spike as they stood together at the bottom of the stairs leading up to the second floor of the Summers house. Most of the lights were turned off since everyone was at the hospital. The shadows hung over the furniture and the family's modest possessions like a heavy shroud.

"You don't like me very much, do you, Watcher," Spike answered, the tone of his voice issuing a subtle challenge to Giles' authority.

"Stay here," was Giles' dry answer, "or you'll find out how much I don't like you."

"Fair enough," Spike replied, nodding his head in appreciation of the fact that if he followed Giles upstairs, he'd probably end up a pile of dust before he got halfway to the second floor landing.

Giles climbed the stairs slowly and deliberately. He crossed the landing and walked out into the dimly lit hallway past the doors to Buffy and Dawn's rooms. Paying no attention to the guest room where Willow was staying, he headed directly for the closed door at the end of the hallway. For almost a year now, that bedroom was rarely used.

As Giles stepped inside, he barely noticed whether much had changed. He vowed in silence to stay focused and walked up to a dressing table whose fluffy drapes spread from the bottom of the mirror down to just above floor level. He quickly opened a drawer, pulled out a small oval bottle with a golden top, no larger than the palm of his hand, slipped it into his pocket and left.

"Find what you want?" Spike asked nonchalantly as Giles swept by him at the foot of the stairs.

Giles never answered but walked briskly out the front door.

Giles pulled the chair closer up beside Buffy's hospital bed and sat down. Tara, Willow and Dawn stood nervously nearby. Xander, with a snoring Anya cradled in his lap, was dozing in a heavy chair in the corner of the room. It was after 2 am and the only sound was the steady, high pitched beeping of Buffy's monitoring system.

Giles paused for a moment as if he were wrestling with the action he was about to take. Then, after a deep breath, he reached into the flap pocket of his tweed jacket. He brought out the small oval perfume bottle with the gold top he had retrieved from the upstairs bedroom in the Summers house. Dawn's eyes suddenly widened as she recognized the object. Frightened, she gripped Tara's arm, and Tara returned the grasp with a gentle but reassuring force.

Willow rubbed Dawn on the shoulder and whispered, "It's okay Dawnie, it's gonna be okay."

Dawn gazed up a Tara. Tara nodded in reassurance.

"Buffy's going to be fine," she said as well and Dawn's fierce grip on her arm relaxed.

Giles slowly uncapped the bottle. As he unscrewed the golden top, a sweet aroma flooded the room overpowering the ever present hospital smell of rubbing alcohol and disinfectant floor cleaner. Gardenias.

The monitor on Buffy's circulatory system beeped faster. Willow glanced nervously at the indicator for Buffy's pulse. The numbers climbed rapidly as she watched.

Eighty, eighty-five, ninety, ninety-five. Buffy's breathing came in faster bursts as well.

Deliberately, Giles held the mouth of the open bottle out in front of Buffy's face and waved it back and forth to stir up the aroma even more. The scent of gardenias was now overpowering, and Willow felt the sweetness making her nauseous. She quickly glanced again at the monitor.

One hundred, one hundred and five, one hundred and ten.

"Giles!" She called out softly.

Giles wouldn't look up at the monitor. His attention stayed trained firmly on his Slayer as he waved the bottle back and forth, now almost directly under Buffy's nostrils.

". . . come on . . . fight! . . ." he growled to himself.

One hundred and fifteen, one hundred and twenty, one hundred and twenty-five, one hundred and thirty, one hundred and forty.

All of a sudden, Buffy's eyes snapped open, and she sat bolt upright in the bed, almost knocking the bottle out of Giles' hand. Her mouth flew open and her eyes glared forward with a look that only could be described as a mixture of terror and despair. Her body shivered and Giles imagined this was how she must have appeared the instant she awoke in her own coffin.

She tried to scream, over and over, and her body rocked forward and backward with the effort but no sound passed her lips. Frightened, Willow and Dawn stepped back but Tara slipped in beside Giles who now gripped Buffy by the shoulders and propped her up.

