Title: Raison d'Etre
Author: Aeneas
Rating: T to M (PG-13 to R)
Summary: What I deserve doesn't wait for me in Sunnydale. I haven't found it yet but I will. When I do, there will be something of mine, of me, left behind when I start killing daisies. Post-Grave, crossover with Angel: The Series.
Disclaimer: All things belong to Joss and Mutant Enemy, except New Orleans and everything in it, for obvious reasons. It's their sandbox, I just play there.

Part One – Finding Faith

Philosopher

Every story begins with a first word. Every journey with a first step. This is my story. Like most of the classics, it starts with a girl.

Picture this, in grand Technicolor imagination where pigs fly home to roost and every vampire meets a sharp stake and has a dusty ending. You'll find me sitting in your favorite smoky pub, the one where old school blues bands still bring rhythm and soul to barstool philosophers staring into their drinks. Cigarettes flare and wink like cancer causing stars shining in the heavens. Sometimes you cough. Sometimes you breath the tar and rat poison in so deep that it fills you and leaves that tingly feeling that could be nerve endings getting fried and brain cells screaming for help.

Cut through the atmosphere with the handy machete I'm sure everyone carries these days and head down the beaten path. I'll be on the last barstool to your right, one hand wrapped around a tall glass of Blue Moon and the other drawing pictures in the puddle left by the condensation. Nothing to look at, just five feet ten inches of skin and blood like every other human on this planet.

If I were human.

Of course, if I were human, I wouldn't be lost in the haze of smoke and cursing American beer. I'd be out with the wife and kiddies and painting my own white picket fence. The American Dream, that's what it's all about. After landing on these shores you can hardly escape from the specter of success and a healthy work ethic. Damn Americans think that they can do anything they want if they're willing to put in the time and elbow grease. Rockets, men on the moon, now they want a ruddy space station spinning around the earth where they can experiment with God knows what. Soon enough you catch yourself thinking that you can do the impossible too. Beat unbeatable odds, dream the impossible dream and all that rot.

I'm man enough to admit it. I let my guard down and the old broad slipped in with her promises of making myself a better man. Of being my own man. Who am I kidding? I'm not even a man. I just sit here on this barstool at the Blue Cats and stare into a pint, playing at being a man. Pretending to be one of them. Pretending that I can't hear their hearts beating in their chests or smell the kalidescope of emotions that humans broadcast for every undead soul out there. Depression has a tang like a fresh orange and remorse is bitter and brings images of the alleyways of Hell's Kitchen. Haven't been there since the glory days of Owney Madden and Mad Dog Coll. I hear they call it Clinton now that it's cleaned up a bit. I wonder if the streets still remember the blood and violence of decades past. They used to reek with it, pulsing with life and aggression. I used to think that some things never changed. Now I know better.

I've seen the world. I've watched it change. Countries rise, countries fall. Never cared much for politics or the affairs of men. Bloody wankers, all of them. One hundred and thirty years had passed before these eyes and proved the old adage that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Life moved faster now. People huddled in steel boxes as they drove, took the subway, hopped on board a plane. They were still trying to get somewhere, trying to be someone, trying to grab onto that unreachable star that would pull them up above their mundane lives. That never changed. The man next to me, a regular, had the two point five kids and the Betty Crocker wife for a few years before his construction business went belly up and he ended up in anger management and AA. What's the git doing here at the bar? Fell off the damn wagon again. He's crying into his Miller and wondering where his life jumped the tracks.

It's a question I ask myself so often that it's become a mantra. The only difference between me and the whimpering sod on the next stool is that he'll leave a corpse when he dies. I'll end up in someone's vacuum or fertilizing daisies. Is vampire dust good fertilizer? Maybe the dust kills the plants. That would be poetic in a twisted justice sort of way. A plague to the living, a parasite to society, and even after we've been sent to hell or wherever demon souls go, our remains are still wrecking their petty vengeance on the foliage.

I like that. I like the idea of leaving something behind even if it would be a patch of dead and brittle begonias. Otherwise I just vanish into a big pile of dust and there's no proof that I ever walked this earth.

Why do I want proof? I don't have that answer. I've got a whole lot of answers and more than one lifetime of watching and seeing and hating all humanity to figure out the whats and whys. But no one has answers for me. Almost no one. Can't forget Peaches. His broodiness, Soulboy, the Magnificent Poof. A pseudo man of many names also moving through this world as a wolf in sheep's clothing. He knows this road and he's probably the only other one to have ever traveled it. I'll be damned before I ask him. Of course, I'm already damned so it shouldn't matter to me. But it does and in a million and one different ways.

One of which is that we're both trapped in Hellsville-on-Earth because of the same bouncing blond hair and holier than thou attitude. A Slayer. A Vampire Slayer to be precise. She's come down a ways since Angel had her. She's darker, has an edge of something hard and ruthless that he never saw in her round teenage cheeks. She's raw and she burns when she touches you. It's not how it was supposed to be. Dance with the Devil, the Devil doesn't change. He changes you. Didn't work that way. We danced, we fought, we shagged. And I'm the one who changed. She went back to her pretty world of sunlight and puppies and I took a crash course on pain and suffering. It's all relative.

