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The bus was filled with breaking voices, broken bones, newly minted slayers, their ranks already broken by death. Buffy settled down in the very back of the bus as everyone around her chattered in broken whispers about what had happened, what they had to do now. Buffy didn’t actually care. She felt broken herself. Broken pieces, everywhere. She wished Spike was there with them now. He was drawn to broken things.
It really shouldn’t have surprised Buffy that Spike had found the old box of them in the basement. He was living down there, after all, and the whole place had been tossed around and ransacked and things had been unearthed that should have remained earthed. But for some reason, it bothered her that he’d found the box, and had started picking through it. There was a moment of irrational anger.
“Where did you get that?”
Her tone was harsher than she’d intended it to be. Spike looked up from the box of broken things with a bit of a cringe. “Was just trying to be useful,” he said. He tossed a half squashed camera back into the box. “But I think this is a box of useless things. Just like me.” He shoved the box back further on the lid of the washing machine.
Buffy came up behind him and touched a hand gently to his shoulder for a second, an it’s okay gesture. He relaxed a smidge. “Where was that?” she asked.
“Dunno. One of the girls dragged it out when they were looking for an extension cord.” He shrugged. “Figured I’d give it a look over, since it seemed like stuff someone wanted repaired.”
“It was, once,” Buffy said.
Spike looked to her. “Once?”
“Yeah,” Buffy said with a resigned sigh. “This is all stuff I broke the first year or so I was a slayer. I thought I’d thrown that box out in the move.”
“Got Joyce’s handwriting on the side,” Spike pointed out. Buffy’s Things was scrawled on the cardboard in permanent marker.
“She must have found it when I tried to throw it out. Which is why I kept hiding stuff in this box in the first place,” she said. “Mom looks through the trash sometimes.” She looked inside. Cameras she had crushed by simply rolling the film too hard. Silver spoons that looked as if they were soft wax, that she had managed to bend with one hand when something made her clench her fists. A door handle that looked as if it had been made of putty. In the corner, wrapped carefully in a bloodstained shirt, was the delicate china teacup with the dragonfly for a handle that Buffy’s grandmother had made her, cracked into three still exquisite, but useless pieces.
“Why were you hiding it?” Spike asked.
“I was breaking a lot of things. They thought it was out of anger, so I started hiding them instead.”
“But it wasn’t out of anger?”
Buffy scoffed. “No, just sheer clumsiness.”
“You’ve never been clumsy in your life.”
“No, but I’d just become like scary wicked strong.” She leaned back against the washing machine with a rueful shrug. “I was always grabbing things too fast, or squeezing them too hard. I spent a lot of months at the beginning when I was afraid to break everything I touched. Strong enough to slay a vampire is strong enough to do a lot of damage.”
“But why didn’t you just throw it out in the first place?” Spike asked. “Use a dumpster at your school or something.”
“Some part of me thought it could be repaired. Sort of like I thought I could hold onto my old, when I couldn’t. I sort of… well… wanted to save some of it.” She tossed up a hand. “Well, like, the camera was expensive. I hoped I could fix it. The silverware and the dishes, they were my grandmother’s. I wasn’t sure if they could be fixed, but I didn’t want to just throw them out. Some of it just ended up there ‘cause of habit. Some of it I actually wanted to keep,” she added. “This.” She pulled out a figurine of a graceful ice skater attached to a wooden base. The base had a thin rim of shattered glass around its top. “This was a snow globe. Do you know how I broke this one?”
“Knocked it off the shelf?”
“I shook it too hard,” Buffy said. “The little snow particles inside hit the glass hard enough that it cracked, and the whole thing just exploded in my hand. Water and glass and plastic snow everywhere. It was actually funny….” She trailed off, since it hadn’t felt funny at the time. She had cried over her lost snow globe, just as she’d cried over a lot of lost things back then. She tossed the figurine base into the box. “Just broken things,” she said. “Broken pieces for broken people. We can throw it away now.”