"Buffy! BUFFY!" Giles shouted in her face. Buffy turned to stare at her Watcher but at first there was no sign of recognition on her tortured features. And then, as if the flood gates of memory, unable to withstand the pressure any longer, were suddenly loosed, Buffy cried out.

It wasn't a shriek nor a scream, but a long, low wailing moan of despair, as if she stood before the gates of Avernus, hovering on the brink of her own damnation and there to greet her was the face of an innocent, someone she knew and loved.

Buffy pitched forward into Giles' arms. Her wails woke even Xander who almost tossed Anya onto the floor in an effort to get to the Slayer's bedside.

Dawn shoved her fist into her mouth and bit down hard on her knuckles to keep herself from crying out in answer. Suddenly, she knew, from the smell of the gardenias, what Buffy saw. She knew what her sister had done.

"Ssshh, Buffy, sshh," Giles whispered as he tried to soothe her torrent of anguish. He wrapped his arms around her and held her more tightly and closely than he could ever remember doing with anyone.

"Ssshh, Buffy, ssshh, I know . . . I know."

"I killed her!" Buffy wailed, finally stammering out her despair in words. "I killed her, Giles!"

"Sshh, I know, Buffy . . . I know."

The hospital released Buffy within twenty-four hours. That was mostly Giles' persuasive work. The doctors agreed that there was no purpose for her to remain since all her tests were normal.

Willow begged Buffy to rest, to stay home and just this once, let the world get by on its own without her for one night. But she left anyway shortly after dusk. Dawn followed before Willow could stop her but no one else seemed concerned.

Tara even grabbed Willow by the shoulder as she headed for the door.

"Let her go, Will," Tara said gently, "they've got some . . . things . . . to do."

Spike sulked in the hallway, and Giles never uttered a word of protest. He only sat at the dining room table pouring over a series of worn ring binders and looseleaf reports he had brought with him from England.

Tara wandered into the dining room and sat down next to Giles. Willow, Xander and Anya followed while Spike lurked in the doorway. Tara finally asked the question that was on everyones' mind.

"Giles, how did it happen?"

"Hmm?" Giles looked up from the notebooks and stared in surprise at the audience around him. "How did what. . .?" Giles removed his glasses and began cleaning them nervously.

"You know," Tara continued, "I always thought vampires were . . . sired."

"That is one way vampirism is spread, yes."

"Then how did . . . ," Tara stopped, uncomfortable with where the train of thought was leading.

For a minute everyone was silent.

"Well it wasn't me!" Spike interjected with a little nervous twinge in his voice. He remembered Tara's response from the other evening. "I never bit her. We just had tea!"

Then Giles spoke slowly and with a gentle authoritative rhythm to his words that drew everyone's attention.

"I've been studying that very question over the last year. Although the most obvious means is siring, there are enough cases of vampires generating merely by a bite or scratch on the victim and in some rare instances just by close proximity to another vampire to cast all our preconceived notions into question."

Giles held up one of the ring bound notebooks.

"This is a series of studies by Dr. Bryan Rossiter, professor of anthropology at Middlefield College in New England along with a fellow researcher, Dr. James Harrington, head of Neurology at the Connecticut Valley State Psychiatric Hospital. They were active in the late 1930's when both men were the first to hypothesize that vampires and other instances of the undead were indeed merely another form of microbiotic infection."

"Hey!" Spike snapped, "Wot? These blokes say I'm nothing more than a case of the bloody flu?"

"In essence, yes," Giles grinned at Spike as he answered.

"I always said you were just a slimy little amoeba," Willow said.

"Watch your mouth, Red!"

Giles ignored the squabble. He opened one of the reports and began to read out loud. Willow and Spike were instantly quiet.

"The pathogen, transferred by bite, any breaking of the skin or possibly even air particles, is capable of hiding from the body's immune system, like some forms of cancer or diseases of muscular degeneration. It travels through the circulatory and lymphatic systems and apparently settles, like rabies, in the brain where it remains concealed and dormant until the immune system fails on the death of the host."