It still left me with nothing. No one will see a patch of wilted flowers and say, that was Spike, Master Vampire and Slayer of Slayers. I'll be in those books the bloody Watchers have and that English bint's thesis. That'll be all that's left of me. No one will care a whit if one more vampire stops biting and killing innocents. Vampires are just animals. Vicious, cruel animals without conscience or care for life. We get put down, rubbed out, hunted, slayed. We are demons. We never change.

So what am I?

A freak. Some sort of cosmic joke or twist of fate. Like the ugly child parents fear or the dog with two heads. I'm a monster's monster. A serial killer in prison. Only this time I built the prison with my own two hands and a sickness I called love because I couldn't explain the pain eating away at me.

I got the bloody soul back. I crawled out of that cave and I went back to Sunnydale. Stark, raving mad and half dead but I was home. Home. Vampires don't have homes, they have lairs and territories. They don't set up house and put doilies on the table. They have nothing but the hunt and the kill. No desires outside of feeding and fucking. It's a pretty simple existence. Only a few of us ever have any grand ideas about destroying the world or other such nonsense.

I've said before that I like this world. I'm not so sure anymore.

What's to like? I sit here in the dark, smoking Winstons next to another of America's failures who fell on his ass when he reached for the goddamned stars. Everything's going to hell and there isn't a place for me in that pretty little hand basket anymore.

Back in Sunnydale I had an epiphany. Crouching in a dark corner, dirt beneath my feet in the school basement and some evil bastard playing mind games with the tattered rags of my sanity, I finally realized that I'd made a mistake. Too late to take the soul back, it was drenched with blood and I was pretty sure that Lurky didn't handle returns. I was a pathetic shmuck according to the greased weasel whispering a hundred voices in my ears. It was right. I'd gone halfway around the globe to be something I couldn't, dreamed that impossible dream and ended up with a nightmare instead. I'd turned into the Poof, crying and sobbing whispered apologies to people long dead and worm food. They didn't care if I was sorry. Their souls were probably up there laughing themselves off of their fluffy white clouds at the spectacle their feared killer had become. Wouldn't matter if I saved all the puppies and the whole bloody world every May for ten more years, they'd still be dead and their blood would still be on my hands.

Once again, that damn little town sitting over the Hellmouth had chalked up another victory over Spike, kicked the pitiful vampire's ass and sent him packing for less toxic pastures. With a two fingered salute I left SunnyHell for the last time and Slayer be damned. She'd fight the big evil just like she always did. If she and her band of Scoobies finally caught the cattle train to the Great Hereafter, so much the better. She'd be back in her precious Heaven, no less sullied for having rolled in the dirt a few times. The epiphany, the strike of lightning that sent me running for the hills and away from the Hellmouth, was that I had a soul. Seems obvious, doesn't it? It wasn't. Not to me. I didn't understand what it really meant. I couldn't see past trying to get to Buffy, telling her that I got the soul for her, that I was want she wanted now, that she could love me now. I was good enough for her now.

I was wrong. It wasn't about being good enough. No one is ever good enough for anyone else. I wasn't good enough for Buffy, never would be as long as she had a pulse and I didn't. She wasn't good enough for me, as long as she drew breath to survive and I didn't. It redefined vicious cycle. I realized that I was. That I existed. I slept, bled, wept, fed. I lived. I had a soul. My eyes were opened and I saw a great big world stretching out before me that had nothing to do with Slayers or vampires. There was an entire existence just past my reach that I had never seen or noticed. All I had been thinking was how to convince Buffy to forgive me. How could I gain her trust? How could I earn her love? Riding away from Sunnydale on the roar of a motorcycle, there was only one question burning in my head. Who am I?

It brought me here. To the streets of New Orleans and a little bar called Blue Cats. No one gave me a second look in the twisted melee of painted faces and frat boy antics that characterized the heart and soul of Louisiana around Mardi Gras. One party bled into the next until there was nothing left but alcohol blood and dancing bodies. I didn't belong here any more than I belonged in Sunnydale but it was a place to start. A place to build a life that would be mine. For over a hundred years, all I was good at was murder and mayhem, fists and fangs. What was I good at now? I asked Lurky for my soul. I asked him to give me what she deserved. Fate must have a sense of humor. I got what she deserved and realized that I didn't know what I deserved. I'm my own man now. My own evil, undead thing as some so aptly describe me. What I deserve doesn't hinge on the whim of a Slayer who has yet to reach a quarter of a century. A child, really. What I deserve doesn't wait for me in Sunnydale. I haven't found it yet but I will. When I do, there will be something of mine, of me, left behind when I start killing daisies.

That's good enough.