Spike reached in and took up the dangerous snow globe base. “How long did you keep breaking things after you turned?”
“It wasn’t a sudden turn, not quite like you. I was a potential like the girls, for years. So I was athletic and hero-minded and I had prophetic dreams sometimes. Then I didn’t notice for a few days after I’d turned until Merrick found me, and told me I was the next slayer. I didn’t believe how strong I was. But these were… accidents because of that.”
“You learned how to control it, though.”
“Yeah, I learned not to break my toys.”
“Well, not all of them,” Spike said with a grin. “I’ve seen you break your toys quite a few times. Render them to dust,” he added.
Buffy sighed. She’d thought for a moment he’d meant himself. “I don’t consider vampires my toys. They’re my sacred duty and all that. And I’m supposed to break them.”
“And you weren’t supposed to break this stuff?” Spike asked. “Gotta be hard.”
“What do you mean?”
“When a vampire’s turned, we wake up with sudden strength. A lot of things get destroyed in those first few weeks of fledging. Coffins, mores, not to mention a lot of people’s bodies. And yeah, the occasional teacup or knick-knack. But that’s where it’s different, I think. We take pleasure in the destruction. It’s part of our new outlook. We love to break stuff up, houses, families, you name it. But you didn’t have that. You had all the strength of a vampire, or more, without the love of broken things.” He shook his head. “Must have been hard.”
“It’s just stuff.”
“Not that,” Spike said. “A vampire suddenly gets to let go. You instantly had to hold yourself back.”
“Not with everything,” Buffy said. “Not with the slaying.”
“But with your family, your friends,” Spike said. “That milquetoast boyfriend you had. You hold yourself back.”
“I have to. Always.”
“But not always,” Spike whispered. “Unless you were holding back for me,” he added. “Didn’t feel like it.”
“No, I never held back for you,” Buffy said, and she closed up the box. “I never had to. You could take it.”
“I can still take it now, if you ever want to get it on,” Spike said low. Then a horrified look passed over his eyes. “I mean if you need to spar. That’s what I mean. Not get it on like…. But with our fighting. We’re still keeping it kind of low key for the girls, but if you need a real workout I’m available. For hitting, and stuff.”
Buffy glanced over at him, touched and amused by his sudden embarrassment. “No, Spike. Maybe later.”
“But I want to help. I know you need to work out to your own full potential sometimes, and…”
“I’ll let you know,” Buffy said. “But you’re still healing from what the First did to you. I don’t want to aggravate your wounds.”
“So you’re holding back again,” Spike said softly. He leaned forward and reached as if he’d take her hand, but he stepped back at the last second. He was still very, very near. She could feel the aura of him on her skin. “I get that. But you’re not going to break me, Buffy. Not in a friendly sparring match.”
I already did break you, Buffy thought. I break everything I touch. Willow and Xander and Anya had all broken. Giles seemed broken. And even Dawn had broken, with her shoplifting and her acting out, though she seemed to be coming back together now.
It had been a fleeting thought, in a melancholy day, and hadn’t mattered too much before. But now Buffy looked back out the far window of the bus they had escaped Sunnydale on, at the slowly receding crater, where Spike had just managed to break everything in a massive act of destruction any vampire should have been proud of. She hadn’t held back. She’d given him that amulet, and she’d given him her heart, and in the end she’d broken Spike, and he’d broken Sunnydale for her. The bus was filled with broken people, broken weapons. All these potential girls would have to be taught how to hold back, now that they’d been taught to go all out. They’d have to hold back, or they’d leave broken pieces of their lives scattered behind them.
Spike hadn’t held back at the battle, and now it was his turn to break something. He’d gone and died and done the unthinkable. And now, Buffy knew, she’d have to gather up the broken bits… of her relationships with her friends, of her own grief-struck mind, even of her own shattered heart. She should have been good at it by now, dealing with broken things, but she’d never learned how to repair the damage. Like a vampire, she was made for destruction, not renewal.
She was going to have to accept the broken pieces.