"Then all of us," Tara asked, "could be infected? . . . we've all been exposed."

"You'll get yours, Red!" Spike smirked at Willow.

"Not necessarily," Giles answered slowly, "In this case, exposure was by indirect contact. It was the months of radiation and chemo to combat the brain tumor which destroyed the immune system. Even then, it took almost a year after death for the pathogen to reassert itself and seize control of her body."

Giles turned the page and read on.

"One of the most disturbing aspects of the phenomenon is how the infective agent restores not just the physical appearance of the body, but also the sounds of the voice, the inflection even down to the emotional and personality responses of the victim which are governed largely by chemical reactions in the brain. However, the entity created is only a mimic, a distortion, as the source of the victim's true personality, the soul if you will, is long gone."

"It is in the mind of the beholder," Giles continued with a horrid finality, "that the tricks are played, imposing familiarity where there is little left but an empty shell."

"And these other kinds of direct exposure?" Tara said softly, trying to follow the authors' line of reasoning. "Scratches, bites, physical contact, especially siring, then the exposure to the micro organism is more . . . intense . . . and the immune system is more likely to be compromised?"

"Yes, quite possibly."

The sarcastic grin suddenly vanished from Spike's face. He stared down at the floor.

"I need a smoke," he muttered absent mindedly, yet didn't stir from the spot. He felt the burning glare of Tara's eyes tunneling through his brain.

"What are you doing here?" Buffy asked Dawn as her younger sister wandered into the clearing before a group of headstones. There was no accusation or the usual scolding tone that Buffy so often used with Dawn. Instead the Slayer asked the question in an emotionless, almost mechanical voice.

"Same thing as you," Dawn said quietly as she followed Buffy's gaze down to the disturbed sod over the burial plot of one very familiar grave.

"It's dangerous. You shouldn't come out here," Buffy replied as if she were reciting something from memory.

"Neither should you."

"I'm the Slayer," Buffy answered, her voice empty of any feeling.

"And I'm the Key," Dawn replied, mirroring Buffy's tone.

For a moment, the two sisters looked at each other and then stared back at the headstone.

"I used to bring flowers a lot," Dawn said.

"I know," Buffy whispered.

"I'm not doing it anymore," Dawn said firmly as if she were trying to convince the graves around her that she was more than just a sixteen year old.

Buffy turned to her sister.

"I'm never coming back here again, Buffy!" Dawn's voice rose as her emotions began to overwhelm her. "She's not here! They took her away!"

"Dawn . . ."

"No!" Dawn cried out. Buffy recognized the wail of despair.

"She died! For no reason, Buffy! They took her life! They took her soul! But that wasn't enough! They couldn't leave us her body! Nooo! When they saw that's all we had left, they had to take that, too!"

"Dawn . . ." Buffy tried to place her hand reassuringly on Dawn's shoulder but Dawn shoved it away.

"I'm never coming here again!" Dawn crossed her arms on her chest and glowered down at the ground. Dawn was silent for a few moments. Finally she spoke again. "What did she say to you, Buffy?"

The question had the impact on Buffy of a slap across the face.

"What . . . ?" she stammered.

"You saw her. She talked to you before you finally . . . " Dawn said coldly. "You never would have let her get that close if she wasn't talking to you. What did she say, Buffy?"

Buffy shook her head and tried to speak but, just as if she were back in the hospital, she couldn't put the nightmare vision into words. Involuntarily, she began to rub the small bandage that covered the wounds on her neck.

"Buffy! What did Mom say to you?!" Dawn screamed.

" . . . I love you both . . . "

The sisters stood in silence. Dawn began to shudder and Buffy wrapped her arms around her. They then turned to leave, passing through the shadows the monuments cast all about their path.

"I'm never coming back," Dawn whimpered.

"Me, neither," Buffy answered.